The Biopolitics of Gesture in the Cinema of Yorgos Lanthimos

Operations of Life
2025
ISBN: 978-3-031-74188-3
Verlag: Springer Nature Switzerland

Buch, Englisch, 293 Seiten, Format (B × H): 153 mm x 216 mm, Gewicht: 516 g

This book establishes a dialogue between Yorgos Lanthimos and Giorgio Agamben as a way of interpreting the “weird” roles, rules, and rituals that define and discipline lives in Lanthimos’s early works, from to . By exploring the resonance between Lanthimos’s cinema and Agamben’s understanding of gesture, this work wants to contribute to a theory of performative power under biopolitical and spectacular modalities of government, focussing in particular on Agamben’s ideas of operativity and inoperativity and on the construction and deconstruction of the white bourgeois, normative, and consensual “formality” of life. In turn, the role gestures play in Lanthimos’s critique of patriarchy and of neoliberal forms of vulnerabilisation is used to question Agamben’s unspoken affinities with contemporary radical feminism and queer theory.

Zielgruppe

Research

Autoren/Hrsg.

Comanducci, Carlo

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Filmwissenschaft, Fernsehen, Radio

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Chapter 1: Constellations of Gestures.- Part I: Mimic Subjects.- Chapter 2: The Gesture of Suffering - .- Chapter 3: The Irreparable Act – .- Chapter 4: The Office of Being - Part II: Sacred Animals.- Chapter 5: The Rule and the Animal – .- Chapter 6: The Economy of Justice – .- Chapter 7: Unfinished Metamorphoses: From Infamous Gestures to Spectacular biopolitics.

Über Autor(innen)

Carlo Comanducci is the author of (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and co-editor, with Alex Wilkinson, of (2019). He writes on cinema, gesture, and film experience, critical and queer theory. He lives, mostly, in France, and teaches film history and film theory at Vistula University in Warsaw, Poland.