David Le Breton’s Existential Sociology of the Body

Abstract

The article presents the socio-anthropology of the body of David Le Breton to an anglophone readership. It goes through his vast oeuvre and shows how the body and the senses appear in his work at the intersection of the physical and the symbolical, sensation and signification, objectivation and individualisation. Tracing some of the influences that have shaped his trajectory (Mauss, Simmel, Merleau-Ponty, Bakhtin, Bataille, Caillois), it presents his sociology of the body as a philosophical reflection on the human condition and a contribution to cultural anthropology and to the sociology of modernity.