Face Politics By Jenny Edkins (New York: Routledge, 2015. 230 pages.)

Abstract

Over the last decade, public discourse in Europe and North America has been
overwhelmingly in favor of banning the face veil (niqab). Politicians like Jack
Straw in the UK or John Charest in Québec have commented on its putative
hindrance to community integration due to its covering of the face. So a book
entitled Face Politics would seem to offer some insights into this anti-niqab
dynamic. A quick perusal of the index for “niqab,” “Islam,” and “Muslim
women,” however, comes up unexpectedly empty. What, then, is “face politics” and how can an academic discussion about the “face” not mention niqab, arguably
one of the most burning issues of “face politics” this century?
The book is a profound, intellectually challenging, sometimes dense, and
yet empathetic and beautifully written exploration of how contemporary western
politics is predicated around individuality and the separatedness of being,
signified by the idea of the face as a “window onto the [individual’s] soul” (p.
165). Because she believes that “a politics that makes the face is a politics that
produces the person as an object” (p.7), the author wishes to propose a different
concept of the face, that of a mask hiding our inseparable connectedness, and
concludes that such an alternative would lead to a profoundly different, and
better, political society, one symbolized by the concept of the tango. Indeed,
the tagline on the dedication page is “If the face is a politics, dismantling the
face is also a politics,” from French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst
Félix Guattari’s 1980 book A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia ...