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There are many approaches to reading the Hebrew Bible, from the pietistic in both Jewish and Christian traditions to the scholarly. Gabriel Josipovici’s approach is not about seeking the reductive ‘meaning’ of a text, but encouraging readers into an open relationship with the text in order to preserve the ambiguities and mysteries that adhere to such texts. Joseph’s encounter with an unnamed stranger in Genesis 37 is used as an illustration of this approach. Standing ‘face to face’ with the text requires humility, and trust in the storyteller.

In his study of psychology in the 1930s, Samuel Beckett registered a number of ideas regarding the face. He took note of the Gestalt idea that the baby is born with the innate ability to distinguish the figure of a face from a blurry buzzing background. His interest was also piqued by the finding that one's perception of a facial expression might change depending on how much of the face is made visible. These ideas would influence his later work. Focusing on the short play That Time, this article looks at Beckett's dramatic presentation of a face alone in the dark. It compares Beckett's approach to face-reading with the study of the face that developed in twentieth-century experimental psychology. Beckett, I suggest, is working with the idea, common in experimental psychology, that facial expressions can be produced involuntarily and perceived effortlessly. However, he also draws attention to a more effortful mode of producing and perceiving faces. Finally, the article situates Beckett's portrayal of the face in relation to a modern culture that increasingly recognises – and celebrates – the face's unmanageability, but has not stopped attempting to manage the face.

This essay proposes a reading of Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face that focuses on the cultural and philosophical contexts of the face, its destruction, and imagined reconstruction in postwar France. The film foregrounds the protagonist's lack of a face and the effort to restore it into a cinematic argument heralding the ruin of natural beauty and genuine face-to-face relations, an approach that in turn theorizes the postwar world as premised on ethical and aesthetic opacity. By considering contemporary treatments of the face, as well as the representations of injury and violence, the essay argues that at stake in the political and aesthetic judgments proposed by the failed face transplants in the film was a concern with the technological reconstruction of a natural and pure state, a reconstruction that was now seen as impossible and could have devastating consequences at the ethical and aesthetic levels.

This text transposes, in the form of an article, the main themes tackled by the director Ygal Bursztyn in his book Face, Battlefield (Tel Aviv, Hakibbutz Hameuhad, 1990). Daniel Dayan thanks the author and the translator Sonia Hadida for their collaboration on this adaptation, reproduced with the kind permission of the review Hermes.

Quoi qu’il arrive, la page du débat interminable sur la réforme institutionnelle sera terminée2 » déclarait le ministre de l’Intérieur en annonçant la consultation de la population corse sur l’avenir institutionnel de l’île3. C’était méconnaître l’extraordinaire volatilité de la vie politique insulaire. Tandis qu’une (courte) majorité d’électeurs s’est prononcée contre le projet soumis au référendum local du 6 juillet 2003, la Corse semble de nouveau aux prises avec ses démons. Si le refus de pousser plus avant la réforme institutionnelle a été interprété par certains comme un recul, il reste que la nature et la portée de la réforme constitutionnelle portant sur la décentralisation qui a précédé la consultation paraît aller dans le sens du renforcement des acquis corses au sein de la République. Cette actualité n’est que le reflet d’une relation complexe entre l’île et le gouvernement central, menant inéluctablement vers la pleine reconnaissance du particularisme corse, et ultimement vers la redéfinition de l’architecture de la République.