ABSTRACT
The skin does not envelope a set of organs; it develops the presence to the world maintained by those organs. The skin is itself an organ – for the physiologist –, but this organ exceeds organicity. Playing with Artaud’s famous phrase, one could say that it is the organ of a body without organs, the organ or indeed the place where a body presents itself as itself. Skins are not impervious to each other: they are porous by definition, organic and metaphysical at the same time. The skin is not the site of a calculation nor a measurement: it is a site of passage, transit and transport, traffic and transaction. It rubs against and irritates, mixes and distinguishes, comes up against or flatters it. The world has no other skin than this turbulence and swell – sometimes ample, sometimes contracted – that make for (font) the histories, mores, grandeurs, decadences and revolutions.
