‘A Figure of Annihilated Human Existence’: Agambenand Adorno on Gesture

Alastair Morgan

Published online: 5 August 2009

� Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

Abstract In this paper, I consider Giorgio Agamben’s essays on gesture, and the

loss of gesture, in relation to Theodor Adorno’s account of gesture given in his work

on Kafka. I argue that both share an account of gesture as an involuntary, yet non-

intentional figure of a generalised destruction of experience. However, in their

respective accounts of an emphatic possibility that can be located in the loss of

gesture, Agamben and Adorno move in fundamentally different philosophical

directions. For Agamben, the loss of gesture opens up the possibility of a space of

existing within the pure possibility of speaking itself. For Adorno, the loss of

gesture returns us to a reified embodiment that can nevertheless image the possi-

bility of a different way of relating to materiality. I argue that, in the attempt to

immanently construct forms of resistance within a generalised destruction of

experience, Agamben’s articulation of an absolute gesturality tends towards an

immuring of the subject within the repetitive space of what Adorno terms

‘objectless inwardness’. Although Adorno’s account of gesture and its relation to

metaphysics and politics is equally problematic in many ways, I argue that his

account of a metaphysical experience that appears within alienated gestures offers

the possibility for moving beyond the destruction of experience.

Keywords Awakening � Experience � Expression � Freezing � Gesture � Loss

It has been noted by several commentators that in his essays on gesture, namely the

‘Notes on Gesture’, and the essay ‘Kommerell, or on gesture’, Giorgio Agamben

A. Morgan (&)

University of Nottingham, Duncan MacMillan House, Porchester Road, Mapperley, Nottingham

NG3 6AA, UK

e-mail: alastair.morgan@nottingham.ac.uk

123

Law Critique (2009) 20:299–307

DOI 10.1007/s10978-009-9058-x

implicitly relies on the account given of gesture by Walter Benjamin, particularly

Benjamin’s critical work on Kafka and Brecht (Benjamin 1993, 1999). Samuel

Weber has argued that Agamben’s text, which has been incompletely translated into

English as ‘Notes on Gesture’, is largely dependent on Benjamin’s work (Agamben

1999, 2007). Weber writes that:

Although he is not mentioned by name in them, these ‘Notes’ owe much to

Walter Benjamin, whose shadow looms large over an argument that looks to

cinema for the reintroduction of gestures into language (Weber 2006, p. 73).

The other figure in the background of these essays on gesture, not noted by the

commentators, is Theodor Adorno. In fact it was Adorno, not Benjamin, who

referred explicitly to the relation of cinema and gesture in his letter to Benjamin of

17th December 1934, when he argued that Kafka’s texts should not be interpreted in

terms of an experimental theatre, but ‘represent rather the last and disappearing

connecting texts of the silent film’ (Adorno and Benjamin 1999, p. 70).

Agamben’s reflections on gesture, particularly in the highly compressed and dense

text that is the ‘Notes on Gesture’, are informed not only by Benjamin’s writing, but

also by the debate between Benjamin and Adorno revolving around the interpretation of

Kafka’s work. Agamben’s work draws constellations of ideas surrounding gesture from

both Adorno and Benjamin. This is not a surprising conclusion given the common

heritage provided by Benjamin for both Adorno and Agamben’s work. Indeed, Adorno

commented to Benjamin, in relation to the Kafka essay, that ‘our agreement in

philosophical fundamentals has never impressed itself upon my mind more perfectly

here’ (Adorno and Benjamin 1999, p. 66). One would therefore think that a comparison

of Adorno and Agamben on gesture might be a rather fruitless exercise, given their joint

common grounding and critical approbation of Benjamin’s work.

However, I will argue in this paper that it is precisely a divergence of philosophical

fundamentals that arises when we compare Adorno and Agamben’s readings of

gesture. This divergence rests on the different ways that they read, to use Adorno’s

terminology, a metaphysical experience of gesture, and how this metaphysical

experience can relate to a politics.

