The Five Senses A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies - (1. Veils)

1
Veils
BIRTH – TATTOOS – CANVAS, VEIL, SKIN – HERMES AND THE PEACOCK – SUBTLE –
VARIATION – VAIR – MISTS – COMMON SENSE – MIXTURE, UNVEILING
BIRTH
Fire is dangerous on a ship, it drives you out. It burns, stings, bites, crackles,
stinks, dazzles, and quickly springs up everywhere, incandescent, to remain
in control. A damaged hull is less perilous; damaged vessels have been
known to return to port, full of sea water up to their deadworks. Ships
are made to love water, inside or out, but they abhor fire, especially when
their holds are full of torpedoes and shells. A good sailor has to be a rea-
sonable fireman.
Fire training demands more of the sailor and is harsher and more
uncompromising than anything that he needs to learn as a seaman. I can
still remember several torturous exercises which teach not only a certain
relationship to the senses, but also how to live or survive. We were made
to climb down dark, vertical wells, descending endless ladders and inch-
ing along damp crawlways, to low underground rooms in which a sheet
of oil would be burning. We had to stay there for a long time, lying beneath
the acrid smoke, our noses touching the ground, completely still so as not
Copyright © 2009. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.
to disturb the thick cloud hanging over us. We had to leave slowly and
deliberately when our name was called so as not to choke our neighbour
with an ill-considered gesture that would have brought the smoke eddies
lower.
The breathable space lies in a thin layer at ground level and remains
stable for quite a long period. Knowing how to hold your breath, to esti-
mate the distance to the heart of the blaze or to the point beyond which
one is in mortal danger; how to estimate the time remaining, to walk, to
move in the right direction, blind, to try not to yield to the universal god
of panic, to proceed cautiously towards the desperately desired opening;
these are things I know about the body. This is no fable. No-one sees
dancing shadows on the walls of the cave when a fire is burning inside.
17
Serres, Michel. The Five Senses : A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2009. ProQuest Ebook
Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/huberlin-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5309536.
Created from huberlin-ebooks on 2023-07-11 13:58:32.
THE FIVE SENSES
Smoke stings your eyes, it fills the whole space, chokes you. Blinded, you
have to lie down. You can only grope your way out. Touch is the last
remaining means of guiding yourself.
But this knowledge was academic until the day of genuine wrath arrived
without warning, one winter’s day at sea. The fire was rumbling, a terrify-
ing sound like thunder. In a moment all the bulkheads were closed.
I admired those who rushed without thinking into the manholes, down
the ladders. I heard a lot of noise and remember nothing.
All of a sudden I am alone. What has happened? In the closed compart-
ment the unbearable heat makes me feel like fainting. I have to get out.
The door, behind, is immovably blocked, panels and levers locked water-
tight, firmly fastened from the other side. I choke under the thick smoke,
lying on the moving floor, shaken by the movement of the waves. Then
all that remains is a porthole. Get up without breathing, quickly try to
unscrew the rusty flanges preventing its opening. They resist, they have
not been used much, once or twice probably since the vessel was launched.
They do not yield. I lie down again at ground level to get my breath. The
weather conditions are worsening, as if the sea were becoming choppier.
I get up again, holding my breath, trying to undo the screws that seem
slowly to be yielding. Three or four times, I do not recall, I lie down again;
as many times, jaws clenched, muscles locked, I work on, with the port-
hole closed. Suddenly it opens.
Light, and particularly air, rushes in, churning the smoke, which becomes
even more choking. I quickly stick my head out through the open hole.
Horrible weather, the brutal cold takes hold. I cannot open my eyes in the
fury of the icy spray; my ears, hurt as they passed through, feel as though
they are being ripped off; suddenly my body curls up, demanding to remain
motionless in its warm retreat. I pull my head back inside, but choke, and
can now hear small explosions. The fire must have reached the munitions
store; I have to get out as soon as possible. I push my head through, then
one arm, not yet as far as my shoulder, only my hand and wrist. The angle
of my elbow is a problem in the small space between my neck and the rim
of brass around the porthole. I cannot get out, I have to get out. Everything
is burning and my head is frozen.
I remain there, motionless, vibrating, pinioned, gesticulating within the

confines of the fixed neckpiece, long enough for me to think, no, for my
body to learn once and for all to say ‘I’ in the truest sense of the word.
18
VEILS
In truth, with no possibility of being wrong. No mistake about it, since my

life quite simply depended on this dark, slow, blinding meditation.
I am inside, burnt to a crisp with only my frozen, shivering, blinded
head outside. I am inside, ejected and excluded, and my head, arm and
left shoulder are outside in the howling storm. Inside, amidst the insane
fire which pushes me outwards, my head and second shoulder, half out,
caught in an agonizing neckpiece, emerge, at the mercy of the storm. I am
neither saved, nor even outside. I am still imprisoned, completely on
one side of the window. The round hoop of brass open in the flank of
the burning vessel is not as big as the compressed circle of my thorax. Still
inside, even though both shoulders are out in the winter weather. The
porthole compresses my chest to the limit – any further and it would be
crushed. So I am going to die. I cannot get a foothold anywhere. Behind,
in the burning hell in which I am still trapped, my arms are of no use,
pressed against my body. I am a wisp of straw caught in a hole, unable to
go forward, with no hope of going backwards, I will choke to death. Is it
worse to breathe in the smoke, or the icy blast, or stay in the rusty iron
collar, I can’t possibly decide.
Then a big wave, coming suddenly from the side, violently jolts the
neckpiece towards my suspended ribs. God be praised, I am out. I breathe
the cold air and almost faint. To my horror, the sea, still more relentlessly,
hammers randomly at the bottom of the boat which tilts over on to the
other side and I am inside again, rammed again into the iron circle up to
my chest. It felt as though the hull were passing over piles of stones. The
shock on one side freed me; a shock from the other side imprisoned me
again.
I was inside, I was outside.
Who was this ‘I’?

It is something everyone knows, unemotionally and as a matter of fact.
You only have to pass through a small opening, a blocked corridor, to
swing over a handrail or on a balcony high enough to provoke vertigo, for
the body to become alert. The body knows by itself how to say I. It knows
to what extent I am on this side of the bar, and when I am outside. It
judges deviations from normal balance, immediately regulates them and
knows just how far to go, or not go. Cœnesthesia says I by itself. It knows
that I am inside, it knows when I am freeing myself. This internal sense
proclaims, calls, announces, sometimes howls the I like a wounded animal.
This common sense apportions the body better than anything else in the
whole world.
19
THE FIVE SENSES
If I slide a leg through, I am still inside, while my leg, thigh and knee are
outside. They become almost black. My pelvis goes through, my genitals,
buttocks and navel are most certainly outside but I remain inside. I know
what it is to be a man without legs; I know for a moment what phantom
limbs feel like. At a precise moment, the very moment when the totality
of the divided body shouts ego in a general toppling movement, I slide out
and can drag through the remainder of my body, pull through the pieces
that have remained inside, yes, the scattered pieces that have suddenly
been blackened in the violent overturning of the iceberg.
The random jolting of the vessel as it heaves to throw the I to the left and
right of the window of hope. I dwell inside, I dwell outside; the I inside the
boat finds itself outside, in the icy gusts of wind. The movement of the
waves pushes or pulls the thorax a few millimetres in either direction,
a tiny distance. My body is aware of this deviation; it is able to appreciate
the movements around it. I am delivered or debarred, breathing or asphyx-
iated, burning from the fire inside or stripped bare by the biting wind,
dead or alive. I go under or I exist. There is an almost identifiable point
which, in the spatial experience of passing from inside to out, is pro-
claimed by the whole body. The I as a whole leaps towards this localized
point and moves decisively from one half of the body to the other when
the point slides, in contact with the separating wall, from its internal to its
external surface.
Since my near shipwreck I have become accustomed to calling this point
the soul. The soul resides at the point where the I is decided.
We are all endowed with a soul, from that first moment of passage when
we risked and saved our existence.
I understood that evening the meaning of the cry: save our souls. Saving
this point is enough. I found myself outside, in the horrifying cold, when
the point passed the threshold of the constraining collar. I was still inside
until that moment. Descartes is right to say that the soul touches the body
at a particular point, but he was wrong to locate it in the pineal gland. It
hovers around the region of the solar plexus. From there it illuminates or
obscures the body, in bursts of light or dark, making it translucid or epiph-
anic, transmuting it into a black body. It is somewhere in that area for
everyone, according to the dictates of each individual’s body. We all retain
it, marked and definitive, where it was fixed on the day we were born.
More often than not, it is forgotten and left in the shadows of internal
20
VEILS
meaning, until the day when the sudden fury of nature causes us to be
born a second time, through chance, pain, anguish or luck. It is not such
a bad thing, pace Descartes, that on that youthful day, piloting a ship, we
were to discover that a pilot says I for his whole vessel, from the depths of
the keel to the tip of the mast, and from the quarter to the boom, and that
the soul of his body descends into the soul of the boat, towards the central
turbines, to the heart of the quickworks. To free yourself from that vessel,
you have to search for your soul in the hold, where the fire is at its most
dangerous – one perilous day.
TATTOOS
The soul inhabits a quasi-point where the I is determined.

Gymnasts train their soul, so as to move or wrap themselves around it.
Athletes do not have one, they run or throw; but jumpers do, and hurl
themselves over the bar pole and beyond; they gently curl their bodies
around the place where it projects itself forward. The difference between
athletics and gymnastics, with the exception of the long jump, lies in the
practice of the soul. The fixed bar, somersault, rings, floor work, trampoline
and diving are useful as exercises in experimental metaphysics, like the pas-
sage through the small porthole, where the body goes searching for its soul,
where both play, like lovers, at losing and finding each other, sometimes
leaving each other, then coming together again, in risk and pleasure. In
certain collective games, players have lost their souls because they entrusted
them to a common object, the ball: they organize themselves, spread them-
selves out, wrap themselves around it, collectively. The metaphysical exer-
cise is transformed here into a manoeuvre in applied sociology.
Lose your soul in order to save it; give it away in order to regain it.
The soul, not quite a point, reveals itself through volume, with precision
in a ship, in the space traced by unusual displacements. Can we find it
superficially now? A more difficult study.
I am cutting my nails.
Where is the subject determined? As a left-hander, I take the tool in
my left hand and place the open blades at the tip of my right index finger.
I place myself in the handles of the scissors. The I is now situated there
and not at the top of the right finger. My nail: awkwardly placed along
the steel blade; my hand: agile and clever in managing the cutting. The
left-hand subject works on the right-finger object. The left hand has
21
THE FIVE SENSES
something of the nature of the self, bathed in subjectivity, the right finger
is the world. If the scissors change hands, everything changes or nothing
changes. The I stays in the vicinity of my left index finger, the nail of
which knowingly and shamelessly caresses the sharp blade, just touching
it. The handle of the tool grasped by the right hand is abandoned by me.
An external motor drives the machine and my proffered index finger
determines the exact limits of the cut to be made. On the one hand, I am
cutting a nail, on the other, my nail is cut. The presentation of the finger
to the blade, its flexibility or rigidity at the moment of cutting, the preci-
sion of the process, are sufficient for the external observer to determine
the state of the soul, the place where it is now in a state of equilibrium, as
it were. The soul of the left-hander is on his left side, on his right side he
is a dark body, a hybrid when forced to write with his right hand.
But that changes and varies. In the case of toenails, the reversal does
not take place. So far away, it is still the body, or the world. So far away,
the soul is absent. No toe touches the blade the way my left-hand middle
finger does. That’s enough about tools.
I touch one of my lips with my middle finger. Consciousness resides in

this contact. I begin to examine it. It is often hidden in a fold of tissue, lip
against lip, tongue against palate, teeth touching teeth, closed eyelids,
contracted sphincters, a hand clenched into a fist, fingers pressed against
each other, the back of one thigh crossed over the front of the other, or
one foot resting on the other. I wager that the small, monstrous homun-
culus, each part of which is proportional to the magnitude of the sensa-
tions it feels, increases in size and swells at these automorphic points,
when the skin tissue folds in on itself. Skin on skin becomes conscious, as
does skin on mucus membrane and mucus membrane on itself. Without
this folding, without the contact of the self on itself, there would truly be
no internal sense, no body properly speaking, cœnesthesia even less so,
no real image of the body; we would live without consciousness; slippery
smooth and on the point of fading away. Klein bottles are a model of
identity. We are the bearers of skewed, not quite flat, unreplicated surfaces,
deserts over which consciousness passes fleetingly, leaving no memory.
Consciousness belongs to those singular moments when the body is tan-
gential to itself.
I touch my lips, which are already conscious of themselves, with my
finger. I can then kiss my finger and, what amounts to almost the same
thing, touch my lips with it. The I vibrates alternately on both sides of the
contact, and all of a sudden presents its other face to the world, or, suddenly
22
VEILS
passing over the immediate vicinity, leaves behind nothing but an object.
In the local gesture of calling for silence, the body plays ball with the soul.
Those who do not know where their soul is to be found touch their
mouths, and they do not find it there. The mouth touching itself creates
its soul and contrives to pass it on to the hand which, clenching itself
involuntarily, forms its own faint soul and then can pass it on, when it
wishes, to the mouth, which already has it. Pure chance, each time.
The body cannot play ball, at all times or in all places. There are zones
where this contingency does not come into play. I touch my shoulder
with my hand. In relation to my hand or mouth my shoulder remains an
object in the world. It needs a natural object, a rock, tree trunk or water-
fall in order to become a subject again. The shoulder has no soul, save in
relation to what takes place outside the body. Now determine where the
soul is, by putting your elbows on your knees, by placing one part of your
body on another.
There is no end to it, the only limit is your own suppleness.
Metaphysics begins with, and is conditioned by, gymnastics.
Let us now draw or paint. Isolate, if you can, the chance encounters of
corners or folds, the small secret zones in which the soul, to all intents
and purposes, still resides. Then isolate as well, if possible, the unstable
zones which are able to play at souls with one another as if playing ball.
Surround also the balls or blocks, which only become subjects in the pres-
ence of objects, the dense or compact regions which always remain objects
or black, soulless deserts, in themselves, or in relation to those zones which
turn them into objects. Drawing rarely defines compact zones. These
explode, burst forth and escape along narrow corridors, form passes and
chimneys, pathways, passages, flames, zigzags and labyrinths. Observe on
the surface of the skin, the changing, shimmering, fleeting soul, the blaz-
ing, striated, tinted, streaked, striped, many-coloured, mottled, cloudy,
star-studded, bedizened, variegated, torrential, swirling soul. A wild idea,
the first after consciousness, would be to trace delicately and colour in
these zones and passages, as in a map.
Tattooing: my white, constantly present soul blazes up and is diffused
in the unstable reds which exchange with other reds; deserts lacking a
soul are black, and fields where the ochre, mauve, cold blue, orange and
turquoise soul very occasionally settles are green . . . This is what our
complex and somewhat frightening identity card looks like. Everyone
has their own original card, like their thumbprint or dental record, no
map resembles another, each one changes through time. I have made so
23
THE FIVE SENSES
much progress since my sad youth and bear on my skin the tracks and
paths traced by the women who have helped me in the search for my
scattered soul.
Those who need to see in order to know or believe, draw and paint and
fix the lake of changing, ocellated skin and make the purely tactile visible
by means of colours and shapes. But every epidermis would require a
different tattoo; it would have to evolve with time: each face requires
an original tactile mask. Historiated skin carries and displays a particular
history. It is visible: wear and tear, scars from wounds, calluses, wrinkles and
furrows of former hopes, blotches, pimples, eczema, psoriasis, birth-marks.
Memory is inscribed there, why look elsewhere for it? And it is invisible:
the fluctuating traces of caresses, memories of silk, wool, velvet, furs, tiny
grains of rock, rough bark, scratchy surfaces, ice crystals, flames, the
timidity of a subtle touch, the audacity of aggressive contact. An abstract
drawing or painting would be the counterpart of the faithful and honest
tattoo in which the sense impressions are expressed; if the picture imi-
tates readymade illustrations, icons or letters, everything is reduced to
a mere reflection of the social. The skin becomes a standard bearer,
whereas it is in fact imprinted.
The beginnings of a drawing changing amidst caresses: naked, stretched
out, curled up at my side, tiger, cougar, armadillo, you seek to guess the
secrets of my historiated, liquid, shimmering skin. Our soul expands, we
are not monochromatic.
The global soul: a small, deep place, not far from the region of the emotions.
The local, storm-prone, surface soul: a viscous lake, ready to flare up, on
which the multiple, rainbow-coloured, slowly-changing light plays. A sharp
point and peacock feathers, the soul pricks us and struts about.
It is there that history truly begins. How can two such complicated
labyrinths meet, be superimposed and complement each other? Ariadne
is lost in Theseus’ labyrinth, Theseus is lost in the avenues and round-

abouts on Ariadne’s mountain. One would have to imagine the relation-
ship between two species, genres or kingdoms, tiger and peacock, zebra
and jaguar, ladybird and poppy, centipede and chalcedony, a chameleon
on marble. Miracles happen, ligers and tigons, although there are not
many of them, and they are rarely long-lived. Otherwise, Ariadne has to
turn white, and Theseus to wind back onto his distaff all the threads that
entangle and divide up her bedizened body. Failing a miracle, our surface
soul is an obstacle to our amorous activities. It is as if we were wearing a
tattooed breastplate, unless we lay it down, melt the map of pathways
and crossroads, and redeploy our soul or make it burn with a different
light, so that the flames mingle.
24
VEILS
When the soul comes to an organ, that organ becomes conscious and
the soul is lost. If my finger touches my lip and says I, my mouth becomes
an object, but in reality it is my finger that is lost. As soon as the soul
settles on it, it takes over. When I lift these bricks, stones, concrete blocks,
I exist entirely in my hands and arms and my soul in its density is at home
there but, at the same time, my hand is lost in the grainy body of the peb-
bles. The object is reduced to a black body and the soul to a white void.
The soul, as transparent as an evanescent angel, whitens the places where
it alights; the skin, imprinted elsewhere with the varied colours of history,
is brighter, lighter and correspondingly whiter at these points, because it
has become alive. Behold: the skin of his face was shining. Behold: he was
transfigured before them, as white as snow. The soul, in patches, shapes
the tattoo, the set of crossed lines drawing a force-field: the space occu-
pied by the formidable pressure of the soul in its efforts to erase gently the
shadows of the body, and the major entrenchments of the body to resist
this effort. On the skin, soul and object are neighbours. They advance, win
or lose their places, a long, hazy mingling of the I and the black body,
resulting from time to time in a peacock’s tail of mingled colours. The strug-
gle ends with the alabaster-white, mystical body. I am no longer anything.
Or with the cybernetic body, a black box, another total nothingness.
The ecstatic transfiguration, the loss of the body into the soul, removes
the tattoo. The totally flayed man, the perfect automaton, also replaces
the body with a total black box. Thus the mingled body finds itself in the
middle, between heaven and hell: in everyday space.
All dualism does is reveal a ghost facing a skeleton. All real bodies shim-
mer like watered silk. They are hazy surfaces, mixtures of body and soul.
It seems simple, although perverse and laughable, to tell of the loves of a
larva and an automaton, or of a phantom and a black box, but the loves
of the composite and the many-hued are consummated wordlessly.
I have only described tattooing in order to show the traces of the soul
and those of the world. We always believe that we know something better
when we have seen it, or that we can explain better by deploying shapes
and displaying colours. To be sure, seen and visible tattoos, imprinted
with a hot needle, have their origin in this gaudy thing that is the soul, a
complex labyrinth of sense striving alternately towards the internal and
external, and vibrating at the limits of each. But I have drawn, coloured
or painted tattoos only in order to reveal the tangible: an abstract picture
of the sense of touch. Abstract insofar as it abandons the visible in order
to rejoin the tactile. The shimmering, vaguely fluid and, as it were, elastic
identity card, obeys the tender map of touch.1 It favours topology and
geography over geometry. Neglecting point of view and representation,
25
THE FIVE SENSES
it favours mountains, straits, footpaths, Klein bottles, chance borders that

are formed through the contingencies of contact. It turns the skin into a
generalized thumb. The skin can explore proximities, limits, adhesions,
balls and knots, coasts or capes, lakes, promontories and folds. The map
on the epidermis most certainly expresses more than just touch, it plunges
deeply into the internal sense, but it begins with the sense of touch. Thus
the visible tells more than just the visible. There is no word corresponding
to touch to designate the untouchable or intangible, as there is for the
invisible which is present in, or absent from what is seen, complementary
to it, although abstracted from it, and incarnated in its flesh. However, the
sense of touch is keen, sensitive and subtle2. The soul is intact, in that
sense. The intact soul entrances touch just as the topological invisible
haunts and illuminates the experiential visible, from within. In the lavish
luxury of tactile sensation, I feel as though I am touching a new abstract,
at least on two sides, one of mixture and coloured patterns, and the other
being one where the geometer abandons his measuring-stick to assess
individual shapes, ridges and corridors.
Many philosophies refer to sight; few to hearing; fewer still place their
trust in the tactile, or olfactory. Abstraction divides up the sentient body,
eliminates taste, smell and touch, retains only sight and hearing, intuition
and understanding. To abstract means to tear the body to pieces rather
than merely to leave it behind: analysis.
I retreat in the face of difficulty by erecting a palace of abstractions.

