Identity marks

The book "Signs of Identity" by David Le Breton discusses bodily expressions such as tattoos, piercings, and physical marks that have transformed into signs of the emergence of diverse individual identities, carrying deep changes in our understanding of beauty and life in general. The art of body painting has experienced great prosperity. The body has become a vessel for the ego that continually seeks embodiment to enrich the meanings of its presence in the world, striving for self-connection. Tattoos and piercings, which are no longer considered marginal, have become tools to highlight and showcase the self. After David Le Breton demonstrated that "the body bearing marks" has, since ancient times and in traditional societies, been an expression of a journey, a message, and especially an expression of identity, he shows how the church strongly opposed this practice, but also how the judicial system, after sailors and soldiers, viewed it as a "mark of shame." He studies how tattoos serve as a language of rebellion, even today, where "body piercing" has become the visible identity on the skin that signifies youth. David Le Breton relies on field research to analyze sequentially: bodily marks in Western societies, the transition from self-contempt to self-assertion, then the search for identity, rites of passage, and the birth of culture. He pays attention to the difference between physical pain, psychological pain, and sexual pleasure, and all those feelings that remain linked to the act of piercing the body itself. Finally, he notes the paradox that while the system of bodily marks has significantly declined in traditional societies, it develops rapidly and innovatively in the Western world, which is overflowing with richness, raising questions about our individual desire to change our bodies. Salem Benabdelali: Writer, translator, and professor at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Rabat, Morocco. His works include: Political Philosophy at Al-Farabi; Foundations of Contemporary Philosophical Thought; A Conversation with French Thought; In Translation; The Guest of the Stranger; The Wound of the Creature; Reading with Its Head Held High; Writing by Jumping and Leaping; The Revival of Language; Readings for Forgetting. His translations include: "Writing and Reincarnation" by Abdel Fattah Kilito; "I Speak All Languages" by Abdel Fattah Kilito; "Semiotics" by Roland Barthes.