Course Description
In light of the pivotal position of the face in contemporary discourses of philosophy, visual arts, and cultural studies, this seminar attempts to explore the new phase of the face in the twenty-first century. As Michel Foucault remarks in the conclusion of The Order of Things, “man will be erased like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.” (387) While Foucault foregrounds the possible disappearance of the Man-form historically constituted since the nineteenth century by taking the face drawn in sand as the last trope for human being, Gilles Deleuze tends to celebrate the “Super-man” or “Super-fold” of contemporary post-face episteme: the chains of the genetic code that replace the organism, the potentials of silicon that supersede carbon, or the agrammaticalities of modern literature that displace the signifier (Deleuze, “On the Death of Man and Superman” 131-32). This line of critical thinking on the dis-appearance or trans-formation of the human face can also be found in the works of Giorgio Agamben. As he points out in Nudities, it is the first time in human history that identity is no longer recognized by the person-persona (the ancestor’s mask of wax) linkage but chiefly by the visual and even digital documentation of the face.

This seminar will thus start with the philosophical dialogue among Levinas, Deleuze and Agamben on the face as the ultimate “defenseless nudity.” It will then move onto historically-specific discourses on the formation and transformation of the face ranging from the nineteenth-century physiognomic theory to contemporary social networking sites.