Giorgio Agamben, Vincenzo Binetti (translator), Cesare Casarino (translator) · 1992 (essay); Eng. 2000 · PDF · Calibre ID 13685
Resurfaced in The Unrepeatable Gesture (2026-10-01).
Role in the triad
The history and the definition: the bourgeoisie lost its gestures; cinema reclaims and records the loss; gesture as gerere, pure means, gag.
Why this book
Moves Kleist’s loss from soul to history (Tourette, Muybridge, Marey, Warburg), explains why Remainder’s model is a film actor, and gives the conflict its third term: gesture neither as product nor as end but as means displayed. Its ‘gag’ (an actor’s improvisation for lost memory) names the liver lady’s line. OCR text layer; quotes are passages the OCR got right; printed pages (PDF = printed + 10).
Quotations
Verified against the book’s own text on the day of the reading.
- “By the end of the nineteenth century, the Western bourgeoisie had definitely lost its gestures.” (p. 49)
- “Patients can neither start nor complete the simplest of gestures.” (p. 51)
- “In the cinema, a society that has lost its gestures tries at once to reclaim what it has lost and to record its loss.” (p. 53)
- “An age that has lost its gestures is, for this reason, obsessed by them.” (p. 53)
- “each single gesture becomes a destiny.” (p. 53)
- “Cinema leads images back to the homeland of gesture.” (p. 56)
- “What characterizes gesture is that in it nothing is being produced or acted, but rather something is being endured and supported.” (p. 57)
- “The gesture is the exhibition of a mediality” (p. 58)
- “it is always a gag in the proper meaning of the term, indicating first of all something that could be put in your mouth to hinder speech, as well as in the sense of the actor’s improvisation meant to compensate a loss of memory or an inability to speak.” (p. 59)
- Derived list: roll call of the lost gesture (Balzac to Beckett)
- Other: glossary (facere, agere, gerere, res gesta, mediality, gag, coupes mobiles)
Themes
cinema · facere/agere/gerere · gag · gesture · Marey · mediality · Muybridge · Nietzsche · politics · pure means · Tourette · Varro · Warburg