Or, in insolent symmetry, when speaking of the body, we might deploy words with the most unusual and subtle silences, tearing them away from their habitual meanings, whilst restoring to them their animal energy and metaphysical heights, both close to a form of linguistic dysfunction that says only that it can say nothing. In that case, we would speak of the body, using words as a silent mirror, in which their image is seen and shows itself, in an apparition that conceals from us a secret and commits us to silence.

Or else we might let words take their place on the body, engraved like an incandescent tattoo – or inscribed as a wound over which the scar tissue forms with dizzying slowness.

The truth is, when it comes to the body, we can hardly tell what we know, whilst knowing things unawares. It is somewhere between this lucid ignorance and this uncertain knowledge that we are the body we have and we have the body we are. From one to the other, we feel what we think and we think what we feel in a circle that makes a virtue out of vice.

Paul Valéry wrote, in ‘Note et digression’: ‘Nothing better illustrates the superficial character of thought that the observations and reflections it can make concerning the body. It [thought] belongs to it, propels it, ignores it, refers to it, forgets it, is surprised by it…’ And he also says: ‘The deepest thing in man is his skin.’ And Roland Barthes tells us, in A lover’s discourse: Fragments: ‘What my language conceals, my body says. My body is a stubborn child, language is a highly civilised adult.’

Alone or seeking out other bodies, the body recognises itself and is a stranger to itself. It is said that the body is most our own in pleasure and in pain, in love or in sickness, on falling asleep and on waking, on braking and on accelerating, in scarcity and in excess, in victory and in defeat. And that we feel the body to be more our own the more we feel it as belonging to others.

Down the centuries, the body – and the different, and sometimes conflicting, ways in which each time, each civilisation and each culture has experienced, used, felt, thought about, looked at, loved, written about, presented, represented, concealed, displayed, bought, sold, cared for, idolised, ill-treated, consecrated or deconsecrated the body – has served as a pointer to the times, the prevailing civilisation and culture, both symbolising and portraying them.

In the body – and in bodies – are found life and death, health and sickness, nature and culture, language and silence, the universal and the particular, identity and otherness, matter and spirit, the physical and the mental, the objective and the subjective, interior and exterior, comedy and tragedy.

There we find loneliness and communication, secrets kept and revealed, the intimate and the shared, nakedness and clothing, the necessary and the contingent, the individual and society, nation and class, race and family, gender and sex, age and image, economy and technology, work and leisure, the beautiful and the ugly, crime and punishment.

There we find power and resistance, domination and liberation, law and transgression, the rule and the exception, fetish and the forbidden, orthodoxy and heterodoxy, conformity and heresy, aesthetics and ethics, religion and morality, the sacred and the profane, reality and fiction, truth and lies, war and peace, the shepherd and the flock, God and the devil.

From epileptic manifestations of anger to ancestral rituals around food; from friendly nods of understanding and agreement to abrupt gestures of rejection and refusal; from the drunk’s smirk and stagger to the ballerina’s faultless leap; from the barbaric greeting of the outstretched hand to the raised fist signalling resistance; from the swagger of the catwalk to the hidden burning in the crematorium; from the fingers that touch the computer keyboard to the hands clasped in prayer or religious supplication; from the restless agitation of insomnia to the baroque profusion of dreaming; from the movements – sometimes slow, sometimes fast – of love to the agonised spasms of sickness; from the elegant ballet of fencing to the brutality of boxing; from the ecstasy of the mystics to the dizzy visions of hallucination; from the tumbler’s somersault to the jump of the skydiver; from the lumberjack’s sharp aim to the music in the conductor’s hands; from the fakir who levitates to the shaman who falls to the ground – the body is the locus of extreme sensations and feelings, sometimes aroused and sometimes quelled, of organic coherence and somatic contradictions, of paradoxes and paroxysms, of harmony and dissonance, of union and fragmentation, of surrender and acceptance, of expansion and pulling back, of transitions and transactions, or alignments and deviations.

