IV
Because it is centrally located in the gesture, not the image, cinema essentially ranks with ethics and politics (and not merely with aesthetics).
What is gesture? And observation by Varro holds an extremely valuable clue. He inscribes gesture in the sphere of action, but distinguishes it clearly from acting [agere] and doing [facere]:
A person can make [facere] something and not enact [agere] it, as a poet makes a play, but does not act it (agree in the sense of playing a part); on the other hand the actor acts the play, but does not make it. So the play is made [fit] by the poet, but not acted [agitur] by him; it is acted by the actor, but not made by him. Whereas the imperator (the magistrate in whom supreme power is invested) of whom the expression res gerere is used (to carry something out, in the sense of taking it upon oneself, assuming total responsibility for it), neither makes nor acts, but takes charge, in other words carries the burden of it [sustinet].
What characterizes gesture is that in it there is neither production nor enactment, but undertaking and supporting. In other words, gesture opens the sphere of ethos as the most fitting sphere of the human. But in what way is an action undertaken and supported? In what way does a res become res gesta, a simple fact become an event? Varro’s distinction between facere and agere derives, in the final analysis, from Aristotle. In a famous passage from the Nicomachean ethics, he contrasts them thus: ‘Action [praxis] and production [poiesis] are generically different. For production aims at an end other than itself; but this is impossible in the case of action, because the end is merely to do what is right.’
What is new, however, is the identification along with these, of a third kind of action: if doing is a means in sight of an end and praxis is an end without means, gesture breaks the false alternative between ends and means that paralyses morality and presents means which, as such, are removed from the sphere of mediation without thereby becoming ends.
Thus, if we are to understand gesture, nothing is more misleading than to picture a sphere of means directed towards an end (for example, walking as a means of moving the body from point A to point B) and hence, distinct from and superior to it, a sphere of gesture as movement that contains its own end within itself (for example, dance as an aesthetic dimension). A finality without means is just as much of an aberration as a mediation that makes sense only in relation to an end. If dance is gesture, this is, however, because it is nothing but the physical tolerance of bodily movements and the display of their mediating nature. Gesture is the display of mediation, the making visible of a means as such. It makes apparent the human states of being-in-a-medium and thereby opens up the ethical dimension for human beings. But as a person in a pornographic film is captured in the act of carrying out a gesture that is merely a means a directed towards the end of procuring pleasure for others (or him or herself), through the sole fact of being photographed and displayed in his or her own state of mediation this person is suspended from that mediation and can become, for the spectators, the medium of a new pleasure (one that would be otherwise incomprehensible); or as those gestures in mime directed towards the most familiar ends are displayed as such, and therefore, held in suspense ‘entre le désir et l’accomplissement, la perpetration et son souvenir’ (between the desire and its fulfillment, the perpetration and its memory’), in what Mallarmé calls a milieu pur–a pure milieu–thus, in gesture, there is the sphere not of an end in itself, but of a kind of mediation that is pure and devoid of any end that is effectively communicated to people.
Only in this way can the obscure Kantian expression ‘finality without end’ acquire a concrete meaning. It is, in a means, that potential for the gesture to interpret it in its very being-means and only thus does it display it, does it turn a res into a res gesta. In the same way, if by word we intimate the means of communication, showing a word does not mean deploying something on a higher plane (a metalanguage which is itself incommunicable within the first level), on the basis of which this would be made an object of communication, but exposing it without any transcendence in its own state of mediation, in its own being as a means. In this sense, gesture is the communication of a potential to be communicated. In itself it has nothing to say, because what it shows is the being-in-langauge of human beings as a pure potential for mediation. But since being-in-language is not something that can be spoken of in propositions, in its essence gesture is always a gesture of a non-making of sense in language, it is always a gag in the strict meaning of the term, indicating in the first instance something that is put in the mouth to hinder speech, and subsequently the actor’s improvisation to make up for a memory lapse or some impossibility of speech. Hence there is not only a proximity between gesture and philosophy, but also one between philosophy and cinema. The essential ‘mutism’ of cinema (which has nothing to do with either the presence or absence of a soundtrack) is, like the mutism of philosophy, an exposition of human being’s being-in-language: pure gesturality. The Wittgensteinian definition of mysticism [,] as the showing of what cannot be spoken of, is a literal definition of the gag. And every great philosophical text is the gag that displays language itself, being-in-language itself, as a giant memory lapse, as an incurable speech defect.
V
Politics is the sphere of pure means, which is to say of the absolute and total gesturality of human beings.
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