ABSTRACT
In Western societies as well as in the so-called traditional societies, if there is one pursuit of meaning that particularly affects all individuals, it is the quest for the origin of biophysiological disorder of illness. The reminder of the existence of organs and the sudden noise they produce are, to paraphrase Lerich’s definition of health, raw and universal body information. A merely phenomenological occurrence at first, illness is that impenetrable and strictly personal event which, starting from a certain threshold established by society, converts the state of health, perhaps equivalent to “normality”, “productivity” and social integration, into another state: the state of illness. Like the “phase transitions” in the physical world (e.g. a liquid becoming a jelly) illness involves, for the individual but also for his social group, a binary change of state and can be regarded, as it was by M. Augé, as the image par excellence of the event. Indeed, if the organism is considered as a whole that functions in certain conditions, then illness, whether it is conceived as an entity or as a disorder or imbalance, is the paradigm of what can happen to or, in spinozistic terms, what affects a body.
