Notes on media and biopolitics: 'Notes on gesture'

The Work of Giorgio Agamben: Law, Literature, Life

Volumn , Issue , 2008, Pages 193-211

  Levitt, Deborah ^a  

^a Eugene Lang College   (United States)

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EID: 84882389655     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
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References (23)

1. Giorgio Agamben, 'Notes on Gesture', Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 55. Further references to this work are given in parentheses in the text.
2. In 'Absolute Immanence,' Agamben submits Deleuze's concept of life to a more detailed interrogation. At stake there, however, is the same question: to what extent does Deleuze's philosophy - as a vitalism and even a biophilosophy - share tacit assumptions with the cultural conception of life which grounds biopopolitcal logic, and to what extent does it shift such assumptions?
3. See Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 220-239.
4. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. DanielHellerRoazen(Stanford,CA:StanfordUniversityPress,1998),p. 4.
5. Agamben, 'In This Exile (Italian Diary 1992-1994)', in Means Without End, p. 122.
6. Agamben, 'In this Exile', p. 123.
7. Virgilo Tosi, 'Etienne-Jules Marey and the Origins of Cinema', in Marey: Pionnier de la Synthèse du Mouvement (Beaune, France: Musée Marey, 1995);
8. Marta Braun, 'Movement and Modernism: the Work of Etienne-Jules Marey', in Marey: Pionnier de la Synthèse du Mouvement and Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904) (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992);
9. Anson Rabinbach, 'Time and Motion: Etienne-Jules Marey and the Mechanics of the Body', in The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990).
10. See Rabinbach, The Human Motor, p. 90.
11. Walter Benjamin. 'The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (Third Version)', Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938-1940, trans. Edmund Jephcott and others, ed.
12. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 266.
13. Giorgio Agamben, 'Difference and Repetition: On Guy Debord's Films', in Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2002), p. 314.
14. See Homo Sacer, p. 99 and p. 183 and ff. Agamben's use of this unusual figure deserves a commentary of its own.
15. Benjamin, 'What is Epic Theater? (II)', Selected Writings, Volume 4, p. 305.
16. In 'Difference and Repetition: On Guy Debord's Films', Agamben suggests that there are two ways of showing the image as such, the image as pure means. He also refers to this condition as 'imagelessness': 'One is pornography and advertising, which act as though there were always something more to be seen, more images behind the images; while the other way is to exhibit the image as image and thus to allow the appearance of "imagelessness," which, as Benjamin said, is the refuge of all images. It is here, in this difference, that the ethics and the politics of cinema come into play' (p. 319).
17. Walter Benjamin, 'Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of his Death', in Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927-1934, trans. Rodney Livingstone and others, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 814.
18. This 'casual comment' is drawn from Kafka's miniature tale 'In the Gallery', which, with its circus spectacle, its consumptive equestrienne, her horse, her master and her alienated spectator, can be read as Kafka's most incisive preview of gesture in the age of biopolitics. See Franz Kafka, 'In the Gallery', in Stories 1904-1924, trans. J.A. Underwood, foreword Jorge Luis Borges (London: Abacus Time Warner, 2002), pp. 189-190.
19. Agamben positions this power of gesture in the sphere of the emptying out, the alienation, of the linguistic being of humans that is the spectacle: 'It is evident, after all, that the spectacle is language, the very communicativity and linguistic being of humans . . . what we encounter in the spectacle is our linguistic nature inverted', 'Marginal Notes on Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle', Means Without End, p. 82.
20. He explains that it is because language loses its power to produce a common medium for human beings in the society of the spectacle that gesture, which exhibits what cannot be said, at once reveals this alienation and, in a new way, opens a common medium. It would be instructive to compare Agamben's formulation of the new relations of images and language to that of Wlad Godzich: in order to function optimally. Images are parasitical noises upon language at first - and then they supplant it: it must be recalled that the technology of images operates at the speed of light, as does the world. Language could slow down the world, thanks to its tremendous negative capability, but it cannot slow down images, for they operate out of the very imaginary that language would have to be able to organize in the first place. Indeed, the question for us is one of dissonance: can language bring the speed of images under control, that is, turn images into a kind of language (but the failure of the various visual semiotics is not reassuring on this score), or are we to see a world, images of this world, all traveling at the speed of light in a universe without logos, as a logical universe? Such would seem to be the postmodern predicament. ('Images, Language, and the Postmodern Predicament', Materialities of Communication, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 370)
21. Guy Debord, 'Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency's Conditions of Organization and Action', June 1957, trans. Ken Knabb, Situtationist International Archive, at: http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/report.html.
22. Agamben, 'Marginal Notes on Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle', Means Without End, p. 80.
23. Gilles Deleuze, 'DELEUZE/SPINOZA, Cours Vincennes: Ontologie- Ethique', 21 December 1980, at: http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle=190&groupe=Spinoza&langue=2.