I baulk at obstacles, just as many fear the other and his skin. Just as many
are afraid of their senses and reduce to nothing, to the tabula rasa of the
inedible, the sumptuous, virtual, folded peacock’s tail of taste. Empiricism
plunges one into a many-splendoured reality that requires great patience
and intense powers of abstraction. What is left to hope for after the events
of birth and self-recognition have taken place?
Body and soul are not separate but blend inextricably, even on the skin.
Thus two mingled bodies do not form a separate subject and object.
I caress your skin, I kiss your mouth. Who, I? Who, you? When I touch
my hand with my lips, I feel the soul like a ball passing from one side to
the other of the point of contact, the soul quickens when faced with such
unpredictability. Perhaps I know who I am when thus playing my soul
like a musical instrument, multiplying the fine threads of self-contact
above which the soul flies in every direction. I embrace you. Pitiful, cruel
and hurried lovers that we are, we had only ever learned duelling, dualism
and perversity. I embrace you. No, my soul does not fly around the fine
26
VEILS
thread that we both wind securely around the contact. No, it is neither
my soul, nor yours. No, it is not so simple or cruel. No, I do not objectify,
freeze, ensnare, or rape you, or treat you as that tedious old marquis
would have done. And I do not expect you to do as I do. For that you
would have to become a ghost or an automaton. For that you would have
to become a larva or a lemur, and I to change into a black box. In reality,
this limit case can occur through illness or tiredness. In all other cases,
I almost always set a brown corridor against your opaline zone, or a light
region on a violet area. All depends on time, place and circumstance. It is
the beginning of patience. And infinite exploration. We feel our way in
the thicket of circumstances like a congenitally blind man deciphering
Braille, as though we were choosing colours of wool in the night. Anxiety
and attention teeter, new and refined. Black on black, clear on confused,
dark on a blend of colours, a rainbow on the whole spectrum of colours,
images necessary for those without a sense of touch, a mountain pass on
a plain, a mountain on a valley, a promontory on a gulf or strait – figures.
The pallid soul flees and hides, withdraws, dons masks and appearances,
makes itself visible from afar and takes refuge, leaves in its wake a cloud of
ink or a wave of perfume, constructs glades, basins and marble pathways;
becomes bold, advances, attacks gently, smiles and reveals itself again,
waits, recognizes the territory, imposes itself, negates itself, shouts or falls
silent, murmurs at length, and suddenly, in a corner of the wood, along the
corridor, against the chimney, in the roundness of a curve or at the point
of a zigzag, white Ariadne appears unexpectedly on the path of the inde-
cipherable labyrinth: your radiant white soul, transfigured on the moun-
tain and enveloped in immaculate dawn.
Death produces the same flat engram on corpses.
The variety of colours, forms and tones, of folds, flounces, furrows, con-
tacts, mountains, passes, and peneplains, the peculiar topological variety
of the skin is most economically described as a developing, amorphous,
composite mixture of body and soul. Every individual place, even the
most ordinary, creates an original combination of them. One could say
that when these mixtures come into contact, they analyse each other or
give rise, from their composition, to simple elements. As if, suddenly, one
pole attracted the soul, and the other took charge of the object. In a free
state, they are combinations, hand and forehead, elbow and thigh. In a
state of contact or contingency, they react in relation to each other and
give rise to those simplicities that we commonly think about in terms of
zero and one, soul and body, subject and object. These simple entities are
27
THE FIVE SENSES
rarely seen in nature, one only ever encounters the indefinite spectrum
of their compounds, one only knows simple entities as admixtures and
through their reactions to one another.
No-one has witnessed the great battle of simple entities. We only ever
experience mixtures, we encounter only meetings. The pure body, the
black body or the candid soul, is more than improbable. Alabaster and jet
are miracles.
I embrace you: here and now our contingency creates nuance on
nuance, mixture on mixture. Brown on grey, or purple on gold. One card
on another, or cards on the table. Two alloys change in composition, the
cards are shuffled, jumbled, redistributed. A storm bursts over both fields.
The lines of force, contours, slopes and valleys are redesigned. The warps
change weft. When yellow is mixed with blue, the result is green. The
titles of mixtures change, as do the titles of alliances. I embrace you as
Harlequin, I leave you as Pierrot; you touch me as duchess and you with-
draw as marchioness. Harlequin of this zone and marchioness of that
place. Or, I embrace you as brass and leave you as bronze, you embrace
me as argentan, you leave me as vermeil. Like the philosopher’s stone
which transforms alloys and transmutes titles. Nothing is more abstract,
learned or profound than this immediate meditation on combinations, nor
more subtle or difficult to understand than this local, complex recasting,
than this complete conversion or these unstable reversals. No doubt we
have never said anything about change, or transformation in general,
which was not entirely caught up in our contingency. We cannot think
about change except in terms of mixtures; if we try to think about it in
terms of simple entities, we merely arrive at miracles, leaps, mutations,
resurrections and even transubstantiation. This is a change through titles,
alloys, fabrics and cards, this is a change through drawings and reactions,
one watered silk on another, hybridity.
One day some barbarian will be able to tell us what prodigious chem-
istry is at work and an under-barbarian will try to bottle it. Horror of hor-
rors, we shall see these tattoos again, but this time reproduced artificially.
Yes, singularity is in motion there, its Brownian movement produces
variations in colouring, our emotion leaves its precise signature. We were
so moved that we changed colour, a peacock’s tail on a rainbow, like spec-
tra suddenly becoming unstable. You embrace me mottled, I leave you
shimmering like watered silk; I embrace you as a network, you leave me
as a bundle. We caress each other along our contour lines, we leave each
other with various knots, in embraces that have changed shape.
If you want to save yourself, take risks. If you want to save your soul, do
not hesitate, here and now, to entrust it to the variable storm. An inconstant
28
VEILS
aurora borealis bursts forth in the night. It spreads, blazing or bleeding,

like those footlights that never stop blinking, whether they are switched
on or off. It either passes or doesn’t, but flows elsewhere in a rainbow-
coloured stream. You will not change if you do not yield to these incon-
stancies and deviations. More importantly, you will not know.
In these lavishly renewed undulations, fluctuations and versatile caprices
brought about by countless changes of skin and direction, there will
sometimes be sudden simplifications, and saturation or plenitude: all
colours of every tone will come together as white; all possible lines, pass-
ing in all directions, will form a surface; the knot will become a point.
In this place summation will occur – totalization. Carte blanche, smooth
fabric, dawn light. On this spot, the intense meditation culminates in an
apex, in the blinding apparition of the singular brought about by the satu-
ration of presence, the transfiguration of the many-hued tattoo into a
pure soul. The I is rarely revealed outside of these circumstances. I am,
I exist in this mixed contingency that changes again and again through
the agency of the storm that is the other, through the possibility of his or
her existence. We throw each other off balance, we are at risk.
At the saturated summit of the mixture, the ecstasy of existence is a sum-
mation made possible by the contingency of the other. My contingency
makes possible the same encounter for her. A white summation of all
colours, a starry centre of threads.
At the empty and null bottom of this same mixture, death, white also
by subtraction or abstraction, is flat.
Without the experience of mingled bodies, without these tangible riots
of colour and mitigated multiplicities, we had long failed to distinguish
life from death. The misunderstanding wherein death resembles glory,
where life is only happy in the tomb, had turned metaphysics into a prep-
aration for murder.
When in fact it is an art of love.
CANVAS, VEIL, SKIN
In the 1890s, Pierre Bonnard painted a bathrobe; he painted a canvas in

which a bathrobe is depicted, and a woman amidst leaves.
The brown-haired woman, seen from behind, half turning to the right,
as if she were hiding, is wrapped in a very long, voluminous piece of
yellowish-orange fabric entirely covering her standing figure, from the
nape of her neck to her feet. All that can be glimpsed are her nose, the tip
29
THE FIVE SENSES
of one ear, one closed eye, her forehead, hair and a sort of chignon. The
bathrobe veils the woman, the fabric veils the canvas. Studded with moons
and half-moons, grained with crescents darker than itself, the material
vibrates with interspersed light and dark areas. The half-moons, set at
different angles, but at regular intervals, create a monotonous effect. An
effect of patterning rather than vibration has been sought. The impression
of printed tissue is more important than the optical effect: the eye is
cheated. A night dress, an eyelid lowered, as if in sleep, the light of moons.
The loosish garment occupies the space. The canvas, vertical like a
Chinese scroll, rises along the length of the body. Foliage fills the back-
ground, impinging ever so slightly on the material, so that ultimately the
picture is reduced to the fabric. Why did Bonnard not paint directly on to
the bathrobe, why did he not turn the bathrobe into a canvas, paint its
material instead of the canvas? Why does he not now paint on fabric but
on another surface?
If you removed the leaves and the bathrobe, would you touch the skin
of the brown-haired woman or the canvas of the picture? Pierre Bonnard
is not so much appealing to sight as to touch, the feeling beneath the
fingers of films and fine layers, foliage, material, canvas, surface, defoliation,
undressing, refined unveilings, thin caressing curtains. His immensely
tactful and tactile art does not turn the skin into a vulgar object to be seen,
but rather into the feeling subject, a subject always active beneath the
surface. The canvas is covered in canvases, veils pile up and veil only
other veils, the leaves in the foliage overlap each other. Leaves lying
beneath the pages. As you are reading, you are no doubt focussing your
gaze on these pages on which I am writing about Bonnard. Remove the
sheets, turn the pages. Behind each one, still another, covered likewise
with monotonous markings. In the end the eye encounters nothing more
than that. All that remains is to touch the delicate film of the printed sheet,
the bearer of meaning; the sheet, page, material-fabric, skin, the canvas
itself of Bonnard’s woman. I leaf through the layers of the bathrobe.
It covers the skin, accumulating layer upon layer.
The Child with the Bucket, painted five years later, is part of a screen, the third
of its four leaves. The child glimpsed on one leaf is playing on the loose
fabric of one of the panels which are set at angles to one another, with
the aim of concealment. A shelter in which to undress, upright so that
one can throw one’s bathrobe over it, a canvas stretched like a garment
away from the skin, a new veil.
Dressed in a double-breasted, printed smock, the child floats on the
material of the screen, on Bonnard’s canvas, in the fabric of his dress or
envelope, and is veiled by as many skins. A round figure crouching on the
30
VEILS
sand, he appears to be filling his bucket under a round, leafy, orange tree:
the small tree in a pot, a small human near the bucket, both originating
in sand or earth, both surrounded by those subtle variegations that cover
them, overlapping leaves, lattice-patterned material. Bonnard’s canvas is
printed with canvases and expresses veils.
What wind will whip up the smock, make the foliage quiver, make the
screen shudder, what wind on your skin?
Thirty-five years later, the same Bonnard produced a Nude in the Mirror,
also called The Toilette. A naked woman, in high-heeled shoes three-quarters
turned towards the mirror, is looking at herself in it. We do not see her
image face on.
Two mirrors and nudity, the hidden front view or stolen image, the sec-
ond mirror as empty as the first, everything impels us to feel the prestige
of the visual, to discourse yet again on eroticism and representation. No.
She is naked, look at her skin: covered in tattoos – mottled, striped,
grainy, ocellated, dotted, nielloed, speckled, studded – even more than
the old bathrobe, and layered with less monotonous patches, like watered
silk. Her epidermis is painted in an extremely odd fashion. She has taken
off her dressing gown and the pattern of the material appears to have
remained on her skin. But the half-moons of the bathrobe are distributed
over it in a regular, mechanical, reproducible fashion; live impressions are
layered randomly and inimitably on the cutaneous garment. The model is
recognizable. The last thin skin, the painted one, is not printed smoothly,
homogeneously or monotonously, it spreads and shines in a chaos of
colours, forms and tones. No other woman has the specific skin of that
woman. You have recognized her.
In the mixture of shades, in the chaos of marks and strokes, you recog-
nize the Belle Noiseuse whom Balzac thought unimaginable: in fact, she
has no reflection in the mirror and cannot be represented. Here the
body rises above disorder, here Aphrodite rises above the waves, even
more complex in her skin than the nautical sound of waves breaking.
No, the old painter of the Unknown Masterpiece3 was not going mad, but
was anticipating more than a century of painting. Balzac was dreaming of
Bonnard, sight projecting touch, reason and order musing on the chaos
of singularity.
Now it could be said that the frontal reflection in the half-seen mirror,
or the image of the woman in the mirror, is reduced to a sort of curtain,
a bathroom hanging, itself tattooed: ocellated, shimmering, mottled, stud-
ded and layered with colours and tones. Mixture for mixture and chaos
31
THE FIVE SENSES
for chaos, the skin’s image is the curtain, its reflection a canvas and its
phantom a sheet.
But the canvas as a whole – the window, wall, plate, table, fruit, draperies,
scattered towels – could serve as a screen, poster, leaf or veil: a patterned
curtain, a tattoo, like the skin.
The woman with the lavishly decorated body, facing the richly deco-
rated reflection of the curtain, is holding in her hand a shawl: is it a piece
of curtain, a fragment of canvas, a bit of her skin? It is a rag seamlessly
joined to the scrap of material stuck to her.
Pierre Bonnard’s Nude in the Mirror is underpinned by the equivalence
or equation of canvas, veils and skin. Nudity is covered with tattoos, the
skin is printed, impressed. The nude is pulling on her bathrobe or the child
his smock, plain or brightly coloured printed fabrics which express inac-
curately, rigidly or conventionally our individual impressions. The painter
places marks on the canvas, supposedly in order to express his impres-
sions: he tattoos it and reveals his fragile, private and chaotic skin.
This one exhibits skin, that one canvases, another luxurious veils.
The naked woman in the mirror is standing at her washstand like the
artist at his palette and she often has as many pots at her disposal: tubes,
bottles, brushes, sprays, soaps and makeup, nail polish and creams, lotions,
mascara, the whole cosmetic apparatus. She washes, adorns and paints
herself. She puts foundation on her face and then the surface tone, just as
the painter prepares his canvas. The skin is identical to the canvas, just as
the canvas above was identical to skin. The model does to herself what
the artist does with her; to be sure, they have in common the virtuosity
of optical effects, but they also work on a common variety over which
their touch passes. Their hands sheathed in skin linger on skin.
Cosmetics and the art of adornment are equivalent expressions. The

