2.08.2006
Skin (History and Theory of the Body)
Title
Field
History and Theory of the Body
Summary
The best way to start this summary is with Benthien’s opening words: “This book examines the relationship among self-consciousness, subjectivity, and skin in literature, art, and science from the eighteenth century to the present. It deals with skin as the symbolic surface between the self and the world, a surface whose status has been undergoing a striking change over the last centuries. My central thesis is that the integument of the body has become an increasingly rigid boundary in spite of the fact that medicine has penetrated the skin and exposed the interior of the body.” (1) Benthien then sets out on writing the history of skin coming into its current meanings and currency in determining the subject, the body, self and other, etc. Her methodology is one of interdisciplinary literary studies situated on one object, skin, traced fragmentarily over time – this isn’t an attempt at a comprehensive history, it sort of takes up different ways skin is interpreted, read, styled, etc. She describes these as “thematic clusters.” (13) She begins with a chapter on a sorta historical etymology of the sign of skin and notes the contradiction between skin as the outer covering of the authentic self and skin as the metonymic sign of the self…umm…itself. After tracing this duality, Benthien moves to a chapter on penetration, charting the history of medieval surgery, anatomical illustration and dissection to reveal the move from a body conceived as porous to skin as “a final body boundary.” (37) Moving into greater specificity in the penetration of the skin, the next chapter deals with flaying (this book is really great), particularly examining the various visual representations of the flaying of Marsyas (and other penal flayings and flaying in medical history to flaying in Silence of the Lambs. I want to add that this awesome archive isn’t just cool in its diversity – it is great (as are most of her thematic clusters) because it is wonderful in thinking the production of knowledge of self and body, self and other. The next two chapters delve into the distinction between skin as the barrier to the soul, as obfuscation, etc. in a close reading of Balzac’s The Woman of Thirty, Kafka’s observations in his diaries on the grotesqueness of human faces, and Sylvia Plath’s writings. (I’m sorry that I’m just outlining chapters…but it is the best way I can think to summarize this book…) Next, as Benthien begins to look at race and gender, she discusses skin that bears markers of either immunity (myths of Achilles, etc.) in the case of men or women stained by birthmarks (Toni Morrison’s Sula). Her discussion of race is based on a history of the normalizing of white skin – “the juxtaposition of ‘white’ and ‘black,’ which, historically, is paradigmatic for all thinking about skin color: both biological-physiological as well as cultural-anthropological interpretation always revolves initially around the opposition between light and dark.” (145) After setting up this sorta literary anthropology of oppositional skin color, she looks at the work of African American writers (again, Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, John Edgar Wideman) – “to show the extent to which African-American literature works through, reflects, and decodes what is considered the anthropology of physical differences. The associative field connected with the theories of skin color – ‘lightness’ and ‘darkness,’ the ‘coloring’ and ‘decoloring’ of the skin, transparency and nontransparency, thickness and insensitivity – is deconstructed, not least by applying exoticizing strategies to ‘white’ skin.” (183) Benthien then moves from the skin itself to the skin as sensory organ, exploring touch and its relationship to aesthetics – “the close relationship between perception and self-image, to the felt awareness of living in the body, of the boundaries of the body, and of ego identity.” (186) – ending with a close reading of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient and a chapter on new media and the skin, mostly focused on the work of Stelarc. In Benthien’s conclusion, she cops to the fragmentary nature of her work, but states that the examples she works through and the themes she selects while maintaining her interdisciplinary lit crit methodology shows “narrative literature has retained an awareness of skin, giving it considerable space not only as a means of characterizing individuals physiognomically and pathognomically but also as a place of subjectivity and connection with the world.” (236)
Keywords
Skin, boundary, penetration, fragment, self/other, subject, connection, teletactilty, thickness/thinness, identity, individual, myth, language, literature. Open body/closed body.
Other Notes
I like this book a lot. There were a lot of problems (esp with the chapter on African American literature which was an argument basically just flipping the script of the previous chapter on colonial encounters constructing whiteness and blackness - I mean, I think the readings were really excellent, but the conclusion of the chapter was weak – I quoted it above), but on the whole, I thought it was great. I liked the weirdness, the jumbly examples that somehow worked together, the chapters on penetration and flaying were incredibly rich and interesting. But I guess I liked it because it is a neat jumping off point to think about such a metaphorically rich and important organ that I think is often neglected.
“It is only the experience of the body as a monad – concretized in the image of the skin as a wall – that then gives rise to the ecstasy of stepping out of the dermis.” (237)
Other QE Works Cited
Fehrer, Michael (ed.) Fragments for a History of the Human Body. (History and Theory of the Body)
Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic. (History and Theory of the Body)
Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies (History and Theory of the Body)
Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits. (History and Theory of the Body)
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. (History and Theory of the Body)
