On Muzzles and Faces: The Semiotic Limits of Visage and Personhood

Abstract

The essay investigates the anthropological concept of personhood from the point of view of the dialectics between two fundamental elements of the socio-cultural, linguistic, and semiotic construction of the self-identity of the human species: on the one hand, the human face and, on the other, the non-human muzzle. After demonstrating that their semantics is contrastively articulated in all Indo-European languages, and after showing that such contrast is featured also in several non-Indo-European languages, including those referring to supposedly alternative “ontologies of nature”, the essay criticizes such opposition through a close reading of Lévinas, Deleuze and Guattari, and Derrida’s philosophical texts on the face and on animality. Ultimately, it proposes that the construction of the animal muzzle as an interface of non-personhood is instrumental to the substitution of the human victim in the sacrifice that establishes the human community. Only through eradicating the primordial stigmatization of the muzzle, however, will a non-violent foundation of human personhood and community be possible.

Artifacting Identity. How Grillz, Ball Gags and Gas Masks Expand the Face

“…In this regard and drawing on Massimo Leone’s investigation into the phenomenology of the face—an inquiry also articulated through the etymology of the words face and muzzle —we will consider the agency of the nose-mouth assemblage in facial meaning construction, setting our focus on the lower facial mereology where the boundary between human animals and non-human animals has been located. If “human animals constitute their visages because they destitute the visages of non-human animals into muzzles” (Leone 2021 : w/p), our paper is interested in recognizing some facial performances where the boundary of humanity is differently placed in value through three artifacts. These restitute a differential, expanded humanity including animality within the face.…”

Gotta face ‘em all: Pokémon, Japanese animated characters, and the emergence of playful visual animism

“…Despite this, the franchise tends to follow the traditional norms of cartoon animation (especially Japanese animation), by making eyes and gazes, as well as faces, fundamental communicative interfaces for meaning-making among living beings, including animated ones (Leone 2021); furthermore, as a typical trope of animation, both the anthropomorphic and the expressive gaze are often used for humans and Pokémon alike. This is evident in all the manga, anime and games since the second generation: the same visual expressive traits are used as the basis for certain Pokémon and human characters, or to express the same temporary attitude (see Fig.…”

“…taxonomic heterotopy. The former uses typical styles and techniques of animation (even if in heterogeneous ways) to ensure the recognition of Pokémon and humans alike as living, sentient creatures, sharing the communicative and expressive function of the face (Leone 2009(Leone , 2021; in case of the latter, the hybrid design of Pokémon does not simply deviate from, but actually challenges the interpreters' cultural codes of taxonomy, undermining their semiotic codes of segmentation between living and non-living, different kingdoms of nature, and the very perceived difference between the human and the animal, the cultural and the natural.…”