An everyday experience with a child confirms it: if we put on a mask in its presence, it is horrified, although it knows that beneath, there is just our familiar face—as if some unspeakable evil pertains to the mask itself. The status of a mask is thus neither imaginary nor symbolic (denoting a symbolic role we are supposed to play), it is strictly real—if, of course, we conceive the real as a “grimace” of reality.

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