Face and facial disfigurations: Self and alterations of self

Disformations: Affects, Media, Literature (New York: Bloomsbury, 2021), 23-42.

What happens when a face begins to lose its familiar form, falls apart, becomes faceless? And how can language mediate the barely thinkable experience of the gaze facing the formless? To answer these questions, this chapter delves into the formal work and affective agency generated by several encounters between subjects and disfigured faces that took place during the second decade of the twentieth century. Reading the faceless images in modernist texts by Rainer Maria Rilke, Gaston Leroux, and Richard Weiner in dialogue with the war experiences of the gueules cass é es (broken faces), the survivors of the First World War who suffered extensive facial injuries, as rendered by Bernard Lafont and Henriette Rémi, I argue that rather than simply represented the faceless faces are performed through the formal work of affects that structure their discursive forms. Not only do the witness accounts from the battlefront and the literary fictions share an emotional force of the traumatic images but they also enable affects of shock, disgust, and fascination to unfold and shape the texture of these faceless encounters. Shifting from an ontology of the face toward the formal analysis of the faceless encounters, the aim of this chapter is to demonstrate that far from merely providing a narrative theme or a striking visual motif, the faceless face operates as a fi gure that embraces, on the one hand, the aesthetics of the formless, and, on the other, the experience of the real.

In recent years, facial difference is increasingly on the public and academic agenda. This is evidenced by the growing public presence of individuals with an atypical face, and the simultaneous emergence of research investigating the issues associated with facial variance. The scholarship on facial difference approaches this topic either through a medical and rehabilitation perspective, or a psycho-social one. However, having a different face also encompasses an embodied dimension. In this paper, we explore this embodied dimension by interpreting the stories of individuals with facial limb absence against the background of phenomenological theories of the body, illness and disability. Our findings suggest that the atypical face disrupts these individuals’ engagement with everyday projects when it gives rise to disruptive perceptions, sensations, and observations. The face then ceases to be the absent background to perception, and becomes foregrounded in awareness. The disruptions evoked by facial difference call for adjustments: as they come to terms with their altered face, the participants in our study gradually develop various new bodily habits that re-establish their face’s absence, or relate to its disruptive presence. It is through these emergent habits that facial difference comes to be embodied. By analyzing the everyday experiences of individuals with facial limb absence, this article provides a much-needed exploration of the embodied aspects of facial difference. It also exemplifies how a phenomenological account of illness and disability can do justice both to the impairments and appearance issues associated with atypical embodiment.

Two unique texts which are crucial for the cultural history of the face were published in 1919: “The Uncanny” by Sigmund Freud and the short story “The Erased Face” by the Czech author Richard Weiner. While Freud depicts his failure to recognize his own face in the mirror, Weiner’s text focuses on the image of a head-like “oval stub” devoid of any human features except the eyes. The paper deals with the phenomenon of disfiguration, both in the context of the peculiar aesthetics of “formless” and in relation to “broken faces” (gueules cassées) who suffered massive facial injuries in World War I. The central image of a face without a face is interpreted as an intermedial figure which connects literary, visual and historical memory while heralding the aesthetics of the post-modern portrait, especially in paintings by Francis Bacon, rendering identity through deformation. The narrative and images of losing one’s face are further discussed in connection with contemporary psychoanalysis.

Seven interdisciplinary essays on the human face. Authors: Jeanette Kohl and Dominic Olariu: Editorial Jean-Claude Schmitt: "For a History of the Face: Physiognomy, Pathognomy, Theory of Expression" Bernard Andrieu: "Appearance-Based Prejudice. Between Fear of the Other and Identity Hybridization" Sigrid Weigel: "Phantom Images: Face and Feeling in the Age of Brain Imaging" Georges Didi-Huberman: "Near and Distant: The Face, its Imprint, and its Place of Appearance" Claudia Schmölders: "Eye Level. The Linear Perspective in Face Perception" Jonathan Cole: "Facial Function Revealed through Loss. Living with the Difference" Jeanette Kohl, Dominic Olariu and Rainer Schmelzeisen: "Face Matters. Facial Surgery from the Inside"

Philosophy Today, 2023

This article was written well before the recent protests in Iran and addresses the chapter in A Thousand Plateaus on 'Faciality' by examining Deleuze and Guattari's proposal to 'dismantle' the abstract machine that is responsible for producing the subject's collective or group face. After examining the components of the abstract machine, including its relationship to visual perception and emotion from the perspective of American Ego Psychology, a comparison is drawn between faciality and Walter Benjamin's earlier thesis of the reproducibility of certain kinds of images in a technological or modern media society. The article concludes by outlining the three-step program of 'schizoanalysis' that Deleuze and Guattari proposed as the political objective of 'dismantling the face. This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Philosophy Today (summer, 2023). This draft version is for personal archival, instruction, and scholarly use only.It is deposited under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Performance Research, 2018

MATRIZes, 2019

This paper is about experiencing images as an interactive imagistic process, as pointed by Bergson in his book Matter and Memory through a dubious aspect of photographic portrait in terms of its repudiated reception within public space. We present a series of photographs taken in four Latin American cities which depict intentionally defaced headshots. Enlisting the studies of Deleuze, Bergson, Benjamin and Barthes, we advance that these photographs are documentary testimony of different reactions. The photographs urge us to move beyond what the disfigured faces mean as iconic signs, making us see them as indicial of the dynamic interaction between the portraits and the anonymous disfiguring agents as an image. RESUMO Este artigo é sobre experienciar imagens como processo imagético interativo, como apontado por Bergson no livro Matéria e Memória, por meio de um aspecto dúbio do retrato fotográfico, em termos da sua recepção repudiada no espaço público. Apresentamos uma série de fotografias de quatro cidades latino-americanas que retratam rostos desfigurados intencionalmente. Recorrendo aos estudos de Deleuze, Bergson, Benjamin e Barthes, apontamos essas fotografias como testemunho documental de diferentes reações. As fotografias nos incitam a ir além do que os rostos desfigurados significam como signos icônicos, para serem vistas como indícios da interação dinâmica entre os retratos e os agentes desfigurantes anônimos, como uma imagem. Palavras-chave: Retrato, desfiguração, propaganda, Bergson, imagem a PhD candidate in Social and Institutional Psychology at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. Master of Arts-Fine Arts at the Concordia University (2013). Orcid: 0000-0002-7058-9637.

2012

This special issue of "kritische berichte" contains seven interdisciplinary essays on the human face. CONTENTS Jeanette Kohl and Dominic Olariu: Editorial 3 Jean-Claude Schmitt: For a History of the Face: Physiognomy, Pathognomy, Theory of Expression 7 Bernard Andrieu: Appearance-Based Prejudice. Between Fear of the Other and Identity Hybridization 21 Sigrid Weigel: Phantom Images: Face and Feeling in the Age of Brain Imaging 33 Georges Didi-Huberman: Near and Distant: The Face, its Imprint, and its Place of Appearance 54 Claudia Schmölders: Eye Level. The Linear Perspective in Face Perception 70 Jonathan Cole: Facial Function Revealed through Loss. Living with the Difference 83 Jeanette Kohl, Dominic Olariu and Rainer Schmelzeisen: Face Matters. Facial Surgery from the Inside 95 View on: http://www.ulmer-verein.de/?page_id=14080