Abstract
Not far into Jean-Paul Sartres’ novel, Nausea, we learn that its narrator, Antoine Roquentin, suffers from a curious problem; one that might at first glance seem merely idiosyncratic, but which has in fact become surprisingly common in our late modernity. He has profound difficulty, that is, recognizing or understanding the psychological expressiveness of the human face…even his own. Looking in the bathroom mirror one day, his gaze is transfixed by an enigmatic, bizarre, even inhuman sight—a “grey thing” is how he first describes it—but the “thing” he sees is actually just the puzzling sight of his own apparently meaningless physiognomy: My glance slowly and wearily travels over my forehead, my cheeks: it finds nothing firm, it is stranded. Obviously there are a nose, two eyes and a mouth, but none of it makes sense, there is not even a human expression.… I draw my face closer until it touches the mirror. The eyes, nose and mouth disappear: nothing human is left. Brown wrinkles show on each side of the feverish swelled lips, crevices, mole holes.
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Notes
- 1.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea (New York: New Directions, 1964), pp. 16–17. (Sartre 1964)
- 2.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 23. (Wittgenstein 1980)
- 3.
My account of the post-Cartesian crisis of expression is indebted to Roger Shiner, “The Mental Life of a Work of Art,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 40.3 (Spring 1982): 253–268. (Shiner 1982)
- 4.
E.H. Gombrich, “The Mask and the Face: the Perception of Physiognomic Likeness in Life and in Art,” in Maurice Mandelbaum, ed., Art, Perception, and Reality (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 3–4. (Gombrich 1972)
- 5.
- 6.
Alan Leslie, “Children’s Understanding of the Mental World,” in Richard Gregory, ed., The Oxford Companion to the Mind (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), p. 139. Emphasis added. (Leslie 1987)
- 7.
Annette Karmiloff-Smith and James Russell, “Developmental Psychology,” in Samuel Guttenplan, ed., A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind, p. 253.
- 8.
See Charles Taylor, “Heidegger, Language, and Ecology,” in Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1995), pp. 100–126. (Taylor 1995)
- 9.
Taylor, “Heidegger, Language, Ecology,” p. 105.
- 10.
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne Univ. Press, 1969), p. 194; hereafter abbreviated TI. (Levinas 1969)
- 11.
Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1984), p. 90; hereafter abbreviated RR. (de Man 1984)
- 12.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 168; hereafter abbreviated TP. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987)
- 13.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p. 152. (Wittgenstein 1997)
- 14.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1970), §225, p. 41e. (Wittgenstein 1970)
- 15.
See Michel ter Hark, “The Inner and the Outer,” in Hans-Johann Glock, ed., Wittgenstein: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2001), pp. 206–7. (ter Hark 2001)
- 16.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. 1, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988), §919, p. 163e. (Wittgenstein 1988)
- 17.
Stanley Cavell, “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Thought,” Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001), p. 48. (Cavell 2001b)
- 18.
Richard Eldridge, ed., Stanley Cavell (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003), p. 6. (Eldridge 2003)
- 19.
Avrum Stroll, Surfaces (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1988) (Stroll 1988); hereafter abbreviated S.
- 20.
Ellen Lupton, ed., Skin: Surface, Substance + Design (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002). (Lupton 2002)
- 21.
Stanley Cavell, “Knowing and Acknowledging,” Must We Mean What We Say?, p. 263. (Cavell 2001a)
- 22.
Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1979), p. 481. (Cavell 1979)
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Rhie, B. (2017). The Philosophy of the Face. In: Hagberg, G. (eds) Wittgenstein on Aesthetic Understanding. Philosophers in Depth. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40910-8_10
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