Ethics, Gesture and the Western
Keywords:
gesture, Agamben, Western, genreAbstract
This paper relates the Western Movie to Agamben’s implied gestural zone between intention and act. Film is important in the realisation of this zone because it was the first means of representation to capture the body in movement. The Western movie explores the space of ethical indistinction between the acts of individual fighters and the establishment of a rule of law, or putting this another way, between violence and justice. Two classic examples of an archetypal Western plot (Shane, 1953 and Unforgiven, 1991) that particularly embodies this are cited. In both a gunfighter who has forsworn violence at the start is led by the circumstances of the plot to take it up once more at the conclusion. In these terms all the gestures contained between these beginning- and end-points are analysable as an ethics of gesture because, captured as gestures, they occupy the human space between abstraction and action, suspended between them, and reducible to neither. David Foster Wallace's definition of this narrative arc in Infinite Jest (and embodied in it) is adduced in order to suggest a parallel between Agamben's notion of an ethics of gesture, and an ethics of genre.
References
Agamben, Giorgio. 1993. The Coming Community. Translated by Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Agamben, Giorgio. 2000. ‘Notes on Gesture’. In Means without End: Notes on Politics, translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino, 49–59. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Arendt, Hannah. 2006. On Revolution. London: Penguin.
Bazin, André. 1971. ‘The Western, or the American Film par excellence’. In What Is Cinema?, 2:140–48. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Birmingham, Peg. 2011. ‘Agamben on Violence, Language, and Human Rights’. In Philosophy and the Return of Violence: Studies from the Widening Gyre, edited by Nathan Eckstrand and Christopher S. Yates, 124–34. London: Continuum.
Fisher, Jaimey. 2013. Christian Petzold. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Grønstad, Asbjørn, and Henrik Gustafsson. 2014. ‘Introduction: Giorgio Agamben and the Shape of Cinema to Come’. In Cinema and Agamben: Ethics, Biopolitics and the Moving Image, edited by Asbjørn Grønstad and Henrik Gustafsson. New York: Bloomsbury.
Honig, Bonnie. 2016. ‘Charged: Debt, Power, and the Politics of the Flesh in Shakespeare’s Merchant, Melville’s Moby Dick, and Eric Santner’s The Weight of All Flesh’. In The Weight of All Flesh: On the Subject-Matter of Political Economy, by Eric L. Santner, edited by Kevis Goodman, 131–82. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190254087.003.0005
Koester, Joachim. 2017. ‘The Place of Dead Roads’. Wall-mounted description at Camden Arts Centre, London, where the video installation was exhibited from 28 January to 26 March 2017.
Marcus, Greil. 1995. ‘Cowboy Boots and Germans’. In The Dustbin of History, 103–110. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Marcus, Greil. 1995. ‘John Wayne Listening’. In The Dustbin of History, 209–215. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Österreichisches Filmmuseum. 2016. "My Darling Clementine." Accessed 1 November 2016. https://www.filmmuseum.at/jart/prj3/filmmuseum/main.jart?j-j-url=/kinoprogramm/produktion&veranstaltungen_id=1110&ss1=y
Perez, Gilberto. 1998. The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Pippin, Robert B. 2010. Hollywood Westerns and American Myth: The Importance of Howard Hawks and John Ford for Political Philosophy. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Rose, Charlie. 1997. "Interview with David Foster Wallace. The Charlie Rose Show March 27 1997." Accessed 22 November 2015. http://www.smallbytes.net/~bobkat/rose.html
Tompkins, Jane. 1992. West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Vaux, Sara Anson. 2012. The Ethical Vision of Clint Eastwood. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.
Wallace, David Foster. 1996. Infinite Jest. New York: Little, Brown and Company.
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal, provided it is for non-commercial uses; and that lets others excerpt, translate, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).