The Face as Fingerprint : Mediation, Silence, and the Question of Identity in Ingmar Bergman’s « Persona »

Abstract

This volume is dedicated to readings of the borderline informed by Psychoanalysis. My essay is the exception. In it, I analyze Ingmar Bergman 's Persona (1966) with an eye to the dangers of a one-way conversation. Interestingly, Persona dramatizes an inversion of a typical psychoanalytic session, for here the patient says nothing and her nurse confesses. The aftermath of this inversion and its consequences are explored with the help of the Italian feminist, Adrianna Cavarero, the Danish Philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, and the Serbian performance artist, Marina Abramović. Enjoining a debate within psychoanalysis from the border regions of existential and feminist philosophy, I argue that the silence of an interlocutor creates a mask screening the speaker from the mutual recognition needed for a healthy sense of identity. This essay argues the case for conversation. I. The Embodiment of the Word, its Flesh is the IssueThe discourse of modernity posits the individual even as the age ushers in mass culture.Fascination with the particularity of the flesh accompanies a copious range of abstractions describing society at large. Concepts such as civil society, the crowd, and the public abstract from the bodies they purport to acknowledge. The tension between the supposed singularity of the individual and the open door of mass participation in cultural life becomes a staple of critique. One only has to think of Kierkegaard's notion of the nihilism of the Present Age, Nietzsche's claim that the subject is merely a prejudice of grammar, or Heidegger's conception of das Man to understand the split between bourgeois cultural conceptions of the individual as the favored unit of analysis and these critics' realization that a collectively held conception of the singular ironically functions as a point of identification. It is that irony, that semantic fluctuation between universally held concepts and particular experience, which conjures up the image of Narcissus as he sees his own reflection as an other; the moment of desire itself becomes a moment of misrecognition.If we let our imaginations loose and imagine that he maintained his human form long enough, we can conjure up a Narcissus who might have gotten past seeing himself as the other, having realized that Echo's disembodied voice, which seemed all too familiar, had repeated what he said out of an unfulfilled desire for reciprocation. Perhaps