Shierry Weber Nicholsen (1999) has outlined two different constellations of

ideas that are definitive for Adorno and Benjamin when thinking about their

writings on gesture. In Benjamin’s work she argues that we ‘find a complex that

relates shock to disappearance, containment, failure and purity’. In Adorno’s work

we find a complex of ‘freezing, obliqueness, survival and awakening’ (Weber

Nicholsen 1999, p. 215). In relation to these constellations of ideas, we might say

that Agamben blurs the differences between Adorno and Benjamin, that his writing

on gesture contains all of these ideas apart from perhaps two (those of failure and

awakening) as, although Agamben refers to gesture as a ‘gag’, it is not in relation to

a failure of expression but as a revealing of a more fundamental and originary level

of a language that dispenses completely with any concept of expression (Agamben

2007, p. 156). Failure is not fundamental or an endpoint, in the sense that Benjamin

came to argue eventually, with his later critical thoughts on his original Kafka essay,

that Kafka failed in an attempt to preserve the transmissibility of a tradition without

any law or doctrine. Similarly, there is no sense of awakening in the obliqueness of

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gesture in Agamben’s essays but a fundamental disappearance of any subject who

could awake to anything.

What is Gesture?

How do Agamben and Adorno understand gesture? Certainly, in the ‘Notes on

gesture’, Agamben agrees with Adorno in arguing that no definitive definition of

gesture can be given, due to the complete loss of gesture in modern societies; a loss

that Agamben dates from the end of the 19th century. He begins the ‘Notes’ with an

account of different attempts to record gestures that, in their attempt to record, only

mark a dead space within gesture, or an annihilation of the sphere of the gesture.

The dead space of gesture is exemplified in Gilles de la Tourette’s exhaustive

descriptions of the human step, and in Muybridge’s split-second photographs of a

variety of everyday gestures frozen into postures. What is provided by these

attempts to capture an essence to gesture at the end of the 19th century is a tableau

of decontextualised images of gesture frozen in the moment of their undertaking.

There is a sense in the fascination with immobilising gesture of the extreme effort it

takes to walk across a room.

At the opposite pole to these gestures are the involuntary tics and jerks that are

characterised by Tourette’s description of the disorder that came to bear his name.

Agamben describes this annihilation of gesture in the following terms:

The patient is incapable of either beginning or fully enacting the most simple

gestures; if he or she manages to initiate a movement, it is interrupted and sent awry

by uncontrollable jerkings and shudderings whereby the muscles seem to dance

(chorea) quite independently of any motor purpose (Agamben 2007, p. 150).

These two poles of gesture (the freezing of gesture into an immobile image, and

the involuntary spasm as gesture) represent the two extreme poles of the dialectic of

gesture that Benjamin describes in his text ‘What is Epic theatre?’ Benjamin writes

that:

This strict, frame-like, enclosed nature of each moment of an attitude, which,

after all, is as a whole in a state of living flux, is one of the basic dialectical

characteristics of the gesture (Benjamin 1993, p. 3).

Agamben describes a process where this dialectics of gesture is pushed to the

extreme at both poles. First, there is the attempt to freeze the gesture into an image,

posture, or trace of a posture and, second, there is the involuntary invasion of the

whole sphere of any willed subjective owning of the gesture that occurs in

Tourette’s syndrome. Both aspects of this extreme dialectic register gesture as a

loss, specifically as a loss of the natural that comes to be seen as a form of fate.

Agamben writes that ‘for people who are bereft of all that is natural to them, every

gesture becomes a fate’ (Agamben 2007, p. 151).