Greeks in their exquisite wisdom combined order and adornment in the
same word, the art of adorning and that of ordering. ‘Cosmos’ designates
arrangement, harmony and law, the rightness of things: here is the world,
earth and sky, but also decoration, embellishment or ornamentation.
Nothing goes as deep as decoration, nothing goes further than the skin,
ornamentation is as vast as the world. Cosmos and cosmetics, appearance
and essence have the same origin. Adornment equals order, and embel-
lishment is equivalent to law, the world appears ordered, at whatever
level we consider phenomena. Every veil is a magnificently historiated
display.
32
VEILS
Superior to the physicist, the naked woman in the mirror imitates the
demiurge. She constructs the order of a veil: prepares her skin, decorates
a layer, a variety of world, submits it to law. The artist reveals the order of
the world in the order of appearance, as does she. We can hear all that in
the discourse on the deceptive or superb effects of sight and bedazzle-
ment, which forgets how the variety has been worked on: canvas, veil
and skin that the hands have woven, coated, softened or fortified.
And objectified. The naked woman at her toilet, in front of two mirrors,
is busy with her self-portrait: an artist in her studio. She paints her face,
neck, and would have put makeup on her breasts in times gone by, she
manicures fingers and nails, removes overlong hairs from her fur, shapes
a mask, in the Indian or African manner, gives herself an identity. Paints
the skin of her face, paints a mask or paints on a mask; her skin becomes
a veil, then a canvas, as if the cosmetic fabric had received the imprint of
her face, as if the so perfectly contrived finish could be torn off, as if the
still damp fresco could be detached like a mobile canvas, as far removed
from the body as the bathrobe or smock, as the leaf of the screen – a hov-
ering, floating object. An impression or imprint made on an opaque area
formed by perfumes, lotions or makeup. The skin of the subject is objecti-
fied, it could be exhibited in a museum. Just as a thumb makes its mark on
a page, a chaotic or ordered, but nonetheless individual fingerprint, so the
face imprints on this gossamer mask its indelible relief and personality. The
naked woman with cosmetics, as she mixes tones and pastes, prepares to
cast the mould of her impressions.
Let us enter the world of the fêtes galantes where so many masks and
fantastical disguises whirl and dance: they display themselves and spread
out, hide, fall, change places with each other. At one moment the skin is
lost, the person strays, the sloughed skin flies through the air. At the feast
of love, the dancers shed their skins. The skins that pass, vital, sprightly
and delicate in the thin air, as though they were spirits, are visible only
momentarily. Watteau and Verlaine noted them. A tiny spark of danger-
ous joy in which the cosmetic, an adornment prepared to last barely an
evening, flies off towards beauty, for eternity.
Cosmetics approaches æsthetics in the sense of art theory. In the streets

of Paris things just as beautiful as those created by Bonnard, Boucher or
Fragonard can be seen. Sometimes women’s adornment is so well adapted
to their nature that our breath is taken away, just as when we gaze at
the world; but cosmetics becomes an æsthetics of sensation, because of
33
THE FIVE SENSES
a particular harmony: the naked woman in the mirror tattoos her skin, in
a certain order and according to precise laws, she follows exact pathways;
she emphasizes the eye and the gaze, accentuates with colour the place
to be kissed, crowning the zone of words and taste, underlines hearing
with an earring, traces bridges or links of colour between the wells or the
mountains of the senses, draws the map of her own receptivity. With
cosmetics, our real skin, the skin we experience, becomes visible; through
adornment the particular law of the body is revealed, just as by means
of crosshatching, colours or curves on a map, the ordered world displays
its landscapes. The tattooed, chaotic, unruly nude wears on her skin the
fleeting common place of her own sensorium – hills and dales on which
currents from the organs of hearing, sight, taste or smell, ebb and flow, a
shimmering skin where touch calls forth sensation. Cosmetics reproduces
this summation or mixture and attempt to paint them, differently accord-
ing to different social conventions, instinctively tracing these temporary
tattoos. Masks left to museums can be understood in this way; to each
his cartography of sensations, to each his cosmetography, if I dare so
express myself, to each his facial imprint, or, very precisely, his personal
impressions – another way, in our Latin languages, of saying his printed
mask. I imagine that the reason why we do not have a ring hanging
from our nose, as other peoples do, is that we have forgotten the sense of
smell.
No, woman does not wear a duplicitous mask, as moralists say, and is
not repairing the irreparable as young men claim. She traces the Tender
Map of touch, as well as the streams of her hearing, her rivers of taste and
the lakes of her listening, all of these mingled, quivering waters, from
which her constant beauty arises. She makes visible her invisible identity
card, or impressionable body. Her sensuous world is covered with a map,
to the exact scale of its surface; detail for detail, eye for eye.
Who has not dreamed that maps such as this might be drawn identical
to the world itself, measure for measure, the impossible dream of an
ultrafine film following all the fractal details of the landscape, the cosmic
dream of an exquisite cosmetic on the skin of each thing which one would
remove, spread out and exhibit, after unrolling or unfolding it, to make
visible the wine-dark sea and its light breezes, finer than wrinkles in the
corner of a laughing eye, the pastel mauve of the lilac, the patch of sky,
the tilted, moist corolla, the cosmos in all its order and adornment?
The Garden pulls, hides and smoothes out this transparent covering
which is infinitely invaginated on each object. It objectifies the face of the
landscape, the membrane of its mask.
34
VEILS
A tangible medium is necessary before form, colour and tone can exist.
Skin, covering, veil or canvas. The image is formed on an unfurled variety,
the map is drawn and printed on a page.
Bonnard loved all sorts of media: stage sets, posters, papers, materials,
fans, vellum in books, cardboard covers, sheets or screen panels. He pro-
duced the masks for Ubu roi. Before the eye sees, there is the texture of
the canvas. The eye has no weight to impose, it imprints nothing. On
the subject’s front line is the skin. Everything is enveloped in a film. In the
beginning, touch; at the origin, the medium.
The painter, with the tips of his fingers, caresses or attacks the canvas,
the writer scarifies or marks the paper, leans on it, presses it, prints on it.
There is a moment when seeing becomes impossible, when the nose is
touching, sight is cancelled by contact; two blind people who can see only
by means of their canes or walking sticks. The artist or artisan, through
his brush, hammer or pen, grapples at the decisive moment with skin
against skin. No-one who has refused contact – who has never kneaded
or struggled – has ever loved or known.
The eye, distant, lazy, passive. No impressionism without an impressing
force, without the pressure of touch.
With his fingers of skin, Bonnard makes us touch the skin of things.
The Garden of 1936 traces an almost diagonal path to paradise. There is

no perspective, depth, or restored relief to lead one to suspect that the
viewer’s gaze has been staged. Bonnard throws a bouquet in our face. The
dark-haired woman was covering herself with a bathrobe, the screen was
hiding who knows what. The only things reflected in the mirrors were
the curtains, screening nudity, the eye is cheated. Here paradise disap-
pears out of sight, hidden by a curtain of foliage or trees that form part of
paradise. And it is offered with great generosity. Whoever decorated this

garden dress, this printed veil, this leaf, must have plunged naked into
the flora and bathed at length in the colours and tones.
In the same year, the Nude in the Bath appears. Immersion. I cannot say
that I have seen this nude, I cannot claim to know it, I try to write that
I know, that I am living what Bonnard attempted to do. Immersion reveals,
close to the sensitive skin, close to the apparitions or impressions in which
it is enveloped or bathed, a sort of membrane, a fine film which inserts
itself, or comes into being, between the medium or mixture and the male
or female bather, a variety common to the feeling and the felt, a gossamer
fabric which serves as their common edge, border or interface, a transitional
35
THE FIVE SENSES
film that separates and unites the imprinter and the imprinted, the print-
ing and the printed, thin printed material: the bath reveals the veil.
This canvas gives us the key to Bonnard’s secret and, finally, that of
impressionism. The bath tests sensation, it tests it in the sense of a labo-
ratory experiment. This is the experience of sensation, or rather, this is
experience or sensation. Bonnard throws himself naked into the garden
swimming pool, bathes himself in the world. Naked bodies, exposed by
centuries of painting, are not aimed at voyeurs, but reveal what belongs
to the realm of the senses. They are all female bathers. Not models to be
painted, but models of what it is necessary to do in order that one might
one day paint or think: throw yourself naked into the ocean of the world.
Feel this membrane, this fabric forming around yourself: this invisible veil.
And draw it back gently, tactfully and delicately, from this laminated
corridor between the skin and things, stretch out, unfold, spread, exhibit
and flatten it; slowly smooth the thin veil, cosmic in the garden and cos-
metic on the skin of the Belle Noiseuse, as she steps out of her bath, take
special care not to tear the veil – this is the canvas.
The Garden depicts the subject stepping out of the bath. I cannot decide
whether it reveals the fabric of things themselves or the flayed epidermis
of Pierre Bonnard, the subject of the impression or the impressed object.
They are brought together by the bath, into which the subject plunges,
imprinted with foliage and flowers.
A shroud, or winding sheet, is a cloth the purpose of which is to wipe
away sweat, the sweat of the dying man. The skin is covered with perspi-
ration, it exudes and becomes mottled, beaded and a blend of different
colours, like that of the female nude. The shroud materializes the liquid
veil, the mask streaming with sweat or blood: the fabric flows like fluid,
but is also solid because of the deposits left behind, almost ethereal
through evaporation. The film between the skin and the bath is the site of
transitions and exchanges. The bathrobe, in the bathroom, amidst the

steam, could be called a shroud.
In Turin one can visit the shroud that enveloped the body of Christ in
his tomb, the veil of his face. Plunged alive into the most painful tortures,
covered with sweat, blood, spittle, dust, scarified by flagellation, pierced
by nails, run through by spears, his corpse was rolled in the linen fabric,
a thin layer between the atrocious world and the printed skin. He was
buried beneath this veil. Removed gently, stretched, unfolded, flattened,
exhibited, the veil becomes a canvas and displays the traces of the body
and face. This is the man.
According to tradition, Veronica was the name of the holy woman who
wiped the crucified Christ’s face, covered with a liquid mask, dripping
36
VEILS
with sweat and blood. In ancient languages this name means the true
icon, the faithful image. True, faithful because imprinted, impressionistic.
Veronica becomes the patron saint of painters; her eyes full of tears,
blinded with grief and pity, she made with her hands the imprint of the
skin, the mask of pain, a holy woman of contact and caress, her hands
open and her eyes unseeing.
The Garden of Bonnard is like the bathrobe: the world is more luxurious
and more happily endowed than a regularly printed, woven veil; the gar-
den enlarges the dotted skin of the nude at her toilet to the scale of the
landscape, with more exuberance and greater richness in the tones and
patches of colour. This is the shroud of the artist emerging dripping after
bathing in the world, a true image of the garden.
Some look, contemplate and see: others caress the world or let them-
selves be caressed by it, throw themselves into it, roll, bathe or dive in it,
and are sometimes flayed by it. The first, their large eyes embedded in their
smooth, flat skin, are unacquainted with the weight of things. The others
give in to the weight of things, their epidermis marked locally and in
detail by the pressure, as if it had been bombarded. Their skin, therefore,
is tattooed, striped, striated, coloured, beaded, studded, layered chaoti-
cally with tones and shades, wounds and lumps.
Their skin has eyes, like a peacock’s tail.
It sees, is seen, varies, unfurls and displays itself. Pierre Bonnard gave
us, over half a century, his successive cast-off skins and flayed tunics. We
believe in images but do not find them here, the mirrors empty them-
selves and we have fine, sensitive skins. An exhibition of trophies and
scalps, hanging on the wall.
The garden-paradise unfurls a happy, sloughed skin.
Bonnard’s bathrobe, Bonnard’s nudes, Bonnard’s gardens display skins
in full bloom.
The eye loses its pre-eminence in the very area in which it is dominant,
in painting. At the limits of its endeavour, impressionism attains its true
original meaning, contact. The nude, ocellated like a peacock, reminds us
of the weight or pressure of things, the heaviness of the column of air
above us and its variations. Tunics, curtains, scarves, leaves, bathrobes are
printed like books, using strong pressure. The skin, a hard and soft wax,
receives these variable pressures according to the strength of things and
the tenderness of the area. Hence the tattoos, traces and marks, our mem-
ory, our history and the parchment of our experiences. Our cutaneous
garment bears and exhibits our memories, not those of the species, as is
37
THE FIVE SENSES
the case for tigers or jaguars, but those of the individual, each one with
his mask, or exteriorized memory. We cover ourselves with capes or coats
from modesty or shame about revealing our past and our passivity, and in
order to hide our historiated skin, a private, chaotic message, an unspeak-
able language, too disordered to be understood and which we replace by
the conventional or exchangeable impression of clothes and by the sim-
plified order of cosmetics. We never live naked, in the final analysis, nor
ever really clothed, never veiled or unveiled, just like the world. The law
always appears at the same time as an ornamental veil. Just as phenomena
do. Veils on veils, or one cast-off skin on another, impressed varieties.
The ancient Epicureans gave the name of simulacra to the fragile mem-
branes, which are emitted everywhere, fly through the air, are received
by everyone and are responsible for signs and meaning. The canvases of
Bonnard and others fulfil, perhaps, the function of simulacra. To be sure,
they pretend to do so. But above all: between the skin of the painter and
the fine envelope of things, the veil of the former encounters the veils of
the latter, the canvas seizes the momentary junction of the sloughed skins.
A simultaneous simulacrum.
Painters sell their skin, models hire out their skin, the world gives its
skins. I have not saved mine, here it is. Flayed, printed, dripping with
meaning, often a shroud, sometimes happy.
HERMES AND THE PEACOCK
Let’s talk about the peacock, a doubly monstrous bird, which has so many
long feathers that it cannot fly, as if evolution had erred through excess;
displaying a hundred eyes which you can imagine watching you even if
you know they cannot. When it struts, it displays an ocellated tail, reveal-
ing eyes of feather or skin.
Mercurial, but limited to earth-bound displays of flightiness, one day
the bird crossed Hermes’ path. Argus, the man who could see everything,
is said to have had two pairs of eyes, one on the front of his head, like
everyone else, the other behind. No blind spot. Others say that he had a
hundred – fifty in front and as many on the nape of his neck – or that he
had an infinite number of eyes all over his skin. Said to be clairvoyant at
first, then pure gaze, then a massive eyes-ball, and finally skin tattooed
with ocelli, fantastic proliferation gone mad. Growth and phantasm often
38
VEILS
go hand in hand. Argus sees everywhere and is always looking: he only

ever sleeps with one pair of eyes shut or with his eyelids half closed; half
asleep, half awake; the best of all watchers, whether earth-bound or aloft,
deserves his nickname of Panoptes, the panoptic.
An excellent example of perfect sight and lucid skin, just as the previously
mentioned painter was an example of vision and perceptive tattooing.
Panoptes would have been highly valued, nowadays, in the study of the
world and experimentation. He would have been a leader in laboratories
or observatories, or in the field; he would have kept watch marvellously
well. We need always to pay constant attention to things, in science or in
our travels.
Back then, in those mythic times, Argus was employed in surveillance.
Panoptes spied on the extra-marital loves of Zeus, at the instigation of
Hera, the jealous wife, who had him spy on the conjugal relationships
of the gods and at the same time on Jupiter’s amorous adventure with
a nymph.
There is an immense difference between the observation of things and
the surveillance of relationships: two worlds, perhaps, are in opposition
here; two kinds of time, that of myth and that of our history.
Myth is not concerned with the careful examination of objects. Argus is
the precursor of the private detective. Endowed with a hundred open
eyes while the other hundred are resting, he becomes a policeman, screw,
prison warder: all devoted to shadowing.
Cultures mature when they transfer their focus on relationships between

people to innocent objects. A more relaxed collective life tends to improve
our morals, such as when men turn their attention away from the anx-
ious, uncomfortable loves of their neighbours, towards the trajectory of a
comet. The society in which surveillance dominates ages quickly, becom-

ing old-fashioned and abusively archaic. The past lurks there like a mon-
ster, harking back to the age of myth.
Surveillance and observation. The human sciences keep watch, the
exact sciences observe. The first are as old as myths; the others are born
with us and are as new as history. Myth, theatre, representation and poli-
tics do not teach us to observe, they commit us to surveillance.
Panoptes sees everything, always, everywhere: for what task do the gods
employ him: for surveillance or observation?
39
THE FIVE SENSES
In the Greek sense of the verb to see, he incarnates theoretical man, an

omnidirectional ball of open eyes. Of what use is theory? To monitor rela-
tionships or to examine objects?
I shall call anything lacking an object poor. Myth lacks an object, as do
theatre and politics.
Once, a long time ago, not so long ago, we had few objects. Thing-deprived
humanity lingers in our consciousness. With so few things, our wealth
consisted of ourselves alone. We spoke only of ourselves and our relation-
ships. We lived in and through our relationships. So I shall call myths
poor, because of their lack of objects, and likewise theatre, theories and
politics; poor and wretched our philosophies, and wretched our human
sciences.
We remember so precisely this wretchedness that we cannot fail to
recognize it when we find it here and there among the nations of the
world, and in stories or abstract discourses. We are barely emerging from
places, families and collectives deprived of things, in which we were for
a long time trapped in relationships and condemned to an experience of
the world that was limited to talk. Deprivation leads to surveillance and
betrayal; the villages of my childhood were alive with lucid, talkative
Arguses. Everyone knew everything about everybody as if, in the middle
of us all, there was a panoptic tower keeping watch, an indiscreet social
contract or inevitable police report. Little or no attention was paid to
things, each person monitored the relationships of everyone else. I have
known societies composed entirely of sociologists. They were unbelievably
talented, both in watching and reporting. We have barely left that Antique
age, not all of us have emerged from the poverty that lasted from the
mythical ages until quite recently. I recall mythical societies entirely caught
up in representation, hibernating in language. Poverty is not only mea-

sured in bread but in words, not only by the lack of bread but by an excess
of words, an exclusionary prison. Language spreads when bread is lack-
ing. When bread arrives, speaking is out of the question. The mouth, long
starved, has too much work to do. We have learned to love objects.
There is no place for things on the boards of a theatre. We provide
plays and words to those who have only words. Our theories are bereft of
objects, they watch over relationships. So if you ask philosophy for bread,
what you get are nice words and representations. If you ask it for bread,
it has only circuses. It lives on relationships, on the human sciences, in
myth and antiquity, without leaving the village of our childhood; it has
40
VEILS
no world, produces no things, provides no bread. For how long has it

been poor and starving, as was our youth?
A prosperous, productive philosophy would provide more than enough
bread for all those who passed by.
The growth of objects, the exponential flood of things, have made us
forget the time of their absence. And that time seems so far away from us
now! Archaic, antediluvian and indeed mythical. Myths and philosophy
recount that time to us. Memories of places where lovers were kept under
surveillance, and pursued as far as the Bosphorus, in an empty, sonorous
space, with no-one thinking to eat. Thus philosophies without object –
nearly all – thus philosophies, aged and poor, which take their values
from the human sciences alone – almost all – appear so ancient to us that
we read them as myths. As though they were politics, theatre or magic.
When they come across an object, they change it, by sleight of hand, into
a relationship, language or representation.
They pull us backwards. On the whole, the observant person is better

than the surveillant, detective or policeman; and the astronomer who
falls to the bottom of a well is better than the woman who, behind his
back, mocks him to her friends. Who has a grasp of reality, he who gapes
at the stars or she who hides in the background, making fun of him? Do
the washerwomen know that a well makes an excellent telescope and
that, from the bottom of this vertical cylinder, the only telescope known
in Antiquity, one can see the stars in full daylight? What have they to
laugh about, not knowing that the scholar descends knowingly into the
abyss. Did they know this, the authors of fables that still make us laugh?
Did the philosophers? It is better to go from relationships to things, a
demanding innovation, than to return from objects to relationships, an
easy practice: from science to theatre, from work to politics, from descrip-
tion to myth, from the star thing to the theatrical representation. The exact
sciences came after the object had emerged, they foster its emergence.
The idea of going backwards is frightening: when objects are replaced by
relationships, issues, fetishes and goods. These are all forms of regression.
A little bit of naivety is better than suspicion.
Inundated with objects, we dream of relationships as of a lost paradise.
That paradise made for a very ordinary hell, peopled with voyeurs and
volunteer policemen, slimy with suspicion, and where laziness rivalled
politics. The philosophy of suspicion gives rise to the oldest trade in the
world. Communities, still deprived of objects, whether voluntarily or
41
THE FIVE SENSES
through the cruelty of others, indulge in the delights of policing and polit-
ical imprisonment, and condemn themselves to the hell of relationships.
Conversely, their masters do not want objects. Proof that things liberate
one from surveillance and that observation frees one from suspicion.
Sciences that are not acquainted with objects can only rely on sleuthing
and policing, they are caught up in myth. Objective knowledge creates
present history whereas the human, ancient sciences lead to mythology.
The observer weaves in the light of day what the surveillant undoes
during the night. Which is more frightening?
Hermes will kill Panoptes: the bearer of messages will triumph over
the watcher, surveillant or observer. Communication and information kill
theory. How?
Zeus, the king of the gods, loves Io, a beautiful nymph; Hera, a princess,
suffers from jealousy. A jealous person lives in a place of thorns, where sur-
veillance begins: a vantage point from which to see. Zeus deceives Hera by
cheating: he transforms the nymph into a heifer. What, me, love an animal?
The heifer shines, however, with a wonderfully white, smooth coat.
Hera suspects something, she is suspicious of the bull circling around
the cow. As she is able to metamorphose beings as easily as Zeus, she
sends a gadfly, her own prickly envy, that stings the female and maddens
her, forcing her to leave.
Io, a wanderer, gallops through Europe, gives her name to the Ionian
Sea, running along the shore, always fleeing, and passes into Asia at the
place now known as the Bosphorus or Cow’s Step; a vagabond, she suf-
fers and complains, unfortunate to have been loved by a god, in as much
pain from wandering and love as the crucified Prometheus from ven-
geance and immobility.
Hera guessed correctly, Zeus was indeed hiding behind the appearance
of the bull.
The queen, foiled, calls Argus, whom nothing escapes. Panoptes guards
the cow, even Zeus can do nothing about it. The king is foiled in turn.
Jealous panoptic theory sees all from the top of its tower.
Method in the human sciences, which deal only with relationships, apes
police and inquisitorial suspicion. It spies, shadows, sounds hearts and minds.
42
VEILS
It asks questions and remains suspicious of the answers, it never asks

