The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, writing after the Second World War, speaks of the face as a surface that signals a beyond—a world, or worlds—from which the other emerges. The face has the potential to neutralize in an antagonist the impulse to kill. It humanizes, which is to say it reveals the parts of the human being that would be disgraceful to annihilate. This phenomenology, over which German fascism and its many European accomplices cast a long shadow, obviously can’t be read with total literalness; the millions of casualties of those forces all had faces, in many cases vividly present to their murderers. But the pandemic gives it a fresh and compelling sense. States and societies everywhere drop or never implement in the first place so relatively simple a public health intervention as universal masking with N95s or better, bowing to pressure from capital and layers of the population who think concealment of the face harms them and, especially, damages their children. Smiles are back. Who wouldn’t want that? Did you know that cats smile with their eyes only? The slow blink, the squint. Relaxed. A cat “smiling” with its mouth is gathering pheromonal information, maybe issuing a threat. Back off: I have teeth. I admit I do feel a stranger is less likely to want to kill me if my face is maskless, if I risk vascular illness with potentially lifelong, life-shortening consequences for the sake of perpetuating the fiction that “normal” times have returned. Genuine connection also does sometimes seem more possible when full faces meet. Intimacy. The face is powerful. But it’s strange…in selfies lately that I thought I’d smiled for, my mouth is so often tense, flat. This can perhaps be explained largely by the fact that I’m autistic and lack facial proprioception, have no reliable idea how the way I move my face appears to others. But you can tell I was having an okay day when the photo was taken if you pay attention to my eyes. If they’re relaxed enough to almost close a little.
Daniel Sarah Karasik’s most recent book is the poetry collection Plenitude (Book*hug Press). They are the managing editor of Midnight Sun, a magazine of socialist strategy, analysis, and culture. “Smile” is excerpted from their manuscript-in-progress Sing Me Awake, a collection of micro-essays and prose-poemy fragments about the communist horizon and the organizational vehicles, actual and potential, that might carry us towards it.