The Biopolitics of Gesture in the Cinema of Yorgos Lanthimos Operations of Life

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 Kinetta to The Killing of a Sacred Deer. 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.

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

Carlo Comanducci is the author of Spectatorship and Film Theory: The Wayward Spectator (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and co-editor, with Alex Wilkinson, of Matters of Telling: The Impulse of the Story (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.