1 An Existential Phenomenology of the Face: Sketching Out Enfaced Consciousness and Facial Alienation

Beginning on the precipice of World War II, She Came to Stay follows a tormented love triangle between theater maven Pierre, his long-term girlfriend Françoise, and her younger, perpetually dissatisfied friend, Xavière. As foreshadowed by the epigraph attributed to G.F.W. Hegel (“Each conscience seeks the death of the other”), the novel is a fictional exploration of the problem of other consciousnesses.⁷ In his review of She Came to Stay, Merleau-Ponty describes the problem of other consciousnesses as the phenomenon wherein

[i]t is I who bring into being this world which seemed to exist without me, to surround and surpass me. I am therefore a consciousness, immediately present to the world, and nothing can claim to exist without somehow being caught in the web of my experience. […]

If another person exists, if he too is a consciousness, then I must consent to be for him only a finite object, determined, visible at a certain place in the world. If he is consciousness, I must cease to be consciousness.⁸

The result of this antagonistic relation between consciousnesses is that “we try to subdue the disquieting existence of others” through any means necessary by reducing subjects (persons) to objects (things).⁹

In her pursuit of thematizing a robustly philosophical existentialist ethics, Beauvoir’s preoccupation with the ambiguity that emerges from the tension between existence as subjective and intersubjective can be taken as another formulation of the Hegelian problem of other consciousnesses. According to Stacy Keltner, ambiguity, in the Beauvoirian sense, “signals the tension between seemingly opposing experiences of the self as both a free subject and an object for others,” composed of “three essential moments: the existent’s experience of itself in the world; its fundamental ethical relation to others; and the temporal unity of existence between past, present, and future.”¹⁰ In The Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir writes that “[t]his privilege, which he alone possesses, of being a sovereign and unique subject amidst a universe of objects, is what he shares with all his fellow-men. In turn an object for others, he is nothing more than an individual in the collectivity on which he depends.”¹¹ In an attempt to overcome traditional philosophical dualisms, Beauvoir expounds a notion of (inter)subjectivity that, in Claudia Card’s words, “is not that of a subject in or even related to an object but, rather, a ‘subject’ (consciousness) who is at the same time an ‘object,’ an incarnated subject, embodied consciousness, a chooser who is also and at the same time at the mercy of what lies beyond its control.”¹² The plot of She Came to Stay is largely motivated by the characters’ experiences of this ambiguity, as each one in their own way reacts to their existence as “a being who is, on [the] one hand, conscious, a choosing subject, an agent, and on the other hand (at the same time), an object of perception (both others’ perceptions and one’s own).”¹³

It is important to note that this Hegelian-inflected sense of consciousness or subjectivity is “neither a thing nor an inner, emotional world; it is, rather, our way of being in the world,” which is necessarily affected by the fact of the physical body.¹⁴ As a result, She Came to Stay actually takes up the more specific problem of other embodied consciousnesses, since “[i]t is as embodied perceivers that we experience the world and it is as embodied perceivers that we discover the presence of the other and the necessary relationship that exists between us.”¹⁵ Beauvoir explicitly articulates her phenomenological commitments to an embodied notion of consciousness later in The Second Sex, writing that “in the position I adopt—that of Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty—that if the body is not a thing it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and the outline for our projects.”¹⁶ Expressing a clear affinity with Merleau-Ponty in particular, Beauvoir believed that, as Toril Moi puts it, “the body is our perspective on the world, and at the same time that body is engaged in a dialectical interaction with its surroundings.”¹⁷ Thus, “[w]hen Beauvoir writes that the body is not a thing, but a situation, she means that the body-in-the-world that we are, is an embodied intentional relationship to the world.”¹⁸ This understanding of embodied consciousness is a central philosophical tenet of She Came to Stay, in which “each human body [is represented as] an integrated system of perceptual powers, which include its consciousness, [which is] uniquely located in physical space.”¹⁹

