Catalogare volti: Dalla semantica della categorizzazione facciale alla pragmatica del biopotere

The paper embarks on a Parisian stroll through the 10th arrondissement, tracing the paths of Rue Bichat and Rue Alibert surrounding the Hôpital Saint-Louis. It sets out to reconstruct a genealogy of a diagram and a mode of conceptualization, articulation, and semiotic categorization. The exploration aims to address several crucial questions. When and under what intellectual circumstances does the arborescent diagram — an extensively studied tool in philosophy, logic, and semiotics, as exemplified by Umberto Eco’s work — emerge as a knowledge instrument in the natural sciences, particularly in biology? How does it intersect with the theory of evolution? Furthermore, when does its application transition from the natural sciences to medicine, specifically to the domain concerning the body’s surface — histology or tissue science, and subsequently dermatology? What connections can be discerned between the Enlightenment-era tree diagrams of dermatology and Cesare Lombroso’s physiognomic theory, which was closely entwined with (pseudo)positivist racism? What attributes of the tree diagram and its manipulation traverse the realms of logic to criminal anthropology?