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.
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Notes
- 1.
Although Butler acknowledges that she adopts a normativity, her philosophy is still not rationalist. Sarah Salih (2004) characterizes all her work by an “ethical impetus to expand the norms in which ‘humans’ can conduct their lives in socially recognized public spheres,” however, Butler does not propose to impose rules that arbitrarily condemn others who do not follow their ideal parameters. The ethical aspiration that she describes starts from an intimate desire of ourselves with others, thus being a productive and creative drive that does not require a repressive exercise to be maintained, on the part of either a Hobbsenian State or a Freudian Superego.
- 2.
The paradigm of this process is the close-up in film, after all, according to Deleuze (1986, p.115): “There is no close-up of the face. The close-up is the face.” In his view, the enlargement of the personal face by the cinematographic camera destroys everything recognizable in it. It disconnects the subject, that is, a relational being who belongs to a vast and diverse set, and transforms it into a “ghost.” Other parts of the body, as well as objects and even landscapes, are also vulnerable to the same procedure. As long as it is decontextualized and framed as readable by the eyes of the spectator, anything can become a face.
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Santos, C.D. (2023). Ethics and Politics of Masking and Unmasking: Contrasting Lévinas’ and Deleuze’s Takes on the Face. In: Magalhães, L., Martins, C.O. (eds) Masks and Human Connections. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16673-0_17
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