Cinema and Agamben ― Ethics, Biopolitics and the Moving Image

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).