Illustration by Shorri on deviantart.com
Those who know me well know that I hate the human face. Well, hate is perhaps too strong a word to use; let us simply say that I have a strong philosophical aversion towards the face and a mistrust of all those familiar facial features that so conveniently express emotion and display our conformity to the dominant reality (not least of all the smile).
For the face is not some kind of natural formation, nor is it uniquely individual as many people like to believe. It is rather a type of social machine that eventually envelops and codifies not just the front of the head, but the entire body, thereby ensuring that any asignifying or non-subjective forces and flows arising from the libidinal chaos of the latter are neutralized in advance.
The fact that most people love their own white, grinning faces with the same passion that slaves love their oppression and take every opportunity to shamelessly promote their own profile - not least on Facebook, for example - is a source of no little disappointment and irritation I have to admit.
On the other hand, I'm full of admiration and respect for those who counter the privileging of the face within Western metaphysics by choosing to veil, mask, hide, or disguise the face in some manner. It takes courage, I think, to willingly lose face or seek to escape the face. I will always love Lady Chatterley not merely for her sexual frolics with her lover in the woods, but for daring to stand naked before a full-length mirror and place a "thick veil over her face, like a Mohammedan woman" in order that she might better know her body "apart from the face with all its complexities and frustrations and vulgarity!" [DHL]
And I will always love Michel Foucault for daring to become a masked philosopher, surrendering both name and face and instructing people: 'Do not ask me who I am and do not expect me to remain the same.' In celebrating anonymity in this manner, Foucault reminds us of something that Nietzsche taught: Every profound spirit loves a mask - and the profoundest of all despise even their own image.
Re this touching 'rage to apply the eraser', a minor problem might be that I don't remember Foucault erasing his name from his books, anonymising his authorship, or declining lecture fees on the basis that he didn't know who he was from one day to the next. As James Miller has commented in 'The Passion of Michel Foucault', the latter's stated desire to lodge his voice 'in this great anonymous murmur of discourses held today' is rather belied, to take just one of countless possible examples, by the photograph of MF's rather unattractive large and near-hairless head, lips puckering to a megaphone, which was used as a cover photograph to the lecture collection 'Fearless Speech' (Semiotext(e), 2001). As Miller suggests, calling Foucault's pretentious project 'if not a hypocritical farce, then at least a comic failure', the latter's 'lifelong quest for a due measure of academic recognition' more plausibly suggested an unstable ambivalence about celebrity, fame and exposure, in which the post-Nietzschean fantasy of some kind of enigmatic impersonality co-existed, in Miller's acutely observant phrase, with 'the desire to let blossom in secrecy a singular kind of genius'. Foucault might have had pretensions to effacing his face, but certainly little interest in disengaging his image from his voice. Unlike Maurice Blanchot, who habitually refused photographs and interviews, or the true philosopher-recluse E M Cioran for whom existence constituted no more than a 'temptation', or Samuel Beckett, who refused to discuss the meaning of his work, Foucault became a public intellectual hardly less exposed, cited and lionised than Jean-Paul Sartre. Whether one sees this as a delicious paradox or a flagrant contradiction is probably, ultimately, a matter of personal taste, but it was certainly a marketable conceit.
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