Beauvoir’s sense of embodied consciousness in She Came to Stay and her subsequent philosophical writings is a progression in phenomenological thought with origins in Edmund Husserl’s concept of the living body in Ideas II.²⁰ Sara Heinämaa notes that, as embodied, conscious experience “does not appear as part of the physical body. Nor do we see it beside the body. Nor is it inside or above the body. Instead, it appears as a reality belonging (gehören) to the body.”²¹ The living body, in this paradigm, is “a specific kind of material reality, because it is the meeting point of the physical and the psychical, a turning point (Umschlagspunkt) from one to the other.”²² This account opens up opportunities to explore the existential meaning of embodiment in a manner that extends beyond the mere empiricist, scientific accounts that take the human body as a mere object.²³ Taking up this line of inquiry, Merleau-Ponty maintains that the body co-constitutes one’s conscious, subjective experience of the world, decisively asserting that “he is his body and his body is the power for a certain world.”²⁴ He later states, “Thus, I am my body, at least to the extent that I have an acquisition, and reciprocally my body is something like a natural subject, or a provisional sketch of my total being.”²⁵

And yet the relationship between one’s subjectivity and one’s body can be exceedingly more complex than Merleau-Ponty initially lets on. As Beauvoir points out later in The Second Sex, that is often the case for women. Thematizing her notion of bodily alienation, Beauvoir meticulously demonstrates how women under patriarchy are socialized to treat their own bodies as objects (rather than as their subjective means through existing in-the-world). Responding directly to Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir writes in The Second Sex that “woman is her body as man is his, but her body is something other than her.”²⁶ Unlike man’s, woman’s body is often lived as an object that feels external to her and over which she feels little control. Under patriarchy, to be woman is to be denied a unified experience of one’s body and self.²⁷ The relationship between woman and her body is often one of alienation.

I want to go one step further than the existing literature and argue that in She Came to Stay—since consciousness frequently apperceives and is apperceived through the face—there is an exploration of an even narrower problem of other enfaced consciousnesses. Throughout the text, Beauvoir gives the impression that the face is an important site of embodied conscious experience, often discussing the physical appearance and existential meaning of characters’ faces. This tendency of Beauvoir’s reflects broader cultural significations of the face as the body part that encapsulates one’s unique subjectivity; it is what makes each existent distinct from all the others. In She Came to Stay, consciousness is lived through the face, a phenomenon that I refer to as enfaced consciousness. Conceptually, enfaced consciousness does not insist on a radical separation of the face from the rest of the body but instead describes another aspect of embodied experience that can be, but is not necessarily, primary to the traditional concept of embodied experience, which posits the body as a unity. I say “primary” because, as shown in She Came to Stay, there are times when the face is—descriptively speaking—the most relevant and/or salient body part, coming to the perceptual fore amid the background of the whole body. Although, as the novel itself and other works of existential phenomenology demonstrate, this is not always the case.

The language of enfaced consciousness serves as a linguistic tool to ground my discussion of a facet of embodied existence that tends to be overlooked: the face itself cannot be a direct, unmediated object of experience. One can directly apprehend one’s own arms and legs, but not one’s own face. How does this physiological fact shape one’s situation as a being-in-the-world? What does it mean to have one’s subjecthood encapsulated by a face that only others can see directly? Is the face, then, necessarily always lived for-others? In what ways might it be possible to live the face for-itself? These questions prompt me to introduce the language of facial alienation, which refers to the experience of feeling and/or being estranged from one’s own face as though it were an external object, and simultaneously from oneself, since the self is thought to manifest in the face. Alienated from oneself in this way, one becomes destabilized or unanchored in the world into which one is thrown. Located on such uneven ground, how does one act? How does one come to be in the world?

