When the face mask burns. Agamben and the pandemic visage

Abstract

The presence of the face recurs in the writings of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (b. Rome, 1942) since the very beginning, in the 1970s, and has stepped back into the limelight with his reflections on the COVID-19 pandemic, in 2020. According to Agamben, the pandemic man is the man of social distancing, whose face is being obtrudedand disrupted by the medical mask. And if, according to a tradition originated by Lévinas, the face is everything, since it would represent the viaticum to what Heidegger had called the Open (Germ. das Offene), when the man loses it, as it happens with anti-contagion masks, «the man disappears»: without a face, without any language left but that of «numbers, digits and lies», the human being is no longer human. Within what Rastier called a «political theology of conspiracy», the face plays a strategic role; it embodies a position that flattens the philosophical discourse reducing it to the cogency of pandemic contingency and reveals itself, naturalistically ontologized and placed as a metaphysical pivot, as a profoundly conservative device: identity, subjectivity, humanity would find their own placeonly in the face. For Agamben, who seems to reject any possible – or necessary – anthropological reconfiguration, the mask is the death of human being, because it is the death of their political dimension. A semiotics of the face, then, cannot fail to confront with the Agambenian perspective, armed with the intuition that there is no real opposition between “face” and “mask”; the first, just like the «naked life» (It. nuda vita) studied by the philosopher, is nothing but an abstraction obtained ex post and placed as the foundation of the second: but it is, in turn, just one among the many semiotic masks that the human being may decide, or not, to wear.