itself whether it has the right to act as it does.
It is said that God is not deceitful in the exact sciences, where the
innocent object remains loyal and trustworthy. God does not deceive, he
establishes the rules of the game, and remains within them. Man deceives
in the human sciences, and worse still, he cheats. In the exact sciences,
if God does not deceive, there is all the more reason for him not to cheat.
Man deceives in the human sciences, and worse still cheats – not only
subtle, complex and refined like the God of the exact sciences, but hiding
his game of deceit, by feigning a different strategy, suddenly changing the
rules, and cheating offside. Man cheats in the social sciences, where
breaking the rules is law. Where changing the rules is law.
The exact sciences construct subtle theories that are at once honest,
elegant and stable. In them, a cat remains a cat: the identity principle. The
human and social sciences describe theories even more underhanded
than fraud, more duplicitous than cheating, in order to outsmart their
object. Here everything becomes possible; a cow is a woman or a god a
bull, even the identity principle is unstable. Reason watches while reason
sleeps, reason sleeps while it watches, a hellish world of relationships in
which stability itself fluctuates.
The human sciences are necessarily involved in the worst kinds of double
dealing, whether from beneath the table or behind your back. The term
hypocrisy describes this procedure quite well: here method is critical –
hypocritical – by undermining or backstabbing objects or relationships.
It tricks tricksters, deceives deceivers and hides behind those who cheat
(those who cheat do it behind the players’ backs), it robs robbers, plays
policeman to the gendarmes, teaches the most famous detectives a lesson,
subjects the grand inquisitor to searches, keeps voyeurs under surveil-

lance, betrays liars, studies the weak and miserable, exploits them by tak-
ing from them information, their little secrets, their last possessions.
The hypocritical method consists in always placing oneself behind, and
this immediately creates a queue. One must therefore get quickly behind
the last person in the queue, stand behind the last one whose back can
still be seen, then hide one’s own back for fear of being caught in turn by
someone who has understood the game. Thus the rules of the method: set
a liar and a half to catch a liar, a more depraved person to catch a depraved
one, the pluperfect, or more-than-perfect, as we used to say; a theoreti-
cian to catch a voyeur.
43
THE FIVE SENSES
The movement has no end and constructs long, monotonous, difficult

chains of reasoning that seek closure. In other words, philosophies which
draw on the human sciences try to find sites which, in the final analysis,
escape criticism, the last link of the chain, or the end of the queue. They
indulge in reasoning based on extremes, just as in the classical age philos-
ophies that drew on the nascent exact sciences appropriated the divine
extreme, the non-deceptive God of philosophers and scientists. God can
neither be deceived nor deceive us, that was the endmost point. Here the
limit would be, at the opposite extreme, to cheat or deceive so much that
all imaginable cheating would already have been anticipated. The extralu-
cid and inescapable panoptic has already seen everything.
Did the traditional theology of knowledge and evil foresee these
closures at the extremes? Here we have God and the Devil.
Does our age of social sciences set up the Devil as a new extreme, in
opposition to the God of philosophers and scholars, the God who domi-
nated the classical age and the emergence of modern science?
God neither deceives nor cheats. Objects in the exact sciences remain
stable. Man deceives and cheats, so much so that he disappears some-
times, like Zeus beneath the skin of the bull, like Hera behind the sting of
the gadfly.
Now it could be said that he who cheats and deceives does so because
he wants to win. So the first attribute of God consists in being indifferent
to winning.
Detach yourself from notions of winning or losing, be indifferent to victory
or loss, you will enter into science, observation, discovery and thought.
Here two extremes are defined: a stable apex of trust; a maximum of dis-
trust. To the stability of the object corresponds the lability of relationships.
God has guarded the exact sciences since the classical age. Some say he
appropriates them, some that he favours them. The Devil dominates the
human sciences, a deceitful trickster from the outer limits of evil. It is said
that he deploys extreme and exquisite cunning to foil God’s power and
goodness and to win or regain the place of God. God deploys no cunning
and refuses conflict. The war between the Devil and God never took place,
one wants to win, the other does not.
Indifferent to winning or defeat, beyond the scale of victories and losses,
beyond the scalar podium, beyond metrics, God is infinite. Here infinity
is defined by indifference to the battle with evil, the battle to end all
battles.
44
VEILS
Free from the hell of relationships, God is devoted to the object, and
thus creates the world, the complete set of objects. Everything derives
therefore from his refusal to be part of the game.
Hera and Zeus play chess, play at deceiving each other or winning, devil
against devil, their cheating reaching the extremes of evil. The Devil is the
god of myths, or of the human sciences, our god. Our thinking takes place
under his regressive reign.
Is it possible to conceive of a new man who would have no time for
cheating or deception, who would be set free from the animal podium on
which victory is all that matters?
Panoptes sees everything and knows everything, from his extremal site.
Nothing escapes him. Using falsely naïve images, myth provides an excel-
lent description of concepts that we have difficulty in forming. The aim of
the game is to find foolproof moves. Hence the construction of extremes:
God, the Devil, Panoptes himself, Hera the queen and Zeus the king. The
strongest pitted against the strongest, like rutting wapitis.
Zeus attempts to deceive his wife who tries to catch him, and therefore
cheats: where you see a cow, it is really a woman. Hera cheats and the
gadfly flies and stings according to her will. The goddess positions herself
behind the god, who positions himself behind her: he undermines the
goddess who undermines him. In this game with no rules, the back of
each is turned towards the other, offering up a weak blind spot.
Let us look for a third, all-seeing man. Let us imagine someone with no
back: an insomniac, without a blind spot, never inattentive or unaware,
intensely present, nothing but face, an omnidirectional ball of eyes, an
interlocking geometry of indestructible facets, waking and sleeping in
flashes of light and dark, like a lighthouse on the coast or, more accu-
rately, like a set of lights and signals, controlling a particular zone and
filling the night, it stares or signals at random. This is Argus. Here at last we
have total theory, the unassailable method that can conquer everything.
There is no getting around Argus. Here at last is the right position for
those who desire to be first or last, critical yet never subject to criticism,
an observing presence with no observable opacity, always a subject, never
an object. No-one takes Panoptes from behind, he has no underside or
back, he is a sphere made for scanning.
Those who deal with men and rule over them always stay in the black,
blind, impotent spot of the active or present subject, behind his back.
Illness plays a minor role, as do sleep, misery, linguistic poverty, the residual
45
THE FIVE SENSES
unknown of collective relationships, or childlike hope. The doctors of bod-

ies and souls, economists, politicians and rhetors, inhabit this weak spot,
sheltered from blindness, in the dark of the unconscious or on the edge of
tears. They see without being seen, each one finding his two-way mirror or
his shuttered window. The philosopher who sums them up, integrates and
reflects them, becomes panoptic: inescapable and unassailable like Argus.
You who look at everything through your perpetually open eyes, is
your lucidity never bathed in tears?
Here is the state of play: Zeus himself is in check. The queen beats the
king using the panoptic rook-tower. Zeus then calls on his knight, Hermes
enters. The king orders his angel to attack and to kill Panoptes.
It is impossible to approach him or take him unawares. There is no sur-
prising a surveillant: consider the pre-conditions of this strategy of always
more. The knight must circumvent the all-seeing tower. How?
Hermes sends Panoptes deep into a magic sleep by playing the syrinx,
as others charm snakes. Hermes invents the syrinx or Pan-pipes for this
battle.
A new combat between extremal sites: Panoptes has total and complete
vision. In the realm of sight he leaves his adversary no opening. Hermes
therefore quits the terrain on which Argus is unassailable and moves into
the realm of sounds by taking over the entire spectrum: hence the name
of Pan’s pipes. Pan against Panoptes. Consider the pre-conditions for the
strategies of total war. Listening and looking in confrontation, a strange
conflict of the faculties of sense: hearing against sight, or ear against eye,
one totality opposed to another, armoury for armoury, the sum of sound-
waves balancing the sum of evidence. The geometral plane of messages
against the ichnographic plane of intuitions, a fabulous struggle in an
inconceivable space, the system of harmony enveloping the theory of

representations.
Suddenly these fantastic gigantomachies, the all-powerful against the

all-powerful, the Devil and God, Jupiter and Juno, Pan and Panoptes, are
reduced to an apparently simple confrontation. The syrinx sends Argus to
sleep, the cobra writhes, inoffensive, to the tune of the Indian flute.
Whence come these magics of fascination? Enchantment comes from
chanting. What effect can the ear have on the eyes, what effect can sound
have on sight, listening on looking?
46
VEILS
A visible event is localized and locatable in its distance and angle,

coordinated with the surrounding visible; we occupy a point of view, per-
ceive profiles, sight defines a place. The panoptic myth seeks to force this
place and exceed its definitions. Just as Leibniz added together the differ-
ent views of a thing in order to obtain its ichnographic or geometral
dimensions, so Panoptes totalizes the body’s points of view, adds together
the sites from which he sees. God alone, for Leibniz, reveals simultane-
ously all the profiles of a thing. Spherical Argus alone presents himself as
a God-like eye made of eyes – facetted vision like that of flies. A real, but
minor or limited benefit, because the best of all watchers, the geometral
subject, far from perceiving a geometral-object, sees space as the sum of
places, while still seeing each thing according to its profile. His body, still
linked to a place, behaves like a lighthouse, round like its lantern and
sending out into the surrounding area shafts of light while at the same
time receiving the brilliance of things at every point on its sphere.
A sound event does not take place, but occupies space. Even if the source
often remains vague, its reception is wide and general. Vision provides a
presence, sound does not. Sight distances us, music touches us, noise
besieges us. Absent, ubiquitous, omnipresent sound envelops bodies. The
enemy can intercept radio transmissions but does not have access to our
semaphore; sight remains unintrusive, sound-waves will not be contained.
Looking leaves us free, listening imprisons us; we can free ourselves from
a scene by lowering our eyelids or putting our fists over our eyes, by
turning our back and taking flight. We cannot escape persistent clamour.
No barrier or ball of wax is sufficient to stop it. Practically all matter, par-
ticularly flesh, vibrates and conducts sound. Hermetic to light, the black
veil blinds and other bodies may obstruct other passages, but Hermes
works in a medium that knows no hermetic barriers. Local vision, global
listening: more than just ichnography, geometral for both the subject and
object, hearing practises ubiquity, the almost divine power of universal

reach. Singular optics, total acoustics. Hermes, the god of passage, becomes
a musician, for sound knows no obstacle: the beginning of the total ascen-
dancy of the word.
We are speaking of magic, but at the same time of philosophy, common
sense and the world as it is. Pan charms Panoptes by overwhelming his
conductive flesh. Strident sound makes his eye-covered skin quiver, his
muscles tremble, his tears flow, his bony frame vibrate. The clairvoyant ball
is covered by a lake of tears. Argus collapses with excitement. The global
triumphs over the sum of sites. The sound-wave has immediate access to
totality, so fruitlessly sought by adding together places or points of view
47
THE FIVE SENSES
and juxtaposing eyes. Have you ever encountered a work, accomplished

effortlessly and on the first attempt, that you could never achieve, even
in a hundred thousand attempts, over your whole lifetime? Did you not
weep? Argus collapses. However panoptic and lucid this bright sphere is,
it remains differential and pointillist, analytic of micro states or dwarf
scenes. However vulgar a sound is, it succeeds immediately in imposing
itself on the surrounding area. The victory is virtually magical, as it were,
and of a sensuous order. Sound undoes sight, or charms it: the latter
focuses itself at the endpoint of a narrow beam of light; but what else do
eyes usually do except focus on that point? Sound puts sight in its place.
Thus Leibniz, eternally running after the untotalizable sum of ichn-
ographies, succeeded in closing his system with Universal Harmony.
Representation, even if panoptic, falls asleep when Harmony resounds.
Better still, if we can form an idea of a world, of God, or merely of a system,
if we accede to totalities, it is never because we are led there by partial or
endless representations, we only ever get there through harmony, meta-
physical Pan-piping.
Whether we read this myth literally, or as magic, or philosophy, we obtain
the same result: Pan overturns Panoptes. It sums up in simple, perfectly
dove-tailed acts what we disperse across discourses and disciplines. But
the world around us angrily screams this result: by which I mean that
the environment that we have prepared or constructed plunges us into an
inextinguishable din. We have long been sleeping, drugged with sounds
and music, no longer seeing anything or thinking. Hermes has taken over
the world, our technical world exists only through the all-encompassing
confusion of hubbub, you will not find anything left on the earth – stone,
furrow or small insect – that is not covered by the diluvian din. Great Pan
has won, he has expelled silence from space. If you pity me, tell me where
I can go to think.
Pan’s flute prods and disturbs. Once on a June evening, in those long-
gone years when the ends of days sank into silence, I was waiting for a
total eclipse of the sun on a terrace facing a garden, overlooking the foli-
age of a maple tree. It soon became dark and an eclipse wind, like a wave,
had risen when suddenly from the neighbouring house burst forth a sort
of wild dance, with the strange, biting, astringent sound of Pan’s pipes.
Young people were celebrating some festival, they had confused shadow
with twilight and were playing as night fell. However much one knows
about it, the veiling of the sun’s light is disturbing and transports one to
another world. Pan was taking me there, I knew that he had blinded both
48
VEILS
the sun and my sight, sweeping over the space in a wave of wind and
covering appearances in orange, purple and green tones which set my
teeth on edge. Horrified, I heard the approach of what might have been
complex, cruel Aztec gods.
Here is the second state of play: Hera herself foiled. The king takes the
queen’s rook by moving his knight. No-one speaks of Io again, as she
moves weeping towards the Caucasus, close to Prometheus in chains, a
virgin standing at the foot of the cross. No-one speaks of her except those
who weep for the misfortune of the world. Hermes has put Panoptes to
sleep and killed him: everyone is talking about the murder.
All sites are local to Argus for as far as he can see. As a subtle analyst, he
totalizes the information about a place flawlessly and faultlessly. Hermes
intercepts all information, in all places; sites of transport and translation,
interference and distribution, he occupies passages. Argus occupies a tac-
tical position. Hermes invades strategic sites. One will win the battle, the
other the war. Argus, intensely present, detects every presence; but one
who is everywhere does not need presence and is absent through ubiquity.
Police no longer need to shadow anyone, they simply set up road blocks.
They do not need watchers, here and now. Everything changes when
presence is no longer the primary consideration.
Panoptes possesses light’s clarity, Hermes seizes the arrow of its speed.
Classical philosophy until recently placed its trust in illumination, contem-
porary philosophy is discovering the rapidity of the lightning bolt. The
speed of light is more important than its purity. Consider the novelty of this
victory: the principal quality of a theory or idea, its oldest value, clarity, is
overtaken by the speed at which it travels. Pan or Hermes kills Panoptes:
the swiftness of a message is of more value than the lucidity of a thought.
We are speaking here of the new state of knowledge. We are speaking of

