“If the face is a politics,” posit Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “dismantling the face is also a politics.” The face has been extensively thematized in much of ancient and contemporary philosophy and arts. This course introduces the face as the contested site of religious and secular ethics and as closely connected to the emergence and disappearance of the modern autonomous individual at the intersections of her gender and racial identities. We draw upon several philosophers, literary authors, and visual artists with the aim of exploring the manifold ways in which the face has been imagined as the object of representation, interpretation, investigation, and subversion. Surveying a large array of visual, literary, and cinematic artifacts, we will ask the following questions: How is the emergence of the portrayal of the face in the early modern period related to the rise of individuality, and what does its disappearance in Foucault’s “face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” indicate about the autonomous individual in modern times? Is the face natural or is it produced? How has the external face been employed in literature and visual arts as a way of charting the inner human character? How does the face as a chronicler of history function as the site of telling, or of the failure to tell, stories? What does make the face significant biologically, religiously, and politically? How can it be dismantled? And finally, what politics and ethics might a different conception of the face entail?