Facelessness

Agamben, Deleuze, & Levinas on the Ethics of Evil

Introduction

Got no human grace

You’re eyes without a face

Such a human waste

You’re eyes without a face

-Billy Idol

I have found, since my introduction to both thinkers, a fondness between the work of Deleuze and Levinas’ ethical-political projects. The language may be different: immanence, difference, becoming minor for Deleuze and the Same, the Other, and relation with the Face for Levinas, having some overlap in their use. On the other hand, I have felt that there was something missing in my reading of Levinas that is much more present in Deleuze and plenty of the thinkers he pulls from or is a contemporary of: an understanding of why people act in a reactionary way and the means by which people can attain a revolutionary consciousness or unconsciousness. In short, Levinas seeks to understand that which makes murder impossible, that relation with the face of the Other that could make the holocaust no longer a possibility for humanity; sameness and totality don’t fully explain the extent of reasons why people can commit violence against others, especially at the level of the social. Deleuze and Guattari’s Schizoanalytic framework gives us the conceptual tools to understand these phenomena as processes of molar networks of desire, taking away our autonomy, and the means capable of taking them back. Through this, I think we can understand the concepts of Levinas’ Other and the face much more deeply by giving them a dimension of understanding the frameworks of the unconscious, in connection with society, that give way to the possibility of a relation with the Face of the Other and other frameworks and mechanics that block that relation.

It is this latter aspect that I wish to further develop here, an exploration into the forces that produce a subject that is blocked off from the possibility of an ethical relation with a particular other. For a combination of Deleuze & Levinas, I see this relation with the face of the Other as a micro-political revolution, a moment of awakening, something that reinvests the flows of desire which may be cut off, or directed against others towards that which brings one into direct contact with the humanity of another person. But there are times and places where the molar forces people invest into create blockages at the micropolitics of the unconscious: we can not redirect these flows away from their assemblages if we can not interact with another as an autonomous human being.

These are the faceless beings, those that, from our experience, have no entrance into any kind of ethical relation; they are not condemned by a judge in front of a jury of their peers, but, alongside birth, they found themselves stuck inside of ontological categories that make them less than persons, an unrelational relation to those within the society, a nullified infinity. These aspects bring about a need to bring in a biopolitical lens, found in Foucault & Agamben’s work, to understand Facelessness in how it articulates itself at both a Molar and micropolitical level. Particularly with Agamben in Homo Sacer, we find a biopolitics that articulates lives that do not matter; but, it is only bringing this in the context of a libidinal economy of Facelessness that we may find the processes that produce and maintain the justified mass cruelty found in biopolitical modernity at the scale of individualized persons. Bringing together these figures, despite the gaps between their focuses, allows me to ask and answer the questions of how these large structures block us off from our face-to-face, one-on-one interactions. How do they make us into beasts of cruelty or apathy, if there is even a difference between the two anymore?

The Other, the Same, & the Faceless

I wish to begin by turning to the two major relations that Levinas posits in his own work: the Same & the Other. For Levinas, the Same is able to change; it is merely a process of reidentifying itself time and time again, the process that becomes problematic, that of undermining the metaphysical desire towards the Other, is that of the totalization of the same. Thus, what Levinas seeks is not a relation of negation found in alterity, as one may find in the Hegelian master-slave dialectic, but one founded on the breaching and breakdown of the totality of identity & egoism, “The metaphysical other is other with an alterity that is not formal, is not the simple reverse of identity, and is not formed out of resistance to the same, but is prior to every initiative, to all imperialism of the Same.” Totality, in Levinas’ framework, is a reduction to finiteness that avoids entering into a relation of alterity with another on the basis of reducing it to egoism in terms of individual relations or to top-down facts in terms of knowledge production (Levinas specifically mentions historical writing, leaving out all the minutiae of lived lives). Totality finds its antagonism in the face-to–face relation with the Other, where the Face of the Other represents a door to entering into relation of respect with their infinite alterity, this is the relation that opens up the possibility of the true & infinite Ethical relation for Levinas: “It is my responsibility before a face looking at me as absolutely foreign that constitutes the original fact of fraternity.” The infinite alterity of the Other calls me forth towards a responsibility beyond that of the same, beyond that which I identify with as an extension of myself; it breaks down the totality of any identity in this process.