common sense and philosophy and at the same time we are describing
our world. Having no centre, the network of communication makes pres-
ence superfluous and surveillance obsolete. Audiovisual or computer
circuits make a mockery of the watchtowers of the last war, borrowed from
the ancient Roman camps. Sailors pass by without looking at lighthouses,
their safety ensured by sonar and radar. Those who control the regulation
of codes and their circulation in space allow the watchers to let down
their guard and sleep on the consoles of their ships, listening to music.
The hum of passing messages numbs the dog, spy and informer, and
anæsthetizes the prison warder. Space is better contained and prison more
secure because of the telephone, television and telecommunications.
49
THE FIVE SENSES
All Panoptes’ avatars, all those figures who remain present to presence, in
short, all the successive figures of phenomenology are put out to pasture.
Present everywhere, Hermes, the spirit, suddenly descends into the spa-
tial realm.
Hermes, the network, replaces all local stations, all watch towers juxta-
posed in space, all successive figures in time: his take on geometry rules
phenomenology out of court.
We are speaking at one and the same time of our common sense, of lis-
tening and hearing, and then of the word and code; of music and singing;
of drugs and anæsthetics, because we have forgotten presence or lost our
intuition. We are speaking of newspapers, periodicals, policing or politics
(the struggle of Pan against Panoptes takes place in these every day); of
the new state of knowledge. We are speaking of relationships and objects,
knowledge and surveillance, competition and society. The computer world
takes the place of the observed world; things we know because we have
seen them give way to the exchange of codes. Everything changes, every-
thing flows from the victory won by the table of harmony over the tableau
of seeing. Gnoseology and epistemology change, but also daily life, the mobile
niche into which the body is plunged, as well as behaviour, and therefore
morals and education.
Observation, the idea of clarity, the function of intuition tied us to things
themselves, like anchors or mooring ropes. Theory, by its own admission,
was distinguished from the act of seeing, and the phenomenology of
appearances was left to optics. The mooring ropes break. The message
itself becomes the object. The code states the given, all we are given is
data and the data bank has taken the place of the world.
Or rather: the message becomes the given again, as it did during what
I have called Antiquity, when the collective fed off its relationships and
messages, disdaining and disregarding objects. Relationships return, bring-
ing with them the whole of mythology, the formidable and regressive
burden of conflicts and fetishes. Ahead of these, science rushes headlong
towards its premises. Wealth returns us to poverty. Increased productivity
leads to a state of misery. Pan kills Panoptes: the age of the message kills
the age of theory. Will the human sciences engulf the exact sciences, as
they did in antiquity? As the myths tell us?
50
VEILS
The war that will take place will therefore always be more savage in the
sciences. We shall see secrets and trickery blossom again, jealousy’s reach
extend sky-high where the gods, elderly lovers grown senile, are still
engaged in their age-old struggle to the death.
Is the hell of relationships returning, fed by rigour and efficiency?
Tired of deceitful games and cheating, dreaming that our brief lives
might escape this monotonous age of blood and death, we live in hope of
returning to a state of trust without deception or cheating, to a theory
of knowledge that brings together the exact and the human sciences.
A new knowledge and epistemology, a new man and a new education.
It is only on this condition that we shall escape collective death.
Hera, the loser, is still a player in spite of everything. She strips dead
Argus, takes the panoptic skin of the watcher, a shredded, billowing rag of
shut eyelids, and lays it on the plumage of her favourite bird, the peacock.
All that is left of the omni-directional ball of intense eyes is the dual colour
of the ocellations and the brilliant pattern they make, a fascinating, silky
fan. The motionless fowl, squawking harshly and tunelessly when Hermes
plays on the flute, limping low to the ground when Hermes flies past, has
only dead theory to display when it spreads its tail. Sight gazes without
seeing at a world from which information has already fled. Representation,
a still ornamental species in the process of extinction, provokes gawking
admiration in the public parks and gardens where onlookers congregate.
Touch sees a little. It has heard.
In the towns, only our fellow men see us; no doubt they consider us as
we consider them, height, weight and corpulence varying little. Bull’s-eye
windows, shutters and panes gaze sightlessly.
In the countryside, peacocks with ocellated tails pass by, as well as cows,
flies, dogs, hares and glow-worms. They have large, glaucous eyes, or small
many-facetted visual apparatuses which reflect back to us minute, detailed,
colourless, striated, striped, shimmering giants in countless fragments.
We consider the landscape, as a whole and in detail, it considers us as
a landscape.
We are merged into it and its variety.
51
THE FIVE SENSES
Our skin varies like a peacock’s tail, even though we do not have feathers.
It is as though it could see. It perceives confusedly on its whole surface
area and sees clearly and distinctly by virtue of the hyper-acute singular-
ity of its eyes. Everywhere else on it there are vague kinds of ocellations.
The skin forms pockets and folds and, refining itself at a given site, creates
an eye. The obvious concentration of ocellations here is found merely in
diluted form everywhere else. If it forms a hollow – a rimmed, pleated,
hollowed, half-oval fan – it becomes an ear where hearing is condensed.
Everywhere else, be it an ear-drum or drum, it hears more widely and less
well, but it still hears, vibrating as though auricular. Our skin resembles
that of jaguars, panthers and zebras, even though we do not have fur. The
pattern of the senses is displayed there, studded with subdued centres and
spotted with marks; the skin is a variety of our mingled senses.
The skin, a single tissue with localized concentrations, displays sensitiv-
ity. It shivers, expresses, breathes, listens, loves and lets itself be loved,
receives, refuses, retreats, its hair stands on end with horror, it is covered
with fissures, rashes, and the wounds of the soul. The most instructive
diseases, the sicknesses of identity, affect the skin and form tattoos
that tragically hide the bright colours of birth and experience. They are
calls for help and advertise their misery and weakness; we must learn
to read the writing of the enraged gods on the skin of their victims, as
on the pages of an open book. The alphabet of pathology is engraved on
parchment.
The organs of the senses form knots, high-relief sites of singularity in this
complex flat drawing, dense specializations, a mountain, valley or well on
the plain. They irrigate the whole skin with desire, listening, sight or smell.
Skin flows like water, a variable confluence of the qualities of the senses.
Interior and exterior, opaque and transparent, supple or rigid, wilful,
present or paralyzed, object, subject, soul and world, watcher and guide,
a place where the fundamental dialogue with things and others happens
and where it is most brilliantly visible, the skin bears Hermes’ message
and what remains of Argus.
SUBTLE
We no longer know why, when it is acute, or refined or delicate, we describe

a sense or a thing as subtle. We have lost the memory or secret of it.
52
VEILS
In the Cluny Museum six large tapestries, originally from the Château
of Boussac, have been given the collective name of The Lady and the Uni-
corn. They show or illustrate the five senses.
Each scene takes place on a blue, oval island. Well-defined and self-
contained, the island is dotted with sprigs of flowers. It portrays a group:
one or two women, the principal one and her attendant, two main
animals, the lion and the unicorn, three or four trees, pine, holly, oak and
orange, covered with foliage and laden with fruit, a host of small animals,
monkeys, lion cubs, herons, magpies, jennets, cheetahs . . . plus specific
objects, a mirror for sight, a positive organ for hearing, a sweet dish for
taste, a plate or basket of flowers for smell. Touch has no specific object.
The island of each sense stands out against a red, orange or pink back-
ground. The background is also laced with twigs, leaves and flowers and
dotted with animals.
The balance of open and shut, or the contrast of one to the other, is
achieved through colour and density. The fauna and flora, life, crowd
together on the island and are diluted on the background, as if the fabric
were dilating the scene or receiving a lighter animal and floral cloud from
the denser source. Stronger and warmer impressions on the plateau on
which the trees grow, their blue outgrowth projecting on to the red; a less
dense, less compact and colder configuration against the background.
Exact and faithful outlines: each organ is drawn like an island, eye, ear,
mouth, nose, an abundant, teeming complex of sensations, the skin stretches
out its background canvas and is tattooed by these fiery centres. The island
is woven from canvas of the same texture as its background, the organ is
made from puckered skin. One notices in the scene that touch alone has no
need of a special tool, its skin becoming at will both subject and object.
A neat question, an easy one too, arises in the case of the sixth tapestry,
the only one with a written cartouche. Have we five senses, or six?
Scholastic thought in the Middle Ages divided our sensorium into external
and internal. Hearing, sight, touch, smell and taste were reputed to be
external. In fact, the mirror reveals the image of the animal and not that
of the subject: it shows the neck and nose of the unicorn and not the face
and neck of the young girl who will utter her desire; the bonbonniere
offers the mouth the taste of sweetmeats; and as this sense remains weak
and unrefined, the island adds a shelter here, a trellis on which roses climb,
to indicate the extent to which smell contributes to taste; the crown or
53
THE FIVE SENSES
necklace combines the smell of roses with carnations, giving the double
meaning of the word bouquet; the hand tactfully caresses the stiff pole or
erect horn; hearing listens to the pipes vibrating to the action of the bellows.
This is the exterior world, flowers or sugars, animals or music, wood or
ivory; the woman does not see or hear herself, does not feel or touch
herself. Indeed a sixth sense is necessary, in which the subject turns in on
itself and the body on the body: a common or internal sense, indeed a
sixth island was necessary, a doubly enclosed island for the body itself.
A tent represents this interior, the intimacy of the body, and begins to
construct the common body of these different women, this one smelling
entirely of rose or carnation, that one quivering with harmony, a third dis-
playing graceful images, yet another turned entirely to sugar or honey . . .
the pavilion encloses their totality.
The tent consists of a blue veil, blue like each of these insular organs,
but in addition woven and draped, with many folds and richly decorated.
Each island is flat and enclosed but open to the space around it, a well-
defined external sense but open to events in the world. The new blue
pavilion is doubly closed, to the island and in space; it is closed on itself.
And it is veiled in drapery.
The entire description is equally valid for tapestry and body. Each insu-
lar sense organ forms a dense singularity on the diluted, cutaneous plain.
The island is woven of the same fabric as the background, each sense
organ is invaginated in the same skin, spreading around it. The internal
sense is draped in its tent, a new veil, a new fabric, but the same carpet
and the same skin. The internal sense is veiled in skin.
Touch seems to have the upper hand. It comes together with the
common sense, the sum of the first five, and weaves their tent. Standing
alone, it required neither tool nor specific object, neither mirror nor organ,
neither flower nor sweetmeat. In addition, before smelling the flowers
gathered into a circlet, the woman touches them, singling out each one
between index finger and thumb. The woman representing sight holds
the handle of the mirror with her right hand and, with the left, caresses the
neck of the unicorn. The one representing taste offers her fingers to the
bird as a perch, as in the art of falconry. The one representing hearing
touches the keyboard of the organ. The hand serves five times as a com-
mon factor and a common sense develops there.
Touch will win the day. With his large paw, the lion turns back and
raises the tent hanging; with his cloven hoof, the unicorn raises and turns
back the fabric flap of the pavilion; with both her hands, the woman lifts
54
VEILS
and twists the material which seems to cover, hold and cradle the pre-
cious jewels, enfolding them in their casket where they will soon be out
of sight in their closed jewel box. She touches the girl, touches the animal,
touches the monster.
Touch has the upper hand, the pavilion, an internal sense or the body
itself, closes its veils as the body does its skin. The organs of the external
senses are open veils or envelopes. Through these doors we see, hear and
experience tastes and fragrances; through these walls, even when they
are shut, we touch. The fabric of the pavilion, or the skin of the body, can
either open or close, the external sense retaining its integrity. The internal
sense is clothed in skin that is either impermeable or pierced with win-
dows and forms its tent or pavilion, its habitat or tabernacle.
Touch ensures that what is closed has an opening; the body of the
woman occupies the space of the open doorway and closes it. The hang-
ings and the veils of the partly open tent will fall and close on the woman-
summation, on the common sense, the totality or mixture of the five
others, on the internal sense, the closure of their externality.
Touch has won the day through the equivalence of veil, fabric and skin.
Its palette combines flowers, fruits, leaves, birds and animals. The world
is printed on the wax garment that surrounds and clothes us, that now
offers us an intimate habitat. A factor common to four external senses, an
open and closed sense in itself, it protects the internal sense and begins to
construct it.
The whole description applies to the final tapestry, to the woman’s body
and to the sensorium in general. The cloth of the island is woven of the
same fabric as the cloth of the tent and the background. The fall of the veil
or cutaneous garment implies something new – their tattooing is different.
The pavilion sets an ordered geometry, dotted with regular tongues of
fire, against the sometimes dense, sometimes extensive, but always cha-
otic scattering of the patches of skin.
The tent opens and closes, as does the casket – two black boxes. Black or
white? Light illuminates the interior of the pavilion, shading into the dark-
ness of the interior surface of the box’s lid. White and black? We know and
we do not know. Are they opening or closing the tent, is the maidservant
preparing to close the chest? We do not know and we know.
Our body is covered with skin, is imprisoned within it. It opens on to
the senses. It closes on the internal sense, remaining slightly open. Touch
continues to predominate, it is well acquainted with these juxtapositions
of white and black, of openings and locks.
55
THE FIVE SENSES
The sixth tapestry constructs the body: the feminine body? There is no
male in the Cluny Museum, no male and no sky.
Touch therefore has the virtue of closing and outlining an interior. In the
tapestry that expresses the sense of touch, the lion and the unicorn each
wear around their necks a shield attached by a belt, a monkey remains
prisoner of a neckpiece chained to a roller. The dog, the hyena and the
jennet are held on a leash and the other monkey is held by a belly-band.
Yes, touch surrounds and encircles. I rest my case.
The roller has its own significance: impression. The cylinder imprints on
the exterior world, just as the necklace makes an impression on the skin
of the neck. It could not be better said, it could not be better demonstrated
or written.
All the tapestries are silent except the last.
The woman signifying sight lowers her eyelids, the unicorn contem-
plates its own image in the mirror, and the lion, its eyes wide-open, looks
at us: specifically animal sight. The woman with the necklace of flowers is
satisfied, at a distance, with touch; the monkey smells a rose: specifically
bestial smell. The monkey again raises a sweetmeat to its mouth while,
absentmindedly looking away, the woman barely touches, as though at
a distance, the sweets in the bonbonniere. Taste is also animal, the lion
pokes out its tongue. The young girl signifying hearing plays and does
not sing, she hears. She forms a message at a deeper level than her voice,
a colourless or sense-free harmony, before the sense of language. The
constituent women, each one dedicated to a single sense, keep their dis-
tance from language. It could be said that, incapable of speech, their
efforts are confined to pure animality. The external senses share muteness
with the flora and fauna, and with a few objects.
The resulting woman, having constructed her body or pitched her tent,
accedes to language, which crowns the open-closed pavilion of the inter-
nal sense, imprinted with tongues of fire.
The naïve external senses abandon themselves to leaves and branches,
to rabbits, herons, foxes and to the young, hornless unicorn, ever defence-
less against poisons. They have the wild status of thyme, goat and holly.
Bleating, caressing the light air with their wings, sweet-smelling and
tasting, and of undoubted elegance in form and colour, but mute like
brutish animals or tree branches. Open and abandoned to the world like a
flat island to the sea. Unstable also because they are mingled: indefinable
56
VEILS
shades of colour, mixed bouquets, tastes with variable fragrances, touch

quivering with sense. Plunged into the variable and the mixed, tattooed.
Multiple also: scattered, studded or dotted, never single. The chaotic whirl-
pools of the senses never achieve singularity, conservation or identity.
Hence these tapestries, studded and spangled with every thing in the
world.
The internal sense speaks at last and for the first time. The tent is printed
with burning tongues and crowned with writing. Language arrives.
The pavilion opens and shuts, contained but facing the outside. The
woman is standing in her doorway, turned outwards, attentive, her body
is given over to what is given. It is necessary to write the dative: TO.
Defined by the closing of the volume on itself, the slightly open tent
reveals itself. The body can write or say: MY. My body, my belonging,
which behaves like a circle and turns in on itself.
Monadic, the pavilion stands isolated on its island. Shut, open, it is
revealed as singular. The body can say or write: ONE.
Solitary belonging gives itself to itself and to what is given.
Dense and blue, the body burns with stray languages. Empty like the
tent, it leaves behind its jewels and regrets their absence: DESIRE. At
the end of the fifteenth century, this term retains its Latin meaning, nos-
talgia, more than it embodies the contemporary meanings of lust and
covetousness.
I leave behind my jewels, those that my body was wearing, those
displayed by my partial bodies when they were a scent of roses, a shiver
of sounds, a simulacrum in the mirror . . . I carry them and shut them in
the casket. I miss them. I am nostalgic for a lost world, a lost paradise, an
island between two seas, where the senses sparkle like a lake of gemstones.
I speak now and shelter in the tent of language or writing. The tabernacle
closes, its flaps are lowered. I live now in the prison of my language and
the jewel-box closes. Having withdrawn beneath the veils printed with
tongues of fire and beneath the crown of the written cartouche, the body
which has left the world mourns it, the woman who leaves behind her
jewels misses them, the beauty of the five senses lies in the black box
while we sleep under the blue hangings engraved with fire.
Solitary belonging, devoted to itself, no longer devotes itself to what is
given, except to what language gives us – to what is said or dictated.
TO MY ONE DESIRE
This is the first sentence, the originary, primary proposition, as original as
the fault committed in the past by a girl on a paradise-island, as original
57
THE FIVE SENSES
and permanent. These are the first words uttered by the body when it
becomes an interiority endowed with a voice, and is enveloped in flames
and imprinted with signs, when the skin-tapestry or the skin-pavilion no
longer bears on itself lilacs or cheetahs but geometry and letters. This is
the sentence that causes the world to flee and the necklets to be aban-
doned, that excludes rabbits and goats and that chased us from paradise,
these are the words which cause the senses to withdraw into a black box.
Our only desire is that it be reopened.
The woman-summation bids farewell to the world, takes the veil
beneath the tent of language.
This is the first cogito, more deeply buried although more visible than the
thinking cogito. I feel, I have felt; I have seen, heard, tasted, smelt; I have
touched; I touch, I enclose myself in my pavilion of skin; it burns with
languages, I speak; I speak about myself, about my loneliness and the
nostalgia of lost senses, I mourn the lost paradise, I regret the loss of that
to which I was giving myself or of what was given to me. Since that phrase
was written, I desire. And the world absents itself.
This is the first, self-contained proposition, literally circular, the first
stable unitary philosophy of identity. My desire identifies with writing,
I exist only in language. The identity principle shuts itself off and is blind
to the unstable, multiple, mingled, invisible senses, hidden in the jewel-
box in the tent.
The girl, having laid aside her regrets, will turn back, will enter once and
for all the tabernacle of language. We have always dwelt there with her,
we have never left it, we have never seen, known or understood the
Cluny tapestry.
I cannot tell or write of touch, nor of any other sense. I live in the tent
crowned with the cartouche and clothed in tongues. Those who are in
the tent with me demonstrate categorically that no-one can go outside,
has ever gone outside. You will not find, they say, any language to tell or
write things – flowers or fruit, birds or rabbits, sounds or shapes, tastes
or smells – to write or tell the world before the emergence of language.
You will only find a tapestry in the Cluny Museum. You find yourself
foreclosed. They are right. I cannot write or describe the five tapestries,
for if I describe or write, I only speak of the sixth. The original language
has come into being, we can do nothing about it.
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VEILS
It is said that the horn of the unicorn is a protection against poison. One
merely has to grind it to a powder, and mix or dissolve the powder in a
beverage, in order to mithridatize oneself against harmful pharmaceuticals.
The unicorn liberates us from drugs.
One day I was lecturing to an audience in a marquee, as attentive to
them as they were to me. Suddenly, a large hornet stung me on the inside
of my thigh, a combination of surprise and exquisite pain. Nothing in my
voice or intonation betrayed the accident and I finished my talk. I do not
mention this particular memory in order to boast of Spartan courage, but
only to indicate that the speaking body, flesh filled with language, has
little difficulty in remaining focused on speech, whatever happens. Words
fill our flesh and anæsthetize it. It has even been said, and written, that
the word was made flesh. Nothing makes one more insensitive than
words. If I had been looking at some image, listening to the sound coming
from an organ, smelling a garland of flowers, tasting a sugared almond or
grasping a pole, the hornet sting would have caused me to cry out. But
I was speaking, balanced in a groove or enclosure, protected by a discur-
sive breastplate. You want to anæsthetize a patient completely? Get him
to speak with passion and vigour, ask him to talk about himself, and him-
self alone, of his one desire, demand that he prove something or that he
convince his audience. He is intoxicated with sonorous words, the hornet
is powerless. Militant egotists, we speak in order to drug ourselves.
We seek the pharmaceutical, the fabulous animal which can free us from
the hardest of hard drugs, language. We find it in the Cluny tapestry.
The lion and the unicorn raise the veils or flaps of the doorway, the lady
emerges from the prison, flecked with tongues of fire, takes cascading
necklaces of gems out of the black box with the open lid: they pour from
the box as the woman frees herself from the veils and is reborn. Then,
accompanied by the monster, she visits the island paradise amidst the
oranges and cheetahs, the same world of five continents or aspects. She
participates in the banquet of things, to our joy and hers.
Always accompanied by the unicorn even when we evoke her name . . .
the fabulous is always with her: stories, poems, mythologies. To accede to
things themselves, let your tongue be still.
When the shuttle moves on the tapestry loom, the thread of the weft
passes under the threads of the warp. Thus sense becomes entwined in
the fabric, as does melody, sometimes, in sonorous flesh, and deep thought
in vowels. The dazzling display of the figures and colours on the worked
59
THE FIVE SENSES
canvas corresponds to a thousand ties and knots on its other side, events
on the underside of the canvas which, by hiding them, obscures the roots of
the adjective ‘subtle’. The secrets of the tapestry are knotted beneath it.
This is the secret of the unicorn: the secret of the five or six subtle senses.
The skin hangs from the wall as if it were a flayed man: turn over the
remains, you will touch the nerve threads and knots, a whole uprooted
hanging jungle, like the inside wiring of an automaton. The five or six
senses are entwined and attached, above and below the fabric that they
form by weaving or splicing, plaits, balls, joins, planes, loops and bindings,
slip or fixed knots. The skin comprehends, explicates, exhibits, implicates
the senses, island by island, on its background. They inhabit the tapestry,
enter the weaving, form the canvas as much as they are formed by it. The
senses haunt the skin, pass beneath it and are visible on its surface, the
flowers, animals and branches of its tattooing, eyes that stud the peacock’s
tail; they cross the epidermis and penetrate its most subtle secrets.
Displayed beneath our gaze since the Middle Ages, the enigma of the
unicorn can be read, without representation, as the secret of subtlety; the
tacit ascendancy of the tactile.
VARIATION
Bonnard’s nude with cosmetics, and the myriad-hued garden, display var-
ied canvases, skins and appearances. Let us consider the sense of variation.
Varied means multiple: a thousand shades and tones, a thousand forms
enhance the woman’s tattoo and the floral exuberance of the park. Like-
wise, the remains, the cutaneous rag of panoptic Argus, laid at his death
on the peacock’s tail, is dotted with varied ocelli: the pavane does not
sound monotonous, the feathered fan sparkles with many colours. Finally
the blue island of the senses and the red background surround the lady
and the unicorn with diverse flora and varied fauna: nothing plain, but on
the contrary diversity, abundance, proliferation, number and difference.
The field is covered in flowers and grass: the tufts on the ground and the
threads of the fabric are juxtaposed. We shall speak first of all of discrete
or distinct variety. The fruit of the orange trees is clearly distinguished
from the acorns, as are the carnations from the roses and the goats from
the lions. The skin of the nude is tattooed in a variety of ways; the woman
has turned pink, probably from the smell of the roses, but she has been
affected at the same time by quite different causes: modesty or caresses. The
traces and marks of all the senses are mingled: we shall call it continuous
60
VEILS
variety and describe her skin as variable. Woman is often variable, like the
sky and the weather. Next to the lady of the Cluny Museum, the unicorn
combines a goat’s beard on a horse’s body, with strange cloven hooves
and a narwhal’s horn. The discrete and continuous variety on the tapestry
is not averse to mixing. It is not known whether the legendary beast sym-
bolizes a mixture of the senses or the jumble that the senses cause us to
perceive, but the important fact is that the monster varies in itself. Thus
the tail of the peacock, silky to the touch, seems to see. It has been killed
by listening, a mixture of three senses scattered on the fan.
Everything that precedes this and that comes after is a variation on the
idea of variety.
Our skin could be called variety, in a precise topological sense: a thin
sheet with folds and plains, dotted with events and singularities and sen-
sitive to proximities; discrete and panoptic when the eyes make regular
holes in it; but also continuous when tattooed, like that of the naked
woman at her mirror, in reality a compound like the unicorn.
Fable once again speaks the truth. The total woman or completed body,
the internal or common sense, the sixth or totalizing tapestry, the skin of
the final tent, in other words you and I, are manifested in the reality of
your daily life or mine, in the form of a suit, cobbled together with its
seams visible. The circumstances of our lives, be they tragic or opportune,
and our will, are responsible for this. The variety of sight, basted with large
tacking stitches on to the variety of hearing, these sewn temporarily to
each other, and each one separately and both together tacked on to those
of taste, smell and touch, piece by piece and in no particular order, work-
ing towards the definitive garment which never eventuates, forms com-
ponents which are seen and which, on occasion, clash with the resulting
variety or with a neighbouring one: the goat’s beard beneath the nostrils
of a horse attracts attention, the neck beneath the narwhal’s horn causes
surprise. This is how we originate and how we are formed: a slapdash

