Noli Me Tangere: the efflorescence of the third skin in the torsions of pain in Howard Barker’s The Europeans

Abstract

This study is the first to consider the prominent role and significance of the skin in Howard Barker’s work. It demonstrates that, for Barker, the skin embodies a twofold function: the symptomatic-pathological and the aesthetic-ethical. The phenomenon of skin, however, is inextricable from that of pain and jouissance. Indeed, this dyad of skin and pain finds an emblematic illustration in The Europeans. In The Europeans, pain features as the main impetus in the aesthetics and ethics of the embodied self in its relationship with the other. This pain, nonetheless, is not restricted to the level of sheer physical pain, and crucially involves pain in a particular ontological, epistemological and ethical sense. I shall take pain to effect both immanentisation and transcendence. Through the proposed notion of ‘the third skin’, or ‘the skin of proximity’, it shall be demonstrated that both of foregoing processes are realised in an intercorporeally fabricated space, concretised in the medium of skin. Starhemberg’s self-conception can be considered as a narcissistic (and melancholic) envelope and Katrin’s as a hysterical envelope of suffering. Katrin and Starhemberg by ‘undergoing and undertaking’ their pains achieve self-overcoming, ex-peausition and alteration in proximity to the other. This aesthetic process of strained individuation culminates in an ethical moment of impassioned super-individuation.

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