Cuerpo, humano

This book is a journey into the interior of the body to celebrate its physicality without separating it from its poetics. Blood and cells, symbols and memories. Through the work of care and clinical practice, the author has listened to many bodies—in the quest for contact and attachment, in the turbulence of adolescence, in the experience of illness, in gender metamorphoses—but also to symptoms and silences, such as the self-inflicted cuts on arms facing emotional pain or the protruding bones of anorexia. Our body accompanies us and knows how to comfort us, yet it can also be our enemy. It is an alchemical laboratory capable of infinite guises: anatomical, pathophysiological, political, artistic; young, old, energetic, weary... In this work, Vittorio Lingiardi places the body center stage and speaks to us of the organs that compose it—from liver to brain, from eyes to heart—weaving together the voices of science, myth, art, and literature. He achieves the feat of restoring it to us whole, in perfect harmony with the psyche. Of all the books on the subject, *Cuerpo, humano* (Body, Human) is the only one marked by a comma—a sign that imposes a pause, both respiratory and mental, to seek out one’s own body. Today, it is an object of many gazes but little true attention: medicine breaks it down into isolated parts, online life distances it from deep relationships, politics instrumentalizes it, and war tears it apart.