The word “person” has an interesting history. Traditionally it is said to have come to us through the Latin persona which the Romans inherited from the Etruscan phersu, which in turn derived from the Greek prósopon, mask (pros, front, opos, face). However, the relationship between the Etruscan and Greek terms has not been proven.
In chapter 148 of Hopscotch, Julio Cortázar cites a different etymology taken from Attic Nights by Roman grammarian Aulus Gellius (2nd century AD), who quotes an obscure author named Gavius Bassus. I quote from the grammarian’s book:
1. Cleverly, by Heaven! and wittily, in my opinion, does Gavius Bassus explain the derivation of the word persona, in the work that he composed On the Origin of Words; for he suggests that that word is formed from personare [making noise.] 2. “For,” he says, “the head and the face are shut in on all sides by the covering of the persona, or mask, and only one passage is left for the issue of the voice; and since this opening is neither free nor broad, but sends forth the voice after it has been concentrated and forced into one single means of egress, it makes the sound clearer and more resonant. Since then that covering of the face gives clearness and resonance to the voice, it is for that reason called persona, the o being lengthened because of the formation of the word.”1
More than “making noise,” the verb personare would be equivalent to sounding “through (per-).” Despite the dubious legitimacy of this etymology, the idea of persona as a mask that concentrates and conducts the sound of the voice is quite suggestive. Since the mask is a theatrical prop and theater an expression of the polis, that is to say of bios exercised in community, the mask, understood as person, would become a lining that covers the face of zoē and allows its voice, the voice of bare life, to resound on the stage of the community. The aural representation of the mask of bios is our name, first property of the church and then of the state, which serves as the handle by which the juridical persona can be manipulated and accounted for in civil society. Thus, says Thomas Carlyle, “The name is the earliest garment you wrap round the Earth-visting ME; to which it thenceforth cleaves, more tenaciously (for there are names that have lasted nigh thirty centuries) than the very skin.”2
Our hypothesis seems confirmed to some extent by the use given to the word person in jurisprudence, as if it were a legal mask (bios) superimposed on a real life form (zoē). From the point of view of the law, a person either natural (an individual) or legal (an entity or corporation) is nothing other than a subject of law. Seen this way, the world ordered by law is a juridical theatre that transforms zoē into bios, always at the expense of the first. This juridical theatre is the basis of our modern theatre of desolation.
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