However, just what this naturalness of gesture is, is left undefined or explored in

Agamben’s essays. Adorno gives an account of the alienation and distortion of

gesture, as a parallel to the alienation and distortion of subjectivity, in his essay on

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Kafka and in the earlier cited letter to Benjamin of 17th December 1934. He reads

the alienation and distortion of gesture through the increasing hypostatisation of the

individual as a space of what he terms ‘objectless inwardness’. Through a futile

process of disavowing all material and non-identical contents within the supreme

structuring, individual consciousness, a space of ‘objectless inwardness’ becomes

posited as a thing (Adorno 2003, p. 261). There is a reification of a complete

emptiness that is at the heart of human subjectivity. This space cannot be filled by

words. Kafka’s attempt to express this space as a destruction of experience leads

him to the gesture. It is only the gesture, in its emphatic guise, that can approach a

means of expression for the pure space of empty subjectivity but, in the very process

of manifesting this expression as bodily gesture, the subject is doubly disgusted and

alienated at an element that is seen as alien to the sovereign self. In his essay on

Kafka, Adorno (2003) writes that:

Inwardness, revolving in itself, and devoid of all resistance, is denied all those

things which might put a stop to its interminable movement and which thus

take on an aura of mystery. A spell hangs over Kafka’s space; imprisoned in

itself the subject holds its breath, as though it were not permitted to touch

anything unlike itself (Adorno 2003, p. 262).

Adorno reads the loss of gesture in terms of a withering of language and the

power of language to express the empty space of a reified subjectivity. The pre-

linguistic returns at the limits of the possibility of language, but all it can mean for

the subject is a disgust at the forms of expression that result. At this point, Adorno,

too, conjures the image of fate:

Together with the repulsive, the familiar, the unintelligible, and the inevitable,

such a person has seen the image of fate suddenly light up (Adorno 2003,

p. 249).

Fate, in this sense, represents what has happened to the subject through a process

where it has disavowed all its material and non-identical contents, and has been

reduced to the repetitive attempt to capture the only gestures that it can make

to express such an isolation, but the very materiality of the gestures causes them

to be repellent to the identical subject. This is the space within which Kafka’s

protagonists move.

For Adorno, then, the loss of gesture, the distortion and alienation at the heart of

gesture, is related to a deep failure of language in its relation to objectivity; a failure that is

related to the human subject being deprived of a ‘language of things’ (Adorno and

Benjamin 1999, p. 70). What gesture promises is an element within language that can

mirror the materiality of the objective world, a non-predicative function within language;

one might say the musicality of language. However, the gestures that arise through a

withering of the powers of expression within language can only function as interruptive

shocks, as markers of alienation and horror. There is no emphatic recapturing of a space

of gesture before language in Adorno’s account. However, there are two aspects to

gesture which could open up a space for a subjective awareness of reified life.

First, in the very process of alienation and distortion, the subject recognises its

own non-identity with itself. That which is dominated materiality comes to stand

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over and appears to dominate the subject, but in the shock at this alienation of

gesture lies a recognition of an element of materiality and non-identity at the heart

of subjectivity. This is a process of de-subjectification, but one that holds open the

possibility of an awakening to a different way of a subject relating to objectivity.

The second moment of awakening relates to the emphatic nature of gestures.

Gestures are both completely ephemeral and at the same time take on the aura of an

emphatic statement, such as ‘that’s the way it is’. The indecipherability of gesture

loosens the grip of any identity thinking, and the merging of the absolutely

ephemeral and the perpetual within the frame-like freezing of a gesture points to the

perpetual recurrence of the same within capitalist societies of exchange. However,

the refusal to identify within gesture puts gesture beyond use for any identity

thinking. Gesture serves as an interruption for any form of expression, and blocks

any productive use or straightforward attribution of meaning.

Adorno’s account of gesture locates it within the aporias of subjective expression.

It is therefore parasitic upon a traditional notion of gesture as an interiority that is

expressed in the body. However, Adorno twists such a notion around in the sense that

the only way that the interiority of the subject existing in a space of ‘objectless

inwardness’ can express such a state is through an alienated and distorted gesture.

