Modernist Prosopopoeia: Mina Loy, Gaudier-Brzeska and the Making of Face (original) (raw)

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.

In 'Reality and Its Shadow' , Levinas dismisses knowledge as a whole from art. This has deep implications for the ethical. The aesthetic event has nothing to do with the ethical event – art does not seem to hold a place for ethical knowledge. This situation is problematic with respect to the conflicting phenomenological evidence (as beholders or readers we have extensive ethical experience) as well as with respect to Levinas himself, who occasionally relies on works of art in his ethical phenomenological analyses. My article aims to fill in the blank spaces by finding a place for the ethical in Levinas's model of ethical signification in art. To start with, I elaborate on the notion of ethical experience (falling short of the ethical event) by way of László Tengelyi's work on time-art and his conversation with Levinas. Next, I turn to Levinas's portrayal of the insomnia of art, where the traces of such an experience can be located in the ebb and flow of consciousness, in the vicinity of the anonymous event, and on the way to the critical articulation of this event. In the second part of the article, I try to capitalize on this genetic model of ethical knowledge with reference to the faces of art. I attempt to show how in the in-depth experience provided by film (for example, in Herbert Ross's classic, Play It Again, Sam) faces come alive and signify. Rather than tying them in with the sublime, I argue for a limited yet undeniable presence of exteriority in the faces of the movie.

This illustrated in-depth study comprises mostly verbatim quotation of individual themes presented by the inimitable Max Picard in his notably poetic ‘Human Face’ (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1930, 221 pp., illus., original German text 1929). Includes 15 major portraits in monochrome, many of Renaissance provenance, plus additional illustrative material suitable for classroom study. Readers of the present paper will also benefit from the editor's ‘Meta-Analysis of Max Picard's "Human Face" With Implications for Portraiture and Its Exhibition,’ Academia.Edu, 2020. Apperceptive Foci Presented and Illustrated: A. Endemic Fear of the Face B. Impenetrability of the Face C. Eternal Hierarchy of the Human Face D. Spiritual Pictoriography and Reverberation of the Face E. The Divine Appointment of Primeval Facial Images F. Expansion of the Visitation Face; Reenactment of the Silence G. War of the Demonic and the Divine in the Human Face H. Articulation of the Face in Planes and Their Living Alternation I. Lifelong Convergence of the Face Upon Its Finalized Form J. Hierarchical Self-Ordering of the Face and Its Tragic Cubist End K. Demonstration of Divine Power in Artistic Human Figuration Careful comparison has been made to the German original (München, 1929). The editor notes with pleasure that Picard's masterwork was given an astoundingly faithful English dress by the late screenwriter S. Goldstein (1901-1970), a student of languages. The translation is not mentioned in Goldstein’s 'New York Times' obituary (1970) but it undoubtedly constitutes the screenwriter’s most notable literary achievement. (Note: Fair Use and Quotation freely granted to world scholarship.)

In this paper I develop a concept of the face that begins with a simple idea: the face is that which withdraws from self-presence, thereby enabling the possibility of self-relation with others. The face is the mark of the self in the sense proposed by Walter Benjamin, as the medium that manifests the sign by withdrawing from it (“Painting”), thereby opening up possibilities in the materiality of the medium itself for future self-configurations unseeable in current forms of self-identity. This idea, I argue, leads to an affirmation of the self as other, as the self “to come,” opening up possibilities for critique from the place where the face withdraws. My aim here is to counter two tendencies in theoretical work: one in which the face is taken to be the sign of simple self-presence, and the other where, in its withdrawal from self-presence, the face disappears into a system or conceptual scheme, losing its singular specificity as this face, and hence its potential for being something other than what it is. The paper offers a critique of Deleuze and Guattari's pre-critical/classical concept of faciality, arguing that it is incapable of accounting for 'this face' as the mark of an absent presence. Instead I propose a critical praxis that begins from the fact of 'this face' as the opening into possibility. To exemplify this approach I draw on the photographic art of Alan Sekula and its invocation of the face of resistance to global capitalism.

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.