We are living in a moment in which the human body, our first evidence, the place where reality becomes undeniable has begun to disappear from the image. It is neither accidental nor neutral. It is a cultural gesture: a programmed withdrawal. For centuries the body was a site of knowledge, conflict and revelation; now it appears monitored, softened, or directly removed. This is no longer about modesty or domestic morality. What we are witnessing is the construction of a new secular theology, a system of norms that presents itself as rational, progressive and protective, yet operates with the same dogmatic impulse as older religions.

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The body becomes uncomfortable because it reminds us of what contemporary discourse tries to annul: that we are vulnerable, permeable, mortal. Every fold, every irregularity, every gesture that marks the fragile zone between the inside and the outside introduces a risk into a world that aims to neutralize all friction. It is no surprise that the image of the body becomes an early target of control: whoever controls the body controls the imaginary; whoever decides what can be shown also decides what can be thought.

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Today’s censorship never calls itself censorship. It does not say “this must not be seen”; it says “this might offend,” “this might be misinterpreted,” “this might be unsafe.” The vocabulary changes, but the operation remains the same: a symbolic cordon that dictates which forms of the body are acceptable and which must disappear. The result is a flood of sanitized bodies, smooth, weightless, almost fleshless. No eros, no wound, no danger. Only a polished neutrality that borders on unreality.

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When the body is erased, the limits it imposes are erased with it. What remains is intellect operating without friction, a consciousness no longer contrasted by anything external. This absence of resistance allows the ego to expand without opposition, producing an abstract, self-referential identity detached from experience. It follows the same logic as any impoverishment of language: when what can be shown is reduced, what can be thought is reduced as well. The disappearance of the body is, in this sense, the disappearance of reality as a shared frame.

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But the problem runs deeper than moral vigilance. What is at stake is the very idea of the body, and with it, the idea of reality. When the body is removed, the possibility of experience is removed too. The image becomes a sealed space through which nothing can pass. 

Tension the point at which experience turns into transformation is eliminated entirely.

What vanishes is not only anatomy but its capacity to signify without permission. In older iconographies, the body carried meaning even when doctrinal systems tried to domesticate it. Its presence was irreducible. Today we witness the opposite movement: it is not doctrine trying to contain the body, but the body being expelled so doctrine can expand without resistance.

This secular doctrine presents itself as a safeguard against harm, yet it functions as a new code of purity. The body must be clean, neutral, harmless. Any trace of intensity, sexual, emotional, symbolic, is perceived as a threat to an order that desires frictionless images. The contradiction is obvious: the more culture tries to neutralize the body, the more ghostlike it becomes; the more it tries to erase it, the more it exposes its fear of its presence.

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This disappearance has perceptual consequences. Without the body, the image loses weight, tension, risk. And without risk, no revelation is possible. What remains is a self-contained surface incapable of opening fissures in perception. An image that does not disturb, that does not shift, that does not destabilize. An image that, ultimately, does not transform.

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Yet something insists. No matter how much culture wants a bodyless body, there is a resistance that cannot be eliminated: the materiality that leaks through the margins, the gestures that refuse to vanish, the symbolic memory that persists even within the most aseptic devices. There, within that fissure, the real question appears: what exactly does our era fear when it fears the body?

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Perhaps it fears the body’s power to disorganize discourse.
Perhaps it fears that the body reminds us that we are finite.
Perhaps it fears that the body reveals what cannot be controlled or programmed.

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Erasure becomes the reaction: soften, sanitize, replace. But suppression does not resolve the conflict; it only displaces it. The body always returns as remainder, as shadow, as fragment. It returns because the image that excludes it loses its foundation when it expels it. Without the body, the image floats, untethered from reality, incapable of producing experience.

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To work with the body today, or with its absence, means entering this field of tension. It means challenging the new secular dogma that tries to dictate what can be shown and what must remain hidden. It means recalling that the body is not a threat but the frontier through which something larger than ourselves attempts to break through.

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What is truly revealing is not censorship itself, but what censorship exposes: a profound shift in our relation to the real, to the visible, and to ourselves. And in that shift, the body acts as mirror and wound, as warning and insistence.

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Because even when it is erased, the body continues to do what it has always done:
press from within, demand presence, open fissures in what others try to close.