Visages, visagéité, facial recognition symposium

Where does the human body begin, Pierre Fedida asked in 2000. Through the orifices, through the epidermis, through this or that limb, through the head? The individual is a continuum where bottom and top, inside and outside, surface and depth feed into each other. And yet, within this continuum, one element emerges as the primary signature of the human body: the face. Its apparent superficiality - and (sometimes forbidden) nudity - can be seen (the etymology of face-visum-video indicates this). Its anteriority in the homo erectus makes it a "face" (as opposed to the "tails" side, which indicates its reverse). Being visible, being up, being in front: this is what will give the face its weight in its metaphysical power.

Where to designate and establish the human body? If, in an iconoclastic gesture Georges Bataille speaks of the big toe, if Nietzche starts from the stomach, if Artaud wants a body without organs, it is to overturn an axiological system, a political program and a metaphysics that can be heard even in the language that pursues the overvalorization of the head: political greatness ("capital"), power ("to be at the head of"), religious power (holy "Face")... In the pneumatological fantasy through which religions have been established (the breath, the utterance of a Christian Word, but also Egyptian, but also Greek with Zeus etc.), the breath of life is also the breath of life.), the breath of life is also the exhalation of breath from the interior of the alveoli of the lungs, through the mouth. The gods of many religions and mythologies can be composite, with multiple attributes. What they have in common, however, is a head, which is the locus of world creation and truth.

Where to identify the human body? Some computers can be opened with a fingerprint. Some Hollywood action movies have made dreams come true with iris recognition (and the sci-fi dream has come true). The history of mankind is rich in the means deployed to identify bodies, to separate the bad from the good, to prioritize and select them. From caricatures and drawings, then photographs superimposing more or less catastrophic ideologies on the images (from the physiognomy of ancient centuries, evolving since the 19th century towards typologies governed by racist aims), to the ignominy of the delirious taxonomies of the Nazis. Against the various projects that seek to reduce the individual to a caste, a gender, a status, Michel Foucault said he would refuse (allegorically) the identity card. Artificial intelligence is currently opening up a new way of identifying bodies, through facial recognition. This is undoubtedly one of the major ethical challenges facing our society and the sciences. It seeks to identify possible hostages, and can be used to search for victims of natural disasters. If it hadn't arrived too late, it could also have been used to recognize certain student faces in a certain square in a certain country, and to prolong the manhunt for those bodies that were not immediately crushed. Good customs and bad customs should undoubtedly be mapped out...

These meetings were conceived from a (happy?) coincidence: on the one hand, there's the ethical (and deontological) question that arises for scientists working particularly on artificial intelligence, one of the practical actualizations of which is facial recognition. On the other hand, we have Emmanuel Levinas's reinvention of ethics in the second half of the twentieth century, based on the concept of visageness. In both cases, the face is the privileged site for the concentration of scientific and metaphysical efforts. It is this place that these encounters wish to circumscribe, on the terrains of applied sciences, sciences of the aesthetic sphere, linguistic sciences, social sciences and so on.