Tactilism and dermography: «When You Will Come» by Laura Pugno

Abstract

The skin, the marvelous and highly complex covering of our organism, is omnipresent in the work of Laura Pugno. In this essay, treasuring above all the hypotheses formulated in one classic of psychoanalysis such as The Skin-Ego by Didier Anzieu and a volume by the anthropologist David Le Breton, we follow the minimal, humble deeds of the very young protagonist of When you will come, the second novel by the Roman writer, as well as a splendid allegorical-fantastic representation of the urgent need to mark defined limits in our liquid time (the adjective belongs, as is more than known, to Zygmunt Bauman). In an era of collapse of the symbolic, the epidermis – the organ that precisely draws the outline of our bodies – would seem to be the last limit left to us, the one from which to start again.