2 Françoise’s Face: Enfaced Consciousness and Facial Alienation in She Came to Stay

As early as the first chapter of She Came to Stay, Beauvoir alludes to an understanding of the face as critical to the relationship between two consciousnesses:

“It’s almost impossible to believe that other people are conscious beings, aware of their own inward feelings, as we ourselves are aware of ours,” said Françoise. “To me, it’s terrifying, especially when you begin to feel that you’re nothing more than a figment of someone else’s mind.” […]

“To me their thoughts are exactly like their words and their faces: objects in my own world.”²⁸

In this opening exchange with Gerbert, Françoise admits that she struggles to view other people as having rich inner subjective experiences in the same way that she does. When confronted with evidence (or the possibility thereof) that others are indeed conscious beings, Françoise is scared, threatened. She realizes that she is vulnerable, a being thrown into the world, and lacks complete control over others’ experience of her. In response, Françoise attempts to objectify others, in hopes of dominating them through reducing them—in “their words and their faces”—to mere objects that exist solely for her.²⁹ One of the ways that Françoise enacts this objectification is to engage in a form of bad faith by acting as though she and she alone exists as a pure, disembodied consciousness, an illusion in which she constitutes the world by herself for herself, unencumbered by the usual burden of intercorporeal intersubjectivity.³⁰

The narrator reveals in the novel’s second chapter how this bad faith tendency affects Françoise’s relationship to her face in particular. Françoise is described as “not beautiful, yet she was quite pleased with her face. Whenever she caught a glimpse of it in a mirror, she always felt a pleasant surprise.”³¹ In seeing her face’s reflection, Françoise recognizes herself as an independent subject and an object for-herself.³² Otherwise, “[f]or most of the time, she was not even aware that she had a face.”³³ Here, still, Françoise understands existence on her own terms, as constituted by her consciousness alone. Unfortunately for Françoise, this mirage does not last.

Taken together, these scenes demonstrate the ambiguity of existence as it is simultaneously subjective and intersubjective, or for-itself and for-others. In particular, they highlight the interplay between Françoise’s experience of herself as an existent and her ethical relation to other existents as they exist alongside her in, and help to co-constitute, her world. Throughout the novel—but especially at its beginning—Françoise struggles to hold together the “seemingly opposing experiences of [her] self as both a free subject and an object for others” as simultaneously true facts of existence, instead oscillating between perceptions of herself and others “either as pure freedom, transcendence, interiority or as pure object, immanence, [and] exteriority.”³⁴

In the third chapter, Françoise expresses the ambiguity of existence as it is lived through her face. Getting ready to see Pierre at the theater, Françoise “dabbed some powder on her nose just on principle and turned quickly away from the mirror. Whatever face she wore that night did not really matter. It did not exist for her and she had a vague hope that it would be invisible to everyone else.”³⁵ Looking tentatively at herself in the mirror, Françoise half-heartedly performs the feminine ritual of powdering her nose. All the while, she knows that she reaps no immediate benefit in doing so because she herself cannot directly apprehend her face as an object of experience. She instead experiences her face as an object of/through the mirror’s mediation and others’ direct experience of it, as she engages in what she knows is ultimately a futile attempt at fashioning herself only for-herself. Since Françoise cannot directly see her own face, who does she powder her nose for? For Pierre? For passersby whom she does not know? Struggling to make sense of it all, Françoise shies away from her face’s reflection rather than enjoying it, pretending that—as if out of sight, out of mind—she does not have a face at all.

Conversing with Pierre amid the clamor of the theater troupe’s holiday party, Xavière talks about their acquaintance Paula in both physiological and existential terms that work to characterize her face as (1) the locus of her subjectivity and (2) an exterior reflection of her conscious interiority. Xavière describes Paula as having “ ‘ascetic’ ” cheeks, “ ‘a large generous mouth and such expressive eyes.’ ”³⁶ Pierre responds that Paula’s eyes are actually “ ‘[t]ransparent,’ ” which is unfortunate given his “ ‘prefer[ence for] sultry eyes.’ ”³⁷ Throughout this exchange, Pierre and Xavière repeatedly blur the distinction between the physiological parts of Paula’s face (her eyes, her mouth, her cheeks) and her personality (her asceticism, her generosity, her transparency). In linking—and perhaps even conflating—the two, Beauvoir alludes to a phenomenon of enfaced consciousness wherein one lives and experiences the world through the face. Specifically, this scene demonstrates the existential meaning of how one experiences others through their faces, such that Pierre and Xavière believe that they can gain insight into how Paula acts—and therefore the sort of life that she lives and the sort of person she is—through her face as it appears to them.

