Tom McCarthy · 2005 (Metronome Press); Vintage ed. 2007 · EPUB · Calibre ID 4209
Resurfaced in The Unrepeatable Gesture (2026-10-01).
Role in the triad
Anchor: the lost gesture staged. A man who must understand every movement before doing it hires re-enactors to make his gestures feel ‘real’.
Why this book
Makes Kleist’s fallen state literal (rerouted motor functions, ‘No Doing without Understanding’) and takes a film actor as its model of the unfallen body, which is Agamben’s cinema. The re-enactments are a puppet theatre run by a machinist; the liver lady fails on the third repetition like Kleist’s youth; the novel ends weightless, turning back and forth in a plane.
Quotations
Verified against the book’s own text on the day of the reading.
- “No Doing without Understanding: the accident bequeathed me that for ever, an eternal detour.” (ch. 2)
- “There are twenty-seven separate manoeuvres involved.” (ch. 2)
- “lifted more than a thousand imaginary carrots to your mouth, or one imaginary carrot more than a thousand times, which amounts to the same thing.” (ch. 2)
- “Every move he made, each gesture was perfect, seamless.” … “Perfect. Real. My movements are all fake. Second-hand.” (ch. 2)
- “My body seemed to glide fluently and effortlessly through the atmosphere around it—gracefully, slowly, like a dancer through water.” (ch. 8)
- “The liver lady had come up with that fantastic line but then dropped her rubbish bag when she’d tried to re-enact her movements for a third time.” (ch. 8)
- “I and the other re-enactors were like a set of devotees to a religion not yet founded: patient, waiting for our deity to appear, to manifest himself to us, redeem us; and our gestures were all votive ones, acts of anticipation.” (ch. 16)
- “Go?” I said. “Nowhere. Just keep doing this.” (ch. 16)
- Excerpt: ch. 2, the carrot
Themes
authenticity · cinema · De Niro · gesture · physiotherapy · re-enactment · remainder · repetition · second-hand · slow motion · weightlessness