Gesture (Agamben)

Gesture, as Agamben develops it and as Neroni mobilizes it within her critique of biopolitical theory, names a dimension of human action that exceeds mere physicality or bodily movement. It is not reducible to what a body does (praxis) nor to what it produces (poiesis), but belongs instead to a third register: the sphere of means as such, of pure mediality. When Agamben writes that gesture is "communication of a communicability," he is pointing to the capacity of gesture to make visible the very potential for communication rather than any particular communicative content — it exposes the medium, the opening through which meaning could flow, rather than transmitting a fixed message. In this sense, gesture belongs to the dimension of language not as code but as condition-of-possibility, a showing of the frame rather than the picture.

Within Neroni's argument, gesture functions as a partial but insufficient bridge between biopolitical thought and the psychoanalytic subject. Biopolitical theorists like Agamben remain anchored to the body and to bare life as their foundational categories; gesture strains against this anchoring by intimating something "beyond the body" — a personhood, or singularity, irreducible to biological substrate. Yet this straining remains incomplete: without the Lacanian subject's constitutive relation to the unconscious, to desire, and to language as structured by lack, gesture risks being a phenomenological gesture toward the subject rather than a theoretical account of it. Gesture thus marks the threshold between biopolitics and psychoanalysis — pointing toward the subject without being able to theorize it.

This concept appears exclusively in neroni-hilary-the-subject-of-torture-psychoanalysis-and-biopolitics-in-televisio, where it serves a diagnostic role in Neroni's broader argument that biopolitical theory is theoretically underequipped to contest biopower precisely because it abandons the subject. Gesture cross-references Bare Life and Form-of-Life — two of Agamben's signature concepts — as the framework within which it operates: Bare Life names the stripped, purely biological existence that sovereign power reduces subjects to, while Form-of-Life names a potential mode of existence that resists such reduction. Gesture inhabits the tension between these two poles, showing that something exceeds bare biological existence without yet achieving the full complexity of form-of-life.

The cross-reference to Language is particularly significant: gesture, as "communication of a communicability," operates at the meta-level of language — it is about the opening of signification rather than any particular sign. This resonates with the Lacanian account of Desire, which is itself not a positive content but a structural effect of the subject's insertion into language and its constitutive lack. Gesture approximates this structure — it gestures, so to speak, toward the void that desire circles — but without the Lacanian machinery of the signifier, objet petit a, and the Other, it cannot fully theorize the subject it implies. Similarly, the cross-reference to Singularity and Identity underscores that gesture marks something irreducibly personal — a "person" beyond physicality — yet without the Lacanian account of identity as constitutively split and misrecognizing, this personhood remains underspecified. Gesture thus occupies a hinge position in Neroni's argument: it is the most the biopolitical framework can offer, and the very place where that framework's limits are most visible.

The Subject of Torture: Psychoanalysis and Biopolitics in Television and FilmHilary Neroni · 2015 (page unknown)

The gesture is, in this sense, communication of a communicability.

The phrase "communication of a communicability" is theoretically loaded because it performs a reflexive redoubling: it shifts the object of communication from any content to the condition of communication itself — the medium, the opening, the potentiality — which aligns gesture with a meta-linguistic or even pre-symbolic register that Lacanian theory would associate with the dimension of the signifier as such rather than any particular signified.