Abstract
To say that a selfie is a photographic self-portrait is correct but does not begin to capture the specificity of this contemporary widespread phenomenon whose inner form needs to be accounted for on, at least, two intersecting levels: (1) the logic of the selfie as a specific kind of digital image that already belongs to a “post-photographic” condition and (2) the logic of the selfie as an act/event of self-presentation that, while continuing a tradition of self-portraiture, can no longer be explained only in terms of that tradition. The analysis in this chapter is ultimately directed at an ethical dimension of the selfie practice: It is the question about the place and predicament of the face—of its humanistic meaningfulness and value—in our contemporary life-world. With the selfie, the author argues, the common paradigms for conceptualizing the visuality of the face are no longer enough for attending to the concrete setting in which the contemporary face tends to singularize itself.
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- 1.
On this matter, see, e.g., Chap. 4 by Kris Belden-Adams in this volume.
- 2.
For Nicholas Mirzoeff (2016), for example , “the selfie resonates not because it is new, but because it expresses, develops, expands, and intensifies the long history of the self-portrait.”
- 3.
With the selfie, the visual is typically intertwined with the textual, which calls for a separate discussion.
- 4.
There are, of course, exceptions here. But these exceptions are completely supervenient on the core of the phenomenon: the face image. And, in this sense, subgenres that rework the face standard are not refutations but rather reminders of what the standard is. For an interesting example of such exception , see Paul Frosh (2015).
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
The use of the self-image as means of self-promotion has a long history of its own. On the role of Renaissance self-portraiture in creating a celebrity identity for artists such as Michelangelo, Dürer , and Titian, see Loh (2015).
- 8.
This invisibility is not something outside the visible, but a dimension of the visible itself—what Merleau-Ponty (1968 [1960], 247) would call “the invisible of the visible.”
- 9.
- 10.
Both painting and photography also use a third modality of self-portraits anchored in the imaginary. The question of the imagination is one with which I shall not deal with here.
- 11.
For an insightful account of the self’s relation to the camera, see Wilson (2012).
- 12.
In earlier years, photography allowed similar (albeit different) results in self-depictions that involved the photographing mirrors and the images they reflect. An important subcategory of selfies continues this line of photography.
- 13.
- 14.
For a philosophical analysis of the question of visuality in the Narcissus myth, see Kenaan (2014b, part 1).
- 15.
A key text for discussing the alterity involved in the mirror image and the self’s early sublimation of that alterity is of course Lacan’s “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” (2007).
- 16.
On Dürer’s project of self-portraiture and the self-portrait as a statement on art, see Koerner’s (1997) impressive work.
- 17.
For an interesting attempt to analyze selfies as big data, see Lev Manovich’s Selfie City Project at http://selfiecity.net
- 18.
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Kenaan, H. (2018). The Selfie and the Face. In: Eckel, J., Ruchatz, J., Wirth, S. (eds) Exploring the Selfie. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57949-8_6
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