Watching Paula dance for the group, Françoise loses herself in thought as she grapples with the evidence of the existence of other consciousnesses before her:

Just what am I? [Françoise] wondered. She looked at Paula. She looked at Xavière whose face radiated shameless admiration. She knew what these women were. They had their own special memories, tastes, and ideas which distinguished them, personalities that were expressed in their [facial] features.³⁸

Françoise sees Paula’s and Xavière’s unique, individual existences encapsulated by their faces. Paula’s and Xavière’s consciousnesses are, in other words, enfaced. They “had their own special memories, tastes, and ideas which distinguished them” from each other and from Françoise herself. Their individuality and status as subjects are, according to Françoise, written across their faces. From the physical appearance of their faces, Françoise is able to learn about who Paula and Xavière are in an existential sense, beyond their mere physical appearances. That very “what” or “who” that is communicated to Françoise is part of an interconnected system of enfaced existence. Here, Françoise does not immediately view Paula or Xavière as objects or others; rather, through their faces, Françoise recognizes them as subjects, and the “problem” of the problem of other consciousnesses seems much less problematic.

In this scene, Françoise experiences facial alienation. She reflects on how “[s]he thought of herself as a consciousness naked before the world. She touched her face: to her it was no more than a white mask. And yet all these people saw it; and, whether she liked it or not, she too was in the world.”³⁹ In touching her face, Françoise is forced to confront that she is not pure consciousness but enfaced. As enfaced, as a being-in-the-world alongside others, Françoise is necessarily an object of others’ perception. This is a brute fact of her existence. And yet she felt her face “was no more than a white mask,” an object covering over or protecting something hiding beneath.⁴⁰ But what might that be? A “true” self? A “pure” self? Thinking of her face as a mask, she reveals her experience of her face as an impersonal object rather than as the locus of her subjectivity or a means through which she actively experiences and engages with the world. Françoise struggles to make sense of the importance attributed to her face—both by her and by others—and her sense of estrangement from it; this is because

in herself Françoise could not see any clear-cut shape. The light that had flashed through her a short while before had revealed nothing but emptiness. “She never looks at herself,” Xavière had said [about Françoise]. It was true. She never gave her face a thought except to take care of it as something impersonal. She searched her past for landscapes and people, but not for herself; and it was not her ideas and her tastes that made her face what it was. That face only reflected the truths that had revealed themselves to her, and they no more belonged to her than the bunches of mistletoe and holly that hung from the flies.

I am no one, she thought.⁴¹

Rather than conceive of it as shaped by her personality, Françoise admits that her own face has been formed by the truths of others. In comparing these truths to the theater’s decorative mistletoe, Françoise alludes to the ready-made values she encounters as a being thrown into a world she did not create. Again, Françoise must grapple with the ambiguity of existence as it is lived through the face. In particular, Françoise is confronted with “human existence as a project; that is, as a projection toward the future that simultaneously establishes a unity with the past and the present.”⁴² Thrown into a world of ready-made values created before her and for her, Françoise must nevertheless choose herself as a freedom, a task at which, she comes to realize, in her life thus far, she has largely failed: “She was a woman among other women, and she had permitted this woman to grow at random without shaping her.”⁴³ Rather than confront the immense burden of constant self-creation, of constant choosing, of projection, Françoise has allowed herself to be all too easily swept up in a world that has been created by others.

