What remains of our bodies today? Apparently everything. If one observes the progressive shifts of society towards hypermodernity, one finds that the body is omnipresent in the preoccupations displayed in the western world.
This evolution would require us to comply with the aesthetic conventions of the moment, which reminds us magazines, the dedicated programs where the body is honored, and the unprecedented development of the vogue of well-being.
“Mens sana in corpore sano”/(“a healthy mind in a healthy body”) has indeed become an injunction well understood by the RVP of well-being who do not hesitate to correlate with their precepts about the body sometimes sophisticated techniques — and why not useful — concerning the spirit, its appeasement and its equilibrium in the face of the ferocity of the world.
The body is thus pampered, triturated, explored, corporal practices today go through the inscriptions on the body, its restraint, its mastery, its aesthetics obviously.
But he is also martyred, he is always asked for more, then quits to appease him, to relax him: this oscillation between a suffering body and a valued and gratified body concerns the sliding of the pleasure obtained by the body towards contemporary research. enjoyment without limit.
Today, everything happens: medicine, for example, that explores more and more the possibilities of keeping the body “alive”; the body is also the object of obsessive attention, including in the field of art, where what has been called “body art” has gone from the exhibition of body modifications to the aestheticization of body wastes erected into artistic works.
As for the spectacle of the body, nothing beats the image and this one speaks for itself: the examples are not only numerous, they are omnipresent. Whether teen reality shows, body programs or TV series, the image of our obsession with the body is systematic: the exhibited bodies must not only challenge us, but also fascinate us.
It is, therefore, a question of unlimited enjoyment for a body that should also be limitless.
In these famous TV series, the bodies are of course delivered to the eye, but their exposure is plural: aesthetic bodies, where the plastic is predominant, but also dead bodies, erratic, dissected, where there is the talk of an incessant search on this that could finally reveal this body on his enigma.
This in-between concerning bodies, sublimated or waste, exposed or otherwise invisible, shaped or deconstructed, betrays the insistence, despite everything, of a saying on the body that never ceases to challenge us and that resists any prevalence of the organic.
But the living body, say the subject, also has a soul. And no need to probe the bodies to find it. It is sometimes enough to substitute for the insistence of the gaze at the time of listening.
