Gestures as Archives: Truth, Loss, and Resistance

Abstract

In this paper, I develop a phenomenological investigation of gestures that focuses on their temporal formation and their historical sedimentation. My approach combines a genetic phenomenological analysis with psychoanalytic investigations, to elaborate on the idea of an archeology of gestures that explores the hidden historicity of their fugitive expression and the consistent patterns of their bodily manifestation. The paper examines four aspects of gestures—hovering, exhibition, mimesis, and resistance—in order to question their relationship to truth. In the last part of the paper, I explore the role of gestures in difficult processes of mourning and melancholia, focusing on the somatic incorporation of a lost other in oneself. In the light of these analyses, I propose to consider gestures as bodily archives that speak for cryptic inscriptions of past experiences, whose role is to keep alive a past that we cannot let go but also for emancipatory transitions toward new horizons, where the sense of our experience can finally be conquered as our own.