What might it mean to not have a face? Just before succumbing to a severe bout of pneumonia, Françoise “stood before the [looking] glass, staring at her face. It was a face which conveyed nothing; it was stuck on her head like a label: Françoise Miquel.”⁴⁴ Françoise experiences the object-image of her face in the mirror as an external reflection of her internal emptiness. Françoise thinks of her face as metaphorically “stuck on her head like a label.”⁴⁵ Her face identifies her—indeed, it names her—but it does so in her nothingness. In her “failure to maintain her own individuality,” Françoise struggles to act according to values of her own creation, in large part because “she is no longer capable of [acts] of genuine independence” through which she could define herself as a unique subject.⁴⁶ Instead, she orients her life around Pierre as a means through which she can “choose” herself as a being-in-the-world without having to actually choose herself for-herself.⁴⁷ As such, “[she is] no one,” and this no-one-ness is encapsulated by her face.⁴⁸ The narrator continues:

It’s my fault, Françoise thought, as she slowly climbed the steps. […] [F]or many years now she had ceased to be an individual; she no longer even possessed a face. The most destitute of women could at least lovingly touch her own hand, and she looked at both of hers with surprise.⁴⁹

Having abdicated her individuality and condemned herself to immanence through her attachment to and desire for total unity with Pierre, Françoise not only sees emptiness in her face but feels like “she no longer even possesse[s] a face” at all.⁵⁰ She is faceless. Alienated from herself, Françoise is also alienated from her face. The phenomena of enfaced consciousness and facial alienation implicit in this passage also make evident how the experience of facial alienation cannot be wholly disentangled from the broader experience of bodily alienation as Beauvoir discusses it in The Second Sex. Françoise’s inner monologue demonstrates how one can experience alienation in a variety of ways and from multiple body parts, shown by the touch of her own hand, and how these particular experiences of alienation seem to inform, and perhaps to even co-constitute, one another.

To further flesh out the difference in the lived experiences of bodily alienation and facial alienation, I turn toward a significant trope in existential phenomenology: the feathered woman.⁵¹ Sitting together in a café shortly after Xavière moves to Paris, the trio

could hear the woman with the green and blue feathers talking in a flat voice […]. She had decided to leave her bare arm on the table and it lay there forgotten, ignored; the man’s hand was stroking a piece of flesh that no longer belonged to anyone.

“It’s funny the feeling it gives when you touch your eyelashes,” Xavière remarked. “You touch yourself without touching yourself. It’s as if you touched yourself from a distance.”⁵²

The woman’s arm, through the man’s touch, is no longer her own. She “experience[s] her arm as a mere thing impersonally related to her consciousness” rather than as an integral part of her body, which serves as her grasp on the world.⁵³ The feathered woman’s experience of bodily alienation differs importantly from the subsequent description of Xavière touching her eyelashes. Edward Fullbrook and Kate Fullbrook read Xavière touching her eyelashes as “illustrat[ing] the unbridgeable difference between experiencing one’s body as the instrument of one’s subjectivity and experiencing it as an object,” uncritically subsuming the face into the whole body.⁵⁴ Rather, in calling the sensation of touching her eyelashes “ ‘touch[ing] [her]self from a distance,’ ” Xavière describes an experience of facial alienation.⁵⁵ Unable to see herself perform this motion on/to/with her own eyelashes, the tactile experience involves the feeling of estrangement from or disunity with her face as “the instrument of one’s subjectivity” and as a simultaneous object of her own and others’ experience.⁵⁶ A feeling of distance appears, a disjuncture resulting from the chiasmic experience of feeling her eyelashes meeting her fingers and yet not being able to witness this action being performed.⁵⁷

