Arendt and French existentialist takes on masks

This chapter starts from a problematic central to the work of Hannah Arendt, but which also pervades the thought of her contemporaries–Sartre, Beauvoir, and Fanon. They grapple with the uncontrollability of personal appearance, where this self-disclosure is both a much-desired recognition of one&s;s uniqueness and a risk from which one tries to escape. This common concern notwithstanding, this chapter argues, by tracing the concept of the “mask”, that she disagreed with them on the possibilities of disclosing individual uniqueness. Refuting the common association, also expounded by her French contemporaries, of masks with the hiding of the face, Arendt resuscitates another, more enabling notion of persona , the Roman theater mask that covers the face while allowing the voice to come through. This chapter focuses on two of her metaphorical uses of the term, namely as legal personhood and as social roles, and argues that each can be situated in a critical dialogue with French and Francophone existentialism, in order to argue that she disagrees with her contemporaries on (1) the status of visibility vis-à-vis other registers of appearance; (2) the possibility of transcending alienation from social and legal constructions; and (3) the narrative construction of the self.