Skin: On the Cultural Border Between Self and World

by Claudia Benthien, Thomas Dunlap (Translator)

"Only skin deep," "getting under one's skin," "the naked truth": metaphors about the skin pervade the language even as physical embellishments and alterations―tattoos, piercings, skin-lifts, liposuction, tanning, and more―proliferate in Western culture. Yet outside dermatology textbooks, the topic of skin has been largely ignored.

This important cultural study shows how our perception of skin has changed from the eighteenth century to the present. Claudia Benthien argues that despite medicine's having penetrated the bodily surface and exposed the interior of the body as never before, skin, paradoxically, has become a more and more unyielding symbol. She examines the changing significance of skin through brilliant analyses of literature, art, philosophy, and anatomical drawings and writings. Benthien discusses the semantic and psychic aspects of touching, feeling, and intellectual perception; the motifs of perforated, armored, or transparent skin; the phantasma of flaying; and much more through close readings of such authors as Kleist, Hawthorne, Balzac, Rilke, Kafka, Plath, Morrison, Wideman, and Ondaatje. Myriad images from the Renaissance, anatomy books, and contemporary visual and performance art enhance the text.

256 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 2002

Reviews

[Jjryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author’s work, translated from the German, is a wide-ranging examination of sources and theories of the skin through language, images, and scientific and artistic discourse from the eighteenth century to the present. The book traces historical moments that have shaped the emergence of a collective body image of separateness with the skin conceived as boundary, contact surface and identity. Her cultural study of skin in language through figurative speech and literary writing probes the historical-anthropological significance of skin as a place of semiotic meaning and physiological function. Thematic sections include; the depth of the surface, boundary metaphors, penetrations, mirror of the soul, and mystification. Really interesting stuff!

[Chris Miles]

I'd never heard of the story of Apollo and Marsyas until I dipped into this book. The moral of the story is: don't play Guitar Hero with 'the Shining One' if you value your hide. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsyas