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 Lanthimoss early works, from Kinetta to The Killing of a Sacred Deer. By exploring the resonance between Lanthimoss cinema and Agambens understanding of gesture, this work wants to contribute to a theory of performative power under biopolitical and spectacular modalities of government, focussing in particular on Agambens ideas of operativity and inoperativity and on the construction and deconstruction of the white bourgeois, normative, and consensual formality of life. In turn, the role gestures play in Lanthimoss critique of patriarchy and of neoliberal forms of vulnerabilisation is used to question Agambens unspoken affinities with contemporary radical feminism and queer theory.