Staring how we look sobre la mirada.pdf - artecolonial

FACES 101
will make an equal claim. In these readings, staring at a face creates a responsibility
arising from our shared humanity.
For other modern thinkers, however, face-to-face relations imperil us. In
the tradition of human relations laid out in Hobbes, Machiavelli, and Hegel,
Sartre sees faces as threats to be read. “The body advances,” he writes in
his essay on faces, “bearing the sacred object between its shoulders on its
neck” (Sartre 1956, 159). All staring is domination in which “our faces rule”
and reveal “our darker passions” (159). The fleshly materiality of the other’s
face—its immanence—is disturbing, even repulsive. Faces have “voracity”
and are “pierced with greedy holes” and make “objects leap backwards”
(161). Faces of other people diminish the self in Sartre’s account of faceto-face
interaction, in which our own visage is puny, stuck in a narcissistic
moment and unable to realize all the potency it witnesses in another face.
The “I” is intimidated and resentful in the presence of another’s face, limited
because “I do not see my own face” (159). “I carry [my face] in front of me
like a secret which I have not fathomed,” Sartre begrudgingly observes, “and
it is the faces of others, instead, which teach me what mine is like” (159).
As we saw in chapter 5, one’s own face then is an epistemological problem,
solved only by analogy.
This anxiety of facedness intensifies in the modernist literature of alienation.
In 1962, for example, the Polish émigré writer Witold Gombrowicz
characterized human interaction as “a relentless duel of face-making, facewearing,
face-imposing” (Newton 1998, 244). In this grim mutuality of facial
fashioning, the sufficiency of our own face is forever compromised by
the intrusive face of another, always demanding a reckoning. Such “facial
claustrophobia” is defensive posturing seemingly specific to modern urban
anonymity, where we are assaulted by alien faces at intimate range—as anyone
who has taken a subway at peak hours knows all too well (248). With their relentless
particularities, the faces of others engulf us with pleas for recognition,
what one critic calls “the ordeal of intersubjectivity as physiognomy” (249).
RECOGNIZING FACES
Faces, then, are texts we engage or resist, opportunities for revelation or refusal.
For Buber and Levinas, the faces of others beckon and bond us to one
another. For Sartre and Gombrowicz, faces confront and alienate us from
one another. We stare at faces to differentiate friend from foe, familiar from
strange, invitation from rejection, anger from adoration, comic from tragic.
The ability to recognize faces is essential in human interaction, indeed to
our survival. Much of the entire brain as well as specialized areas recognize