“The body is the material expression of the violence of the social world,” French writer Édouard Louis said in an interview with the weekly New Statesman. “For me, bodies express the world, society. If you expose the bodies correctly, you expose the world correctly ”.
In his latest novel, Struggles and metamorphosis of a woman (published in Italy by Nave di Teseo), Louis puts his mother’s body at the center and describes how it was deformed by the material conditions in which he lived.
Richard Horton, editor of Lancet, one of the most important medical journals in the world, starts from this book for his latest editorial: “Cost of living. Energy prices. Taxes. Interest rates. Exchange rates. Inflation. These indicators are charting a new cartography of the economic crisis. But the politics of global upheaval is strangely abstract. The public debate is mostly conducted in numerical terms. It is clinical, in the sense of aseptic, devoid of feelings and coldly detached from human reality. Yet it is precisely the human body that suffers the harshest effects of the social catastrophe caused by a toxic combination of war and government ineptitude. Our skin is the canvas on which political failure is engraved ”.
Nancy Krieger, an American epidemiologist, wrote an essay in 2005 entitled Embodying inequality, embodying inequality, in which he made three statements, summarized by Horton: “First, bodies tell stories of the conditions of our existence, stories that must be heard. Second, the stories the bodies tell may not exactly match a person’s statements. Third, the bodies reveal stories that people may not be able to tell ”.
Krieger and Louis insist that the biological and social dimensions of our lives are intertwined in ways that are often overlooked, but which we should instead listen to and learn to decipher. ◆