Please allow me, and forgive me, to turn away from the most immediate news for the space of one column and focus on a social phenomenon that is more than just a fad: I want to talk about facial tattoos. .
Just a few years ago, in the Western world, this practice was reserved for the most eccentric, often mentally damaged individuals and the cruelest criminal gangs, thus forever marking the faces of their members so that they can never escape.
That's not the case anymore.
Identify
You only have to walk into a coffee shop or other store to see that the practice has been “democratized”—at least it has become more widespread.
In the younger generation, it is not uncommon to come across a young person who has a clearly visible mark on their neck or even their face. She felt the need to write an often cryptic symbol on her face. It will now be part of his identity, it will be inextricably linked to it. And whatever anyone says, it won't be “just a tattoo.” This is a signal to the world that says something like this: I am this tattoo first. What does it matter if she says the opposite: through this symbol she fell into this universe.
What happened? How could this preserved body part that represented the face be colonized by tattoos? Whatever one may say, a taboo has fallen, a symbolic boundary has been crossed. We might even think of it as a form of physical transgression.
For my part, I see this as a sign of a general psychological breakdown.
Today's individual is so immersed in relativism gone mad that he does his utmost to find indelible markers of identity and leave a mark deep within himself that transcends the vagaries of existence.
Here the body becomes the last existential buoy through which the individual connects with concrete life.
But it is a body that is no longer given, a natural fact, as it presents itself to us with biological sex. This can apparently be rejected in the name of gender theory. In our age of general skepticism, we can treat our sexual bodies as an optional cadaver that does not concern us existentially.
It is a body project onto which we symbolically project our life, one tattoo after another, until it is completely covered. We must mark ourselves and mark ourselves again.
distress
I'm willing that for some it's about turning their body into a work of art. But for most it is a matter of compensating for the lack of an inner life with a completely external life.
This brings to mind a famous saying by Georges Bernanos: “We understand absolutely nothing about modern civilization unless we first admit that it is a universal conspiracy against all kinds of life.”
There are every sign of immense distress here.