“In contrast to the latency that is elsewhere associated with testimony (both in Agamben’s work and that of others such as Elsaesser), the face is now associated with ‘non-latency’. In contrast to the common view of the face as ‘expressive’, in particular as expressive of readily recognisable affects, the face is now associated with a ‘pure visibility’. Pure visibility, in turn, is deemed to be equivalent to ‘non-latency’, suggesting that rather than concealing hidden depths of meaning, the face is ultimately an empty cipher. Such a suggestion, of course, is not the same as a simple statement of the face’s emptiness. Instead, it arrives at that conclusion in a rhetorically painstaking manner, labouring, like Beckett, the statement of expression’s absence. The grimace is associated with this expression of a ‘mute identity’ or, to put it in familiar terms, of the expression of the inability to express”

“Emotional maturity, we are just beginning to glimpse, may mean capacity to feel truly, in relation to the facts of our world, the feelings of others; and also to create in our responses to others a relationship of “feeling together” which is something different from and better than single individuals could experience alone. So little do we know about this that we have scarcely any vocabulary to talk about it. But something like this is at the basis, we are sure, of acting together, for out of common feeling much more than from shared intellectual concepts comes the capacity to cooperate for valued ends.”