A Philosopher Examines the Heart, Muscle and Metaphor Alike
In a new essay, Matthieu Dumont, who has lived with a heart condition since childhood, explores the organ as both medical fact and cultural symbol.
Matthieu Dumont, a philosopher born in 1985, has just published La forme d'un cœur with Editions Les corps Conducteurs, according to Le Temps. The book examines the heart both as a physical organ and as a symbolic one, tracing its presence across medicine, art and culture.
Dumont writes from experience: he has undergone several operations since the age of six for a faulty aortic valve, a condition he shares, he notes, with Arnold Schwarzenegger, whom he describes as a mass of muscle hiding an unsuspected fragility at its centre. He calls himself a "cardiophile."
According to Le Temps, the essay argues that the heart occupies a paradoxical place today: symbolically neglected, as the brain absorbs public and media attention, yet medically overinvested, weighed down with instructions to stimulate it, protect it, cure it or replace it — a burden the newspaper says is now tracked obsessively by connected watches.
The book moves, Le Temps writes, from Frida Kahlo to Christ, gathering figures associated with the heart in art and belief. Among the citations is Roland Barthes, who described the heart as "cet organe érectile qui se gonfle et défaille comme le sexe" — an erectile organ that swells and fails like sex itself.
Le Temps calls the essay a book that starts slowly, like a heart warming up, before accelerating into something it describes as dizzying and brilliant.
Sources
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