In Deleuze and Guattari's work on faciality we find an assertion that "the face is a politics" and that only certain forms of political and social organisation make faces. For them the alternative to making faces is a dismantling of the face, which is also a politics. But what would dismantling the face entail, in practical terms? What sort of a politics is it? Is it already taking place? Is it a politics that is to be desired, a better politics, a 'progressive' politics? Or does the persistent use of images of the face in protests such as those in Manhattan, or elsewhere, before and after, with its insistence on the politics of personhood that the face embodies, tell us something different? This book examines these questions and others in a series of chapters on the politics of such diverse issues as images of faces in photographs and portraits; expressive faces, psychology and neuroscience; face recognition and face blindness; facial injury, disfigurement and face transplants. It explores the works of Suzanne Opton, Robert Lyons, Ly Daravuth, Alfredo Jaar, Antony Gormley, Mona Hatoum, Chuck Close, Francis Bacon, Paddy Hartley, Mark Gilbert and Orlan.
The book opens up a vast field of further research that needs to be taken forward to begin to address the politics of the face more fully, and to elaborate the alternative forms of personhood and politics that dismantling the face opens to view. The book will be agenda-setting for scholars located in the field of international politics in particular but cognate areas as well who want to pursue the implications of face politics for the crucial questions of subjectivity, sovereignty and personhood.
