Chapter seven ‘ the underlying gesture ’ : towards the notion of gesture in jean d ’ udine

In his groundbreaking essay Notes on Gesture (1992), Giorgio Agamben describes a gestural catastrophe that befell the late 19th century European culture. On the one hand, he points out the proliferation of motor disorders registered in medical records, on the other hand, an unprecedented fascination for movement and gesture in the sphere of art. “An age that has lost its gestures is, for this reason, obsessed by them”, he writes, giving various examples of gestural infatuation, including Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Isadora Duncan’s free movement dance, Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of eternal return, Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, Marcel Proust’s novels, and, in particular, the emerging motion picture (Agamben 2000, 52f.). Not without certain psychoanalytical implications, Agamben argues that from the outset cinema was predestined to become a means to register both the loss of – and the extraordinary fixation on – gestures. The seemingly inevitable interest of silent cinema in gestural expression goes, however, beyond the technical limitations of the epoch, as became evident in sound film. The origins of this gestural fascination are therefore to be