Furio Semerari, Expression and responsibility. Face, eyes, voice and body

 

Life, as the aggregate of human and non-human beings’ relations with the world in the form of needs, desires, sentiments, intentions and plans, must necessarily be expressed or externalized. In the case of man, his face, his eyes, his voice and his body have a truthful value when it comes to communicating who he actually is (what he really thinks, feels, desires, etc.), that is very different from and much more reliable than his words, his behaviors and his conscious actions, on account of the fact that the former have such a close tie with the most deep-rooted and deeply-ingrained strata of the human being. Since they are particularly revealing of his real identity, man finds himself faced with the problem of a responsibility for what he shows of himself to others through his face, his eyes, his voice and his body, and what other beings, in a variously positive or negative sense, can influence.

 

Published on: Poetics of gesture, N. 19 New Series – Year X 2014