Becoming Unrecognisable
I remember staying up through the night to watch CNN's live coverage of Yitzhak Rabin's burial service and how it was a speech given by his granddaughter at that event which brought me closest to the significance of his death.i The granddaughter explained to the world watching that the memorialising images of Rabin's face was not the face she knew. This was not her grandfather we saw on the screen. On the contrary, in death Rabin was, for her, unrecognisable - 'a smile that is no longer'. While Western news services desperately tried to sustain Rabin's recognisability, to allow viewers to continue to see him 'as he was' - indeed, to allow the dead to speak again through his last public words uttered at a peace rally only minutes before he was killed - it was also reported that British actor, Paul Eddington, best known for roles he played in BBC (UK) comedies Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister, died of a rare skin cancer which left him 'faceless' and 'unrecognisable'. While I make no attempt now to compare these disparate stories, it was the tension produced in the strangeness of these two faces coming together, back to back, as they did in many of the Australian television news broadcasts, that got me thinking in a new way about the face and death and the problems of recognition and recognisability.ii
What I saw that night after Rabin's assassination as I was switching between various news services was that just as reports on Rabin sought to restore his face in death, television news tried equally hard to smooth over the shock of Eddington's facelessness in life. For Rabin's granddaughter, the mass circulation of her grandfather's image was unbearable. Addressing her dead grandfather, she cried: 'The television does not stop transmitting your picture'. Yet, it was not these pictures that news services identified as potentially 'disturbing' but the image of Paul Eddington's apparent facelessness. In this chapter, I explore what it means to look directly into Eddington's face, to look in the way television advised us not to. For as with the strange mix of tenses in Rabin's granddaughter's speech, this direct view of the spectacular loss of Eddington's well-known face shatters the illusion of eternal sameness - the almost sacred conception in Western cultures of a unitary, transcendent self. And as I will show, to see through this particular veil is to look in the way that Maurice Blanchot suggests Orpheus did when he 'turned back': 'to look into the night at what the night is concealing - the other night, concealment which becomes visible'.iii Or, in this case, to look into the face at what the face normally conceals - 'the blinding non-existence of death', which our hearts, as Schopenhauer once said, tell us cannot possibly be true.iv
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