Article:
Agamben’s cinema: Psychology versus an ethical form of life

Simple item page
dc.creatorHarbord, Janet
dc.date.accessioned2018-09-26T11:54:44Z
dc.date.available2018-09-26T11:54:44Z
dc.date.issued2015
dc.description.abstractAgamben’s essay on gesture is perhaps his most influential piece of work for film studies, in which he argues that cinema at its inception captures the moment at which humans have lost control of their gestures, manifest in a crisis of communicability. Comparing the traces of the gesticulating bodies of Gilles de la Tourette’s patients with those in the proto-cinematic series of photographs taken by Eadward Muybridge, Agamben suggests that these are the twin processes of a biopolitical production of life; respectively, the body as the site of investigation and the exemplary body put to work. Yet the ethico-political implications of Agamben’s essay on gesture and the biopolitical production of life are relatively under-developed. This article pursues not only cinema’s relation to biopolitical capture but also the way in which cinema came to compensate for such a reductive version of corporeality by constructing the concept of an individual located as complex interiority. When gestural communication declines at the close of the 19th century meaning is relocated to the internal space within the human body; commensurate with this production of human interiority as a site of truth, cinema becomes a machine whose task is to decipher the turmoil of the inside, a process reproduced as narrative explication.en
dc.identifier.doi10.5117/NECSUS2015.2.HARB
dc.identifier.doihttp://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/15195
dc.identifier.urihttps://www.necsus-ejms.org/test/agambens-cinema-psychology-versus-ethical-form-life/
dc.identifier.urihttps://mediarep.org/handle/doc/3378
dc.languageeng
dc.publisherAmsterdam University Press
dc.publisher.placeAmsterdam
dc.relation.isPartOfissn:2213-0217
dc.relation.ispartofseriesNECSUS. European Journal of Media Studies
dc.rights.urihttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
dc.subjectRöntgenstrahlungde
dc.subjectBiopolitikde
dc.subjectGestede
dc.subjectInnerlichkeitde
dc.subjectÜbertragungde
dc.subjectX-rayen
dc.subjectbiopoliticsen
dc.subjectgestureen
dc.subjectinteriorityen
dc.subjecttransmissionen
dc.subject.ddcddc:778
dc.titleAgamben’s cinema: Psychology versus an ethical form of lifeen
dc.typearticle
dc.type.statuspublishedVersion
dcterms.bibliographicCitationHarbord, Janet (2015): Agamben’s cinema: Psychology versus an ethical form of life. In: NECSUS. European Journal of Media Studies 4 (2), 13–30. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5117/NECSUS2015.2.HARB.
dspace.entity.typeArticleen
local.coverpage2021-05-29T05:27:28
local.identifier.firstpublishedhttps://doi.org/10.5117/NECSUS2015.2.HARB
local.source.epage30
local.source.issue2
local.source.spage13
local.source.volume4

Files

Original bundle
Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
No Thumbnail Available
Name:
NECSUS_4_2_2015_13-30_Harbord_Agambens_cinema_.pdf
Size:
247.73 KB
Format:
Adobe Portable Document Format
Description:
Original PDF with additional cover page.
Download

Collections

2015/2 – #Vintage