Abstract: An essential entry point into the Balzacian novel, the body is the point of articulation between a poetics of character, which mixes the pictorial and the physiological, even the physiognomical; a writing of detail, where a hermeneutic reading of signs and symptoms unfolds in a form of “pathology of social life”; a scientific discourse (an anatomical and willfully clinical vision); and an unavowed materialist philosophy where the tensions peculiar to Balzac are measured.
