Body, border, skin - about vulnerability and armoring

Borders define the present. Yet our relationship to them is divided. We speak of national borders, of upper limits, of the persistence of former borders, of ideological borders, of the limits of what can be said, and of those of good taste. Of borders that must be maintained, preserved, and protected, and those that must not be crossed. Borders that are dissolving, and those that are being violated. While some cannot be sharp and absolute enough, the overcoming and elimination of others cannot proceed quickly enough. Physical, geographical, biological, civilizational, political, psychological, symbolic, moral, and planetary borders.

We project an invisible, imaginary boundary around us and call it the private or intimate sphere, which should be respected and not crossed in social interaction. We barricade ourselves in tank-like automobiles, as if it were necessary to equip ourselves with this prosthesis in order to cope with the challenges of everyday life. Often enough, one might recognize this as a signature of the zeitgeist. That of hyper-individualistic isolation and egological isolation - each for themselves and against all. Self-contained monads, each traveling alone in the threatening terrain of the present. An atomization of society that became abundantly clear in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. The Other became a danger, touch, breath, the ultimate threat. At the same time, it made our interdependence and our shared vulnerability abundantly clear.
Contrary to every form of isolation, an over-presence of expressions of solidarity can be observed. The slogan of the moment, especially among younger people: I feel! Certainly, there is no need to harbor any illusions about the inflationary nature of this communicative practice. All too quickly, the claim of empathy reveals itself as a mere simulation of compassion, and that of solidarity as a self-serving automatism of self-affirmation. Perhaps, however, this also conceals a longing for a new sensitivity. Paradoxically, we become both more sensitive and more irritable, both more sensitive and not sensitive enough, more delicate and dull at the same time, vulnerable and more understanding on the one hand, hypersensitive and less receptive on the other. We feel too much, feel compelled to feel. We are overinformed, exposed to too much information, confronted with too much that is overwhelming. We are unable to absorb, process, and retain the mass of information. It penetrates and perforates us, just as the appeal to feeling hollows us out and forces us into armor. The individual demand, which is a socially internalized one, to feel everything, to show solidarity with everyone and everything, to perceive every injustice, etc., turns us into thin-skinned, thick-skinned creatures, anesthetized by the endless amount of injuries of all kinds. Bodies of almost unheard-of tension populate social media in particular. Bodies whose inner being pushes outward so aggressively that the skin appears to be stretched to the limits of its elasticity. Physical demonstrations of boundaries stretched to the point of bursting, almost making us fear that even the slightest physical contact would mean their rupture. Nothing is denied more stubbornly than wrinkles, and little do we fear more than the violation of our skin, the violation of our boundaries, as if there were a real danger that we might spill out of ourselves like water from a damaged jug.
Therefore, we protect our skin because we want to protect ourselves, not only in the physical sense, but above all in the symbolic sense. The boundary does not want to be questioned because it fears its dissolution. What are we, where are we, if we lose our boundaries? This fundamental existential fear disguises itself in all sorts of masks and recurs on the most diverse levels. Those who speak of boundaries speak of violation, of the fear of its violation. Skin care is boundary protection.
The skin is the largest organ of the human body. Skin is washed, anointed, painted, smoothed, and tightened; it serves as a canvas and is understood as a mirror of our condition, similar to the eyes, which are said to reflect the soul. Independently of our control, skin ages, becomes wrinkled, blotchy, and thinner. Skin envelops and unveils, conceals and protects, reveals and gives away. Those who cannot help themselves are stuck in their skin. And those for whom it becomes too much, immediately jump out of it.

Entire careers in TV and the Internet are based on the fact that the dermatological cleansing of skin, presented in microscopic magnification, becomes a spectacle of the explosive disposal of pimples, cysts, andAbscesses. The insistence on the interior of the body is undeniable and is probably as old as the fear of injury. As if the oldest secrets were hidden deep within the body, finally revealing themselves to the surface with every ounce of sebum, pus, or blood.
Knife crimes can be so effectively exploited politically because the fear of strangers is linked to the fear of being cut, to the fear of violent penetration of the body. Sealing off, sealing off, as if one could close oneself off from the world, as if bodies, bodies of any kind, were spaces that could be closed off.
Skin is usually understood as a shell, a casing that contains what it encloses. It can rightly be said that the skin also represents the most important boundary for humans. It is the boundary closest to all of us. Like a sharp and unambiguous line, it separates what is on this side from what is on the other, what is inside from what is outside, what is one's own from what is foreign. The skin as an absolute boundary, the outer shell of the inside, which encloses it and separates it from the outside. This is my body, and my skin indicates where I end. Inside, there resides my self. There is my limit. Beyond this limit lies everything else, the external world. A deceptive dualism.
"The deepest part of a person is the skin," the French poet Paul Valéry once wrote. The body is not solid, but open space. A folding of the outside that is experienced as inside. And isn't even the emptiness between bodies a kind of body? "There's a gap in between, there's a gap where we meet," says the song "Where I End and You Begin" by the band Radiohead. In the catalog of the band Swans, there is a song with a similar title, "Where Does a Body End?" Where does a body begin and end? In a documentary about the Swans, Michael Gira, the band's leader, philosophizes about the materialistic cycle and exchange in which we all find ourselves. We are all temporary accumulations of molecules in the form of a human body, porous, permeable, fluidly connected to the world around us. At the very latest, when we die, our body dissolves, evaporates, other organisms feed on it, emitting gases that other people in turn inhale. The body has no end, is limitless.

We can learn a lot about ourselves and our relationship to the world if we think differently about boundaries. The border is not a line, but a threshold, a space of transition, of mediation, a zone of interest in which the processes of inter-esses (Latin), the processes of being in-between, take place. The willingness to open up is the willingness to expose one's own vulnerability and therefore the willingness to potentially be hurt. Not because one actually wants to be hurt. But because true encounter, true exchange, can only take place under the condition of openness. Drawing on the Jewish thinker Emmanuel Levinas, one could reinforce the notion of a pre-philosophical obligation, a being at the mercy of the other. At stake is the discovery of an unavoidable connection between bodies that arises from their shared vulnerability. One can understand oneself as equals without making oneself equal, namely, by recognizing one another in one's difference and treating one another as equals, as Jule Govrin so aptly puts it.

Today's racism disguises itself as ethnopluralism, no longer speaking of race and genes, but of cultures that are either compatible or incompatible with one another. A new language for the same old classifications. There is only human blood, says Holocaust survivor Margot Friedländer, born in 1921.

12/13/2024
Benjamin Johann (born 1988) studied theater and media studies, German studies and the ethics of text cultures, worked at the FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, is now a freelance author, publishes in various forms and formats and is co-host of the podcast "Projections - Cinema Talks". His involvement with film, art and culture is always also an engagement with society, philosophy and politics - always looking for the ethical and aesthetic lines of flight of our present. Since her birth, his daughter has reminded him of the vital power of fascination and anarchy.