Wittgenstein’s meditations on the meter in Paris could be thought of as meditations on racial purity. The impossibility of a pure, clean reference in the face of the liability of the physical material of the meter to change, this thoroughgoing critique of the notion of form, is of a piece with the French turn to focus on the body, not in the manner of healing it, as in a psychoanalysis that addresses mental life in the name of exorcising maladies, but in the manner of a being that has porous borders, and is in that respect unlike a soul that is imagined to have formal integrity. A clear and distinct idea such as Descartes would make his Meditations contingent upon, deriving being from thinking, is circumvented by being brought from the mind up there to a body down here that it is impossible to surmount in thought. The porousness of the body is analogous to the porousness of a racial group, which cannot be clear and distinct, any more so than the ancestry of the individual, which shears off into the mist of time.