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This book, a translation of Chasseguet-Smirgel (2003, Le corps comme miroir du monde), has sadly become the author's last. With her unexpected death in early March 2006, Chasseguet-Smirgel has left us with a powerful manifesto in which she addresses an issue that has been dear to her all of her life—the body-mind dualism in all its manifestations and deformations. The book is divided into two parts: the first, written after September 11th, 2001 (9/11); and the second, written before. This non-chronological order is confusing at times and somewhat stalls the flow. Yet, at the risk of backshadowing too much, I believe that Chasseguet-Smirgel chose this path because she may have experienced a sense of urgency to publish her last reflections about a world in which human beings are constantly held in suspense and frightened by ever-increasing violent attacks on and annihilations of the body.
Shocked by the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Chasseguet-Smirgel postulates that everyone must wonder about the constitution of a human being who so readily sacrifices his own body to destroy those of others. Although the history of religion is filled with stories of bodily self-sacrifice, such as Jesus Christ or St Catherine, the destruction of one's own body to kill others seems to be a unique 20th century phenomenon where the body itself is transformed into a killing machine. Although Chasseguet-Smirgel does not say so directly, she nonetheless implicitly argues that multiple trends in the cultural conscious and unconscious already existed, which prepared the way for the misuse of the body in such a horrific manner as shown by the suicide bombers. When read this way, the non-chronological order of her book makes more sense because the first part, ‘Reaching the light,’ then reads like the manifest content of her project, while the second, ‘The rebellion against the biological order,’ becomes the latent content.
To prepare her readers for her argument that the current political violence has