Description
The paper will build upon Jenny Edkins' concept of "face politics". Using art-as-method, specifically collaging, the face is shown to be a sight and site of nuclear war. It is argued that the destruction of the face plays a different role in nuclear politics than it does in conventional militarism, where the face of a wounded solider can sometimes contest militarism. The image of the faceless is conceptualised and situated within broader images of the uncanny and the sublime. Ultimately, it is argued that the hypervisibility of the nuclear faceless backgrounds the true violence of nuclear weapons and war. By imagining nuclear harm only through detonation, nuclear facelessness hides the nuclear mundane and everyday infrastructures of the apocalypse.
