Plaidoyer pour un prosopocène: Sémio-éthique du visage

The medical masks that have emerged as a device to contrast the contagion of COVID-19 heavily affect the presentation and perception of the face, radically altering its phenomenology and semiotics, and thwarting its singularity. The global cultural production has often reacted to these unprecedented constraints, emphasizing the ethical importance of the face’s wholeness and singularity against any attempt at fragmentation, segmentation, and classification. The article proposes a general semiotic reading of the cultural tendencies which, in contemporary societies, operate, on the contrary, towards a reification of the face, and which the COVID-19 pandemic has only accentuated. The article focuses, in particular, on the new techniques of automatic processing of facial images, whose rhetoric of technological achievement it debunks. In conclusion, the article suggests that the protection and liberation of the face as a bulwark of humanity can only be achieved by envisioning a new era called the “Prosopocene”, which would guarantee an inalienable face to every form of life against any human or automatic de-figuration.