Des Visages Une Anthropologie by David Le Breton

 Yes, every book by David Le Breton is wonderful. In this  essay released by Editions Métailié Des Visages

Une Anthropologie Edition Revue et Actualisée, David traces for the readers a complete portrait of faces and the importance of faces for painters, arts, philosophy, movies, architecture, mythology, literature, without forgetting Covid-19, relationship of old people with their faces and bodies and of course what it means an alteration of the face for a society that live of pictures and imagines.

I wanted to read this book so badly for what happened to me as well. The blockage of a muscle, the mandibular-tendon, per two decades altered my face, my senses, breathing, hearing, muscles, body, everything. 

I lived a real hell emotively, psychologically, physically and socially. Healing, seeing my face back to the normality is like a daily-surprise and sometimes I am amazed by this new freedom and the possibilility to see again my old face, although, I still can see here and there  the "old" and altered Anna Maria, a person pretty unsecure socially, psychologically and emotively that, thank Lord, is disappearing. I must rediscover the person I was a lot of time ago and the one that I will become.  

And after this, back to the book.

A strong example of alteration of the face the nuclear bombs launched by the Americans in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The ladies who had lost their facial attributes were called "vierges de la bombe" and they stayed secluded in their homes for their entire existences because of the devastation caused by that bombs to their faces.

What is it the face if not, writes Le Breton, The Other? The Closest Other we have, in which every individual recognizes himself and exist at the eyes of the others. It is also the direct reflection of the name we bring with the face. 

Plato added that no one could be part of anything if not with an harmonic and perfect face, giving to this passport for the society an incredible importance.

We are our face, in terms of visibility. A good face, a good smile means for the society a lot and any possible interference that alter this reality can be devastating for the person in terms of acceptance.

This one is also a study of facial bone characteristics, what certain lines of the face, nose, lips meant in the past, examining also the thesis of Lombroso who defined criminals, for sure! certain guys with certain facial characteristics (sic!)

The myth of Narcisse and the impossibility to be without the Other. The myth told that if Narcissus would have had the chance to see his face terrible things would have happened to him. So his parents removed every possible object where their son would have seen displayed his imagine. One day Narcisse looked in the water of a lake seeing the beautiful reflection of a wonderful guy. He fell in love for that imagine falling in the water and dying for trying to reach the young reflected. Thanks to that death the appearance in the world of narcissus. 

Another example pretty powerful the one of the Portrait of Dorian Gray. Here we see perfectly the duality sometimes existing in a person. In the case of the wonderful book of beloved Oscar Wilde, the portrait contains the errors, horrible things committed in his existence by Dorian, preserving the same face of Dorian from the old age, and putting, let's use this verb, nasty, horrible facts, only in the portrait. The portrait became visibly horrible, and altered because of what committed by Dorian. At the end Dorian not tolerating anymore that view, decided to stab with a knife the portrait thinking that he would have survived: but the portrait was the obscure side of his dissolute soul and body: he represented his essence, so stabbing the portrait with the same knife with which Dorian had killed the creator of the portrait, meant to Dorian killing himself, becoming what the painting was before: a horrible old, dissolute man, giving back to the painting the portrait of a young and still genuine Dorian, set free from that revoltating old man he became with the time.

A beautiful essay for sure!

Highly recommended

Anna Maria Polidori