What’s so Special About Faces? Visages at the Crossroad Between Philosophy, Semiotics and Cognition

From the very beginning of the ERC Project FACETS, which supports the publication of this issue (the editors, Marco Viola and Massimo Leone, are FACETS’ post-doctoral researcher and PI, respectively), it has been immediately clear that the central object of the project’s research — variously named, in different languages, with the quasi-synonyms “face”, “visage”, “countenance”, etc. — was and would continue to be a huge success, both in the project’s main discipline, that is, semiotics, and in those that were intertwined with it in the project’s highly interdisciplinary program of research. This success, which has allowed FACETS to organize conferences, publish special issues of journals, and even launch a new series of books on the subject, was further accentuated with the advent of the pandemic, whose dramatic developments considerably thematized the face, in terms of both the obligation to cover it to defend it against the virus, and the need to digitize it to continue its social existence. To what do we owe the success of the face? An immediate answer might be the following: the face is so central to the lives of both individuals and societies that it is present like a rhizome with very deep and extremely ramified roots not only in individual psychologies but also in societies, so that almost everything, in the mental dimension as well as in the cultural one, can be related to the face. One of the realizations that have emerged from editing this special issue of the journal presented here, however, is that this individual and social centrality of the face alone cannot explain its academic success. Other objects of study are equally present in the lives of individuals and societies, but for this reason they do not attract such intense, multifaceted, prolonged, and fervent disciplinary efforts. Perhaps then the explanation is to be found elsewhere. In the field of art theory, which has also been highly concerned with the face, Hubert Damisch and others have begun to speak of “theoretical objects”, i.e., those objects that, while on the one hand are figures of representation, on the other hand become lumps around which theoretical elaborations coagulate, not only concerning the object in question but the entire field of art theory. Clouds, for instance, so elegantly studied by Damisch (1972), may appear an iconographic subject among the many represented in the history of art, even more so because they often remain in the background, embellishing the skies that surround the real subjects of representation, such as Madonnas, saints, and stories of Christianity. And yet, looking at those clouds with different eyes, one can discern in them a whole development of art history according to new theoretical coordinates, which radically change the general approach of the discipline.