But totality is merely a process of reduction, a process of making the infinite into a concrete identity. Totality, as mentioned above, has breaches; it leaves something with the potentiality of a face for a subject to possibly find, even if it may be met with internal resistance; the Other, while not their infinite alterity, exists as a set of identifiable facts. Levinas attempts to understand our unethical actions towards others either by the totality, discussed above, that leaves me without an ethical obligation towards that which I can not identify with or through the sensibility, which may be a modality of the former option, that creates the experience of a world of things meant for unreflected enjoyment and consumption; sensibility is thus a world experienced without alterity. I wish to posit a third relation, less than the relation of the I & the Other, even less than the relations established in the totality of the Same: the non-relational relation, the relation that leaves no doors open for the possibility of a face-to-face encounter, a process that does leave the Other as reduced or outside, but makes them into nothing, makes them unworthy of perceived existence itself.

This third relation, the nonrelational, is what I wish to designate as the Faceless. It is a designation that goes beyond the perception of the outside of the totality of the Same that one may find already in Levinas, but rather a designation that defines a being outside of existence at an ontological and ethical level. The totality of the Same makes the other exist within a reduction to the Same; it is allowed existence at the cost of its infinity; the Faceless, however, can not be allowed to exist in any capacity, the experience of totality is maintained only by their complete exclusion. It is not enough to exclude them from an ethical relation founded on alterity, normal totality already does that for most people we exist around, the Faceless must be extinguished within the realm, at the opposite of an ethical relation. This is marked at the level of their ontological being, whether that be determined by the political reality at the base as a biological, political, or cultural enemy. It is in this way that I must now turn to biopolitics to make a particular distinction for Facelessness in political reality.

Infinite condemnation

In Levinas’ Other, we find a relation where one becomes incapable of murdering the Other because of an infinite ethical obligation to them; in the Faceless, we too find a relation where one becomes incapable of murder, not because of ethical obligation but in its opposite: one becomes incapable of murder because one has no relation to this kind of outsider. In Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben seeks to expand the project of biopolitics, started in various writings and lectures by Foucault, and pair it within the studies on sovereignty primarily through Carl Schmitt, as well as Walter Benjamin, Thomas Hobbes, & Hannah Arendt. The work establishes two relation of internalized exclusion that found sovereign societies, that of the sovereign who is seen as the foundation for a society, its political power, and its laws but is considered outside of these domains, and, on the other end, the Homo Sacer, or condemned man, who is exiled from society and is defined, by roman law, as a man who can be killed without their killer being charged for homicide. Through these various influences and discussions of sovereignty and death, Agamben seeks to expand Foucault’s biopolitical analysis that politics, while always having had a power over exclusion and death, has now morphed, since the birth of modernity, into something that has power over life.

Before this, Agamben discusses the societies that established political subjects as lives already established within a designation of higher life, bios, that of thought, those that worked to live were treated as outside the political community, whose lives are resigned to the term zoē, referring to all forms of life, otherwise designated as Bare Life. Western politics has typically treated zoē as outside the realm of politics, to make decisions for the political community and exile or condemn those who violate the law were the rights of the sovereign. Agamben argues that modernity constitutes a moment where there was an expansion of politics into the realm of zoē; where it had always designated what was political life and what was excluded into bare life, bare life becomes a site of management that escapes no member of the political community. Foucault establishes this time period in his discussion of the birth of Liberalism in his Lecture series, The Birth of Biopolitics, designating the moment in the 17th through 19th centuries where the management of populations as an economic aspect becomes a major aspect of power. Here, the concern is primarily that of population growth or decline, since these designate the States’ abilities to defend themselves. This continues, for Foucault, in Discipline & Punish and The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: an Introduction, as attempts to understand, through genealogy, how states manage the complacency and ordering of entire populations who, from the 17th century onwards, become a more direct concern for states, as criminals, citizens, and sexual subjects. Agamben finds something that could use further expansion in Foucault’s analysis of the condemned man in Discipline & Punish, in that modernity is not merely about regulation or discipline but still about exclusion; it is not merely that anyone has the possibility of being condemned to maintain control over the entire population, but that any life can be condemned to the point of having no value at all. For Agamben, “In modern biopolitics, sovereign is he who decides on the value or the nonvalue of life as such.” Exclusion extends its reach beyond the domain of an inclusive/exclusive disjunction for a political community and enters the domain of annihilation; it is no longer enough to remove one from the rational political making process or condemn one for opposing the community through crime, there are lives from the moment of their birth that are designated as unworthy of life itself.

