What is world history if not also the war history of immune systems?

The initial experience of faciality rests on the basic circumstance that humans who regard humans are themselves regarded by humans, and return to themselves by way of the sight of the other. In this sense the face, as vision, is the face, as visage, of the other. At first, then, a face is always something that can only be viewed over there and up there. In the initial bipolar interfacial game, the gazes are distributed among the partners in such a way that each, for the time being, learns enough about himself by looking into the face of the other who is looking at him. The other thus acts as a personal mirror; but he is also the opposite of a mirror, for he permits neither the peace nor the discretion of a reflection in glass or metal—but above all because he produces not an eidetic reproduction, but rather an affective echo. One can only speak of a glance into one's 'own' mirror face when the individual has turned away from the other and towards its face, which now appears and must be appropriated in the reflecting image.

Heidegger...no longer invites us...to seek the truth in the inner person; instead, he calls upon us to become involved with the monstrousness of the external. His village is a site of the immense. Like all mouthpieces of the truth, he calls out the bystanders to come—yet here, coming no longer means entering a divine intimate space, but rather going out into an ecstactic provisionality.

The mask is the facial shield that is raised in the war of sights.