Ethics and Politics of Masking and Unmasking: Contrasting Lévinas’ and Deleuze’s Takes on the Face

Abstract

The face is where assumptions about who we are, why we interact with each other, and how people can and should respond to others’ appeals are articulated. By covering it, masks question these assumptions, bringing up other possibilities of conceiving the subject, being part of a collective, acting politically, and even thinking about the human. But what are these assumptions exactly? As the 2020’s global pandemic forced governments to impose many health measures to contain the spread of the coronavirus, including the use of face masks, a once subversive gesture became not only normalized, but mandatory, radically changing the mask’s political connotations. While masking implies an ethical subscription to the collective good, exposing the naked face now seems to become a political performance by anti-mask activists. Confronted by this reality, this chapter proposes to revisit two different philosophical takes on the human face: as a kind of ethical relationality, as described by Emmanuel Lévinas (Totalité et Infini: Essai sur l’extériorité. Kluwer Academic, 1971) and as the product of an abstract machine, as presented by Deleuze and Guattari (A Thousand Plateaus. University of Minnesota Press, 1987). Both formulations conceive it as more than a set of eyes, nose, and mouth, but as an important signifier delineating the other.