piece of work, subject to the vagaries of time and the blunders of brief
opportunities. At times our skin, a hasty and untidy construct, happy from
some fortunate encounter, resembles the chimera, with inexpertly attached
fragments: a chin adorned with strange hairs, or pasterns not matching
the hooves. Our upbringing or environment, the chain formed by the
chance assembly of our genes, makes weird half-breeds of us, variables
on a globally stable pattern. Our time does not end in a system, but in a
rough-cut and patchwork rag. All women differ, the goat, mare and nar-
whal differ, all women come together in the woman in the sixth tapestry,
the mare, narwhal and goat come together, the unicorn brings about the
required totalization, the woman wears the animal skin. We are all dressed
61
THE FIVE SENSES
in fabulous skins, assuming the guise of enigmatic sphinxes. The skin varies,
discrete, continuous, inexpertly sewn, horned. It varies: woven, historiated,
tattooed and legendary.
The construction of the body proper is like the fiction of the unicorn.
What is revealed here about the skin can be said more generally. It is
presented and lives as a discrete variety, with separate islands, but also as
a continuous variety, with mingled regions or states. It totalizes and adds
together these two sorts of varieties: it mingles or juxtaposes the juxta-
posed with the mingled. What results from this is called variable.
The senses vary, the feeling and the felt vary. To measure their appear-
ances according to the criteria of truth or falsehood is obviously inappro-
priate: one must first of all think in terms of the variable.
The horse variety joined together with the goat variety and mixed with
it produces a very ordinary monster that juxtaposes and mingles places:
witness the issue of tigers and lions, ligers and tigons, thus named accord-
ing to the species of the male or female. There is protest about genetic
manipulation. But any genesis is party to such manipulation, any indi-
vidual, any organism can call itself a sphinx or unicorn. Who, after all,
would dare affirm that they were not of mixed blood? On the blue island
or red plain you see a rabbit, leopard, or a heron in flight. The identity that
you attribute to them is a sign of your ignorance: each one is the result
of cross-breeding. I reproach myself for not knowing enough about the
varieties of rodents, waders or panthers; about hybridization. The marvel-
lous thing about the tapestry is that it consists entirely of crossings, other-
wise how could it be woven?
We have to come to terms with a difficult idea that shakes our notion
of identity. The unicorn is, and is not, at the same time, in the same place
and in the same relationship, a horse, goat and walrus. Again, that can be
said of the goat, walrus and horse. I have said this about the skin, about
variable and mixed sensation, about the engendered organism or about

the completed body itself, a heterogeneous structure hastily cobbled
together with sticking plaster. I also say it of myself. I am and am not this
or that, here and now, in the same relationship. Half-breeds in our own
thought, do we not all know this? Hybrid in our existence, do we not all
think this? Changeable, diverse and varied? I do not know or feel this or
that, here and now, in the same relationship. But if I have to describe it,
I am positively obliged to feel or know it. In addition, if I promise or write
it, I feel, know or am it without a shadow of doubt.
I, feeling, unicorn: a horn in the middle and tattooed everywhere else,
with a fluid identity.
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VEILS
Suddenly I know why the unicorn has only one horn. The chimera with
the varied body, its sundry parts hastily cobbled together with sticking
plaster, loses its identity because of all the joins in the rag. Its deviation
from the identity principle consigns it to fable, imagination and legend.
Yet in this impossible location, in this cutaneous excrescence springing
forth from the centre of its forehead, its identity is successful. It is there
only that it is a unicorn, and it is to this that its name refers. In every other
respect it can be said that it is a goat or horse. Rather like an ordinary ani-
mal or man, one can speak of right or left, or one can speak of left or right.
Plus a weld, a seam in the middle. Plus a perineum, as Plato, seeing a trace
of tacking, was wont to say. But a chimera accentuates seams, it makes
them blatantly obvious. In the middle, where the skin is welded together,
grows an enormous horn, skin itself. Neither right nor left, nor even rift
or leght, but exactly in the centre, like Polyphemus’ eye. This is where the
very concept of chimera takes form, the very meaning of the unicorn, its
impossible or characteristic organ, its name. Here the otherwise impossi-
ble mixture is successful. Here the sensible is successful.
And suddenly I understand why, according to the legend, by dissolving
the unicorn’s horn in liquid and drinking the potion, one is mithridatized
against poisons. To understand the single horn, one must understand the
mixture, make and drink it. Scientists from the Royal Society in London
who once drank, as an experiment, a solution of rhinoceros horn and
concluded, in the absence of consequences, that its supposed effect was
myth or legend, did not understand that they had already understood.
The legend simply expresses the mixture, as the horn does the seam.
Conversely, the mixture can so far only be expressed in myth or legend,
like the sensible.
VAIR4
The prince seeks a queen. What is to be done in a principality, unless he

can find a shoe that fits? He sends out the town crier, he wants to see all
the women.
To see? Come, come, would a king’s son be so lacking in taste, and not
know that seeing tell us very little? A seer isn’t worth much. No, he asks
the candidates to try on a vair slipper, and here begins the mystery.
A story often proposes two riddles, that of the things said, and that of
the narrative: for example, the riddle that the sphinx poses Œdipus and
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THE FIVE SENSES
that he solves; then the one posed by the myth to all who hear it, and
which remains for a long time without an answer. It is necessary to under-
stand that Œdipus’ name signifies that he knows feet, that he is acquainted
with, or can resolve everything relating to feet. Thus the narrative explains
the riddle and anticipates the solution. Likewise the prince solves his
question: the vair slipper belongs to Cinderella; as he is ruler and has the
means, his method is as expensive as possible. He makes such a thorough
review of all the women that he is guaranteed not to overlook any. But
the riddle of the story remains: why is the slipper covered in vair, why
use the word vair, just as we might ask: why give the name Œdipus to the
one who unravels the riddle?
What can be said, first of all, about a slipper? Incidentally, would you
please give credit to a book of philosophy which at last asks serious ques-
tions – what can one say, I ask, about a slipper? It gently sheathes the
foot, like an invaginated pocket: an awkward pleat, a sort of bonnet or the
finger of a glove. You can feel its shape, an open and shut tent, made by
and for the touch, skin on skin in places where it suffers, pathologically
sensitive. What intelligent leader or captain would admit that our feet are
the site of the greatest sensitivity? Would he say that there is nothing in
his head that has not first of all been in his feet? The prince, however,
begins there. Just as humble, Cinderella began with Cucendron.
Touch the vair slipper, caress its warm, soft, gentle fur. A higher, sparse
layer of long, thick hair protects another lower layer of fine, short hair.
All fur reveals and conceals a similar double property. The skin of the foot
is protected by a skin that is protected by another layer, protected in turn
by yet another. Quadruple, quintuple variety.
Give no credence to the glass slipper: it is the wrong word, devoid of
meaning, inappropriate for dancing, solid, brittle, hard, cold, transparent.
Glass is seen or reveals, clearly and distinctly, vair is touched and hides,
soft, not hard, loose, not tight, extremely pleasant to feel, and gentle, vel-
vety and voluptuous to the eye, leaving the dancing foot free. Now look
closely at vair: a colour lacking in homogeneity, white and black, not
black or white, distinct and separate, but with somewhat mingled colours,
not grey, but precisely squirrel, a mixed ash-grey colour. In the language
of fur, or that of the furs of heraldry, vair indicates a varied colour.
Now, in an ordinary sense, it could not be said that the prince discovers
the poverty-stricken woman. He does not unveil Cinderella beneath rags
or finery, revealing glimpses of her adorable body: the rags already express
admirably ocellated nakedness. No, the prince discovers his queen, sitting
almost naked amidst the ashes, by encasing her foot in the vair slipper.
Recognition works by touch, not sight, by the stereospecificity of that
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which fits perfectly. Exactly the right size, the slipper moulds itself point
for point to her foot. The skin precedes the gaze in the act of knowing,
vair wins a victory over glass. Is it a fairy story or a letter on the blind5? Or
true love whispered with a grateful caress?
Vair designates a varied colour, soft, double fur, a slipper that allows the
foot enough freedom to dance, a variable shoe.
A glass slipper, constant and rigid, calls for a fixed and rigorous concept,
valid for a stable world: an accurate measure for a foot that does not grow,
walk, run or waltz. A flexible slipper is better in a world, in a variable
environment, where rats change into footmen, where things whirl around
under a fairy godmother’s magic wand, where unrecognizable horses are
transubstantiated into lizards.
When in proximity to cinders, the world varies: a fairyland where
pumpkins become carriages that after midnight become cucurbits again,
alchemy that transforms rags into crinolines; the servant, miraculously,
becomes a princess. Meanwhile, for the Prince, things are immutable; just
as for other women, stepmothers or false sisters, balls and societies, noth-
ing changes. For Cinderella, things fluctuate, volubly.
The reasons for the alliance between a fairy who in a trice changes
things, and an overburdened victim, are not to be found in resentment
alone or in the impotent dream of the persecuted. Those who are excluded
or beaten concentrate within themselves the power of metamorphosis or
apotheosis. Society considers them to be pestilential and then suddenly
adores them as gods. This has been a common phenomenon since the
dawn of history. The hearth, to which the stepmother consigns the poor
ash-covered girl – just as in times gone by the scapegoat was burdened
with the refuse and sins of the world – is the antechamber of palaces.
These two values or positions, misery and glory, oppression and royalty,
murder and power, Tarpeian rock and Capitol, close to each other but
opposed, are ordinarily the hallmarks of all stories with sacred content.
They are the two sources of the in no way exceptional, and in fact quite
ordinary, double worlds of anthropology, politics and religion. The victim
and the Prince are separated by nothing more than the twelve strokes of
midnight or the touch of a magic wand.
But Perrault’s story attempts to say even more. It traces the path of a
value to its dual other, from the cinder value to the gold value, from the
hearth to the palace, from one source to the other, from the place where
power oppresses you to the place where it belongs to you; it traces the
path of variation. The whole century is looking for the same road: the
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THE FIVE SENSES
distinction between good and evil, falsehood and truth, power and mis-
ery, never poses a very difficult problem – you could even say that it is a
distinction that we make almost naturally. All our hatreds lead us to it, all
our violence impels us towards what is supposed to be a rational, or sacred
division. But the path from one of these positions to the other, the con-
tinuum that links them, or the gulf that separates them, poses a much
more formidable question for which neither our culture nor our resent-
ments prepare us. The whole century is seeking the path of variation.
Things vary, volubly. You always arrive at a crossroads at which, to your
discomfort, the coach in which you are travelling morphs into a pumpkin,
where gold, between your fingers, is reduced to ashes. Yet the slipper is
the sole object amongst these changing appearances that resists the wave
of instability. Midnight chimes, noble luxury collapses into ignoble banal-
ity, the shoe remains unaffected by the transformation. It does not become
an ignominious clog, as it should. One vair slipper remains at the palace,
a hostage of the prince and a witness, while the other slipper returns
to the scullery: there is an invariant in the variation, one in each world.
A unicorn’s horn. A place of seams, mixture and marriage.
We were not expecting, either, to see things, or hear the word. Things
vary, the word says so. Vair designates the varied or variable but does not
itself vary. The whole secret of the tale is contained therein: the foot of the
chosen beauty in the shoe, the king’s business, a subtle sense in the desig-
nation, the business of science. The age-old dispute about glass and vair,
the one transparent and the other a veil, has long pointed to the nub
of the matter. Glass breaks, fur varies. The root of the word vair goes back
to varied, which suits us nicely. The root of the word varied, varus, knock-
kneed, lame with two odd slippers, suits the Prince. He was looking for a
knock-kneed woman, because he had always understood that they make
marvellous lovers. A limping gait gives an uneven and therefore varied
beat. Clearly there is no getting away from the foot of the Belle Noiseuse,
the only stable or unvarying element in the striped, striated, chaotic and
varied painting of Balzac’s German painter. Here, I encounter it again as
the invariant variable element, in body and in name, just as in Œdipus’
riddle.
The slipper grips the foot and is the correct size. The foot designates
the unit of measurement. The unit, of course, must not vary, the slipper
which envelops it and is the correct size, is the hallmark of the variation.
The vair slipper, the parameter, becomes the variable. At the same time as
Perrault was writing his stories, Leibniz was introducing into mathemat-
ics, and into the same French and Latin languages, the notion of the
variable, and giving variety as a criterion for the reality of a phenomenon.
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Variation requires one to think both the stable and the unstable simulta-
neously, not pure instability, which is strictly speaking incomprehensible,
but the invariant in the variation. The whole voluble world refers to the
stable measurement of the foot, the whole path of change is travelled by
means of the variable slipper, another seven-league boot.
We come back to the unicorn’s horn, a large excrescence of skin, the
synthesis of the right and left horn crushed to a powder and dissolved in
a liquid, blended into a potion so that left and right are to be found indis-
solubly at the same time, in the same place and in the same relationship.
We once again encounter the unthinkable mixture. In the impossible
horn the chimera at last achieves the union prefigured over its whole skin
by vague meanderings and bizarre juxtapositions.
So with the vair slipper. Flexible but specific, with the potential for all
shapes but fitting one only, individual and voluble, open and shut, hold-
ing the foot firmly but allowing it to dance, it obliges one to think in the
same place, at the same time and in the same relationship the stable and
the changing, the one and the multiple, reference and variation. Quite
precisely, vair designates the variable.
In the prince’s hands, the slipper leads to the irreplaceable princess and
tomorrow we shall go to the queen’s wedding: a unique key opening only
one door. For us, absorbed in the story, the word vair gives the meaning,
the key to language: to what is a variant sense to be referred?
Sight is pained by the sight of mixture. It prefers to distinguish, separate,

judge distances; the eye would feel pain if it were touched. It protects
itself and shies away. Our flexible skin adapts by remaining stable. It must
be thought of as variety, like the vair slipper. It apprehends and compre-
hends, implicates and explicates, it tends towards the liquid and the fluid,
and approximates mixture.
MISTS
I like to live in the dark, in a material as well as a moral sense – the man
in the public eye enjoys no freedom. I practise seeing in the dark. Often
light appears harsh, aggressive and at times cruel; wait for night, take
pleasure in the twilight, light the lamp rarely, let the shadow come. The
night shines like a black diamond, it shines inwardly. The body as a whole
sees the close proximity of things, their massive night presence, their
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THE FIVE SENSES
tranquillity. Bright light removes them forcibly from that peace and takes
away mine. My shadow body can evaluate shadows, it glides amongst
them, between their silences, as though it knows them. Shadows excite
the closest possible attention and are even subtly revealing; our whole
skin comes alive. Even on the darkest night almost anything can be done
without the faintest extra gleam of light, you can even navigate the mid-
dle of a sunken lane on a moonless night. The soles of your feet begin to
be more aware, your shoulders brush against the branches, the stone in
the ditch gives off a peaceful light. One can do almost anything without
light, except write. Writing requires a glimmer. Life is satisfied with shad-
ows, reading requires clarity.
Night does not anæsthetize the skin, but makes it more subtly aware. The
body trains itself to seek the road in the middle of darkness, loves small,
insignificant perceptions: faint calls, imperceptible nuances, rare effluvia,
and prefers them to everything loud. Things wandering in the silence and
shadow help it to rediscover practices long since lost through forgetful-
ness and habit. Technical prostheses date from such a recent time in our
history that our humiliated bones rejoice in playing once again from an
ancient score; our tendons and muscles, the garment that is our skin, sing
with joy when we throw away our sensorial or motor crutches: wooden
legs, lamps, automobiles. Our technology is often like orthopædics for a
healthy limb, which, as soon as it is replaced or lengthened, so theory has
it, becomes ill or impotent. Let us keep what augments us and spurn what
diminishes us.
But the world provides more than just night or shadow to frustrate
the skill of the attentive person. Even if darkness envelops us, it does not
attack the skin as mist does. The anguish into which fog plunges us comes
not only from the blindness it provokes, but from the way in which it
trails and crawls, in layers, over our arms, shoulders, thighs, stomach and
back. What does it mean to veil, how does a veil cover things? Shadow
awakens our limbs, intensely present when sight is veiled; they hasten
to take over automatically from the eyes. When mist veils sight, it lulls
the body to sleep, saturates it, anæsthetizes it, our skin makes a concerted
effort over its whole surface to resist its compresses. Impression fails under
compression. Our skin loses the freedom to back up our hesitant gaze. Fog
tears out our back-up eyes, it blindfolds or cocoons us. Mist multiplies
veils. Veils are invisible at night.
The large, relatively stable trihedron which traverses and orients us,
left-right and up-down, is left unchanged by the shades of night, which
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also maintain the distribution of the large surrounding masses. They allow
what little remaining light there is to emerge, and there is always a little.
The markers and relationships by which our skin relates to the surround-
ing volumes are removed by mist. In order to learn that in such circum-
stances one loses confidence in even the most reliable instruments, you
have to have passed through a bank of mist so thick that you lose the per-
son next to you, even though you may be touching elbows. Aircraft have
been known to come out of the clouds upside down, or ships stray off
course on irrational orders from the officer of the watch, thrown into a
panic by the fog. Fog removes the skin’s potential, its extension and ascen-
dancy, it creeps into every corner and progressively fills every part of
space, it blankets or sticks to flat or curved surfaces, it fills crevices. Global
shadow, local mist. Night suddenly flares up from afar and the surround-
ing volume remains empty. Mist lurks and creeps and spreads slowly,
from place to place, filling or skirting around neighbouring areas. Night is
empty or hollow, fog is full; darkness is ethereal, mist is gaseous, fluid,
liquid, viscous, sticky, almost solid.
Darkness is concerned with optic space and retains Euclidean volume;
shadow, like clarity, preserves the order of common geometry; fog occu-
pies a variety of topologies and is concerned with the continuous or ragged
space of touch. Its tatters invade the by-ways. When dense and compact,
it accumulates; when insubstantial it rarefies and vanishes like mist. Thus
shadow retains the features of the world, whereas mist transforms them
continually by homeomorphism, causing distances, measurements and
identities to be lost. On an open bridge, swamped by a pea-souper, you retain
the tactile certainty of being situated between the captain and the watch,
phantom neighbours like phantom limbs, but you lose the sense of their
size, the shape of their profile, and your feet, like their bodies, vanish into
the unfathomable distance. Shadow leaves everything invariable and mist
makes everything variable – continuously, whether broken or unbroken.