It is here that one can bring Facelessness into the political context. Homo Sacer as Faceless is possible only within a political regime that designates that there are lives not worthy of life, not at the level of betrayal of a community but at the level of their biological or ontological existence. It is a life that can not matter, but Agamben is premature to assume that this exists outside of any ethical domain just because it is typically done within legislative or judicial domains. It is ethical precisely because it must be decided and acted on at an individual level; Hitler may have reigned as Sovereign over the biopolitical project of the holocaust, but it may be better to understand him as a figure that represents the centralized figure of sovereignty made diffuse throughout the entire population that contributed to this project. What was sovereignty if not the Germanness, the ableism, the anti-Jewishness that was constituted as life that did matter as opposed to that which could not? We may confront Nazi society, from our retrospective view, as an entire system, but that leaves out all the biopolitical minutia of individual actions: everyone who turned in their neighbors to the local authorities, every guard that decided to enact a little extra cruelty to the prisoners that would be shortly gassed to death, every soldier that made people dig their own graves before shooting them. The designation of what lives did not matter, and which therefore could have anything done to them regardless of the cruelty, may have come from above, but it finds a repetition, it finds an investment at a micropolitical level in each member who enacted the actions that would add up to the death toll we can merely see as a statistic now.

Facelessness designates bare life as an ethical category, a life that could not beg for itself to be murdered instead of just killed in front of the other that confronts it as bare life in need of annihilation. Agamben finishes Homo Sacer by arguing that the camp has now become the regular site of power throughout biopolitical modernity, and everyone gets made into bare life in one way or another. But I wish to venture into how we got to here at a micropolitical level, articulated by Deleuze and Guattari throughout Capitalism & Schizophrenia. How are people brought into systems that designate lives worth nothing more than extermination? How are people able to enact the biopolitical will of modernity sovereignty not merely as a necessity to survive but in the enjoyment of its cruelty? An understanding of a micro-political biopolitical libidinal economy becomes important in answering these questions, but first, I wish to take a detour to further establish the logical existence of facelessness within the system of sense articulated by Deleuze in The Logic of Sense.

Sensical Asense

The reason for this detour is to establish a logic of political/ontological exclusion that exists at the level of the system and any particular unconscious at the same time. Deleuze’s system of sense and non-sense establishes an understanding of a system of signs in very much a similar way that we might understand political sovereignty. Nonsense is not that which is outside of sense, but merely that aspect of the system of sense that has no referent other than itself; its exclusion from being sense gives the possibility for an entire system to become sensical. Sense, as opposed to aspects of language like denotation or manifestations, does not concern truth value or the individual desire of the speaker or writer, but instead brings about the presuppositions necessary for understanding by providing pre-existing referents for each sign being used. Outside of any system of sense exists an absence of sense, asense, that is non-referential.

In this system, we may find great parallels to how sovereignty has been studied and represented above by Agamben and the thinkers that he builds from, but it is here where we may be able to make a larger distinction between the internalized exclusions of the Sovereign and Homo Sacer. Sovereignty, like nonsense, finds no base upon which to found itself: divine right finds no referent under their god, democracy finds no referent under some abstract idea of a people. The Sovereign represents the bringing in of sense, and with a particular form of authority or power, to the entire structure of a political community; they defend the referent of their political power by establishing it as the referent at the base of the entire society.

Asense, on the other hand, has a particular kind of existence from the perspective of the system of sense. The total body of signs that could be designated as asensical should be, theoretically, infinite, but there are particular ones, those that exist as a negation of our system of sense, that are intelligible as asense from inside the system of sense: sharp circles and perfectly round squares, to name a couple of abstract examples. This is the sensical asense that I wish to designate, a form of asense that the system of sense brings into itself by leaving it on the outskirts of itself: a controlled and semi-referential outside. It gains its reference by its exclusion and negation of the entire system of sense. To return to political systems, we find this in the citizen criminal, the terrorist, the enslaved, etc… that are possibilities understood only in their opposition to the existence of the entire system of political sense; this is the basis for Homo Sacer, who has been condemned to bare life and the possibility of annihilation by any member of a society, the foundation on which the faceless is made possible. They are designations that are referential without the sovereignty that includes them as internal to the system; they are thus referenced from entirely outside of themselves. A man in Iraq or Egypt could easily read words in arabic plastered on the signs of businesses and the front covers of books, they are words to them, but to the American audience at large, they find them on the news, in war movies, in videos games as signs that no longer have the autonomy of being words; they are rearticulated to inspire fear and terror, to push off the possibility of becoming sensical within their own system of sense. The Faceless are represented as an impossibility, as a negation to all things within the system of sense.