From Velázquez’s Christ Crucified, to Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People; from Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, to Bacon’s Studies from the Human Body; from Albrecht Dürer’s Four Books on Human Proportions, to Ingres’s The Virgin Adoring the Host (‘This is my body’); from Manet’s Olympia and Déjeuner sur l’herbe, to Courbet’s The Origin of the World; from Michelangelo’s Prisoners to Rodin’s The Thinker; from Goya’s Majas to Helena Almeida’s Pintura Habitada; from Botticelli’s Primavera to Paula Rego’s Possession; from Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon to Lucian Freud’s Last Portrait; from Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0 to Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy; from Rudolf Nureyev, in La Bayadère, to Marlene Dietrich, in The Blue Angel; from Maria Callas, in ‘Traviata’, to Amália Rodrigues, in ‘Barco Negro’.

The relationship between music and the body is manifested in multiple and complex ways. Music and body are inseparable: music mobilises the body, the body incarnates music. From hip-hop to punk, from samba to techno, the body becomes the point of intersection between sound and action, between rhythm and gesture. As a visual performance of gender (Grace Jones), as a space for transgression and desire (Madonna), as deviation and the stage for multiple identities (David Bowie), as an emotional translation of sounds and silences (Pina Bausch), the body is lightning, thunder, ray of light, mutation, fashion, prosthesis, symbol.

And if music and dance are arts of the body, cinema – the art of light, of time and of presence – is also made from its physical dimension. The body manifests itself, in film, in the acting, in the sound design, in the screenplay, in the direction, in the image, in the editing, in the viewer’s experience. The body dances with the camera in films such as Singing in the Rain (Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen), All That Jazz (Bob Fosse), Flashdance (Adrian Lyne) and Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (Jacques Demy), where the choreographed movement becomes a visual celebration – what became known as ‘ciné-danse’. But the body is also the idealised image of desire and fetish, projected onto characters such as Madeleine in Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock), Gilda in the film of the same name (Charles Vidor) or Lola Lola in The Blue Angel (Josef von Sternberg). Science fiction uses the body to question the limits of what is human and what is technology: Robocop (Paul Verhoeven), The Terminator (James Cameron) and Blade Runner (Ridley Scott). There is also the vulnerable body, marked by time and by sickness, as in Amour (Michael Haneke) and The Father (Florian Zeller), where ageing is inscribed in flesh and in memory. Dissident, queer, non-normative bodies, which challenge the classic models of representation, can be seen in films such as Paris is Burning (Jennie Livingston), Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma), and Tangerine (Sean Baker). In Cléo from 5 to 7 (Agnès Varda) and Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman), the female body is not only visible, but politicised, through routines and gazes that present a social representation and reveal an identity under construction. In Antonioni, the body gives material form to the existential alienation of the characters (The Adventure, The Red Desert, The Night, Blow Up), whilst in Cronenberg, the body is a laboratory, mutation, experimentation, dissolution (The Fly, Videodrome, Dead Ringers, Crash). In the cinema of Steve McQueen, the body is the locus of conflict – racial, political, sexual, existential (Hunger, Shame, 12 Years a Slave, Lovers Rock).

Portuguese cinema shows a relationship between identity, desire and marginality, through the bodies filmed by Cláudia Varejão, João Pedro Rodrigues, Teresa Villaverde and Pedro Costa (who in this edition of Electra engages in a memorable conversation with the photographer Jeff Wall).

The body is accordingly the magnet for every attraction and representation, every course of action and projection, every staging and mythologisation, and every desire and dispute.

The body is anatomy and physiology, algebra and geometry, text and context (often also pretext), form and content, visual image and performative action, model and instrument, means and end, motive and instrument, subject and scientific object of research (anthropology, sociology, history, political science, medicine, mathematics, chemistry, physics, morality) and artistic object of creation (dance, theatre, music, film, sculpture, painting, photography, performance).

From personal hygiene to working techniques, from daily routines to festive rituals, from erotic games to worldly display, from private conduct to public behaviour, from commercial exploitation to agonistic combat, from political vigilance to social discipline, from medical control to judicial monitoring, from economic uses to abuse of labour, from religious coercion to moral compulsion, the histories of the body deal with all this.

Of course, this is a history that abounds in stories. The history of women’s bodies is different from that of men’s bodies. And the history of the lady’s body is different from that of her maidservant. There is a broad divide between the history of the peasant’s body and that of the noble’s body, between the history of the soldier’s body and that of the priest’s body, between that of the urban body and that of the rural body, between that of the homosexual body and that of the heterosexual body. In our time, these histories of the body and of bodies provide an inexhaustible source of discoveries and surprises – and they are an inestimable resource for understanding our being and our existence.

