People are all in the Faciality, except Wagner’s animals and Mozart birds. Norman Mailer Said That ounce at a certain age, we all-have the face we deserve. The face Does not bind. The face is universal. We wear a face, It Does not wear us. The distinction is crucial.
The face is the most human of things. Man has a face and not simply a muzzle or a front, because he dwells in openness, because in his face he exposes himself and communicates. This is why the face is the place of politics. Our unpolitical time does not want to see its own face, it keeps it at a distance, masks and covers it. There must be no more faces, but only numbers and figures. The tyrant, too, is faceless…[…]For us, alone, there can be no salvation: there is salvation because there are others. Giorgio Agamben
Twenty-six years ago I maintained that the use of ornamentation on objects of practical use would disappear with the development of mankind, a constant and consistent development, which was as natural process as the atrophy of vowels in final syllables in popular speech. By that i did not mean what some purists have carried ad absurdum, namely that ornament should be systematically and consistently eliminated. What i did mean was that where it had disappeared as necessary consequences of human development, it could not be restored, just as people will never return to tattooing their face.
Each human face looks the same, but at the same time is totally different from one another. The Gemara Sanhedrin says: Each person was created with a distinct face, mind and voice. Nowadays the principle has not changed but maybe we have?.
With our hectic lifestyles , cybernetic soul, we have lost our ability to relate to other people with an open ear, understanding heart, and true empathy? We only have machinic algorithms. As said Boris Pasternak in Dr. Zhivago: “ It’s a sickness lately. I believe the causes are moral. The vast majority of us require constant hypocrisy, erected in a system. But you can’t, without consequences, show yourself every day different from what you feel: sacrifice for what you don’t love, rejoice in what makes us unhappy. The nervous system is not a void sound or invention. Our soul occupies a place in space and lies inside us like teeth in the mouth. You can’t rape her endlessly.”
We have only two ways to relate to one another. It can be “panim b’panim” or “achor b’achor,” “face to face,” or “back to back.” That means people can actually relate directly to each other (face to face) or they can be as far apart as two people standing back to back. When two people are standing back to back, they are further apart that they are from anybody else in the entire world. The entire circumference of the world separates them. Whereas when people are directly engaged with each other in a conversation, or the like, it is an actual connection between two people in a real way. Only in that place we may find a face that loves us beyond any transitional misunderstanding .
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