The body is the place where the relationship with the world is realized: it is the dimension that defines the manifestation of mirroring events introjected in different times: phylogenetic, epigenetic and ontogenetic. Every description of the body within the humanistic tradition tends to reflect and to propose a one-dimensional image of it, transforming the somatization of experience either into an immersion in pleasure and physiological need, or in the instrumental captivity of organs that enable and yet limit the expression of a transcendent subjectivity. When the soma is thus flattened onto a single level of intentionality or meaning, the body becomes a stratification of intertwined elements, a fabric that unfolds on the same phenomenological level as experience, which therefore ignores its many resonances and the emergent virtuality of its predicates. The humanistic body is reduced to a simple histological slide based on which to draw the conclusion, already implicit in the premises, of a dead somaticity. Deprived of its relational multilevels, the body stands problematically at the intersection between the theriopoietic dimension—its continuous overlap with animality—and the technopoietic one, i.e., the sensation of a decentralization, of a somatic captivity. The body, however, is not a set of mechanisms, a version in the flesh of Jacques de Vaucanson’s automata, but a vital entity. In fact, it is: (i) evolutionary, since the body is continually made; (ii) relational, since the vital expression is always a copula towards the world. The body exists in that it always presupposes an external contribution; it is a “matrix of relations” with the world and it is from these relations that the predicate emerges, so that the latter can never be inferred through an internal reconnaissance. Subjectivity is the modal expression of the body in its plural reference to totality. The present contribution, drawing on the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, aims to investigate the intentional multiplicity of the body, its vital expression through external reference, its appeal to an intrinsic heteronomy, and its dissipation not only of thermodynamic energy but of also external references.