The characterization of physical touch in She Came to Stay differs drastically from Glen A. Mazis’s reading of touch, following Merleau-Ponty. “In touch,” Mazis writes, “the distinction between touching subject and touched object blurs […]. Rather than a confrontation and appropriation, [in touch] there is a permeability of boundaries and an opening up of interpenetration, of communion.”⁵⁸ Touching entails not only a literal empirical sense of closeness but an affective one as well. But for Beauvoir, touch, too, can erect boundaries and maintain distances, serving as a form of apprehending that includes a sense of taking, knowing, appropriating, and/or dominating.⁵⁹ The scenes I use as demonstrations of enfaced consciousness and facial alienation, which prima facie seem to point toward the importance of touch for conscious experience, do so insofar as touch, too, becomes violent, aggressive, or appropriative. Crucially, this scene with the feathered woman illuminates distinctions in the self-other relation at work in the experiences of bodily alienation and facial alienation. While both phenomena share a similar sense of fragmentation between the self and the other, bodily alienation and facial alienation are oriented differently. Specifically, the feathered woman’s experience of bodily alienation demonstrates how her experience of herself is altered by the very relation that she has to the man who touches her. Xavière’s facial alienation is, instead, defined by the experience of herself and by the way that she makes herself an other for-herself through her own touch. For Xavière, touching her own eyelashes does not blur but instead maintains the boundaries between the touched object and the touching subject, which are affirmed all the more when she later burns herself with a cigarette.⁶⁰ For the woman with the blue and green feathers, the man’s touch initiates her experience of bodily alienation through her interaction with an other as she plays the role of an Other. Xavière, by contrast, experiences facial alienation in interacting with herself as both a self and as an object.⁶¹

Leading up to the novel’s end—when Françoise enacts the epigraph’s promise by murdering Xavière—Françoise’s experience of her own face becomes an increasingly central element of the text. At this point, the novel’s main love triangle has dissipated, and Françoise seduces Xavière’s newfound object of desire, Gerbert, which Xavière discovers by reading their letters. Feeling betrayed, Xavière’s “cheeks were on fire” as she “star[ed] at Françoise with burning eyes.”⁶² Françoise

sat down on the edge of the couch, dazed, and repeated. I did that, I. […]

[…] She turned away and switched on the light. Her image suddenly sprang from the depth of her mirror. She faced herself. “No,” she repeated. “I am not that woman.”⁶³

Looking in the mirror, Françoise confronts (“face[s]”) the mirror image of her face, which she spends much of the novel being preoccupied with but desperately trying to avoid.⁶⁴ At first, she resists: “ ‘No,’ she repeated. ‘I am not that woman’ ” who steals her friends’ lovers, though eventually through “star[ing] at her reflection,” she realizes that in fact she is.⁶⁵ The scene continues:

She stared at her reflection. They had been trying to rob her of it for a long time. Inexorable as a duty. Austere and pure as a block of ice. Self-sacrificing, scorned, clinging obstinately to hollow morality. […] Xavière existed; the betrayal existed. My guilty face exists in the flesh.

It will exist no longer. […]

Either she or I. It shall be I.⁶⁶

Françoise simultaneously struggles against herself and Xavière through her face’s reflection. Xavière and Pierre, through their collusion, “had been trying to rob [Françoise] of [her face’s reflection] for a long time.”⁶⁷ Amid the trio’s toxic entanglement, Françoise no longer knew who she was; she had abdicated herself in the whims of others. Her face was stolen from her. Working to reclaim it, Françoise’s formerly empty face is now vibrantly imbued with newfound qualities, albeit negative ones. Negative, here, can work in two ways: first, in the colloquial sense of negative as “undesirable,” for instance, “[i]nexorable” and “austere”; and second, as the adjective form of negation, as in the Hegelian-inflected destruction of another’s consciousness.⁶⁸ In the first sense, Françoise is no longer, as she once was, pleasantly surprised by her face’s appearance. Bridging the gap between the first and second senses of negative, Françoise’s contentious dynamic with Xavière now colors her perception of her own face. She is conflicted, feeling negatively not only about murdering Xavière but also about the sense of nothingness and no-one-ness that has marked her face for so long. But Françoise has finally found her face.

