ABSTRACT
The body is configured in practices. 1 It is constituted at the cultural level by ideas, attitudes, values; at the emotional level by inscriptions of desire in the unconscious; and at the physical level by movements, postures, spaces. The body is inserted into multiple spaces and times that are always already socially given (although changing and polyvalent as well), positioned in relation to material objects, machines, other humans, animals and plants, represented in cultural artifacts of many kinds, and territorialized by desire, awakened and repressed at different points and in different ways. Certainly the body has natural limits, capacities, deficiencies, being finite and subject to gravity, requiring oxygen and nutrients of various kinds. For millennia these limits defined the human experience in varying yet surprisingly stable ways.
