In the Absence of the Face

Abstract

My principal concern during the last chapter was to mark the substantive evidence of the transmutation of the body into a substitutional representation of the territorial polity it is forced to represent. I have insisted on this forced mutation of the defiant sign of the body into the reluctant signifier of something that it quintessentially is not—the strapping of its bones and banalities to the machinery of some purposeful meaning—in order to suggest and sustain the dialectical force that keeps the suicidal body on the porous borderlines between its material undecidability and its mimetic metamorphosis into something else. In the following chapter, I dwell on an inaugural moment of the Qur’anic revelation when, I propose, the defiant signs put up an active resistance to their doctrinal legislation into a revelatory language and then a world religion. I have opted to work through Qur’anic passages that emphasize the primacy of the word against the principality of the vision in order to investigate how the Qur’anic repressed in effect returns narratively to haunt its own text. I believe that by doing so I have by serendipity detected the central tension that animates the revelatory resonances of the Islamic sacred text.