Gesture is not a language of interiority but an expression of the destruction of

subjectivity, which, at the same time, desubjectifies. Adorno’s argument as to the loss

of gesture, therefore, fundamentally occupies the ground of expression, even if we

are to call it a reflection on the aporias of expression.

Agamben draws on a quite distinct tradition of defining gesture, in placing it

within the sphere of action rather than expression. He draws on a definition by

Varro, which places gesture in relation to what Agamben terms first ‘production’

and ‘enactment’, and then, in Aristotelian terms a ‘poeisis’ and a ‘praxis’. Poeisis is

marked by a production which moves beyond itself to an end, and praxis is marked

by an enactment that has its end within itself. Gesture stands to these two forms of

action as a third possibility, a form of action that ‘… is the display of mediation, themaking visible of a means as such’ (Agamben 2007, p. 155, author’s italics). The

‘means’ that is made visible in gesture is a mute experience that lies at the heart of

language itself, a form of speechlessness that lies within language, as the pure

possibility of speaking itself. In the essay on Kommerell, Agamben argues that:

what is at issue in gesture is not so much a prelinguistic content as, so to speak,

the other side of language, the muteness inherent in humankind’s very

capacity for language, its speechless dwelling in language. And the more

human beings have language, the stronger the unsayable weighs them down

(Agamben 1999, p. 78).

Gesture functions as a ‘gag’ on language both as, first, a cloth put into the mouth

to prevent speaking and, second, as the actor’s improvisation ‘…to make up for an

impossibility of speaking’ (Agamben 2007, p. 155). Gesture functions in this way

because the emphatic role of gesture, for Agamben, is the expression of ‘being-in-

language itself’ (Agamben 2007, p. 155). Therefore, gesture has nothing to express

other than the very possibility of a mute experience itself as the dwelling within

language.

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It is in the interruption of gesture, or the freezing of gesture in a cinematic image,

that this sphere of a pure ‘display of mediation’ can take place within the bodily

undertaking and supporting of a gesture, which is neither a means to an end nor a

movement that contains its own end within itself but, rather, the very display of a

means that is devoid of any self-contained or external end. Agamben, then, moves

from the articulation of mute gesture to thinking about the gesture contained within

language or, more specifically, the word, and articulates a conception of language as

the showing of its own pure communicability, its potential for communication.

The importance of the freezing of gesture into an image, either photographic or

cinematic, or the complete involuntary spasmodic judderings of involuntary gestures,

is that this disconnection of gesture from any context, reveals it as a ‘pure milieu’, a

pure undertaking, that puts it beyond any attribution of identity, intention or

meaning. Gesture is put into play as a space of pure gesturality, beyond any

subjective end or control. In his essay on Kommerell, Agamben points to a dialectic

of two gestures that Kommerell locates in Jean Paul’s writing.1 First is the ‘gesture of

the soul’ that arises through an experience of corporeal estrangement, a feeling that

the gestures of the body are cut off from interiority, and that there is an unbridgeable

gap between interior experience and an alienated bodily gesture. It is through a

failure of gestural expression that Jean Paul’s characters turn to language, in its

gestural component, as an attempt to say or show oneself. This is the sphere of the

gesture of the soul, which turns to the materiality of language as an attempt to say

oneself, emphatically, because of the failure of gesture to express interiority. Above

such a gesture of the soul is a higher plane of gesture, the pure gesture, that is the

origin of all gestures. The pure gesture is the gesture that lacks any form of relating to

exteriority. This gesture does not attempt to say or express anything, but inheres

within language as the pure possibility of speaking (Agamben 1999, pp. 77–80).

