In the Absence of the Face

Social Research, Spring, 2000 by Hamid Dabashi

The Qur'an conceals what cannot be seen and in bright day light calls it the Unseen, and yet calls that act of concealment Revelation.

In Revelation, the return of the repressed is repressed.

Thus at the very commencement of the Faith we move from the absence of the Sign of the Face unto the presence of the Name of the Unseen, towards the Sacred site of the Signature, the articulation of the Signifier, "In the Name," and we begin: "In the Name of Allah, the Beneficent, the, Merciful." The Qur'an begins with a fait accompli, "In the Name," and then moves to deliver. In the act of that delivery dwells the inhibition of Seeing, because the Sign is absent, and the Name, as Signifier, has replaced it. Since the Qur'anic Unseen, on Whom the entire Sacred certitude is predicated, cannot be seen, then the whole act of seeing is repressed. But since the most markedly identifiable site of seeing is the Face, then the very act of Faith is predicated on the constitutional impossibility of seeing, or showing, the Face of the Unseen. We cannot show because It, the Unseen, cannot be seen. We are not allowed to see because the Unseen cannot be shown. From the sur-Face site of the Absent Face we are then hermeneutically diverted towards the meaning of the Name. The conclusion is foregone: Since the Face of the Unseen cannot be seen, then no figural representation is possible precisely because no Face can be represented. Since we cannot see the Unseen, then seeing of no Face is permitted. The very act of seeing is suspect because every time we see a face we are reminded of the Face that cannot be seen. To forget that the Unseen, the promissory Citation of the Re-Citation, cannot be seen, we are not to be reminded of seeing.

Qur'anic Re-Citation is one massive act of hermeneutically pregnant amnesia.

The amnesia is made possible not by political imposition but by biological implication. We are implicated in the collective act of amnesia because the absence of the Face of the Unseen is replicated in our own inability to see our own Faces--mirrors not-withstanding.(3) The thing in the mirror is not the Face. It is always-already a Signifier, mutated by the identity of the person we recognize, and never the sign we behold. Because we cannot see our own Faces, we are implicated and complacent in the violent mutation of the meaning-less Sign into the meaning-full Signifier. We quell the anxiety of not being able to see our own Faces as Sign by aiding and abetting in the colossal mutation of all Signs into Signifiers--in "believing in the Unseen."

The result is simple: In the absence of the Face of the Unseen, the Sign is collapsed, significantly mutated, into the Signifier, so that the Signifier can point to the Signified, and so that the whole gambit can implicate a Transcendental Signified Who can in turn hold the whole game together. And that is the origin of the Qur'anic, and with that the Islamic, hermeneutics. The Islamic hermeneutics is categorically predicated on a constitutional mistrust of the Face-value, of the sur-Face meaning, and the reversal trust in the promises of the Hidden, in the Unseen, in that which is to be dis-covered, un-veiled. And that is the origin of the very idea of hermeneutics, of extracting the Hidden meaning: The Signifier pointing to so many potentially Hidden Signifieds that successfully represses its own permutation of the Sign, of having itself been significantly mutated from a Face Unseen, a Sign stolen. The hermeneutic goose-chase successfully conceals the verbal mutation of the word "goose" from the fat bird itself.