Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on Contributors
- The Enigma of Giorgio Agamben
- 1 K
- 2 Integral Actuality: On Giorgio Agamben's Idea of Prose
- 3 The Role of the Shifter and the Problem of Reference in Giorgio Agamben
- 4 ‘Its Silent Working was a Delusion’
- 5 Politics and Poetics of Divine Violence: On a Figure in Giorgio Agamben and Walter Benjamin
- 6 Idea of Poetry, Idea of Prose
- 7 The Fading Memory of Homo non Sacer
- 8 Soulblind, or On Profanation
- 9 Face to Face with Agamben; or, the Other in Love
- 10 Beyond Spectacle and the Image: the Poetics of Guy Debord and Agamben
- 11 Dismantling Theatricality: Aesthetics of Bare Life
- 12 Notes on Media and Biopolitics: ‘Notes on Gesture’
- Index
12 - Notes on Media and Biopolitics: ‘Notes on Gesture’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on Contributors
- The Enigma of Giorgio Agamben
- 1 K
- 2 Integral Actuality: On Giorgio Agamben's Idea of Prose
- 3 The Role of the Shifter and the Problem of Reference in Giorgio Agamben
- 4 ‘Its Silent Working was a Delusion’
- 5 Politics and Poetics of Divine Violence: On a Figure in Giorgio Agamben and Walter Benjamin
- 6 Idea of Poetry, Idea of Prose
- 7 The Fading Memory of Homo non Sacer
- 8 Soulblind, or On Profanation
- 9 Face to Face with Agamben; or, the Other in Love
- 10 Beyond Spectacle and the Image: the Poetics of Guy Debord and Agamben
- 11 Dismantling Theatricality: Aesthetics of Bare Life
- 12 Notes on Media and Biopolitics: ‘Notes on Gesture’
- Index
Summary
In ‘Notes on Gesture’, a brief essay which has appeared in English in three different versions, Giorgio Agamben extends Gilles Deleuze's reflections on the cinematic image and on the image in general, on ‘the status of the image in modernity’:
Gilles Deleuze has argued that cinema erases the fallacious psychological distinction between image as psychic reality and movement as physical reality. Cinematographic images are neither poses éternelles (such as the forms of the classical age) nor coupes immobiles of movement, but rather coupes mobiles, images themselves in movement, that Deleuze calls movement-images.
It is necessary to extend Deleuze's argument and show how it relates to the status of the image in general within modernity. This implies, however, that the mythical rigidity of the image has been broken and that here, properly speaking, there are no images but only gestures.
One of the central characteristics of Deleuze's Bergsonian reading of cinema is the perspective that the boundaries Western philosophy has imposed between subject and object, mind and matter, interior and exterior, are, to use Agamben's term, ‘fallacious’. And that the cinema – both in its earlier incarnations as movement-images and its later exhibition of a direct image of time – reveals this in a unique way. Released from the limiting perceptions of a massy anatomical entity, the images of the cinema's machinic eye can produce a new image of thought, returning thought to the difference and creativity of life, and vice versa.
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- Information
- The Work of Giorgio AgambenLaw Literature Life, pp. 193 - 211Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2008