Lucia Ruprecht

In Our Hands: An Ethics of Gestural Response-ability. Rebecca Schneider in conversation with Lucia Ruprecht

The following conversation aims to trace the role of gesture and gestural thinking in Rebecca Schneider’s work, and to tease out the specific gestural ethics which arises in her writings. In particular, Schneider thinks about the politics of citation and reiteration for an ethics of call and response that emerges in the gesture of the hail. Both predicated upon a fundamentally ethical relationality and susceptible to ideological investment, the hail epitomises the operations of the “both/and”—a logic of conjunction that structures and punctuates the history of thinking on gesture from the classic Brechtian tactic in which performance both replays and counters conditions of subjugation to Alexander Weheliye’s reclamation of this tactic for black and critical ethnic studies. The gesture of the hail will lead us, then, to the gesture of protest in the Black Lives Matter movement. The hands that are held up in the air both replay (and respond to) the standard pose of surrender in the face of police authority and call for a future that might be different. Schneider’s ethics of response-ability thus rethinks relationality as something that always already anticipates and perpetually reinaugurates possibilities for response.

Introduction: Towards an Ethics of Gesture

The introduction to this special section of Performance Philosophy takes Giorgio Agamben’s remarks about the mediality and potentiality of gesture as a starting point to rethink gesture’s nexus with ethics. Shifting the emphasis from philosophical reflection to corporeal practice, it defines gestural ethics as an acting-otherwise which comes into being in the particularities of singular gestural practice, its forms, kinetic qualities, temporal displacements and calls for response. Gestural acting-otherwise is illustrated in a number of ways: We might talk of a gestural ethics when gesturality becomes an object for dedicated analytical exploration and reflection on sites where it is not taken for granted, but exhibited, on stage or on screen, in its mediality, in the ways it quotes, signifies and departs from signification, but also in the ways in which it follows a forward-looking agenda driven by adaptability and inventiveness. It interrupts or modifies operative continua that might be geared towards violence; it appears in situations that are suspended between the possibility of malfunction and the potential of room for play; and it emerges in the ways in which gestures act on their own implication in the signifying structures of gender, sexuality, race, and class, on how these structures play out relationally across time and space, and between historically and locally situated human beings.

The Imaginary Life of Nineteenth-Century Virtuosity

This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from J.B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung und Carl Ernst Poeschel Verlag in Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift fur Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte Vol. 87, Issue 3, pp. 323-355.

Der Virtuose geht. Waslaw Nijinskys L'Après-midi d'un faune

This article explores aspects of Vaslav Nijinskys first choreography, which have so far received little sustained critical attention. The celebrated dancers refusal to stage his own virtuoso skills allows us to investigate his decision to base his choreography largely on the analytical de- and reconstruction of walking. This opening of a “kinetic unconscious”, this move towards what is called here “microscopic virtuosity”, is related to other contemporary theoretical, scientific, and literary explorations: Walter Benjamins “optical unconscious”, research into human movements and gestures, Paul Valérys writings on dance, and an account of foot fetishism in Wilhelm Jensens novella “Gradiva”. We may thus take stock of the wide-ranging aesthetic ramifications of Nijinskys specific and groundbreaking inclusion of forms of stillness into dance.