Giorgio Agamben: The face and death

 Translated by LockdownCriticalLeft, 3/4/2021

It seems that in the new global order that is taking shape two things, apparently unrelated to one another, are destined to be completely removed: the face and death. We will try to investigate whether they are not somehow connected and what is the meaning of their removal.

Willey Reveley, Faceless statue of Proserpina at Eleusis, Watercolor with ink on paper, c. 1785

That the vision of one’s own face and the face of others is a decisive experience for man was already known to the ancients: “What is called the face,” writes Cicero, “cannot exist in any animal except in man.” The Greeks defined the slave, who is not master of himself, aprosopon, literally the “faceless”. Of course, all living beings show themselves and communicate to each other, but only man makes the face the place of his recognition and his truth. Man is the animal that recognizes his face in the mirror, mirrors himself, and recognizes himself in the face of the other. The face is, in this sense, both the similitas - the similarity - and the simultas - the being together of humans. A faceless human is necessarily alone.

This is why the face is the place of politics. If humans had to communicate always and only information, always this or that thing, there would never be politics properly, but only the exchange of messages. But since first of all humans have to communicate their openness to each other, their recognition of one another in a face, the face is the very condition of politics, on which is based everything that humans say and exchange.

The face is in this sense the true city of humans, the political element par excellence. It is by looking into each other’s faces that humanbs recognize and become passionate about each other, perceive similarity and diversity, distance and proximity. If there is no animal politics, this is because animals, which are always already in the open, do not make their exposure a problem, they simply dwell in it without caring about it. This is why they are not interested in mirrors, in the image as an image. Human, on the other hand, wants to recognize him·herself and be recognized. S·he wants to appropriate his·her own image: s·he seeks his own truth in it. In this way s·he transforms the animal environment into a world, in the field of an incessant political dialectic.

A country that decides to give up its own face - to cover the faces of its citizens with masks everywhere - is, then, a country that has erased all political dimensions from itself. In this empty space, subjected at every moment to limitless control, now move individuals isolated from each other, who have lost the immediate and sensitive foundation of their community and who can only exchange messages directed at a name without a face. And since human is a political animal, the disappearance of politics also means the removal of life: a child who, upon being born, no longer sees his mother’s face risks being unable to conceive of human feelings.

No less important than the relationship with the face is, for humans, the relationship with the dead. Human - the animal that recognizes itself in its own face - is also the only animal that celebrates the cult of the dead. It is not surprising, then, that even the dead have a face and that the erasure of the face goes hand in hand with the removal of death. In Rome, the dead human participates in the world of the living through her·is imago, through her·is image molded and painted on the wax that each family kept in the atrium of their home. That is, the free human is defined both by her·is participation in the political life of the city and by her·is ius imaginum, the inalienable right to guard the face of her·is ancestors and to exhibit it publicly in the festivals of the community. “After the burial and the funeral rites,” writes Polybius, “the imago of the dead human in a wooden reliquary was placed in the most visible point of the house and this image is a wax face made in her·is exact resemblance, both in shape and colour.” These images were not only the subject of a private memory, but they were the tangible sign of the alliance and solidarity between the living and the dead, between past and present, which was an integral part of the life of the city. This is why they played such an important role in public life, so much so that it has been possible to affirm that the right to images of the dead is the laboratory in which the right of the living is founded. This is so true that those who committed a serious public crime lost the right to an imago. And legend has it that when Romulus founded Rome, he had a pit dug - called mundus, the “world” - in which he himself and each of his companions threw a handful of the earth from which they came. This pit was opened three times a year and it was said that in those days the mani, the dead, entered the city and took part in the existence of the living. The world is but the threshold through which the living and the dead, the past and the present, communicate.

We understand, then, why a world without faces can only be a world without death. If the living lose their face, the dead become only numbers, which, in so far as they had been reduced to their pure biological life, must die alone and without funerals. And if the face is the place where, before any discourse, we communicate with our fellow humans, then even the living, who are deprived of their relationship with the face, are irreparably alone, however much they try to communicate with digital devices.

The global project that governments are trying to impose is, therefore, radically un-political. On the contrary, it proposes to eliminate every genuinely political element from human existence, to replace it with a governmentality based only on algorithmic control. Facial erasure, removal of the dead, and social distancing are the essential devices of this governmentality, which, according to the agreed declarations of the powerful, must be maintained even when the health terror is eased. But a society without a face, without a past, and without physical contact is a society of ghosts, and as such is condemned to a more or less swift ruin.