The longevity body

Before asking ourselves what a long-lived body is, perhaps we should begin with a more radical question: what is the body?

In the Western imagination, the body is often understood as a biological structure, an organism to be kept efficient, a machine to be treated, trained, corrected, and optimized. When we speak of the body, we immediately think of health, physical fitness, beauty, performance, sexuality, youth, and resistance to disease.

But let’s be serious: the body is far more than this.

The body is not merely organic matter. It is not only muscles, organs, skin, posture, or metabolism. The body is our primary way of being in the world. It is the means through which we feel, remember, desire, suffer, love, work, inhabit places, and encounter others. It is a living threshold between the biological and the cultural, the individual and the collective, the environment and lived experience.

For this reason, speaking about the body means entering a far more complex territory than we might imagine. The body is lived experience, embodied memory, relationship, sensitivity, silent language, personal history, and social history. It is what we are before it is something we possess.

This section begins from a fundamental doubt: we do not really know what we are talking about when we talk about the body. Or rather, we believe we know, because we measure it, photograph it, treat it, train it, display it, and judge it. But perhaps this very familiarity prevents us from truly understanding it.

Longevity Body therefore explores the real object of contention: the body as a living, ambiguous, relational, cultural, and biological reality.

Only after attempting to understand what the body is can we ask a second question: what does it truly mean to speak of a long-lived body?

The biomedical body

I would like to begin with an image.

The image I have chosen to give this post a face shows a body. No one can deny it: it is a body.

And yet, perhaps many of you will hesitate. Someone might say: no, a body is not only this. A body is also a face, a gaze, the colour of its skin, the colour of its eyes, the quality of its thoughts, the memory of what it has lived through, the love it is able to feel, the warmth it can generate, the pleasure or pain it can receive and cause.

I agree.

But this is precisely where we need to pause.

Because the body you are thinking of is not necessarily the body biomedicine speaks about. It is not that holistic, affective, sensitive and relational whole you imagine when you think of yourself, of someone you love, of someone you wish to protect, embrace, understand.

The biomedical body is something else.