The Body of Europe

A ghost is haunting Europe: the ghost of Europe itself. It is a ghost without flesh and bone – a vanishing body that seems to satisfy itself with a vague geographical description. At best Europe refers to the sister of Cadmus, once upon a time abducted by Zeus. Can’t we do better? Is Europe condemned to incarnate itself in a name whose sole reality is to be the one of a political strategy, of a way to deal with crisis? Wouldn’t it be time that we start to interrogate what Europe could mean beyond ghosts and petty politics? After all, it is very well possible that what we call Europe has a body, has a corpus – and that this corpus is no other than the ensemble composed by the fragments of its literary history. What if Europe was not a matter of geography or politics, but a matter of literature – a matter of sense and sensibility: a way to welcome what, in a human body, makes it alive?

48 pages
2025

Publishing coordinator
Laurent de Sutter

Editors
Lorenzo Marsili, You Mi, Niccolò Milanese

Design
StudioKrimm

Illustration
Tarrant Tabor

Copy editor
Marieke Krijnen

Printed in Venice
by Grafiche Veneziane

ISBN
979-12-82216-05-0