If we ask, ‘what is the body?’, there are many possible answers, and here is one of them: the body is what we have made of it over time, in how we have thought of it, pictured it, desired it and assessed it.

Just as there are many arts of the body, so too there are many philosophies of the body (Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Pascal, Locke, Espinoza, Kant, Nietzsche, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Husserl, Bergson, Heidegger, Apel, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Simone de Beauvoir, Popper, Wittgenstein, Foucault, Deleuze). And there is a monotheistic Catholic theology of the body (Incarnation, the Body Crucified and Resurrected, the Glorious Body, the Mystical Body, Teilhard de Chardin, John Paul II), just as previously there was a pagan and polytheistic anthropology of the body.

As Blaise Pascal said, speaking of the Universe, the body is a sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.

In literature, the body induces and seduces, attracts and repels, condemns and saves, kills and dies. It is theme and motif, the driving force behind the action. Here we find bodies of every shape and size, for every function and fiction: the body of the warrior hero, in Homer, and the body of the invisible man, in H. G. Wells; the body-as-figure, in Dante, and the body-as-locus of love and disease in Thomas Mann; the body of Faustus who sold his soul to Mephistopheles, in Goethe, and the body of Gogol’s The Nose (inspiring operas by Gounod and Shostakovitch); the body-by-night of crime, in Sade, and the body-by-day of games, in Casanova; the body-as-monster created by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and the vampire body of Bram Stocker’s Dracula; the body metamorphosing into an animal in Kafka and the gender metamorphosis of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando; Madame Bovary’s body-as-sin in Flaubert and Proust’s body-as-territory and sensitive memory map; Molly Bloom’s body-as-monologue in Joyce’s Ulysses, and the duplicated body in Artaud; Musil’s body in ‘the other state’, and the barbarian body of Bohumil Hrabal; the Chinese body of Duras’s The Lover, and the lover’s body in Annie Ernaux’s Simple Passion; the body of Didier Eribon’s mother (Vie, vieillesse et mort d’une femme du peuple) and the body of Édouard Louis’s father (Who Killed my Father); Cesariny’s Corpo Visível (Visible Body) and Blimunda Sete-Luas in José Saramago’s Memorial do Convento (Baltasar and Blimunda), who can see what is inside bodies – and sometimes, inside the earth.

Daniel Pennac gave one of his books the title Journal d’un corps [Diary of a body], in which he says: ‘Through to the end, we are the children of our bodies.’

And Marguerite Yourcenar’s Hadrian, the sick emperor, who begins to feel the approach of death and so tries to make sense of his life, muses:

Hadrian’s body was the body of the man and of the emperor, the supreme administrative chief and pontiff, the body of the warrior and of the happy and then inconsolable lover, of the builder of walls and of mausoleums and of the tireless art lover of the Villa Adriana, of the Roman statesman and the Greek man of letters. It was as if that Prince’s body, once full of vigour and ready to travel, then sick and weak, contained within itself the grandeur, wisdom, ambition, desire and triumph of the ancient world, but also the seeds of its inexorable decline.

Analysing the connection between power and the body, the German historian Ernst Kantorowicz wrote The King’s Two Bodies, which became a classic of the history of institutions, Law and political philosophy.

The poet knew that in the world everything comes to an end, except the great hidden laws and the dangerous works which utter them. Living in opposition to his body and in flight from his own face, Fernando Pessoa made poetry his corpus and his remarkable edifice of heteronyms offered a strange philosophy of the body and of its absence in himself and in others.

From Bernardo Soares:

Calling it an ‘abyss’ and a ‘fall’, Pessoa conceives of the body as a deceit, an illusion, a threat and a danger, sometimes a hallucination, an enemy and an obstacle, reprising Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophy (the body is the prison or the tomb of the soul), but also some of the more ancient hermetic and gnostic traditions (the soul is light and the body is darkness).

