The research presented here is an attempt to uncover the meanings, values, and imaginaries associated with the face, a way of responding to the fascination it exerts, not to reveal its secrets, but to draw closer, to walk in its presence to discover how much of it is hidden.

The face offered to the world is a compromise between collective orientations and the personal way in which each actor adapts. The mimicry and emotions that permeate it, the staging of its appearance (hairstyle, makeup, etc.), are evidence of a social symbolism within which the actor can maintain their particular style.

The face is also the locus of the other; it is born at the heart of the social bond, already in the original face-to-face encounter between the child and its mother (the first face), and continues in countless contacts that make and unmake daily life.

One of the characteristics of the symbolic violence enacted by the racist consists of the denial of the other's face. Hatred toward the other leads to its disfigurement; The dignity of the face is denied.

The viciousness against the face is powerless against it when it can be looked upon directly. The face is the most human part of a person. The place, perhaps, where the feeling of the sacred is born.