On the Corposphere

Book excerpt: The book presents and analyzes some of the most important issues related to the body seen as a rich and complex anthropological and semiotic object, capable of playing a decisive role in the meaning making processes of cultural and social life. The analysis presented in this book opens a whole set of new venues for the study of body performances and representations, and shows how the embodiment of social and cultural life shape our world. In all of its relationships and in itself, our body works in a sort of corposphere, which is, in turn, part of the semiosphere, defined by Lotman as a continuum occupied by different types of semiotic formations. It is from/in/by the body that all semiosis begins and ends; it is in its presence and absence, in its being and in its presentation amidst the lived situational life where we might discover and shape the senses of the world. Many different academic fields will find in this book deep insights about how the body is at the center of cultural and social processes.