I Love to You and Cut on Me: A Call from the Surface

Abstract

I used to see the bleeding wound in performance art as a conduit that transforms and transfers a sense of pain. Yet, developing this idea further via Jean Baudrillard’s reformulation of reality and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s conception of pain, I contend in this article that the act of wounding—whether performed on skin or latex—is also where ethical and philosophical dialogues take place. Drawing on performances by SUKA OFF, VestAndPage, and Franko B, I argue that wounds in these works do not reveal trauma or inner pain but instead operate as sites of painful (hyper)reality where pain is enacted, not expressed, and where the distinction between real and simulated sensation collapses. Taking a different route from Peggy Phelan, who theorizes the ungraspable depth of vision, love, and subjectivity, I shift attention from the wound as a vanishing point of interiority to its emergence as a surface that seduces, generates affect and relational force. In these performances, wound becomes a situation where pain is encountered through a reversible operation and creative enactment—a cut that realizes pain through appearance rather than through reference to an autonomous suffering subject.

The wound, like the proposition “to” in Luce Irigaray’s phrasing “I love to you,” sustains an intersubjective relation that resists possessive logic. Understanding Irigaray’s approach through the lens of Baudrillard’s theory of seduction, the wounded surface, as a seductive plane of simulation, gains an ethical dimension, seducing both performer and audience into uncertain reciprocity. Far from indexing hidden depth, torn latex and dripping blood mobilize affect at the level of surface, compelling response without grounding it in trauma. From this perspective, a wound is not merely a conduit but an ethical relation calling for mutual engagement.