Heinrich von Kleist, Peter Wortsman (translator) · 1810 (essay); Archipelago ed. 2010 · EPUB · Calibre ID 868
Resurfaced in The Unrepeatable Gesture (2026-10-01).
Role in the triad
The source of the figure: grace lost to consciousness, regained only by the puppet or the god; the youth who cannot repeat his pose.
Why this book
Supplies the theory, the case (the Spinario youth at the mirror) and the machinery (machinist, centre of gravity, limbs as pendulums, prosthetic limbs, gravity-defiance) that Remainder enacts. ‘On the Gradual Formulation of Thoughts While Speaking’ in the same volume adds the ‘embarrassed gestures’ that lead to Agamben’s gag.
Quotations
Verified against the book’s own text on the day of the reading.
- “Each movement, he said, had a center of gravity; it would suffice to control this point from the center of the figure; the limbs, which are, after all, nothing but pendulums, would follow mechanically on their own without anything else needing to be done.” (On the Theater of Marionettes)
- “have you heard of those mechanical limbs that English artists had fashioned for those poor unfortunates who’d lost their own?” (ibid.)
- “I did, indeed, know all too well what a mess consciousness had made of the natural grace of Man.” (ibid.)
- “He was simply unable to repeat the same movement” (ibid.)
- “An invisible and inconceivable force, like an iron net, seemed to settle over and impinge upon the free play of movements” (ibid.)
- “so too, does grace return once perception, as it were, has traversed the infinite – such that it simultaneously appears the purest in human bodily structures that are either devoid of consciousness or which possess an infinite consciousness, such as in the jointed manikin or the god.” (ibid.)
- “Undoubtedly,” he replied; “which will be the last chapter of the history of the world.” (ibid.)
- “they seem to suggest with embarrassed gestures that they themselves don’t rightly know what they wished to say.” (On the Gradual Formulation of Thoughts While Speaking)
- Excerpt: the youth at the mirror
- Other: a misreading worth attempting (C… as film director)
Themes
centre of gravity · consciousness · Fall · grace · infinity · marionette · mirror · prosthesis · repetition · Spinario · the bear