In the Absence of the Face

Social Research, Spring, 2000 by Hamid Dabashi

The implication of this hermeneutic concealment of the Face in the realm of the Aesthetics is quite evident. Painting is faulted because every time we see something (on its sur-Face) we are reminded that the Re-Cited Unseen cannot be re-Sighted and seen, that the Unseen is constitutionally denied the most visible, and thus the ultimate, testimonial of Existence. Visuality is denied the Unseen: The Re-Cited can force or feign forgetting but can never forget that. In the Islamic aesthetics, then, it is not so much the painting which is prohibited as the painted shunned. The painted points to the sur-Face and the sur-Face to the Face, and because we cannot see the Face of the Unseen, the defining occasion of the Re-Cited as Revelation, we should then not look at any Face, re-Sight any Sight, because the mere visibility of every Face reminds us of the absence of the One Face, the Face of the Unseen, we cannot, and can never, see. Every Face is reminiscent of what the Re-Cited must forget. And we, Face-less to ourselves, are accomplices, complacent in the act.

The story of the Qur'anic Revelation as Re-Citation, predicated on the Biblical that it assumes and resumes, is one elaborate account of a movement from the Semiotics of the evident sur-Face and toward the Hermeneutics of the promised Hidden, away from the Aesthetics of the Seen.

2. The Return of the Repressed

Because the Unseen cannot be seen it has a particular penchant for being seen.

   Unto Allah belong the East and the West, and whithersoever ye turn, there
   is Allah's Countenance. Lo! Allah is All-Embracing, All-Knowing.

   -- The Qur'an 2:115

"[A]nd whithersoever ye turn, there is Allah's Countenance" (fa-aynama Tuvallu fa-thamma wajhu Allah) places the Face--Wajh --of the Unseen on everything, East and West, the geographical expansion of being, and this by way of de-Facing everything by surfacing the Unseen on everything. The Face of the Unseen de-Faces everything in order to see and show itself on the sur-Face of everything. Now that we cannot see the Unseen, the Unseen proclaims Itself as visible everywhere, by de-Facing everything. But even this "seeing" of the Face of the Unseen is not an always-already fait accompli. It cannot be seen ex nihilio: "... And whatsoever good thing ye spend, it is for yourself, when ye spend not save in search of Allah's Countenance...." (The Qur'an 2:272) Mission im/possible: And there is the rub where the Face of things actually seen is effectively de-Signed back and away from the Named and unto the presumption of a Sign, a pseudo-Sign. The emerging Sign Language is circular, no longer unidirectional, from the Sign unto the Signifier and on to the Transcendental Signified. If everywhere we turn and everything we do is to see the Face of the Unseen, then the knowability of the Named Signifieds--door, river, pencil, justice--is reversed back to the unname-able Sign, the pseudo-Sign, concealing the fact that the Unseen can really not be seen, by arguing that everything we actually do see is Its Face. When the Face of things actually seen is effectively de-Signed, a pseudo-Sign is generated which now in turn lends legitimacy to the implicated Transcendental Signified that the originary mutation of the visible Sign into the Signifier had occasioned. The Re-Citation thus comes at the Sign from two directions: Once by mutating it into a Signifier on the Site of the Sacred Signature and once by sur-Facing the Transcendental Signified that this signature generates on the sur-Face of all Signs, de-Signing them, and thus attributing the status of a Sign (a pseudo-Sign) to the Transcendental Signified. The actual Sign, the Face of the pagan idol observed, is metaphysically cornered.