Constellation of Gestures

The chapter introduces the system of correspondences between the cinema of Yorgos Lanthimos and the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben that constitutes the framework of this book. Lanthimos’s distinctive style is presented as a critical representation of the “weirdness of the norm,” in connection with Agamben’s idea of gesture and of the operative power of performances. Agamben’s understanding of ideas themselves as “constellations that arrange themselves in a gesture” is connected with the intertextuality and the non-narrative structures of Lanthimos’s films and elaborated into a possible principle for creative academic writing.