The Italian word “muso”, for instance, would derive, according to some etymologists, Footnote 1 from the Gallo-Roman “*musa”, “snout, nose”, which would then give rise to the Provencal “mus”, with the diminutive “mursel” or “mursol”, to the old French “muse” (then turned into “museau” in modern French) the word would have correspondences also in the Breton “muzel” or “morzeel”, in the English “muzzle”, and in the Swiss “mause”. The existence itself and the semantic definition of such class of words seems to indicate that, in the cultures that are verbally codified by these languages, the face of humans and the corresponding part of non-human animal bodies are conceived as endowed with different characteristics. But what about non-human animals? Several if not all European languages include a specific word to designate “the projecting jaws and nose of an animal” (Merriam-Webster) “the projecting part of the face, including the nose and mouth, of an animal such as a dog or horse” (OED). The animality of humans has been increasingly accepted by human cultures at least from Darwin on, and it is evident to most that human animals do have a face. The answer, of course, depends on the definition of ‘animals’ and on that of ‘face’. The channel is new, that is, digital media, and some of the lexicon is inspired by modern science-fiction, like the adjective ‘mutant’, yet the cultural function of this narrative remains that of projecting in a recondite space a deep-seated anthropological worry: do animals have a face? Such trend seems to gain new momentum in the epoch of digital legends, for instance in the story, countlessly repeated by the media, of the ‘goat with a human face’.
As cultural and art historians have long underlined, these and similar texts must be interpreted as projections of the European collective imaginary towards the unknown, mysterious, and fabulous territories of the Orient. Digital social networks have revived several genres of traditional face-to-face mass communication, such as gossip, conspiracy tales, hoaxes, and the ubiquitous fake news they have also revived a genre that has its prototype in the Liber Monstrorum (Book of Monsters), a Latin text originally composed in the late 7th or early eighth century, which then gave rise to the whole tradition of the “the marvels of the east”. The story contains many typical ingredients of exotic narratives. According to unverified reports, villagers had first been terrified by the ‘monster’, then they had started worshipping ‘it’ as an “avatar of god”. The owner, Mr Mukeshji Prajapap, from Nimodia, had posted some footage of the bizarre creature, and the video had gone viral on YouTube and other social networks. In late January 2020, media around the world insistently echoed the news that a ‘mutant’ goat with an “eerie-looking human face” had been born in Rajastan, India. Only through eradicating the primordial stigmatization of the muzzle, however, will a non-violent foundation of human personhood and community be possible.
Ultimately, it proposes that the construction of the animal muzzle as an interface of non-personhood is instrumental to the substitution of the human victim in the sacrifice that establishes the human community. The essay investigates the anthropological concept of personhood from the point of view of the dialectics between two fundamental elements of the socio-cultural, linguistic, and semiotic construction of the self-identity of the human species: on the one hand, the human face and, on the other, the non-human muzzle.Īfter demonstrating that their semantics is contrastively articulated in all Indo-European languages, and after showing that such contrast is featured also in several non-Indo-European languages, including those referring to supposedly alternative “ontologies of nature”, the essay criticizes such opposition through a close reading of Lévinas, Deleuze and Guattari, and Derrida’s philosophical texts on the face and on animality.
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