Dry Greece remains the kingdom of geometers, all born there, in blind-
ing light or in darkness, and empty enough to make you believe that the
dazzling truth will appear if you merely lift a veil. Optics, also, has its
beginnings in these places. The damp Atlantic carries yellowish banks of
mist that tower above you like cliff faces, as do the Baltic Sea and others
to the north. Topology could never have originated in Sicily or Iona,
where everything is known in terms of distance and measurement; one
has to go beyond the Pillars of Hercules to have some idea of it, through
the seas where there is no guarantee that the hazy fog-shrouded distance
is subject to the same laws as what is in close proximity, itself subject to
distortion. Veils, there, are too numerous to count.
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THE FIVE SENSES
Skin attaches itself to a treacherous membrane, to an irregularly-shaped

tatter, canvas or veil, followed by thousands of others, every one different.
The whole environment loses its invariance, reliability and faithfulness.
I am speaking about sensation, culture and science, about philosophy.
Filling space in a random fashion, mist resembles both the medium and
objects, what covers and what is covered. Darkness does not betray, nor
does shadow: in them a thing remains a thing, veiled or not, visible or not,
always accessible through touch. Fog betrays, completely fills the envi-
ronment with potential things. Whether they are objects or vapours – we
cannot tell. Night unsettles phenomenology, mist disturbs ontology.
Shadow reinforces the distinction between being and appearance, mist
blurs it. Thing or veil, being or non-being,that is the question.
COMMON SENSE
Sensation, receptive to any and every message, controls the skin better
than the eye, mouth or ear . . . The sense organs appear on the skin where
it is soft, fine and ultra-receptive. At given places and sites it is rarefied to
the point of transparency and opens and stretches to the point of vibra-
tion, becoming gaze, hearing, smell, taste . . . The sense organs cause
strange variations in the skin which is itself a fundamental variable, a
sensorium commune: a sense common to all the senses, forming a link, bridge
and passage between them: an ordinary, interconnecting, collective, shared
plain.
We bear on our skin the complex singularities of which it is composed:
germs, pimples, navels and inflorescences, folded, drawn and ocellated,
like the bezels of rings. Just as flat or irregular fabric becomes islands,
hems, flounces, frills, gatherings, sewn decorations, so does our skin form
the continuous backdrop, the base note of the senses, their common
denominator. Each sense, originating in the skin, is a strong individual
expression of it.
Conversely the skin, the plain to these mountains, receives all the senses
together. Rather more transparent, vibrant and concentrated, sharper,
higher in altitude or in performance, the senses are more specialized than
the skin and, therefore, cruder. The skin displays them collectively, unfolds
their density, opens out and exhibits things deposited by them in a central
place, dilutes and thins them down. The plain is made of the sands that
wash down from each mountain along the rivers, just as the face is made
by the erosion caused by tears and laughter lines. Our wide, long, variable
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VEILS
envelope hears much, sees little, secretly breathes perfumes, always shud-
ders, draws back with horror, withdraws or exults at loud sounds, bright
light, foul smells. Shivers when it sees white and when it hears high notes,
and flows smoothly beneath every caress. We are bathed in things from
head to toe. Light, shadow, clamour, silence, fragrances, all sorts of waves
impregnate and flood our skin. We are not aboard a vessel, ten feet above
the water line, but submerged in the water itself.
Exquisite sensitivity – normal sensitivity – does not mind dense mes-
sages but prefers subtle ones, feeds heartily on quantity, but delights in
the places where quantity withdraws, leaving only traces: quality, a gentle
beginning, the barest of traces. Thus does faint evidence of the visible and
the audible linger on the skin, chiaroscuros and whispers; on it remain
the invisible side of the visible, the inaudible sounds of music, the heavy
caress of the light wind, imperceptible things, like remnants or marks of
loud, harsh energies. Skin is haunted by the gentleness of the sensual.
I come to the conclusion, furthermore, that the sexual organs, recogniz-
able on the skin – tertiary as in the angle of the elbow, secondary as in the
adornment of hair or the tessitura of the voice, primary, unnameable
because of the shame of everyday or scholarly words – are sense organs,
singularities on the common plain, remarkable sites, folds, seams, buds,
hems or seeds, mountains and wells, springs irrigating the whole land-
scape, as do the others. They emit and receive, recognize and vary.
I have certainly not the skill, competency nor specialized knowledge to
conclude thus. But I regret, as a gentleman, that physical love is ponder-
ously described today both in supposedly learned discourse, and in ordi-
nary usage, only in pathological terms. As though it were dramatic, fateful
or painful. Thus denominated, sex indicates the illness of separation, of
being cut off. The pathetic or pathogenic grimace fades when the senses
joined together form de facto particular cases of the skin-variety. Skin
translates the amorous caress into arousal, subtly displaying desire and
diluting listening and seeing to the point where they almost disappear. It
bears the signs of the one and the signals of the other and the energy and
information of both. Odours beguile love, which then calls for champagne.
Love shines amidst the five senses and is their happy summation. Love
knows no separate zones, nor specialization.
Alcohol swells, burns and corrodes the epidermis, thickens and hardens
it, gives to those that it drugs the appearance of heavy pachyderms;
an elephant man or mammoth woman moving about under anæsthetic.
The primary sense of the French word blaser, a northern term, refers to
71
THE FIVE SENSES
insensate body armour. The learned, humpbacked idiot, Master Blazius,

discourses much and drinks copiously, having become indifferent through
an excess of words and mediocre wines. The maker of phrases has made
his skin blasé.
In the year 1692, during the month of July, Leibniz published in the
Journal des savants a brief conjecture – whether good or bad, true or false,
on the whole it was quite profound – on the origin of the word blason,
which means a mark in old Celtic and Saxon. Or otherwise, indicates a
sign. The author quotes Scandinavian, Icelandic, popular speech, Greek
and English slang. We believe today that blason and blaser both come from
the Dutch word meaning to swell. The noble carries a sword and the
ignoble displays his overripe paunch, swollen with alcohol or importance,
or sometimes both together. But why separate the two values: the blason
and toughened skin can be confused. Each is a sort of callus.
Leibniz, again, compares the French blesser, to wound, with the English
bless, in both cases meaning to mark with a sign, defamatory and painful,
or fortunate and salutary, two values for whomever receives it, marked
with a beneficial or deadly seal, and sometimes both at once. The Greek
blaise means bandy-legged, the opposite of knock-kneed: he who points
his feet outwards. Poor Blaise, still marked by his feet. Leibniz goes fur-
ther and claims that French bleu and blanc, English blot and German Blitz
belong to the same group. Blotch, colours, lightning, scarifying the sky.
The baron and the alcoholic, blessed and wounded, master and slave,
king or victim, marked out for glory or sacrifice, armadillo,6 taboo, bear
the sign and are marked with the seal. But why carry values to extremes?
All in fact bear a mark and name: they are all tattooed.
Admittedly, it must be understood that the language of the blazon
codifies a prior tattoo. Originally both the heraldic and the ordinary shield
were covered in skin. But also, I believe, before coding and even before
any voluntary lesion or benediction, or imposition of the written or spoken

name, the individual tattoo of each person acts first of all as a sign, marking
and naming him. A wart here, a scar there, flaming red hair. We are born
emblazoned, our skin imprinted. Nicknames come from the impressions
left on our skin by our personal histories.
But even greater understanding is needed; there is an obscure relation-
ship between naming – the mark, sign, scarification, writing of the proper
name on the parchment skin – and anæsthesia. The voluble array and mix-
ture of colours express fluctuations in time and history, and deposit our
identity there. If we try to stabilize it in order to have an invariant, identify-
ing, constant, compact sign, then we are blasé about what surrounds us.
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VEILS
We must either feel or be named. Choose. Language or skin, æsthesia or

anæsthesia. Language solidifies meanings.
The argumentative, Latin-speaking scholar on his mule is drugged with
wine and good words. How many impressions and how much time have
I wasted inscribing so much writing in a sort of heraldic code on paper
skin? Unstable stripes mingling in patterns on watered-silk skin would
make a better page. I have no code for it, nor pen, but I am attempting to
make a tracing of it.
Was my grandfather trying to turn me into a writer when he would
mutter: ‘Don’t bite your nails, child, how else are you going to scratch
your little girl friends when you’re playing?’
Hippopotamus or horned rhinoceros skins, the protection of armoured
warriors impatient to throw themselves naked into battle, chitinous skins
of beetles, bearing sagittal arms, skins of soldiers or drug addicts, what do
you know about anything? Skins without doors or windows, coats of
mail, bullet proofing, what do you feel?
And what do you feel, equipped with techniques and formulae, pro-
tected by exact, rigorous language?
No, war is not the mother of all things. Battles produce nothing but new
battles, hence no productivity. Yes, dialectics loses its way. Not totally erro-
neous, it enjoys occasional successes, exceptionally or as counter-examples,
but it is always invariably, mathematically false. Show me a single thing
produced in and by conflict, a single thing and I shall be converted; show
me just one invention induced by polemics. I offer my possessions and my
time to anyone who can reveal a single success. As battles produce only
battles, dialectics is reduced to the identity principle, to repetition, to null
information.
Dialectics has enjoyed great success. How is it possible for such an error
to have invaded not only philosophical reflection but also education?
Who amongst the public doubts the generally accepted notion of the ben-
efit of battle, who amongst publicists is ignorant of the fact that the word
‘struggle’ fascinates us? The younger generation has imbibed the idea
of quarrelling with its mother’s milk and reaches adulthood ready to
destroy everything through a belief in the beauty of wars it has not expe-
rienced. And when it has gone beyond that age and those misfortunes, it
will find itself old, like the generation that preceded mine, mourning the
waste of lost lives. It will have waited too long to discover the error of
dialectics.
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THE FIVE SENSES
Nothing is constructed, made or invented, except in relative peace, in a

small, rare pocket of local peace maintained in the middle of the universal
devastation produced by perpetual war. Dialectics owes its success only
to hominoids’ passionate love of quarrelling. They rejoice in murder and
destruction, talk about them endlessly and rush to gape at them as at
a theatrical performance. Most do not know how to construct, invent or
produce a thing or an idea. They want to win, they want to fight. In a
choice between creation and destruction, those few who hesitate can be
counted on the fingers of one hand. All run to the abattoir, stupidly con-
fusing energy and aggressiveness. They adore therefore any theory that
assures them that creative work is born of battles, even if they never see
it proved, even if every significant work is only ever born of an improba-
ble island of silence and peace.
I call them hominoids because this conduct resembles that of primates
locked into their relationships, drugged on domination, physically and
materially, and who pass or waste their time ensuring that this one occu-
pies the first place, and that one the position of lieutenant, one step down,
and so forth down the pecking order. Hominoids fight to remain primates.
Static equilibrium in the animal groove. War is the mother of animals.
Battle produces the society of monkeys, which produces battle. Conflict
stabilizes the archaic bestiality in us. Dialectics describes the logic of
anthropoids. Man comes into being when he sees the falsity of this.
That happens if he has survived the struggles to become a grand old
man to whom wisdom comes at last. Listen to him, the returned soldier
dissolved in tears and having difficulty digesting his wasted life, lamenting
his former thick-skinned, gorilla-like aggressiveness.
Combat – either political or scholarly, involving either language or the
body, bare-handed or armed, individual or collective – and thus hierarchy,
power and glory count amongst the hardest drugs, the chemical and phar-
maceutical composition of which is dictated by dialectics. These drugs give

us a monstrous skin, as does alcohol. Squamous, sclerosed, rigid, insensitive.
Blasé.
Avoid struggles that masquerade as works in progress, avoid battle-
productions and drugs, save your skin. Refine it, while you are waiting for
whatever will happen, for the birth of creativity.
Endowed, supplied, afflicted with a quivering envelope, a tender onion-
skin disturbed by wrinkles like a fragile lake, naked, nay flayed, these are
the ones who are unsuited to the battles of crabs. It appears that life evolved
from animal forms whose soft parts were inside, covered by a hard external
casing, into other forms, such as ours, in which everything hard is interi-
orized as bone, cartilage, skeleton, while the soft is expressed as flesh,
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mucous membranes and skin. Those who love to fight are unevolved
leftovers from a very ancient past, from the dark time when we were
armoured. The newcomers amongst us become gentle, wrinkle-bearing:
we bear imprints. We are clothed in soft, warm wax, we are tarnished
mirrors, a warped, scratched, blotched, diverse surface in which the uni-
verse is reflected a little, on which it writes and on which time traces its
passage; clothed in wax tablets, an ancient image of the soul, clothed in
our intelligence and memory, engraved in a different way from the world,
with a network of longitudes, latitudes and contour lines expressing our
longevity, suffering, broadness of views and generosity. The skin receives
the deposit of our memories and stocks the experiences printed on it. It is
the bank of our impressions and the geodesic panorama of our frailties.
We do not have to look far, or search our memory: the skin is engraved
and imprinted to the same extent as the surface of the brain, and perhaps
in the same way.
Beauties of Asia, fine and delicate creatures that you are, where do you
place your remembrances, you whose tireless skin, devoid of such mark-
ings, conserves its freshness for so long?
Everyone seems to believe that our point of view, our point of vision, is
up in the dress circle, eyes sitting at the top of the trunk on a swivelling,
mobile head, like a lighthouse lantern. Our skin would be the stone base
of the lighthouse, with no relation to the lights and signals, a simple raised
structure ensuring that the gaze will travel. The lighthouse guardian
would be the pupil of the eye, or at least ensure its movement. I assume
that the official in charge of the concept, like the chief engineer in charge
of Lighthouses and Beacons, runs things from his office in Paris, the brain
or central processing unit. An expert trained at the Ecole Polytechnique,
he pays a few quick visits to the sea illuminated by his department, when
he has time. The centre is preoccupied with important things. For the rest,
it suffices to telephone; to send or receive messages, to make language
circulate.
The soul, and perhaps also knowledge, glides up and down the struc-
ture, on the surface of the tower. There is a kind of softness in the way it
presents itself, like naked skin to sea water, a softness strong enough to
resist circumstances or to seek them out boldly when the opportunity
arises, but a strength subtle enough to pick up discreet calls, a hard and
sensitive softness, a delicate balance, sometimes off-balance, between the
delectable and the heart-rending. We learn nothing, really, except what
marks the wax, which is soft and warm but cold enough for the tracing
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THE FIVE SENSES
to endure, adaptive to the point of death but stopping short of it; to write,
I read from my flayed skin rather than copying parchments from the
library. These days I trust this memory more than data banks. An author
speaks for himself. I write on my skin and not on that of others who
would answer for me, as Bonnard paints on his and exhibits it without
shame. I decipher my wrinkles, the engravings of time, written with a
stylus; my soul haunts this inscription-covered hide.
It seems to me that the brain is a local concentration of this place of
knowledge. The thinking I quivers along the spine, I think everywhere.
If everyone exhibited, as painters do, their cast-off skins, their moults,

and imitated the writer and the exhibition of his scarified parchments,
each one with his labarum, shroud or winding cloth, we would see a fine
sight. Wrinkles, scars, tough old hides, corns, psoriasis; work, pain, mem-
ory, secret perversions, tattoo the skin and determine it even more than
its natural colour or high-class shades of brown, acquired on beaches –
where no-one is naked, because clothed in their tan, a thin veil waiting
for cancerous growths, sun-bathing. Bits of rag, marked, tattered and
torn, heavily embossed, on display for all to see, feeble confessions or
occupational stigmata, are we really anything but those rags? Are we any-
thing more than these ghosts?
This is how souls wander in limbo and in bookshops.
One of the last thinkers in the French language, Henri Bergson, left
his successors with several questions to resolve, among which is that of
varieties. Like mathematicians of his time, he distinguished between dis-
crete varieties: contrasting flowers juxtaposed in the fields, animals scat-
tered over the islands; and continuous varieties: a painter’s palette, a
garden paradise, a vair slipper, shades of modesty or emotion on the skin.
He situates the first varieties in space and the second in time; he groups
space with intelligence, and time with intuition; he classifies intelligence
under science and intuition under philosophy. This discrete positioning
shows the limits of his intelligence. It could be thought that he left the
question of time to his successors. One must, before toying with that idea,
go back to his assumptions; the distinction between both families of vari-
eties. For topology has never stopped exploring spaces, trailing continuity
in its wake. The only philosophical mistake committed at the outset is in
fact concerned with those spaces; it was believed for a long time that
Euclidian or metric space, that which we consider usual or everyday, was
the only space conceivable. In fact, since the time of Bergson’s thesis,
geometries, and with them, spaces, have proliferated. We no longer see
76
VEILS
why the continuous should be alien to them, why it should be necessary

