The Biopolitics of Gesture in the Cinema of Yorgos Lanthimos

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 cinema, particularly in his early works (from Kinetta to The Killing of a Sacred Deer ). Addressing Agamben’s philosophy from the point of view of Lanthimos’s cinematographic gestures and the critique of patriarchy and neoliberal forms of precarity and vulnerabilisation that can be found in his films, this study examines Agamben’s unspoken affinities with contemporary radical feminism and queer theory. Exploring the exceptional resonance between these two authors, as well as their limitations, this book contributes to a theory of performative power under biopolitical and spectacular modalities of government, focussing in particular on Agamben’s ideas of operativity and inoperativity in relation to the peculiar status of gestures and performances in Lanthimos and on the construction and deconstruction of the white bourgeois, normative, and consensual “formality” of life. 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 (Brill, 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.