Abstract
The body is an overdetermined concept, burdened with religious and philosophical as well as psychoanalytic, sexual and racial meanings. Since Greco-Roman antiquity, when its beauty and health were emphasized by the sculptors, the body has occupied an important place in Western culture. In the Christian era, the symbolism of the body undergoes a profound transformation; now it is the wounded and suffering body (emblematically presented in the form of the crucified Christ), which inscribes itself in a new ideology, one that emphasizes the notion of redemption through suffering and death. The body thereby becomes a text on which pain can be read as a necessary physical step on the road to a higher moral state, a destiny, or a way of being. This in turn reveals a radical transformation (generally considered positive) in the initial state of the individual or her community.
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