to classify it with time. We can no longer confuse space and metrics, space
and discreteness.
Subtlety goes behind the canvas. A certain figure appears on the front.
Behind, a forest of knots conditions it, prefiguring a computer circuit
board. The medieval tapestry shows the five senses; whereas we believe
we are manufacturing artificial intelligence. In the same sense, the Lady
and the Unicorn weaves a subtle, artificial sensorium. The subtlety enmeshes
the warp and weft, one over the other, or underneath it, high or low-warp.
The interlacing designates an analogous, even more subtle situation. Can
we place a third thread between the other two. Where would it go? Under,
over, beside: what does ‘side’ mean?
Juxtaposition of the discrete variety assumes distance between elements
or seeds. The distance which separates and distinguishes between two
neighbouring flowers, animals, or even threads; the gap, however small,
allows one to insert a third element or seed between the other two. This
possibility initiates a sequence, which reproduces the old question of the
third man: no one knows if, and when, it finishes: between the first and
second seed and the third, can a fourth or fifth be inserted? You can imag-
ine the direction of the series and its simple law.
Before rushing headlong towards infinite things and appealing to time
so as to be able to think about dense accumulation, we need to return to
the situation in which insertion occurs. Indeed the third, at any point
in the series, gets its bearings between the two preceding ones. This inter-
calary situation is subject to several constraints. Where is the third seed
to be placed – between the two, or in the middle of them? What are we
placing between the two elements, a thread or a plane? What inclination
will be given to the plane? At this point, either a finite or infinite series of
new seeds can be aligned on the thread, or the said plane gradually filled
with them, or the said space saturated with them, etc. In other words: the
situation ‘between’ describes a sequence along a straight line separating
the seeds, or permeates the space in which they are both immersed. To be
more precise: this situation also, and especially, deploys a great multiplic-
ity or variety of paths or ways crossing this thread or space. Indeed, at
each level at which the question is again posed, the choice of the interme-
diary situation of the new seed can take place in a different dimension. It’s
something that all women know – dress-maker’s apprentices, spinners,
knitters, or weavers: over, under, etc. None of the paths thus obtained runs
in a straight line, none remains in the same dimension, all twist and curve.
77
THE FIVE SENSES
Since many braids and curls are involved, an inextricable tangle presents
itself. Metric measurement and its rigidity, so often confused with rigour,
disappear. Distinction is distinguished from distance, the number of ways
from here to there increases inexorably, and the paths overlap. The body,
armed with its hundreds of degrees of freedom, used to live flexibly and
still lives in this situation until topology teaches it to us again, or teaches
us a rigour different from that of a wooden automaton. It is immediately
obvious that a knot, in the common sense, is formed as soon as a space-
between presents itself. It presents itself discretely, as well as continuously,
and more often in the first guise rather than the second. Could separate
elements join together more easily than inseparable ones?
The distinction between continuous and discrete varieties no longer

appears so clear. Could each be reduced to the childish gesture of Alexander
the Great cutting the Gordian knot with his sword in order to take control
of the Asian empire? Separation ignores the knot or tangle that lies between
separate things. Since Alexander, we have forgotten Eurasia. A lack of
subtlety prevents us from seeing the forest of knots beneath the canvas or
behind the tapestry, dazzled as we are by the representation of intelligence.
To be sure, the tapestry displays a sort of discrete mosaic, but to analyse it
properly it would be necessary to undo by hand the tangled threads behind.
What a job it would be indeed to separate out this mixture! Before infinity
or time separate the discontinuous from the continuous, the knot ties them
together. The practice and concept of connection precede many others.
The situation described here remains a naïve one. We are only talking
about seeds and threads. It quickly becomes necessary to generalize it.
Where and how is a thread to be slipped between two threads, what path
is to be taken through what space? One has to move up through the dif-
ferent dimensions in order to have a better understanding. Where and

how is a sheet of paper to be slipped between two others, what path is to
be taken, through what space? A knot traces a one-dimensional path in a
three-dimensional variety to connect elements to one, two, zero or three
dimensions. It is necessary to imagine foldings, invaginations, exquisitely
complex situations that generalize the practice and the idea of the knot to
all imaginable dimensions.
The set of elements situated between two others can follow the straight
line that separates them; their metric distance can fill the whole space
into which the two elements have been plunged, but more generally it
describes a subtle and supple path, curved braid, curls and garlands going
from one, and meandering through every dimension, before joining the
78
VEILS
other. The number of such paths increases indefinitely. In the first two
cases, the middle situation is described – a point situated at an equal distance
from the two others or a global series that surrounds or encompasses the
latter – in the third, a state of mixture.
This is the spatial or conceptual situation of the knot. Of course knots
can exist in all imaginable dimensions: smooth or crumpled fabric can
also pass, via an edge of fabric, on or under another canvas and so on.
This situation marks the limits of the analysis. In a discrete variety, sorting
always appears possible, it is a matter of patience. The seeds or discrete
elements, too subtle, light and imperceptible, and the complex paths that
describe their situation in relation to each other, are not taken into
account. In continuous variety, these paths have gained strength. Bergson
expected us to wait until the sugar had melted in the water. He never
required us to wait for the mixture thus formed to separate out. Readers
would have had to wait until the end of time. A mixture is not easily ana-
lysed. Work, heat, light, a thousand pieces of information are necessary.
If I wish to drink this water, I also have to drink the sugar, if I want the
sugar, I must swallow the water, if I want one constituent, I have to pass
via the result as well as via the other constituents. The continuous is
unanalysable at any given moment, and so are mixtures. It could be said
that the sugar and water are tied together by a knot that we cannot always
untie. It is common knowledge that the term analysis comes from a Greek
verb which, as it happens, means to untie. Analysis requires that a knot
be undone. We believe that analysis demands only one cut: the cook’s
knife cuts the tendons, sinews, and muscles, the analyst is satisfied with
having separated the bones. As if bones alone were sufficient for the ani-
mal to live. In discrete variety, sight that divides, the vision of the division,
is blind to the light, tenuous knots that unite the respective situations, as
if a given situation, with given bearings in relation to the other elements,
mattered not at all. The elements of a jigsaw puzzle in a box tell one noth-
ing about the design which becomes visible after the correct assembly of
the pieces. In some ways the analyst always carries a knife, always imi-
tates the young Alexander and knows no bonds.
There are only varieties tied or bound by soft or hard, cobweb-thin, or
thick bonds, knots that analysis undoes with ease or difficulty. This situa-
tion is better described as a mixture than as a medium.
And as a veil rather than a solid. And as skin rather than sight. And as
the body rather than its tongue.
Fabric folds, crumples, turns on itself, is knotted at will. Skin wrinkles,
adapts, reigns between organs and contains complex paths that link them;
more than just the medium of the sense organs, our skin is a mixture
79
THE FIVE SENSES
of them, like a palette. The naked woman’s tattoo resembles Bonnard’s

palette.
The organism forms a gigantic knot with as many dimensions as one could
wish. It begins, in an embryonic state, with one or more sheets, folded,
pleated, rolled, invaginated. Embryology has the appearance of applied
topology, looks like an infinitely wrinkled skin. The organism fills with
local interchangers that finally form a global interchange system, a giant
knot made from small differential knots.
The body folds, curves, adapts, enjoying at least three hundred degrees
of freedom. From the feet to the head or to the tips of the fingers it traces
a variable and complex path between the things of the world, changing
like a piece of seaweed in the depths of the water, a thousand and one
exchanges or signals. Knowing things requires one first of all to place
oneself between them. Not only in front in order to see them, but in the
midst of their mixture, on the paths that unite them. In her right hand
the lady with the unicorn firmly holds a flag strewn with crescent moons
and in her left, the animal’s single horn. Touching is situated between, the
skin is the place where exchanges are made, the body traces the knotted,
bound, folded, complex path, between the things to be known.
MIXTURE, UNVEILING
The skin is a variety of contingency: in it, through it, with it, the world
and my body touch each other, the feeling and the felt, it defines their
common edge. Contingency means common tangency: in it the world
and the body intersect and caress each other. I do not wish to call the
place in which I live a medium, I prefer to say that things mingle with
each other and that I am no exception to that, I mix with the world which
mixes with me. Skin intervenes between several things in the world and
makes them mingle.
Mixture is a more accurate term than medium. Medium, too geometr-
ical, is minimally useful: a centre in a volume, when it is reduced to an
intersection, or the volume itself, when its tendency is to surround.
A point or totality, singular or almost universal. A contradictory and
inflexible concept.
Everything has its place in the middle when the medium is concen-
trated, everything meets and joins together in this complex place, in this
knot, through which everything passes, like an interchanger. It makes
me think of the solar plexus of a thwarted left-hander, of an unwilling
80
VEILS
ambidextrous person. Everything still has its place in the medium when
it expands to fill the volume. Everything meets there. How? By chance.
Where? In proximity to one another. All right, here is mixture. Confluence,
unfurling, occupation of places.
A medium is abstract, dense, homogeneous, almost stable, concentrated;
a mixture fluctuates. The medium belongs to solid geometry, as one used
to say; a mixture favours fusion and tends towards the fluid. The medium
separates, the mixture mitigates; the medium creates classes and the mix-
ture, hybrids.
Everything meets in contingency, as if everything had a skin. Contingency
is the tangency of two or several varieties and reveals their proximity to
each other. Water and air border on a thick or thin layer of evaporation,
air and water touch in a bed of mist. Earth and water espouse each other
in clay and mud, are joined in a bed of silt. The cold front and the hot
front slide over each other on a mattress of turbulence. Veils of proximity,
layers, films, membranes, plates. We live on slow, inexorable moving
footpaths, thousands of metres beneath our feet.
The theory of knowledge is subordinate to its choices, by which I mean

the examples it uses. It could be said that theory and intuition belong
to the order of vision, and that strictly speaking they belong to the solid.
I have long been moving towards the fluid and have encountered turbu-
lences in the past and, more recently, mixtures. Thinking about fusion
without confusion, I shall come soon to liquidity, difficult to conceptual-
ize but the future resides there, and I shall come to mingled bodies.
Meanwhile I am seeking the best model for a theory of knowledge, less
solid than a solid, almost as fluid as liquid, hard and soft: fabric.
The skin, more topological than geometrical, does without measurement.
Topology is tactile. The skin, multisensorial, can pass for our common
sense.
We have just left classical theory, subordinate to the solid and to sight.
We cannot claim to be so exceptional. We are not the only ones, sur-
rounded by boundaries, to throw ourselves into contingency, the only
adaptable ones who can turn our hand to anything.
The world is filled with complex veils.
According to one tradition truth is an unveiling. A thing, a set of things
covered with a veil, to be discovered.
If it could be reduced to this exercise, philosophy would be equivalent
to a rather boring variety of illusionism or juggling. Science would lose its
complexity if it were only a question of discovery. That seems puerile.
81
THE FIVE SENSES
No, there is no thing under the veil, nor does the woman dance under
her seven veils, the dancer is herself a complex of fabrics. Nudity reveals
more pleats and wrinkles. Harlequin will never arrive at his last costume.
He undresses infinitely. There are always more peacock marks, ocelli and
tattoos.
The state of things becomes tangled, mingled like thread, a long cable, a
skein. Connections are not always unravelled. Who will unravel this
mess? Imagine the thread of a network, the cord of a skein, or a web with
more than one dimension, imagine interlacing as a trace on one plane of
the state that I am describing. The state of things seems to me to be an
intersecting multiplicity of veils, the interlacing of which bodies forth a
three-dimensional figure. The state of things is creased, crumpled, folded,
with flounces and panels, fringes, stitches and lacing.
Unveiling does not consist in removing an obstacle, taking away a deco-
ration, drawing aside a blanket under which lies the naked thing, but in
following patiently and with respectful diplomacy the delicate disposition
of the veils, zones, neighbouring spaces, the depth of the pile, the talweg of
their seams and in displaying them when possible, like a peacock’s tail or
a lace skirt.
This medium or mixture would be our model for the state of things,
thinkable or intuitable, or sensible, like a heap of fabrics, a thousand pos-
sible arrangements of veils.
Sensible to sight like an aurora borealis, for anyone who finds themself
in the vaporous, honey-combed, incandescent, draped, light, fragile
underpinning of the dawn light; tangible like the topology of surfaces and
their events or circumstances; audible like waves of the sea or sound, or
batiste handkerchiefs floating in the air; sapid without a doubt, I feel my
tongue sheathed in a fitted rag when I taste; the state of things is the
medium of the senses, or rather their mixture. The skin mixes them and
also veils them.
Weavers, spinners, Penelope or someone like her, once seemed to me to

be the first geometers, because their art or craft explores or exploits space
by means of knots, proximities and continuities, without intervention
from measurement, because their tactile manipulations anticipate topol-
ogy. The mason or surveyor anticipates the geometers in a strictly metric
sense, but she or he who weaves or spins precedes them in art, thought,
and no doubt in history. We had to dress ourselves before building, clothe
ourselves in loose garments before constructing solid buildings.
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VEILS
Generalizing this hypothesis, it can be said that fabrics, textiles and

material provide excellent models of knowledge, excellent almost abstract
objects, primary varieties: the world is a heap of clothes. Where knowl-
edge was concerned, woman was for a long time ahead of man. Pierre
Bonnard’s naked woman, the goddess with the bird, the girl and the uni-
corn or the wretched creature in her slippers.
The hand moves rapidly on the loom and distaff, around the needles, it
creates the thread, twists it, threads it through, folds and knots it, the
hand deftly splicing and lashing, unfailingly finding the gap underneath
that the eye cannot see, it strays across the frosted glass, levelling the seeds
sown by chance, prickles that it alone knows how to identify, on the sand
it traces loops or braids, happy amidst the leaves and garlands the hand
dances, enjoying its degrees of freedom.
Touch is topological and prepares the planes and smooth varieties for a
relaxed, metric, Euclidean gaze, the skin covers with a veil what the eye
cannot see. Molyneux’s problem – whether a person blind from birth,
who has just been operated on, would be able to recognize with his new-
found sight a cube or sphere that he was previously able to identify with
his fingers – raises more questions about the geometry of those whose
vision is not impaired rather than it does about the theory of knowledge.
Why not experiment on a nightingale or a lilac branch, an emerald or a
velvet skirt, which exist, rather than on abstract volumes, which do not
exist? Who among us has ever seen a cube or a sphere? We have only
ever conceived of them in language. So if you give the blind man a ball
and a cobblestone, he will by touch be able to appreciate the continuous
deformations, the jagged edges and particularities, he will soon ask you if
you are able by sight to tell the difference between a ball and a sphere, a
cube and a cobblestone. He will laugh sympathetically at your discomfort.

Are we aware that writing requires the most complex nervous and mus-
cular skill? No other form of manipulation brings into play as many nerve
endings. Those who know how to write could do anything with their ten
fingers, peoples who learn this refinement, learn at the same time all pos-
sible manual trades, cruder and simpler than this one. They who invented
it revealed to humanity the path towards everything that was practically
possible. But conversely, the female embroiderer, sewer, spinner or even
surgeon operating under a microscope, still stitch together seams with
loose links, compared with the fine knots and the intricate paths of writing.
They have their hands in hard things while she who writes immerses her
83
THE FIVE SENSES
hands in the soft sign. A link so subtle that it is attached to nothing, a knot
so tenuous that it is already passing into another order.
Pure touch gives access to information, a soft correlate of what was once
called the intellect.
84

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1

I remain there, motionless, vibrating, pinioned, gesticulating within the

In truth, with no possibility of being wrong. No mistake about it, since my

Who was this ‘I’?

The soul inhabits a quasi-point where the I is determined.

I touch one of my lips with my middle ﬁnger. Consciousness resides in

is lost in Theseus’ labyrinth, Theseus is lost in the avenues and round-

it favours mountains, straits, footpaths, Klein bottles, chance borders that

I retreat in the face of difﬁculty by erecting a palace of abstractions.

aurora borealis bursts forth in the night. It spreads, blazing or bleeding,

When in fact it is an art of love.

CANVAS, VEIL, SKIN

In the 1890s, Pierre Bonnard painted a bathrobe; he painted a canvas in

Cosmetics and the art of adornment are equivalent expressions. The

Cosmetics approaches æsthetics in the sense of art theory. In the streets

The Garden of 1936 traces an almost diagonal path to paradise. There is

paradise. And it is offered with great generosity. Whoever decorated this

transitions and exchanges. The bathrobe, in the bathroom, amidst the

HERMES AND THE PEACOCK

go hand in hand. Argus sees everywhere and is always looking: he only

Cultures mature when they transfer their focus on relationships between

comet. The society in which surveillance dominates ages quickly, becom-

In the Greek sense of the verb to see, he incarnates theoretical man, an

up in representation, hibernating in language. Poverty is not only mea-

no world, produces no things, provides no bread. For how long has it

They pull us backwards. On the whole, the observant person is better

It asks questions and remains suspicious of the answers, it never asks

subjects the grand inquisitor to searches, keeps voyeurs under surveil-

The movement has no end and constructs long, monotonous, difﬁcult

unknown of collective relationships, or childlike hope. The doctors of bod-

inconceivable space, the system of harmony enveloping the theory of

Suddenly these fantastic gigantomachies, the all-powerful against the

A visible event is localized and locatable in its distance and angle,

object, hearing practises ubiquity, the almost divine power of universal

and juxtaposing eyes. Have you ever encountered a work, accomplished

We are speaking here of the new state of knowledge. We are speaking of

We no longer know why, when it is acute, or reﬁned or delicate, we describe

otic scattering of the patches of skin.

shades of colour, mixed bouquets, tastes with variable fragrances, touch

surprise. This is how we originate and how we are formed: a slapdash

variable and mixed sensation, about the engendered organism or about

The prince seeks a queen. What is to be done in a principality, unless he

Sight is pained by the sight of mixture. It prefers to distinguish, separate,

and approximates mixture.

makes everything variable – continuously, whether broken or unbroken.

Skin attaches itself to a treacherous membrane, to an irregularly-shaped

insensate body armour. The learned, humpbacked idiot, Master Blazius,

any voluntary lesion or benediction, or imposition of the written or spoken

We must either feel or be named. Choose. Language or skin, æsthesia or

Nothing is constructed, made or invented, except in relative peace, in a

maceutical composition of which is dictated by dialectics. These drugs give

If everyone exhibited, as painters do, their cast-off skins, their moults,

why the continuous should be alien to them, why it should be necessary

The distinction between continuous and discrete varieties no longer

ferent dimensions in order to have a better understanding. Where and

of them, like a palette. The naked woman’s tattoo resembles Bonnard’s

The theory of knowledge is subordinate to its choices, by which I mean

also veils them.

Weavers, spinners, Penelope or someone like her, once seemed to me to