From Face to Facies
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: This article considers Beckett’s faces in the light of Giorgio Agamben’s account of the face as a disputed biopolitical marker. Agamben refers to the face both in terms of social and juridical identity in ancient Rome and as an icon of contemporary biopolitics, as social identity gives way to biometric recognition. Beckett’s own face figures prominently in the series of machine-generated Eigenface portraits created by artist Trevor Paglen in 2017, and whose use of the Eigenface method invokes modern facial recognition technologies. The Eigenface is examined here in relation to a gallery of ghostly progenitors: the faces of Beckett’s late plays.
Author: David Houston Jones
Institution: University of Exeter
Language: English
Topic: Samuel Beckett and Modernism
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4403477203