In this final chapter, I explore how La piel que habito reflects and responds to the vicissitudes and catastrophes of the past and present. Whether they be individual or collective, national or trans-national, they are all inscribed on and irrupt through the surface of the body. This reading encourages spectators to ponder how the fragments of memory and history are actualised and endure from the vantage point of the present, and how the traces and shards of the traumatic past exceed temporal boundaries. They haunt or contaminate our experience of the present, so that the traumas of the violent past are re-staged, condensed and displaced. The traces of memory and history are externalised, but also erased as they are impressed. Or, they are imprinted in the subjectivity and body without external articulation, thereby escaping from linguistic symbolisation. From this perspective, we can associate the scientific development of biogenetics and biotechnology, one of the main themes in the film, with a ‘synthetic wounding’ of the human body by scientific, technological, political and economic power – a wounding that is both literal and symbolic. This reading obliges us to keep questioning and re-conceptualising our theoretical discussions about embodied human existence. As Gianna Bouchard argues, ‘[a]s the body has become increasingly exploited, manipulated, commodified and commercialised by biotechnologies, so unease has escalated about control over and proprietary interests in all bodies, both human and non-human’ (2012: 94).