Agamben develops this realm of pure gesture by arguing that it becomes

immanently apparent only in a generalised destruction of gestural expression. In the

statement that ‘In the cinema, a society that has lost its gestures seeks to

reappropriate what it has lost whilst simultaneously recording that loss’, Agamben

initiates a dialectic that disintegrates into an appearance of a space of pure gesture,

beyond expression, beyond subjectivity and, even, beyond material affects (Agam-

ben 2007, p. 151). The immobilising of gesture through the cinematic or

photographic image, which attempts to catch hold of a gesturality that is increasingly

escaping in the terms of a ‘generalised catastrophe of the gestural sphere’, in modern

life opens up a space where gesture can hang suspended beyond use, intention,

expression, or body (Agamben 2007, p. 150).

Gesture, Ethics and Politics

We can identify two different trajectories for a theory of the loss of gesture in

Adorno and Agamben. For Adorno, what is definitive as the loss of gesture, is the

movement whereby language is unable to express the experience of a destruction of

1 For an interesting account of Kommerell’s work on Jean Paul, see Fleming, Paul (2000).

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subjectivity, which is encapsulated by the subject’s disavowal of its materiality, and

of anything that is non-identical to its sovereign, empty, law-giving self. Gesture

arises through this experience of a lack of any expression for an interiority that is

socially produced. But, when it arises it stands out as that which is most alien and

negative to the sovereign subject, a somatic marker of its own lack of identity with

itself. The experience of the loss of gesture is one of involuntary interruption to

intention and meaning, of horror at the alienated body, and disgust at the reduction

of subjectivity to a material instance. Alienated or distorted gesture is the result of a

social process that has disarmed the powers of language to express the spaceless

space of a reified and empty interiority. However, what the gesture reveals, as a

form of awakening, is the metaphysical experience of the possibility of a different

way of relating to that which is alien to the sovereign subject. There is within

gesture what Nicholsen has referred to as a ‘refracted mimetic relation to nature’

(Weber Nicholsen 1999, p. 206). This refraction occurs through a process of

desubjectification of a sovereign subject in the horror and disgust at its own

materiality. But this also prefigures the possibility of a different way of relating to

materiality in a non-dominating fashion. Gesture returns us to the passivity of the

body and affects, but awakens us to the possibility of a non-violent means of

relating to materiality.

In Agamben’s writing, gesture or the loss of gesture leads back to a pure

potentiality within language itself. There is a reversal of the movement described in

Adorno. It is not that the withering of language leads to distorted gestures, but that

the attempt to freeze and immobilise gesture in the cinematic image reveals a

potentiality within life itself as a pure possibility of dwelling within language, and

of creating a space for a politics and an ethics that has nothing to do with the relation

of a means and an end. An absolute gesturality thus converges with the space for a

new form of politics that can only arise through the destruction of experience itself.

In this destruction of experience, politics becomes the ‘sphere of pure means, which

is to say, of the absolute and total gesturality of human beings’ (Agamben 2007,

p. 156). Such a space of politics arises through the separation of gesture from any

interior intention, use or meaning effected by a destruction of experience itself. This

opens up the possibility of a transcendence in an experience of complete subjective

dissolution into absolute gesture. This absolute gesturality is:

a figure of annihilated human existence, its ‘negative outline’ and, at the same

time, its self-transcendence not toward a beyond but in the ‘intimacy of living

here and now’, in a profane mystery whose sole object is existence itself

(Agamben 1999, p. 84).

Both these accounts attempt to open up a different space for forms of politics that

can base itself on an experience of the non-identical, the lack of a fixed position or

use for political subjects. Adorno does this through an emphatic notion of

individuality that relies on a retention of subjective experience even in its

dissolution, what he terms a ‘self-relinquishment’ (Adorno 1990, p. 13). The

problem for the relation of such a metaphysical experience to any politics or ethics

is twofold. First, given the account of a destruction of experience that Adorno and

Agamben share, how does a subject survive that can ‘bear witness to its own ruin’

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(Agamben 2002, pp. 132–133). Adorno attempts to resolve this problem, by

articulating the notion of a survival within the subject of a non-violent material

affective experience that can return in an involuntary and refracted manner in

metaphysical experiences. However, the very involuntary and passive nature of such

experiences cannot give any necessary and determinative non-violent content. What

returns as an ‘anamnesis of the untamed impulse that precedes the ego’, can just as

equally be violent rage as tender attentiveness (Adorno 1990, p. 222).

