Sport & Wellness

The body is weighed, photographed, compared; equipped with devices that count each night of sleep, each heartbeat, each step. One might believe that we have never taken such care of it. What remains of the body, when it is no longer inhabited, only managed?

The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty recalled that the body is not a thing among things, an object we would have and could improve as one improves a tool. It is that by which there is a world at all — the very means of being present, of acting, of being seen. A wellness that treats the body as a project to be optimised has already made it an object, and therefore left it. One can know everything of one's numbers and no longer be there.

The Greeks did not separate gymnastic from the rest of a life. To train the body was not to produce an image of it; it was to remain capable — capable of effort, of presence, of action. Sport reduced to spectacle, wellness reduced to a market, have the same forgetfulness: they look at the body instead of exercising it.

The body is not a problem to be solved. It is a practice: that by which man remains present to the world, and capable of acting in it.