The Micropolitics of Biopolitical Libidinal Economy

Deleuze and Guattari work together on schizoanalysis to confront not only the quotidian afflictions that were being mistreated by psychoanalysis but particularly tackle, head-on, the affliction that spread like a cancer through the mass of society: fascism. They wish to understand fascism not as an irrational & rare extreme of our rational society, like many of those that initially studied fascism and nazi germany, “No, the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism, and it is this perversion of the desires of the masses that needs to be accounted for.” Fascism, instead, is an ever-present possibility growing in the cracks, infiltrating the assemblages of desire by any means possible, and forming molar structures through the coming together of a mass of micropolitical forces:

“Fascism is inseparable from a proliferation of molecular focuses in interaction , which skip from point to point, before beginning to resonate together in the National Socialist State. Rural fascism and city or neighborhood fascism, youth fascism and war veteran’s fascism, fascism of the Left and fascism of the Right, fascism of the couple, family school, and office.”

It is here, in micropolitics, where we find Deleuze & Guattari’s answer, building on Wilhelm Reich’s, to how the large assemblages of death came together in Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan during the 1920s-40s.

Like a cancer cell, fascism grows, but not in opposition to the full breadth of possibilities of functions that pre-existed the process of cancer; whatever drive that this cancer represents was one that was meant to be moderated within the mass unconscious, but not made its central task. It is a particular overinvestment that makes the possibility for these forces of permitted violence and cruelty to take center stage, but they preexisted this turn because, according to Deleuze & Guattari, “There are no internal drives in desire, only assemblages. Desire is always assembled; it is what the assemblage determines it to be.” Facelessness, which makes fascism possible once it becomes a micropolitical process, is thus an operation to be controlled, used in certain moments by power to justify itself, but it takes over when it gains too much energy. Systems of totalitarian sovereignty wish to use it in regulated manners, keeping the possibility of a molar facelessness found in a fully judicialized or militarized Homo Sacer that only the state or the sovereign is meant to deal with. It works to create this figure in its regular micro-political practices that organize the desire of the masses:

“Each power center is also molecular and exercises its power on a micrological fabric in which it exists only as diffuse, dispersed, geared down, miniaturized, perpetually displaces, acting by fine segmentation, working in detail and in the details of detail. Foucault’s analysis of ‘disciplines’ or micropowers (school, army, factory, hospital, etc.) testifies to these ‘focuses of instability’ where groupings and accumulations confront each other but also confront breakaways and escapes and where inversions occur.”

Each of these institutions reflects a molar operation at the level of micropolitics, creating the citizen in the affirmation of molar sovereignty and the negation of that deemed outside or antagonistic to a socius. The sovereign, as discussed above, must be able to decide who is deserving of life and death and thus seeks to replicate their sovereign decision on such matters into the desires of the people, but this is not the process of mass facelessness that we find in fascism; it is a regulated facelessness that does not become the primary operation of the body of society.

This facet of biopolitical sovereignty is why fascism is an ever-present micropolitical possibility; it is already inscribed as a potentiality in each organ. The sovereign not only needs to be able to define what is an enemy to the consistency of a political community, but, additionally needs to be able to make and act towards them as bare life without backlash. It creates the delinquent student as a figure in the school, the unmurderable enemy in the army, the lazy worker in the factories or offices, the vegetable, the pitiable sick, or insane in the hospitals, and the criminal in the legal system. In each of these figures, we find a reification of lives that matter less or don’t matter, a negative upon which the citizen must define themselves and invest themselves against and away from. This is where the latent possibility of biopolitics is founded within libidinal economy: axes unto which someone must invest themselves, both in what they designate as the field of possibilities and the destruction of what is deemed outside of those possibilities.

Already, through these, are the molar structures prepared to designate the strict possibilities of the face to face interactions: who gets to be designated as a person deserving of moral consideration in a particular action, the delinquent may be condemned judicially for their action because they are not ontologically condemned in their person (they are thus condemned to practices of reform), as well as the possibility of being deemed persons at all. It is this latter consideration that truly details facelessness and the way it spreads like a cancer in fascism. The sovereign needs the entirety of the socius invested in the annihilation of what would negate their sovereignty: the divine-right monarchs negatively organize society around punishing heresy, and the nationalists negatively organize society around destroying enemies of the abstract idea of the people (and thus keeping the purity of the population). These are diffuse throughout society and exist at a micropolitical scale, ready for constant reinvestment into molar powers through quotidian interactions. It is only under this framework of biopolitics that fascism becomes an immanent possibility within a mass micropolitics.

