The Biology of the Soul (from Homer to Aris Fioretos)

Abstract

The article examines the nexus between anatomy, bodily representation, and embodied emotions, taking as its central heuristic the reciprocal metaphor of the body as a book and the book as a body. Adopting a longue durée perspective from Homeric epic to contemporary literature, the study argues that anatomical knowledge – together with its visual and literary articulations – has never functioned as a neutral or merely descriptive form of knowledge. Rather, it has consistently generated emotional, aesthetic, and cognitive effects, thereby shaping culturally mediated forms of bodily experience. Building on the phenomenological
distinction between Leib and Körper, the article first analyses the Homeric “anatomical atlas”, highlighting both the physiological precision of epic diction and the capacity of corporeal description to activate processes of embodiment in the audience. The emergence of modern anatomy, from Mondino de’ Liuzzi to the Vesalian turn, is thus examined as a decisive transformation in the way the anatomically conceived body is aesthetically experienced:  public dissection and anatomical illustration construct the body as an object of knowledge while simultaneously eliciting wonder, astonishment, and horror – affective responses that situate the anatomical spectacle within a liminal, and ultimately sublime, experiential framework. The article subsequently traces the shift toward the eighteenth-century paradigm of the “man-machine” and the attendant practices of scientific objectification of the body’s interior, before turning to the work of Aris Fioretos. In his Atlas (2020), the anatomical atlas is reconfigured as a narrative cartography of corporeal and emotional resonances, in which body and literary text mirror one another as sensitive, dynamic systems.