The Face of Immortality: Physiognomy and Criticism (SUNY series, Intersections: Philosophy and Critical Theory) - Tapa dura

"Stimilli develops new and stimulating interpretations of the once-influential discourse and imagery of physiognomy and the face in the Western tradition. Physiognomy has been a much-debated subject in cultural and literary studies in the past ten years; the ethical dimension in Levinas and Derrida is currently the subject of an intense debate. Bringing these two topics together is certainly of great interest for literary scholars as well as for those interested in philosophy."

The literature on physiognomy--the art of studying a person's outward appearance, especially the face, in order to determine character and intelligence--has flourished in recent years in the wake of renewed scholarly interest in the history and politics of the body. Virtually no attention, however, has been devoted to the vocabulary and rhetoric of physiognomy. The Face of Immortality addresses this gap, arguing that the trend in Western culture has been to obliterate the face, which is manifested in criticism as a disregard for the letter.

Denouncing this trend, Davide Stimilli draws on Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian, English, and German sources in order to explore the terminology and historical development of physiognomy. Stimilli takes physiognomy to be the resistance to such an obliteration of the face, and argues that it offers a model for a theory of reading that does not discount the letter as inessential. Elaborating on the work of Walter Benjamin, he defines the task of physiognomical criticism as transliteration (which preserves the letter) rather than translation (which obliterates it). The Face of Immortality is meant to exemplify the method and test the reach of such a criticism, which aims at mediating between philology and philosophy, between literal and allegorical modes of interpretation.