The Person (Eclipsed)

 

The Latin Persona originally meant mask, the etymology of which derives from the ancestor’s mask of wax that would hang in the atrium of patrician families homes in Rome, thus marking an individual's belonging to a gens – a word that implies equally heredity and continuity of persons - and also coming to represent an individual's public 'personality' or political standing as a free man in general. The struggle for recognition is thus ultimately the struggle for a mask, a public face, behind which we mistakenly assume is the "real" or at least private person. In truth this distinction is constitutive of personhood per se, without which we are just an accumulation of facts.

Today’s anxiety and conflict ridden culture of identity politics is played out amid an epoch defining collapse in this distinction. Until the age of industrialisation and mass democracy, to be a non-person lacked the abyssal connotations associated with it today, where such a status is almost a fate worse than death, and is synonymous with slavery or destitution of the most extreme kind. Whereas in the Middle-Ages a non-person in the political sense could even be said to possess a kind of freedom which has almost entirely disappeared from the modern world, since without the burden to have a public – which is to say a political – face, they would be left to a solely private existence in the economic and moral sphere. 

Not so for the subjects of contemporary Western culture for whom even the lowest are expected to piece together for themselves a public mask from out of the whirlwind of possible identities and cultural accoutrements. Indeed, modern identity is so fraught precisely because it lacks the constitutive split which personhood formerly contained. Now, not only are we meant to deny our public self as having such a mask like quality, but we are also - by means of the ubiquity of invasive digital technologies – denied any private realm or possible realm of private freedom independent from public obligations, free from the need to permanently ‘show face’.

Unlike in ancient times when the impossibility of ever fully identifying with one’s mask was bound up with the tension and efficacy of public representation, today one fears more than anything else ‘letting the mask slip’. What could be revealed by such a slip? Surely not the humble truth of the private person; the one who goes about their humdrum existence, plagued by the petty irritations and misfortunes we all suffer in order to survive. Since such a difference is denied by modern identity the only revelation such a slip could cause is that of revealing another mask, a more primordial or fundamental mask; the true mask perhaps, to which can be attributed the person’s true intentions. 

Modern identity thus retains a strong notion of univocity or totality within it, the downside of which is this deep suspicion of private life, of opacity, of shadowy corners where intentions and motivations are not entirely illuminated. Think of the public opprobrium directed at celebrities when they are revealed to be rather different than the on screen characters they play; a contemporary stupidity that stands in stark contrast to the artistic representations of actors from the ancient world, sitting in contemplation of their masks and the roles they choose to play. For us Moderns the world behind the mask - and even more so, behind the eyes - is a source of nightmare fuel. 

That this sphere of life, this realm of non-personal freedom, is perhaps the wellspring of our differentiating power – our radical potential as human beings to create for ourselves – means that the rise of identity and the corresponding eclipse of personhood (and character, but that’s another story), is also a sad tale of the overthrow of human freedom. Woe to thee who is secure in their identity, for they will never have the joy of playing a role well. And woe to thee who are insecure, desperately grasping at the vast menu on offer and finding nothing that seems to fit. And why should it fit? Since we are always other to ourselves, always at the mercy of that quantum of doubt; our own words sound like they are only being spoken through us, and we mutely acknowledge the certainty that there can be no certainty. The only way out of this impasse is to retain for ourselves, as an ethos, the radical potentiality that private life possesses. The withdraw from the public square into otium, into the boundless Night of interior life can be as liberatory as any mass mobilisation or protest movement. Guard it jealously! Or as Hegel puts it:

“The human being is this Night, this empty nothing which contains everything in its simplicity – a wealth of infinitely many representations, images, none of which occur to it directly, and none of which are not present. […] We see this Night when we look a human being in the eye, looking into a Night which turns terrifying. [For from his eyes] the night of the world hangs out toward us”.

By separating ourselves from each other with screens we neutralise this revelation, this Night that confronts us through the gaze. And in doing so we forget our own comforting darkness, and thus further accelerate the death of personhood.