If one may take the body to mean, first and foremost, an objective and biological reality, our personal, subjective and intimate relationship with should also be considered, as it is developed by means of a whole set of representations that modify it, overloading the body either with negative or positive representations, and transforming its natural state or sensible appearance. Our experience of the effective body oscillates between a real one visible to the scientific gaze and prone to be manipulated by it, and a virtual body made of possibilities, daydreaming, fantasies and irrealities, which may empty out, expand, double, disguise or even extinguish it. The emergence of new representational techniques poses new problems to us, which refer to both objective techniques and subjective relationships. Nonetheless, for all apparent modifications, our contemporary relationship with our bodies is still characterized by the same hesitancy between a simple, playful experience of a body whose frailty and mortality cannot be forgotten, and the search for a truly ontological transformation aiming at a change of nature and a definitive a definitive assumption of the body.
representation; real body; virtual body