Corpo, umano

The human body is transformation: Ovid knows it as he sings of its Metamorphoses, and so do those who begin the transition to another sex. It is the map upon which personality and memory, joy and mental pain draw their journey. The body can’t be escaped: in law and in health, in gender policies and in robotic simulations. In sports practices and in nutrition. Like a science fiction movie, Vittorio Lingiardi undertakes a journey inside the body: he approaches the organs that comprise it – one by one, from the liver to the brain, from the eyes to the heart – to talk about them with the voices of science and mythology, art and literature.
In the midst of many books named after the “human body”, this is the only one marked by a comma: Human, Body. A comma that is a respiratory and philosophical pause, now that the body is everywhere and nowhere. A book accompanied by illustrations and conceived in three parts: the body remembered, internal objects, and the body rediscovered. While medical specialties break down the body into partial objects and social media drive it away from in-person relationships, this book aims to return the body to center stage. The body is beauty and slavery. Sometimes it speaks when words falter. People with psychotherapy experience can recognize a body traumatized by the unspeakable: the cut on the arms of borderline distress, the protruding bone of an eating disorder, the panic that feels like a heart attack, the vigorexic obsession of swollen muscles, the dysmorphic mirror that begs for surgery to correct a defect that isn’t there. As a poem by Szymborska states, “your genes have a political past, your skin a political cast, your eyes a political slant”. Especially for young people, the body is the place where we search for our identity, and it is often a place of anguish.
Autobiographical, psychoanalytical, and full of fantasies, Corpo, umano is an invocation, a dismemberment, and a reconstruction – idiosyncratic and full of wonder. That is what binds the author to the body: attraction, wonder, fear. Corpo, umano is a celebration, perhaps a farewell. Because, in Szymborska’s words, “when the body starts to ache and ache, it quietly steals from its post”.