QUOTATIONS

What is more deep, is the skin (Paul Valéry)

Everything happens at the boundary between things and propositions.
Paradox appears as a dismissal of depth, a limit. Humor is the art of the surface, which is opposed to the old irony, the art of depths and hights.
(p.11, The Logic of senses, Gilles Deleuze)

“only the similarities differ and only the differences look like” (C.Lévi Strauss,p.249 Conversations,Gilles Deleuze,Pre-textos)

Events are like crystals, they become and grow only out of the edges, or on the edge. This is, indeed,the first secret of the stammerer or of the left-handed person: no longer to sink, but to slide the whole lenght in such a way that the old depht no longer exist at all, having been reduced to the opposite side of the surface. By sliding, one passes from one side to the other side, since the other side is nothing, but the opposite direction. If there is nothing to see behind the curtain, it is because everything is visible, or rather all possible science is along the length of the curtain.
It suffices to follow it far enough, precisely enough, and superficially enough, in order to reverse sides and to make the right side become the left or vice versa. It is not therefore a question of the adventures of Alice, but of Alice’s adventure: her climb to the surface, her disavowal of false depth and her discovery that everything happens on the border.
(p.12, The Logic of senses, Gilles Deleuze)

This is the case –even more so- in Through the Looking-Glass.Here events, differing radically from things, are no longer sought in he depths, but at the surface, in the faint incorporeal mist which escapes from bodies, a film without volume which envelop them, a mirror which reflects them,a chessboard on which they are organized according to plan. Alice is no longer able to make her way to the depths. Instead, she releases her incorporeal double. It is by following the border, by skirting the surface, that one passes from bodies to the incorporeal..
(p.12, The Logic of senses, Gilles Deleuze)

To be sensuous,real,is to be an object of the senses, a sensuous object, and therefore to have object outside oneself which are subject to the operation of "one's senses".

There is said that sensuousness is the human perception through which alone objects are given to us. Objects can only be given to man in so far as they "affect" to him. Human sensuousness is affectibility. Human perception as sensuouness is receptive and passive. It receives what it is given, and it is depend on and needs this quality of being given. As a
sensuous being he is an affixed, passive and suffering being.
(p.12, Eros and Civilization Herbert Marcuse)

Let me propose Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, also known as Doubting Thomas, as an emblem for the project of getting at the depth of surface, of teaching skin-depth.
(p.27, Quoting Caravaggio, Mieke Bal)


Indeed, now that Jesus has simultaneously become the younger man over whose favors (acces to the hole in his body) the three other men vie, the teacher who shows what lies under the skin, and the connoisseur of the beauty of the flesh, the painting becomes full of holes, folds, and creases. Jesus’ suggestive leg at the lower left becomes slightly coquettish. The finger of the lucky Thomas, already inside, is thrice repeated, in Jesus thumb index, and a little finger, going into other folds, other creases of his own body. Opennings are suggested all over the work’s surface, beginning with Jesus half mouth open.
The representation not only stages the three men waiting for their turn, in a suprème reversal of power relations between old and young, when desire comes to threaten social with erotic power. It also stages the intrincate connection between desire and vision.
(p.37, Quoting Caravaggio, Mieke Bal)