Giogio Agamben (2000) 'Notes on Gesture' in _Means Without Ends: Notes on Politics_, trans. Vincenzo Binetti & Cesare Casarino [1992], Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.


'Politics is the sphere of pure means, that is, of the absolute and complete gesturality of human beings' (Agamben 2000: 59)
The argument here is that gesture rather than the image (he is thinking of cinema) belongs to the realm of politics (and not simply to aesthetics) - evoking Benjamin: like awakening from a dream. Gesture is associated with action, and more particularly set apart from acting and making/producing. He is referring to a distinction made by Varro who is drawing upon Aristotle, as follows:
'For production [poiesis] has an end other than itself, but action [praxis] does not; good action is itself an end.' (Aristotle, in Agamben 2000: 56)

What is distinctive in Varro is a third type of action in addition to the above two: if production is a means to an end, and praxis is an end without means, gesture disrupts the false distinction and presents means without end. In this way, gesture is not goal-driven or a movement from A to B (in the way that dance movement, for instance, may have a goal of aesthetic value). For Agamben: 
'The gesture is the exhibition of a mediality: it is the process of making a means visible as such. It allows the emergence of the being-in-a-medium of human beings and thus it opens the ethical dimension for them.' (2000: 57) 

What he emphasises is that this is not action as a means in itself but the 'sphere of a pure and endless mediality' (2000: 58). In relation to language, words are not simply objects of communication but as a means in itself with nothing to say in itself - it is a 'gag': something that could be put in your mouth to hinder speech or express the inability to speak. The event of language is political in as much as it relates to the free use  of pure means. 

The false distinction between means and ends paralyses politics:
'Politics is the sphere neither of an end in itself nor of means subordinated to an end; rather, it is the sphere of a pure mediality without end intended as the field of human action and of human thought.' (2000: 116)