ABSTRACT
The skin figures. It is what we see and know of others and ourselves. We show ourselves in and on our skins, and our skins figure out the things we are and mean: our health, youth, beauty, power, enjoyment, fatigue, embarrassment or suffering. The skin is always written: it is legendary. More than the means of what we happen voluntarily or involuntarily to disclose to sight, it has become the proof of our exposure to visibility itself. It is perhaps precisely because of this that the skin has been hard to see in itself, just as it is hard to see the mirror when we are so intent on what we see in it.
