Rječnik tijela

The title of this book should obviously be understood in a different, perhaps simply narrower sense: it was created by writing, thinking and circling in narratives around a series of concepts related to the body, such as touch, attraction, repulsion, old age, illness, rape, self-destruction. These concepts did not appear on their own, as theoretical questionnaires, but emerged from reading contemporary Croatian and world prose, from a reading that, in itself, required additional analysis and interpretation. One of the possible subtitles of this study should have been: Functional transformations of the body in contemporary literature. This possible subtitle of the work – functional transformations – requires an introductory explanation. The word function is used here, on the one hand, as a clear way of avoiding the substantial bipolarity of subject and object (body as subject and body as object), as the function of the body, i.e. how the functions of the body are what determine them in contemporary society in their diversity and variety. Far beyond the classical and traditional philosophical questions about the relationship between body and soul, today bodies without souls are the primary places of functionalization of human subjects. Namely, bodies are defined through use even when they are not positioned as a means or object. A certain functionalization of the subject is thus the fundamental premise of contemporary body disposal – as sociological insights into the ways in which the body is represented in social structures today (social customs, conventions, codes of conduct, media presentation) suggest. The functionalization of the body is perhaps most visible in the area of ​​sports, where the body is transformed into a machine whose individual abilities are brought to the maximum of development – ​​the function of movement into the maximum of running speed, the function of jumping into the maximum of achieved height. As a whole, it can be said for contemporary Western society that social concern for health has turned into a violent medicalization of the physical, where a healthy body is a social, economic benefit, and not an end in itself. We must be healthy in order to better fulfill our social functions, and thus contribute financially to society. In the case of old age and illness, we are a burden to society, we cost it. The same effect is also exerted by the process of aestheticization of the physical, which is visible through systems such as the fashion and cosmetics industries, in which the body, especially the female body, is not only standardized but also normed, and achieving the norm (as in sports) is equated with social success. The topic of aesthetic surgery, which combines the processes of medicalization and aestheticization of the body, is the final result of this process, the theoretically radical consequences of which are analyzed in bioethically posed questions about what makes a subject a subject, and when (after how many and what interventions in the direction of genetic interventions and bionic replacements) the subject changes its identity precisely as a body. Namely, when the body loses its identity.