Notes from Giorgio Agamben "Notes on Gesture"

(In the cinema, a society that has lost its gestures seeks to re-appropriate what it has lost while simultaneously recording that loss)

An era that has lost its gestures is, for that reason, obsessed with them; for people who are bereft of all that is natural to them, every gesture becomes a fate.

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For it is only as a gesture in which potential and action, nature and artifice, contingency and necessity, become indiscernible (in the final analysis, therefore, solely as theatre) that the idea of eternal return makes sense.

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Gesture rather than image is the cinematic element.

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Film images are neither 'timeless postures' (like the forms of the classical world) nor 'static sections' of movement, but 'moving sections', images which are themselves in motion, which Deleuze calls 'moving pictures'.

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Because it is centrally located in the gesture, not the image, cinema essentially ranks with ethics and politics (and not merely with aesthetics)

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What characterizes gesture is that in it there is neither production nor enactment, but undertaking and supporting.

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Gesture is the display of mediation, the making visible of a means as such. It makes apparent the human state of being-in-medium and thereby opens up the ethical dimension for human beings.

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In this sense, gesture is the communication of a potential to be communicated. In itself it has nothing to say, because what it shows is the being-in-language of human beings as a pure potential for mediation. But since being-in-language is not something that can be spoken of in propositions, in its essence gesture is always a gesture of a non-making of sense in language, it always a gag in the strict meaning of the term, indicating in the first instance something that is put in the mouth to hinder speech, and subsequently the actor's improvisation to make up for a memory lapse or some impossibility of speech.

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The essential 'mutism' of cinema (which has nothing to do with either the presence or absence of a soundtrack) is, like the mutism of philosophy, an exposition of the human being's being-in-language: pure gesturality. The Wittgensteinian definition of mysticism as the showing of what cannot be spoken of, is a literal definition of the gag that displays language itself, being-in-language itself, as a giant memory lapse, as an incurable speech defect.

V

Politics is the sphere of pure means, which is to say of the absolute and total gesturality of human beings