This book proposes a radical look at the body: the extraordinary body, the sick body, the different body, the desire body, the body as hyperbolized territory and as a metaphor for contemporary anxiety by the pursuit of normalization and health. It is also, and as a forced discussion, a critique of the values that clinic and medicine impose on individuals classified as "abnormal".

The title, a brief treatise of concupiscences and wonders, alternates ironically to that of those medieval texts focused on maintaining good physical health and which, by way of manuals and advice, exercised various forms of control over the subjects in order to master pleasures, eroticism and sensuality. The book at hand is, then, an anti-manual who urges us to fight on the limits of what is denied.