Il volto come filtro. Dallo "sfiguramento" alla visible difference

The article presents a first semiotic mapping of “disfigurement”. It reconstructs its lexical semantics, including the alternative terminology that goes beyond pejorative stances and is labeled “visible difference”. The media representation seems unable to escape the chain of associations in which “ugly” is a synonym for “bad” or at best “negative”. “Disfigurement”, however, can be understood as a philosophical category that lends itself to an examination of the interplay between art and religion in the late twentieth century: only an “authentic postmodernism” would be able to enact the contemporary tension towards an Absolute which can only be represented as a ghostly and elusive disfigurement. The face, traditionally an invisible filter defining personhood and identity in Western thought, when disfigured, reveals the ideological overlay of these concepts. The conservative and authoritarian nature of the face (as an index of the form of life that lies beneath and is reduced to it) forces those who cannot or will not base everything on the face to imagine, at the risk of being dehumanized, alternatives for proxy identity expression that can break away from the biological face and the body perceived as a demarcated realm.