Re-Introducing Identity, Prosthetics, (and Myself)
More than fifteen years ago, University of Texas Press published my book, Making Faces, Playing God: Identity and the Art of Transformation Makeup. It was a hybrid project and an odd one. I was motivated by a number of themes that had haunted me in my role as a philosophy writer and teacher. One was the role of recognizability in gluing our social lives together. If we each could change appearance radically at will, if we each had multiple clones, if we did not have (for the most part) unique faces, most aspects of life would be impossible. A second theme spun off the first and was inspired by an anthropologist's claim that societies are even more likely to have masks than weapons, that the impetus behind carnival and Halloween is universal. The idean is that deep, unacknowledged emotions of fear and desire underlie the fantasy of anonymity, of not being recognized. We fear the disruption of losing our place with others, but we lust ...