“Xavière existed,” a conscious corporeal form.⁶⁹ After murdering her, Françoise’s “guilty face exists in the flesh.”⁷⁰ But in whose flesh does Françoise’s guilt exist? In the flesh of Françoise’s own face, the reflection of which she has now come to recognize as her own? Or in Xavière’s flesh, Françoise’s sacrifice? Beauvoir’s original French is riddled with this very ambiguity: “Xavière existait, la trahison existait. Elle existe en chair et en os, ma criminelle figure.”⁷¹ To what or to whom does this “[e]lle” refer? The betrayal (“la trahison”)? Françoise’s guilty face (“ma criminelle figure”)? Upon recognizing herself in her guilty face, Françoise finally finds the strength to assert her consciousness, her existence, and herself; she makes a free choice that unifies the past (her torrid relationships with Pierre and Xavière), the present (their confrontation over Gerbert), and the future (the possibility of her continuing to exist freely as an independent consciousness in-the-world). Françoise can now recognize herself in the reflection of this new, guilty face. Through looking at her face in the mirror, Françoise chooses herself for-herself and discovers that she is free.

In introducing the concepts of enfaced consciousness and facial alienation, which provide linguistic tools for more adequately attending to the specificity of the lived experience of the face, I illuminate a fundamental phenomenological problem: one’s own face, unlike the rest of one’s body, cannot be a direct object of experience. Paradoxically, one’s face reflects one’s self and one’s self is reflected on one’s face, but one cannot see one’s own face unmediated. The face can only be an indirect object experienced through a mediating tool (for example, a mirror) or the imagination (as an amalgamation of such “mirror images”). The “mirror image” of one’s own face as it appears to oneself is necessarily different than the physical face that exists for-others. The difference between these two objects (the face for-others and the mirror image of the face for oneself) exacerbates the unknowability of one’s own body for oneself.

As Françoise’s experiences show in She Came to Stay, facial alienation often occurs while looking at an image of oneself as it is reflected back as an object—in the mirror or glass.⁷² Beauvoir develops this theme further in her most famous novel, The Mandarins, in which she portrays the protagonist Anne’s immense difficulty reconciling her mental image of herself with what appears before her in the mirror as she ages.⁷³ Not recognizing oneself in a reflected mirror image may not be such an uncommon, or even pathological, experience. Unlike woman’s bodily alienation, which Beauvoir characterizes in The Second Sex as a contingent phenomenon socially constructed under patriarchy, facial alienation appears to be an inevitable fact of human embodiment. Indeed, Beauvoir herself recognizes the appeal of, as Nancy Bauer writes, “attempt[ing] to avoid assuming one’s freedom by wishing to transform oneself into a thing” via a self-imposed alienation.⁷⁴ This condemning of oneself to immanence emerges “as a product of the fact that coming to see oneself as separate from the world is coincident with the discovery of oneself as an object in the eyes of others (and, as the case may be, in mirrors).”⁷⁵ Is it possible to experience one’s face for itself? Or is every experience of looking in a mirror, at a photograph, or a reflection condemned to elicit the question is this how others see me? Always entangled with the gaze of others, the face is not only the locus of one’s subjectivity, and thus one’s subjective singularity, but also a premier site of the intersubjectivity of human existence.

The face, it seems, is radically ambiguous. This is not, in itself, a prescriptively ethical claim. But for Beauvoir, what is of critical ethical import is not the mere existence of facial alienation but existents’ response to it. The language of enfaced consciousness and facial alienation highlights the particular significations of the face as a body part, which emerges as meaningful in relation to the whole. More importantly, this paper makes the case that if the face epitomizes Beauvoir’s notion of ambiguity—as demonstrated by my reading of She Came to Stay—then the face demands particular ethical consideration that the language of enfaced consciousness and facial alienation makes both possible and pressing.