I
Some ancient philosophers compared the world to a big animal. This was vigorously opposed by modernity – the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century – , which compared it to a machine. Today, nobody would dare to set foot on this terrain. It is all too clear that first comparison presupposes an internal finality, the second an external causality; whereas we can assign neither property to the world.Footnote1 The hypothesis of a God sometimes seems capable of overcoming both difficulties, but only does so by aggravating them through the integral and indecipherable secret to which it enjoins us to submit ourselves.
Without wanting either to dissipate the secret or attribute it to some other sacred sovereign, we can try to escape the dilemma by proposing to articulate what our time more than suggests to us, that which it rather enjoins us to consider: the world is neither an animal, nor a machine; it is we ourselves. It is neither the pursuit of an immanent finality, nor the effect of a transcendent causality. It is what humanity does (fait) – or undoes (défait) – , what humanity makes of it whilst constituting itself (se fait) – or undoing itself (se défait).
“Globalisation” (mondialisation) is not just the effect of a techno-economic development; it is a reshuffling, a putting back into play of the world (le monde) itself. It is perhaps just as much the end of a “world,” in whatever way (sens) we understand it, as the birth of something other than a world, for which we have no name.
II
At least one certainty imposes itself: if the world were an animal, it would present itself with a distinctive unity – even if distinguished only from a formless outside – and its distinction would display the character of a skin akin to the one where everything alive (tout vivant) distinguishes and presents itself. If, on the contrary, it were a machine, it would have no skin since its distinction and presentation would belong to an order different from that of its machinery.
If the skin is indeed the proper character of a unity subsisting by itself and simultaneously relating to a world around it, how can the neither animal nor mechanical world of humans have a skin – i.e., a proper consistence – if there is no world outside of it (even if it understands itself as a plurality of worlds, which nonetheless remains the doing (le fait) precisely of the spirit and activity of men).
The question of the skin could be the one most apt to illuminating the world of men for us from the moment at which we can do nothing other than consider it as such: neither animal nor machine but world of men devoid of any world-beyond (or other world) in relation to which it could be measured, situated and receive its sense of “world.” For the sense of a “world” is always precisely to make sense (faire sens), i.e., to allow a circulation, an economy, an operation of waypoints thanks to which all that is in this world is also what makes (fait) it and gives it life.
If I say “the world of musicians,” I evoke a sphere or nebula in which values, techniques, fashions, images, practices and even definitions of “music” compose a possibility – or, more precisely, a compossibility – through which those who are in some sense “musicians” recognise themselves, find their way, can exchange, dispute and rival.
That it is matter of something like a skin is indicated to us by the semantic profusion through which “skin” designates as much the person as the membrane (getting under one’s skin,Footnote2 shedding one’s skin); the soul as much as the body, indeed even as body (feeling good/bad in one’s skin) or existence itself (to save someone’s skin). It is not really a matter of metaphor or even metonym; the skin is from where a presence to the world and to oneself begins and ends: not just one’s life but one’s sensibility, one’s activity and passivity, one’s expressivity and signification.
In what way would the world have a skin if it did not have to feel, act and signify outside itself? But how could it not feel, act nor signify, if that is what a world must be? This is the question I am trying to answer, and to do that I must first consider with closer attention what a skin is.
III
The skin does not envelope a set of organs; it develops the presence to the world maintained by those organs. We are familiar with images, referred to as écorchés (i.e., flayed or skinned figures), displaying the arrangement of muscles, tendons, blood vessels and nerves of a body from which the skin has been taken off or lifted (sometimes, the skinned person themselves is holding up a raised piece of skin). Those images are often hard to look at. Nietzsche says that the skin makes the repulsive sight of the organism bearable. One can say that it is less a matter of making bearable – so, by masking – than of making presentable, i.e., visible and recognisable, what is otherwise hidden in the entanglement of organs, tissues, functions; an entanglement that, altogether, remains either incomprehensible to us, or limited to the maintenance of the body (that’s the physiological and medical outlook). However, the maintenance of the organism does not exhaust the presence of an individual.
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.
It does this by exposing the body to other bodies. The skin lets itself be seen, touched, heard, breathed and savoured. We know what skin is by the shaking of hands, kissing, the sight of a chin or gait. This organ therefore exceeds the proper order of the organism: it does not guarantee an interior operation of an autonomous system; it exposes (in French, one can write il expeause, it ex-skin-hibits) this autonomy to all possible outsides.
One could very well say that the skin is the organ of an organism’s heteronomy: i.e., the organ that relates to the others what, at first glance, seems designed for relating only to itself. The individual individualises itself on the occasion of the sight, contact, smell or sound of other epidermises, i.e., enters as a distinct point in the combinatorics and co-appearance of all points. In other words, individuation is always transindividuation.Footnote3
IV
All exterior or indeed foreign bodies take part in what we must dare to call the transpiration of skins. The rock or metal I bump into or handle in turn become skins by transforming themselves into tools, shelter or jewels. Everything that encounters my skin encounters me; and without it, I would encounter nothing.
