Law Critique (2009) 20:299307 DOI 10.

1007/s10978-009-9058-x

A Figure of Annihilated Human Existence: Agamben and Adorno on Gesture

Alastair Morgan

Published online: 5 August 2009 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

Abstract In this paper, I consider Giorgio Agambens essays on gesture, and the loss of gesture, in relation to Theodor Adornos account of gesture given in his work on Kafka. I argue that both share an account of gesture as an involuntary, yet nonintentional gure 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 reied embodiment that can nevertheless image the possibility 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, Agambens articulation of an absolute gesturality tends towards an immuring of the subject within the repetitive space of what Adorno terms objectless inwardness. Although Adornos 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

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implicitly relies on the account given of gesture by Walter Benjamin, particularly Benjamins critical work on Kafka and Brecht (Benjamin 1993, 1999). Samuel Weber has argued that Agambens text, which has been incompletely translated into English as Notes on Gesture, is largely dependent on Benjamins 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 gure 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 Kafkas texts should not be interpreted in terms of an experimental theatre, but represent rather the last and disappearing connecting texts of the silent lm (Adorno and Benjamin 1999, p. 70). Agambens reections on gesture, particularly in the highly compressed and dense text that is the Notes on Gesture, are informed not only by Benjamins writing, but also by the debate between Benjamin and Adorno revolving around the interpretation of Kafkas work. Agambens 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 Agambens 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 Benjamins work. However, I will argue in this paper that it is precisely a divergence of philosophical fundamentals that arises when we compare Adorno and Agambens readings of gesture. This divergence rests on the different ways that they read, to use Adornos 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 denitive for Adorno and Benjamin when thinking about their writings on gesture. In Benjamins work she argues that we nd a complex that relates shock to disappearance, containment, failure and purity. In Adornos work we nd 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 Agambens 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 denitive denition 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 exemplied in Gilles de la Tourettes exhaustive descriptions of the human step, and in Muybridges 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 Tourettes 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 ux, 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 Tourettes syndrome. Both aspects of this extreme dialectic register gesture as a loss, specically 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 undened or explored in Agambens 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 reication of a complete emptiness that is at the heart of human subjectivity. This space cannot be lled by words. Kafkas 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 Kafkas 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 reied subjectivity. The prelinguistic 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 Kafkas 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 Adornos account. However, there are two aspects to gesture which could open up a space for a subjective awareness of reied 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-subjectication, 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 thats 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. Adornos 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, desubjecties. Adornos argument as to the loss of gesture, therefore, fundamentally occupies the ground of expression, even if we are to call it a reection on the aporias of expression. Agamben draws on a quite distinct tradition of dening gesture, in placing it within the sphere of action rather than expression. He draws on a denition by Varro, which places gesture in relation to what Agamben terms rst 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, the making visible of a means as such (Agamben 2007, p. 155, authors 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 humankinds 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, rst, a cloth put into the mouth to prevent speaking and, second, as the actors 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-inlanguage 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 specically, 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 Pauls 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 Pauls 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. 7780). 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 (Agamben 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 denitive as the loss of gesture, is the movement whereby language is unable to express the experience of a destruction of
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For an interesting account of Kommerells work on Jean Paul, see Fleming, Paul (2000).

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subjectivity, which is encapsulated by the subjects 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 reied 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 desubjectication of a sovereign subject in the horror and disgust at its own materiality. But this also pregures 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 Agambens 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 gure 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 xed 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. 132133). 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 Agambens 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 afrmed, 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 dene itself as the essential inoperability of humankind, to the radical being-without-work of human communities (Agamben 2000, p. 140). Agambens 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 difcult 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 desubjectied 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 afrmation 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 Adornos reections on gesture attempt to immanently produce, through an account of the destruction and loss of gesture, an experience that can move reied subjectivity to a critical awareness of the conditions of such reication. 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 pregure new forms of political and communal belongings without identity.

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Whether the movement from an account of the extreme conditions of reied 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 difcult to see how Agambens philosophy of pure potentiality ultimately produces anything more than the afrmation of its own dissolution in a generalised destruction of experience. Although Adornos 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-reection 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 reied 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.

References
Adorno, Theodor W. 1990. Negative dialectics (trans: Ashton, E.B.). London: Routledge. Adorno, Theodor W. 2003. Notes on Kafka (trans: Weber, Samuel and Nicholsen, Shierry Walker). In Can one live after Auschwitz? A philosophical reader, ed. with an introduction, Rolf Tiedemann (trans: Livingstone, Rodney and others). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Adorno, Theodor W., and Walter Benjamin. 1999. The complete correspondence 19281940 (trans: Walker, Nicholas). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Agamben, Giorgio. 1999. Kommerell, or on gesture. In Potentialities. Collected essays in philosophy (trans: Heller-Roazen, Daniel). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Agamben, Giorgio. 2000. Means without endnotes on politics (trans: Binetti, Vincenzo and Casarino, Cesare). Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press. Agamben, Giorgio. 2002. Remnants of Auschwitz. The witness and the archive (trans: Heller-Roazen, Daniel). New York: Zone Books. Agamben, Giorgio. 2007. Notes on gesture. In Infancy and history: On the destruction of experience (trans: Hero, Liz). London: Verso. Benjamin, Walter. 1993. Understanding Brecht (trans: Bostock, Anna). London: Verso, NLB. Benjamin, Walter. 1999. Illuminations (trans: Zorn, Harry). London: Pimlico. Fleming, Paul. 2000. The crisis of art: Max Kommerell and Jean Pauls gestures. MLN, 115 (3). German Issue, April, 519543. Nicholsen, Shierry Weber. 1999. Exact imagination, late work. On Adornos aesthetics. Cambridge, MA, and London, England: The MIT Press. Weber, Samuel. 2006. Going along for the ride: Violence and gesture: Agamben reading Benjamin reading Kafka reading Cervantes. Germanic Review 81 (1): 6583.

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