Cinema and Agamben

Henrik Gustafsson is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Culture and Literature, University of Tromsø, Norway and a member of the Nomadikon Centre of Visual Culture. He is the author of Out of Site: Landscape and Cultural Reflexivity in New Hollywood Cinema, 1969-1974 (2008) and the editor (together with Asbjørn Grønstad) of Ethics and Images of Pain (2012). Asbjørn Grønstad is Professor of Visual Culture in the Department of Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen, Norway, where he is also the director of the Nomadikon Center for Visual Culture. His most recent books are Ethics and Images of Pain (co-edited with Henrik Gustafsson, 2012) and Screening the Unwatchable: Spaces of Negation in Post-Millennial Art Cinema (2011).

A superb attempt to think cinema as a matter of life and death, this state-of-the-art collection draws on the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben to cast new light on the movement of images and on the various kinds of cuts that are made in their flow. The human gesture as captured by cinema becomes here a site of potentiality: a breach of the aesthetic, a differentiation from within and hence an opening to the ethico-political.

• List of Illustrations AcknowledgementsIntroduction: Giorgio Agamben and the Shape of Cinema to Come, Asbjørn Grønstad & Henrik GustafssonFor an Ethics of the Cinema, Giorgio AgambenCinema and History: On Jean-Luc Godard, Giorgio AgambenChapter 1. Silence, Gesture, Revelation: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Montage in Godard and Agamben, James S. WilliamsChapter 2. Passion, Agamben and the Gestures of Work, Libby SaxtonChapter 3. Gesture, Time, Movement: David Claerbout meets Giorgio Agamben on the Boulevard du Temple, Janet HarbordChapter 4. Film-of-Life: Agamben’s Profanation of the Image, Benjamin NoysChapter 5. Biopolitics of Gesture: Cinema and the Neurological Body, Pasi VäliahoChapter 6. Propositions for a Gestural Cinema: On ‘Ciné-Trances’ and Jean Rouch’s Ritual Documentaries, João Mário GriloChapter 7. Engaging Hand to Hand with the Moving Image: Serra, Viola and Grandrieux’s Radical Gestures, Silvia CasiniChaoter 8. Counterfactual, Potential, Virtual: Toward a Philosophical Cinematics, Garrett StewartChapter 9. Montage and the Dark Margin of the Archive, Trond LundemoChapter 10. Remnants of Palestine, or, Archeology after Auschwitz, Henrik GustafssonNOTES ON CONTRIBUTORSINDEX