Cinema and Agamben: Ethics, Biopolitics and the Moving Image

Description

Cinema and Agamben brings together a group of established scholars of film and visual culture to explore the nexus between the moving image and the influential work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Including two original texts by Agamben himself, published here for the first time in English translation, these essays facilitate a unique multidisciplinary conversation that fundamentally rethinks the theory and praxis of cinema. In their resourceful analyses of the work of artists such as David Claerbout, Jean-Luc Godard, Philippe Grandrieux, Michael Haneke, Jean Rouch, and others, the authors put to use a range of key concepts from Agamben's rich body of work, like biopolitics, de-creation, gesture, potentiality and profanation. Sustaining the eminently interdisciplinary scope of Agamben's writing, the essays all bespeak the importance of Agamben's thought for forging new beginnings in film theory and for remedying the elegiac proclamations of the death of cinema so characteristic of the current moment.

Henrik Gustafsson is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Culture and Literature, University of Tromso, 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 Asbjorn Gronstad) of Ethics and Images of Pain (2012). Asbjorn Gronstad 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. -- 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