ABSTRACT
The main aim of this chapter is to argue in favor of a biopolitical potential of art. The ideational foundation of the biopolitical potential of art is rooted in Foucault’s considerations on biopolitics and modern art, albeit the French philosopher has never explicitly assumed that an inherent connection between these two is arguable. Nevertheless, the spotlight here is on the power of contemporary cinema to provide a visual biopolitical critique by prospecting life and examining the authority that historical regimes of power, knowledge and processes of subjectivation have on shaping binational and transnational identities for individuals, such as the Jewish identity that evolved as a puzzle of Israeli and Palestinian coordinates. This paper argues in favor of the existence of a biopolitical potential of art in Udi Aloni’s cinematic portfolio, mainly focusing on the movies Local Angel and Forgiveness. The Spinozist and Benjaminian modern philosophical influences on Aloni’s movies, as well as Žižek’s and Badiou’s critiques on the aesthetic trajectories of the artist’s movies, are explored in order to highlight the character of the biopolitical art, which can be reduced to the following core concepts: radical grace, topological gap, new identity, new place, forgiveness, normalization (of behavior) and normal life standards.
