Cinema and Agamben

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. -- Joanna Zylinska, Professor of New Media and Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK A crucial, timely intervention in studies of film, philosophy and the work of Giorgio Agamben, this volume explores with insight and acuity the intersections of bioethics, politics, and technologies of the moving image. An essential tool for scholars of film and media theory and philosophy, it combines cutting-edge research with two previously untranslated essays by Agamben. Unpicking the mediality of media, with its fractured histories and disseminated ethical futures, Cinema and Agamben represents a brilliant new milestone in this emerging field. -- Jenny Chamarette, Lecturer in Film Studies, Queen Mary, University of London, UK

Henrik Gustafsson is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Culture and Literature, University of Troms, 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 Asbjrn Grnstad) of Ethics and Images of Pain (2012). Asbjrn Grnstad 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).

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction: Giorgio Agamben and the Shape of Cinema to Come, Asbjrn Grnstad & Henrik Gustafsson For an Ethics of the Cinema, Giorgio Agamben Cinema and History: On Jean-Luc Godard, Giorgio Agamben Chapter 1. Silence, Gesture, Revelation: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Montage in Godard and Agamben, James S. Williams Chapter 2. Passion, Agamben and the Gestures of Work, Libby Saxton Chapter 3. Gesture, Time, Movement: David Claerbout meets Giorgio Agamben on the Boulevard du Temple, Janet Harbord Chapter 4. Film-of-Life: Agambens Profanation of the Image, Benjamin Noys Chapter 5. Biopolitics of Gesture: Cinema and the Neurological Body, Pasi Vliaho Chapter 6. Propositions for a Gestural Cinema: On Cin-Trances and Jean Rouchs Ritual Documentaries, Joo Mrio Grilo Chapter 7. Engaging Hand to Hand with the Moving Image: Serra, Viola and Grandrieuxs Radical Gestures, Silvia Casini Chaoter 8. Counterfactual, Potential, Virtual: Toward a Philosophical Cinematics, Garrett Stewart Chapter 9. Montage and the Dark Margin of the Archive, Trond Lundemo Chapter 10. Remnants of Palestine, or, Archeology after Auschwitz, Henrik Gustafsson NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS INDEX