Epidermic States

The chapter argues that the modern understanding of the nation as homogeneous and evenly operative has brought about an undue emphasis on edges. This chapter explores the ways in which borders have become fetishized sites, and the attendant cartographic anxieties that are attached to boundaries, edges, and remote corners. Mobilizing the metaphor of skin, the chapter argues that skin and border both occupy a key position with respect to the individual and the nation insofar as they project, as containers, an image of coherence and cohesiveness. Tightly enmeshed in political and popular somatic metaphors, skin/border indexes the unresolvable gap between, on the one hand, the topographic inscription of unambiguous boundary lines and, on the other, the concealed topological realities of networks, rhizomes, and flows that sustain the illusion of political partitions.