Vittorio Lingiardi: you can’t escape from the body

This article is published in issue 45 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until November 5, 2024.

One of the few reasons why I would like to be reborn would be to be able to understand the importance of the body much earlier, as soon as possible. Yes, I would have liked to know it better and make it rejoice more, as Franco Battiato wrote, my body, instead of putting up with it or misunderstanding it, as I have done for too much of my life. It must be said that, unless we are athletes, it is difficult for someone to teach us as children to give the right importance to our body. If at eighteen, instead ofMan without qualities by Robert Musil I had read Body, human by Vittorio Lingiardi (Einaudi), I believe I would have been a happier and more aware person. In Body, human – where the comma makes the difference – the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Vittorio Lingiardi approaches the organs that make up the body, one by one: from the liver to the brain, from the eyes to the heart, to describe them with the voices of medicine and poetry, but also to express his concern for the contemporary body, at the center of a thousand attentions and yet in need of a listening that never arrives. Sigmund Freud’s lapidary phrase, according to which “anatomy is destiny” (Freud was referring, in particular, to women), if on the one hand sounds like an essentialist prophecy (“you will be the body you have”), on the another can be overturned in a constructionist key (“you will have the body you are”). Everything starts from the body and everything concerns it. «The body is there, and there is, and there is», repeats Wisława Szymborska with implacable simplicity. “You can’t escape from the body.” From presence, even more from absence. The body lives in desire: lost in Don’t bother me of the network have we abandoned it? Do we still know that he is the protagonist of falling in love? In unpredictable ways sexuality governs much of our lives. There is no other animal that thinks about sexuality as much as we humans do. Yet it remains a mystery. Simone de Beauvoir, quoted in the exergue by Lingiardi, wrote: «It had not been her habit, until then, to observe herself. Now, her body imposed itself on her.” Here, finally.

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Source: Vanity Fair

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