Mistrustful and unhappy with this perverse game that leads everything to its own nothingness, Mário Cesariny wrote O Virgem Negra. Fernando Pessoa explicado às criancinhas naturais e estrangeiras (The Black Virgin. Fernando Pessoa Explained to Little Children, Both Natural and Foreign), in which he endows the poet and his heteronyms with the body and sex which enable them to exchange words for what words conceal, or otherwise say in a whisper.

Jorge Luis Borges prophecies: “[He] will dream of a world without the machine and without that sick machine, the body. Life is not a dream, but can become a dream, writes Novalis.”

‘The Body’ is the theme of our dossier in this edition of Electra. With the words that help us to see more clearly what we see, we look, like discreet and impenitent voyeurs, at the body and at bodies and realise that reflecting on this topic hands us a decisive contribution made to an understanding of our uncertain time and our dangerous world.

In our times, the body, with its mutations and prostheses, inscriptions and erasures, manners and fashions, affirmations and negations, transformations and subversions, is a psychic medium, a message and even a manifesto. More than ever, it is today a (threatened) place of freedom and liberation, of choice and decision, or will and imagination. More and better than before, our body has become mobile, mutable, shifting, unstable, transitory and precarious. And highly dangerous.

The enormous contemporary interest in the body may be observed, along with other enthusiasms, in the many exhibitions which have been presented on the subject in recent years: L’Âme au corps. Arts et sciences, 1793−1993 (curated by Jean Clair); Les visages et les corps (curated by Patrice Chéreau); Corps et âmes (curated by Emma Lavigne); Rodin/Bourdelle. Corps à corps; Corps à corps. Histoire(s) de la photographie; Corps invisibles: un enquête autour de la Robe de chambre du Balzac; Touching You I Catch Midnight; Incarnations; Body Worlds; L’ épreuve des corps; Bodies; Degas et le nu; Picasso Sculptor. Matter and Body; Francis Bacon: Human Presence; Au travers du corps; Le corps en mouvement; Corps rebelles; Le corps découvert; La nudité, vue pour les femmes; Nudity is not Radical! and L’Intime, de la chambre aux réseaux sociaux.

In The History of the Body, the monumental work edited by Alain Corbin, Jean-Jacques Courtine and Georges Vigarello, we may read:

We are speaking of the body and of the body in time and in the world. There are worlds where, in relation to the body, its uses and its self-determination, nothing has changed and centuries-old oppression, implacable censorship and police repression continue and have even increased. In those worlds, in the name of a religious morality of the body, of an archaic cultural practice, of a rigid social setting, of an immutable totalitarian political and legal regime, we still see persecution, humiliation, exclusion, ex-communication, aggression, condemnation (even the death penalty), murder.

In the meantime, in our world, much has changed in recent decades. Our relationship with our body has changed, along with the relationship of our body with the bodies of others, the relationship of the body with gender and with sex, the relationship of the individual body with the social body, the relationship of the biological body with the cultural body, the relationship of the human body with the animal body, the relationship of the physical body with the body of age (krónos and kairós are found in the body). We live in a new ecology of the body. And also a new economy and a new biopolitics.

But other questions are now being asked. How solid, far-reaching and lasting are those changes? What are the guarantees of irreversibility and the risks of moving backwards? Do they come together as a new and surprising order which places the affirmation (and not the old negation) of bodies at their centre? In the name of these necessary and imperative changes, in a perverse symmetry, have some things gone too far and, as some allege, have more current and aggressive forms of vigilance and censorship been created, replacing the old oppression with more contemporary forms of oppression? Is there some justice in these claims or might it be that such accusations, coming from the people who habitually voice them, are just a smokescreen for those who wish to keep the old order unaltered and who have never accepted any changes or progress?

For all these reasons, our attitude to the body is a gauge of our respect for others and lays bare our idea of freedom. Because it is in the body that freedom and tyranny begin. It is in the body that we move from before to after.

With its images and its rituals, its arts and its wisdom, its memories and its fictions, the body is a backdrop and a fulcrum of Japanese culture. In this edition, we devote several essays to Japan.

In the words and images that we reveal, we find the body, in its splendour and fury. We look at these bodies and our gaze is drawn by fascination. This was the fascination that the great poet and visual artist Henri Michaux felt for Japan. Michaux wrote one day (in Qui je fus): ‘He was walking slowly, as slowly as possible so that his soul could catch up with his body.’ He might have been talking about us.