ABSTRACT
Commenting on the sudden upsurge of interest in the body in the late 1980s, André-Marcel d’Ans suggested that, with the death of structuralism and psychoanalysis as a human science, we were thrown back on what was left – the essential part – now that the grand abstractions which were once thought to govern our behaviour had collapsed.1 But among the flood of publications on the body that have appeared in the last ten years or so it has been stressed again and again that our relation to both our own and other bodies is a mediated one, passing through concepts like self, identity, integrity and symmetry. Even though we are all given one at birth, the body is not a given: it is something that we endlessly reinvent, day by day, contact by contact, touch by touch. It is definitely and definitively marked by culture.
