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Defiant signs make for very reluctant signifiers, and whether they run along with a globalized paganism of the body or opt for a mystical self-annihilation strapped head to toe with layers of dynamite, they announce the visual evidence of a corpus anarchicum that is yet to be fully comprehended. In the following chapter, I would like to trace some of the clandestine conversations between faces and their corresponding bodies when they must resort to subterranean measures under the severe circumstances of a theocracy. The dialogical negotiations that ensue embrace the anamnesis of every cultural formation: a recollecting of past events now made compellingly present. The bodily memories invested in faces sustain the vernacular languages that bodies speak in defiance of the Latinized tyranny of their presiding cultures. When bodies are denied visibility and their memories repressed, faces act as their archival repositories, telling their forbidden tales. In this chapter, I would like to trace the tensions and discrepancies created between the overinvested memory of faces and the deeply divested recollection of their bodies. In those tensions and discrepancies, a visual form of beheading, we see aesthetically documented the serious indices of the politically mutilated bodies.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137264138_4

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