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.