In Agamben’s argument the sphere of an absolute gesturality merges with a

politics, through the awakening of gesture within images rather than an awakening

of affective resonances through the loss of gesture. The alienation and distortion of

an experience is to be affirmed, in its dissolution of subjectivity, as the creation of a

space in between any purpose, use or ends. It opens up a space of politics that can

think a concept of pure means without ends. The concept of a pure space of

gesturality points to a form of politics that could define itself as ‘the essential

inoperability of humankind, to the radical being-without-work of human commu-

nities’ (Agamben 2000, p. 140). Agamben’s metaphysical experience is an attempt,

through the immanent destruction of experience, to produce or realise a fundamental

form of passive experience that contains itself within a process of pure potentiality.

It is difficult to see how this functions as a form of embodied experience; indeed, it

appears to revert to the very description of that which Adorno criticises as

‘objectless inwardness’ at the beginning of his account of the loss of gesture.

Adorno writes that:

objectless inwardness is space in the precise sense that everything it produces

obeys the laws of timeless repetition (Adorno 2003, p. 265).

The pure immanent transcendence of an absolute gesturality, transformed into a

political space, dissolves the embodiment at the heart of gesture into a form of

desubjectified ‘objectless inwardness’, which has no means to actualise or relate

itself to objectivity but simply holds itself in a state of suspension. Such a suspended

state may have its virtue in terms of an attempt to resist power through an emphasis

upon uselessness and inoperability, but such a ruse itself tends to converge with an

extreme affirmation of the destruction of experience. Adorno writes of Kafka that:

The only cure for the half-uselessness of a life which does not live would be its

entire inutility. Kafka thus allies himself with death (Adorno 2003, p. 271).

Both Agamben and Adorno’s reflections on gesture attempt to immanently

produce, through an account of the destruction and loss of gesture, an experience

that can move reified subjectivity to a critical awareness of the conditions of such

reification. This is only possible, given a generalised account of the destruction of

experience, in an experience at the limits, a metaphysical experience. Both argue

that these metaphysical experiences can in some sense open up a different form of

politics. However, they fundamentally diverge, in terms of the basis for such a new

form of politics. For Adorno, it can only lie in a non-violent awareness of material

non-identity, and for Agamben it lies in an opening of an originary space for an

inoperable being in language that can prefigure new forms of political and

communal belongings without identity.

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Whether the movement from an account of the extreme conditions of reified life,

through to a metaphysical experience and back, in some indeterminate way, to a

form of politics makes any sense, is a problem for both thinkers. But, if the result of

such a process is supposed to open up spaces for resistance to power, it is difficult to

see how Agamben’s philosophy of pure potentiality ultimately produces anything

more than the affirmation of its own dissolution in a generalised destruction of

experience. Although Adorno’s concept of a self-relinquishment is no less utopian

in its attempt to think the possibility of a life without self-preservation, the attempt

to think the relation between metaphysical experience and politics in terms of an

affective, embodied life at least promises a more fruitful conjunction. Without

subjective experience, as embodied experience that proceeds through self-reflection

to an awareness of its inherent contradictions, there can be no possibility for an

experience that would point to a life beyond the life that does not live. Such a

subjective experience cannot be thought alone as that of a formal subject that denies

its own relation to materiality but, furthermore, neither can it be a complete

dissolution of subjective experience without a moment of a recovery of the subject.

Such a moment of recovery can only be theorised in terms of a bodily experience

itself: a basis, a locus, to which human experience always returns, but in a reified

form. This is not a return to an originary potentiality but a body exhausted with all

that it embodies, which, nevertheless, in the painful realisation of its own fragility as

subjectivity, is opened towards the possibility of a different form of life.

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