Camp Physiognomy: Physiognomie.

This essay presents a carousel of reflections on physiognomy, a European science that tendentiously translates facial characteristics into signs of (racial and criminal) character. Guided by Walter Benjamin's "Schicksal und Charakter" (1921), I chart the persistence of colonial modernity's investment in appropriating somatic features as confessors, which are made spill knowledge about a person's interior (essence)—with or without consent. Making leaps between old-school and state-of-the-art practices of facial recognition, these readings examine how physiognomy, though often portrayed as an epistemic relic of a racist past that's been overcome, continues to furnish a hermeneutic arsenal that incarcerates people in their own face and arrests them in a state of undischargeable guilt. The only ethically viable place for physiognomy is under the rainbow of camp's gaiety, where it can be appreciated for the joke that it is. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]