Skin & Disgust

  

   Before my final paper, I'd like to revisit disgust and consider its relationship to skin. The more I discover about skin, both as part of the body and as a metaphor for border, the more connections I can make between it, touch, and disgust.

   By covering the body, skin conceals what is underneath. The body's fluids and tissues lie beneath the skin, nasty and slimy. The idea of a body without a skin covering it is utterly disgusting, and we find relating to it the hardest. Like Steven Connor says, "the skinned body is less of a body even than a skeleton." The flayed skin alone is even more disgusting, as Connor put it into words: "The corpse of a corpse.'' The disgust here, comes from the unimaginability of its 'inside.' Physically, we perceive skin as an outer surface. The inside of the skin is unthinkable, at its most abject. Remembering what Kristeva said, 'Abject is what does not respect borders.' Skin itself is this border. According to Kristeva, disgust is a mechanism developed to establish and reinforce the identity.  And in Anzieu's theory identity is one of the main functions of the skin-ego. 

   Skin is also the border, which protects us from what is disgusting outside. William Ian Miller sees contact as the defining characteristic of disgust, and he says, "The disgusting is what's strange and enstranged but threatens to make contact." Similarly, Walter Benjamin says that ''All disgust is originally disgust as touching.'' Touch can bring us pleasure and warmth, but also germs, disease, and other people's bodily fluids, in an undesired way. Skin protects, but it is also our vulnerability to the outside world. In his book (Tactile Art), Jan Svankmajer also indicates that repulsion is always accompanied by a fear of contact.