BOOK / BORDERS OF REALITY. Andrea Kottow

Essay / Literature

Starting with a 19th-century medical maxim—“Health is the silence of the organs”—Andrea Kottow interweaves the readings that have moved and stimulated her in recent years with a writing style that possesses a high degree of intuition, pleasure, and freedom. The result is this collection of five essays on illness, secrecy, desire, psychoanalysis, and grief, in a book that leaves the impression that the author is drawing on a form of work that predates academia or journalism, thus strengthening the bond—empathy—with the reader and opting for a sinuous style that privileges doubt over certainty.

The body, and the blurring of its boundaries when we talk about the mind, language, pathology, and degradation, could be the focus of this book, which explores unavoidable authors (from Aristotle and Sophocles to Freud and Foucault, including Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Kafka), but also widely recognized contemporary narrators and thinkers, such as Emmanuel Carrère, Siri Hustvedt, Juan José Saer, Diamela Eltit, Carlo Ginzburg, and Jean-Luc Nancy, among others.

The texts in Frontiers of the Real point to a questioning of a social system that for centuries has attempted to impose a clear separation between the acceptable and the rejected, the included and the excluded, the sane and the insane, the healthy and the sick. These are essays that resist the capture of bodies and question the triumph of a discourse that ultimately seeks to control the adventure of living.

Title: FRONTERAS DE LO REAL
Author: Andrea Kottow
Size: 14 x 22 cm
Binding: Softcover
Genre: Essay
Weight: 180 grams
Language: Spanish
Publisher: Hueders
Year: 2022
Pages: 112