Seeing our face. Reflections on Identity, Art, Language

Abstract

The face, the voice, the space that our body occupies are obscure to ourselves just like the experience of our birth. From Psychoanalysis to Phenomenology, from Freud to Merleau-Ponty, through Simmel, Ortega y Gasset and Zambrano, we learn that self-perception - the inward eye - is an experience that encompasses the styles of the verbal and visual (poetic and pictorial) representations, while showing and defending the intimacy, inside and outside the ego. Thanks to its metaphoric essence, the word possess the ability to show itself as a figure, imago. Metaphor is the facet of language. The word takes shape and significance thanks to a fluctuation between subtraction, distance (language is never straightforward), will of adherence and belonging, while making itself visible and becoming the maternal facet of language.