Abstract
A container for the body, the skin is the largest sensory organ and therefore the most open to touch. It forms a comparatively vast, haptic boundary between body and world, putting the body in touch with the world as well as putting the body in touch with itself: the skin feels and communicates pain, pleasure, itch, burn, shiver, and a plethora of other sensations. Steven Connor, drawing on Michel Serres, views skin not merely as a surface, but as a milieu: a meeting point where “world and body touch, defining their common border.” 1 The skin is both physiological—a sensory apparatus—and imaginary: a containing border, which demarcates inner and outer, “I” and “you.” In this way, we have both an inner and an outer skin—an outer skin of the body and an inner one of the mind, an imaginary container for selfhood.
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Notes
Steven Connor, The Book of Skin ( New York: Cornell, 2003 ), 28–29.
Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus , trans. Richard A. Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 15. emphasis in original.
See Freud, The Ego and the Id, trans. Joan Riviere ( London: Hogarth, 1927 ).
Didier Anzieu, Skin Ego , trans. C. Turner (New Haven: Yale, 1989), 101, emphasis in original.
James Knowlson, Damned to Fame ( London: Bloomsbury, 1996 ), 616.
Mary Bryden, Women in Samuel Beckett’s Prose and Drama: Her Own Other ( Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993 ), 7.
See also Jennifer Jeffers, Beckett’s Masculinity ( New York: Palgrave, 2009 ).
Anna McMullan, “From Matron to Matrix: Gender, Authority and (Dis) embodiment in Beckett’s Theater,” in Women in Irish Drama: A Century of Authorship and Representation, ed. Melissa Sihra (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007 ), 98.
See Minako Okamuro, “… but the clouds… and a Yeatsian Phantasmagoria,” SBTA 19 (2006).
Jonathan Bignell, Beckett on Screen: The Television Plays ( Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009 ), 145–146.
See Laura Marks, The Skin of the Film ( Durham: Duke University Press, 2000 ).
Gilles Deleuze, “The Exhausted,” trans. Christian Kerslake, Parallax 3 (1996): 127.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smyth (London: Routledge, 2002 ), 283.
Samuel Beckett, Company (London: Calder, 1984 ), 7.
Anna McMullan, Performing Embodiment in the Work of Samuel Beckett ( New York: Routledge, 2010 ), 88.
William Gruber, “Empire of Light: Luminosity of Space in Beckett’s Theater,” in Samuel Beckett: A Casebook, ed. Jennifer Jeffers (New York and London: Garland, 1998 ), 217.
Anna McMullan, Theatre on Trial: Samuel Beckett’s Later Drama ( London: Routledge, 1993 ), 110.
Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007 ), 17.
Mladen Dolar, “The Object Voice,” in Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, ed. Renata Salecl and Slovoj Žiž ek (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996 ), 13.
Julia Kristeva, The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986 ), 94–95.
Elin Diamond, “Feminist Readings of Beckett,” in Palgrave Advances in Beckett Studies ed. by Lois Oppenheim (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004 ), 60.
Christine Jones, “Bodily Functions: A Reading of Gender Performativity in Samuel Beckett’s Rockaby,” in Samuel Beckett: A Casebook, ed. Jennifer M. Jeffers ( London: Routledge, 1998 ), 189.
From Asmus, “Rehearsal Notes for the German Première of Beckett’s That Time and Footfalls,” quoted in Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett: The Shorter Plays, ed. S. E. Gontarski ( London: Faber, 1992 ), 283–284.
William Worthen, Print and the Poetics of Modern Drama ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009 ), 174.
David Pattie, “Space, Time and the Self in Beckett’s Late Theater,” Modern Drama 43 (2000): 400.
Luce Irigaray, Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian Gill (London: Athlone Press, 1993 ), 41–42.
Anna McMullan, “Samuel Beckett’s Theater: Liminal Subjects and the Politics of Perception,” Princeton University Library Chronicle 67 (2006): 445.
Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill ( Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985 ), 116.
Peter Gidal, Understanding Beckett: A Study of Monologue and Gesture in the Works of Samuel Beckett (London: Macmillan, 1986), 163, quoted in McMullan, Theatre on Trial, 101.
Samuel Beckett, The Beckett Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (London: Pan Books, 2006 ), 352.
James Knowlson and John Pilling, Frescoes of the Skull: The Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett ( London: Calder, 1979 ), 227.
Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, eds., The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929–1940 ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009 ), 518.
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© 2013 Trish McTighe
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McTighe, T. (2013). Skin, Space, Place. In: The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett’s Drama. New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137275332_5
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