Adermatoglyphia

Gilles Deleuze's friends never asked about his extraordinarily long fingernails. Secretly, anecdotally but not simply biographically, they perhaps bear the whole problem of affect. Deleuze seemed to suffer from adermatoglyphia. Like the name suggests, the condition consists in an absence (a) of carvings (glyphia) on the skin (derma), that is, the whorls, loops and arches more commonly known as a fingerprint. Filled with nerve endings, these ‘skin carvings’ heighten sensitivity in fingertips because they increase friction when fingers glide over a surface. In 1943, in the first comprehensive treatise on dermatoglyphics, Harold Cummins and Charles Midlo write: Abundant nerve endings in the skin of the palmar and plantar surfaces serve the sense of touch. Their functioning is aided by corrugation of the skin. In testing the texture of a surface, the fingers or palm are rubbed back and forth over it. The drag against the ridges heightens the intensity of stimulation of the nerve endings. (Cummins and Midlo 23) Fingers seem so well equipped to feel that, a century prior to Cummins and Midlo, Charles Bell argued that hands evidence an intelligent author in The Hand, Its Mechanism and Vital Endowments as Evincing Design. As if no one could touch anything without also touching upon the existence of God. Something of a heretical exception, however, the absence of ridges doesn't decrease Deleuze's sensitivity, as a dermatoglyphist might expect, but rather heightens it to an almost unbearable point. He kept his fingernails long so as to deaden the sensation