The faceless, the non-relational relation, the nullified infinity, becomes a figure and an operation of molar control where apathy, if not outright mass cruelty, becomes a necessary investment by the entire body of the society. On the news, in the schools, and in the streets, political structures are organized by the ability to designate lives that do not matter before the mere possibility of their existence becomes a political threat. We can not say that the 20th century brought about the first mass fascism, as a micropolitical project, we can already find it in colonization, slavery, and segregation. How many of the Spanish soldiers looked in the eyes of dying and overworked native Americans and felt nothing? Regardless of the importance of de las Casas or Vitoria to the Spanish king’s decrees on economic activity in the Americas, this was a much more present reality that the Spanish colonialists invested themselves in: cruelty towards certain others as normality, then as necessity. It may be most explicitly found in the American South (which may be the first of many models of contemporary mass cruelty), establishing in the economic relations of slavery a non-relational relation with blackness, whose exclusion from political community was just as much a major function of society as their necessity into the economic framework of that society. The early structures of African slavery and European indentured servitude get rearticulated through history into a sort of proto-surveillance state through the racialization and defacialization of blackness. It was in this system that black lives were made into lives that could not matter, the ethical possibility of their existence made into asense, their infinite alterity made into a personal threat to anyone within the political community. This system demands of its political community a constant reassertion and reinvestment into this schema, especially as its foundations began to become further under attack. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 turned a molar project that could not cover every meter of the territory of the country into a micropolitical project where the project of slavery had to be invested in by all in both slave and free states.

Facelessness as a micropolitical investment attempts to argue for one’s own face, one’s own mattering, specifically in contrast to lives that don’t matter. What we meet at a micropolitical and quotidian level that invests in this operation of fascism is the spread of the normalization of cruelty. Fascism, as first a micropolitical formation longer before it is a molar one, operates by habituating cruelty against the faceless as an internal pride. But facelessness, especially when it is not regulated in molar formations, is a paranoiac operation; this is what makes fascism a cancer even to the political body it seeks to create. The designation of facelessness comes with the designation of personal enemy, of that which one must annihilate, but it expands outwards. The slave, the racial underclass, the terrorists are threats to a society that must be maintained as faceless, to enter into ethical relation or to acknowledge them as people with minute & unique lives is a threat to the entire society, so those that aid & abet and then those that sympathize must too become bare lives in need of extermination in the eyes of the entire population. Facelessness spreads until it consumes the whole of society; it begins with easier designators, whether that be creed, race, gender expression, political affiliation, etc…, but spreads out to cover any possibility of ethical consideration in the advocates from within that can not be easily monitored or found. Additionally, these societies begin to have this mass cruelty against those deemed faceless as a libidinal outlet for the entire society, despite being a molar operation, by this point, it is still held together by micropolitical actions in the face-to-face interactions or the blocking off of them. It is merely the beginning of this process that Agamben acknowledges in Homo Sacer by stating that bare life becomes a possibility within everyone in biopolitical modernity. Facelessness slowly takes over a society, inflicting cruelty, violence, and death towards the faceless, which becomes more than a seeming political necessity and becomes a site of enjoyment & pleasure. It is here, with cruelty as the primary immanent possibility, that the study of evil must begin: it is not merely an operation done by states onto people in a top-down manner but people that are blocked off by their quotidian, micropolitical investments from making an ethical relation with a particular other and, in extreme cases, with any other.¹²³⁴⁵⁶⁷⁸

1. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, California Stanford University Press, 1998.

2. Deleuze, Gilles . Logic of Sense. Translated by Charles Stivale and Mark Lester. Columbia University Press, 1990.

3. Deleuze, Gilles , and Félix Guattari. “1933: Micropolitics and Segmentarity.” In A Thousand Plateaus, translated by Brian Massumi, 208–31. University Of Minnesota Press, 2005.

4. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus : Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen Lane. New York: Penguin, 2009.

5. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon Books, 1975.

6. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978 - 1979. 1978. Reprint, New York, Ny Picador, 2008.

7. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Volume I: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. Vol. 1. New York: Vintage Books, 1978.

8. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1969.