Face Politics

Over the last decade, public discourse in Europe and North America has beenoverwhelmingly in favor of banning the face veil (niqab). Politicians like JackStraw in the UK or John Charest in Québec have commented on its putativehindrance to community integration due to its covering of the face. So a bookentitled Face Politics would seem to offer some insights into this anti-niqabdynamic. A quick perusal of the index for “niqab,” “Islam,” and “Muslimwomen,” however, comes up unexpectedly empty. What, then, is “face politics” and how can an academic discussion about the “face” not mention niqab, arguablyone of the most burning issues of “face politics” this century?The book is a profound, intellectually challenging, sometimes dense, andyet empathetic and beautifully written exploration of how contemporary westernpolitics is predicated around individuality and the separatedness of being,signified by the idea of the face as a “window onto the [individual’s] soul” (p.165). Because she believes that “a politics that makes the face is a politics thatproduces the person as an object” (p.7), the author wishes to propose a differentconcept of the face, that of a mask hiding our inseparable connectedness, andconcludes that such an alternative would lead to a profoundly different, andbetter, political society, one symbolized by the concept of the tango. Indeed,the tagline on the dedication page is “If the face is a politics, dismantling theface is also a politics,” from French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalystFélix Guattari’s 1980 book A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism andSchizophrenia ...