Skins are not impervious to each other: they are porous by definition, organic and metaphysical at the same time. They share (partagent) their secrets, making one another sensible to each other. I crumple up a herb and its scent lets itself be inhaled whilst what is crushed decomposes itself between my fingers.
The true nature and role of the skin are to be deciphered in the famous Marsyas myth. The satyr, a flutist, dared to defy Apollo, master of the lyre. Irate, the god has the satyr flayed or skinned (fait écorcher). The triumph of the lyre is secured. The skin of Marsyas, hung on a tree by his executioners, then finds itself lifted by the breeze and resounds with melodious accents.
To conclude, the breath, the thrust outweighs the regulated vibration of strings. 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. Skin makes hair stand on end, is exhausting, shivering, retractile, caressing, lubricating, pressing, trembling.
It makes itself into (se fait) the lens of the eye, eardrum, tongue, vagina, olfactory bulb, mucous membrane, papillae. It gets excited, stirred, heated, electrified, repulsed or exhaled. In all respects, the skin translates, betrays (trahit), transpires, transudes the palpitating singularity of the enigma of a being-to-itself insofar as it is from side to side outside itself, nearby and far-off, multiple, always floating and responding to the thrusting of the world’s breezes, breaths and gusts. In all respects, it is the powerful and fragile resonance of all that arouses a form or tonality of existence.
V
If the world, for its part, cannot not have a skin; what becomes of the properties of the being-to-itself that the world nevertheless must be if it is indeed the site or the act of a whole of possible sense?
It does not have skin because it is itself nothing other than – to put it like that – the factorial of all our skins. It is and is nothing but the whole of combinations, assemblages, rubbings, pressures, caresses, violences, bruises, attractions and repulsions, avoidances, osmoses, excitations, captures, signals, signages and signatures which all our skins unceasingly exchange. At the same time, in these exchanges, they form and transform themselves, take on their traits, folds, styles and compose what we call peoples or populations, cultures, rivalries or dominations.
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. This is why, neither animal nor machine, the world has no life of its own (vie propre). It is indeed “the” world, but insofar as it is ours, the one where our presences and absences circulate. As physics attests, it may even be plural. It is the unitotal world of our multiplicity, as much numerical as spiritual, phenomenal or noumenal – as you like.
We can speak of it as of a skin if it develops the copresence of all that presents itself. But this presentation is unendingly resorbed in the succession of copresences. In the end, the world is a co-belonging – neither animal, nor machine – of all that resonates with all, like a breath, like the moulting of a snake or a thermonuclear fusion reaction.
It is a spinning, an interminable tangling whose destination is none other than the maelstrom in which the very idea of the world escapes in order to re-emerge, no matter where, by the will of (au gré de) the co-belonging without cohesion. Because it is not a skin, this expansion – this expansion of space-time, this upwelling of crystals and gas – is far more fragile than skins, skins that are always already fragile because everything there touches upon the extremities.
Marsyas’ skin floats with the (au gré des) zephyrs,Footnote4 but the world is swept away by hurricanes and icy gales. It does not resound with any harmony whatsoever. No hymn celebrates it, except for the one that says that it happens, that it takes place: the world is everything that is the case (der Fall, as Wittgenstein puts it). What happens, what falls down (fallen) from what one would have thought to be a supramundane height of the Idea: the fall (la chute) into what is real, what is actual.
The world is everything happening between us. That is to say, first of all ourselves and everything that happens to us, everything our touch, our sight, our breath, our movement comes to. By way of skin-to-skin referrals – from that of the insect strolling across my screen to that of the Hieronymus Bosch character reproduced within the crystals of this screen – , step by step and from surprise to imminence, from fleeting to immemorial, without knowing it, you come upon the full actuality of the world: the act of existence.
This act is made up (fait) of works and disasters, splendour, horror and insignificance. As long as it is ours, it is the act of an infinite arising that is in itself its whole sense and all the sense there is: a sense that unceasingly goes from skin to skin, never itself enveloped in nothing.
But if this act becomes that of an animal or a machine, of an entity enveloped in an autonomy that would have to justify (rendre raison de) itself, a big coagulation of functions and organs; then it is lost, it implodes, it asphyxiates like a skin whose pores are all coated with a putty of organic or technical self-sufficiency.
VI
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Nietzsche, Le gai savoir 125–26.
2 Nancy refers to the French idiom avoir quelqu’un dans la peau (meaning literally to have someone in one’s skin), which does not translate into English but means to be infatuated with someone (as Edith Piaf sings about it in the eponymous song). The meaning of the English idiom someone is getting under my skin is something of the inverse of the French: it indicates annoyance, being rubbed in precisely the wrong way. – Trans.
3 Evidently, a reference to Simondon is required here.
4 In Greek mythology, Zephyrus is the god personifying the west wind, considered the most favourable and gentlest of all directional winds. As a result, zephyr has come to mean a westerly wind, a gentle breeze, or breeze from the west. – Trans.