Triad 8 of 32 · 2026-10-01 · Difficulty 3 · Shared figure or motif, Conflict, Oblique/structural
The thread
Three texts about a gesture that is lost and the attempts to get it back. Kleist (1810): consciousness spoils grace; the youth at the mirror cannot repeat his own pose; grace returns only in the marionette (no consciousness) or the god (infinite consciousness), ‘once perception, as it were, has traversed the infinite’. Agamben (1992): ‘By the end of the nineteenth century, the Western bourgeoisie had definitely lost its gestures’; cinema ‘tries at once to reclaim what it has lost and to record its loss’; gesture is neither facere nor agere but gerere, ‘the exhibition of a mediality’, at bottom a gag. McCarthy, Remainder (2005): a man who must relearn every movement (‘No Doing without Understanding’) envies De Niro’s seamless gestures and hires re-enactors to stage scenes until he feels ‘real’; the liver lady drops her bag on the third repetition, as Kleist’s youth fails on his. Conflict: return via the infinite (Kleist), via cinema and pure means (Agamben), via endless rehearsal (McCarthy), which yields ‘votive’ gestures that never arrive. Agamben never cites Kleist in Means Without End; the bridge is built here.
The three books
- Remainder, Tom McCarthy; 2005 (Metronome Press); Vintage ed. 2007. Anchor: the lost gesture staged. A man who must understand every movement before doing it hires re-enactors to make his gestures feel ‘real’.
- Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist (‘On the Theater of Marionettes’), Heinrich von Kleist, Peter Wortsman (translator); 1810 (essay); Archipelago ed. 2010. The source of the figure: grace lost to consciousness, regained only by the puppet or the god; the youth who cannot repeat his pose.
- Means Without End: Notes on Politics (‘Notes on Gesture’), Giorgio Agamben, Vincenzo Binetti (translator), Cesare Casarino (translator); 1992 (essay); Eng. 2000. The history and the definition: the bourgeoisie lost its gestures; cinema reclaims and records the loss; gesture as gerere, pure means, gag.
Notebook
- Repeat a gesture ten times: Kleist’s youth ‘raised it ten more times: but for naught!’; McCarthy’s narrator, ‘Hundreds of times. More.’ (ch. 9). Write one small gesture of your own ten times, a paragraph each, no sentence reused. Where does it become an ‘attitude’, the soul lodged ‘in his elbows’? Is the tenth Kleist’s comedy or McCarthy’s trance?
- Facere / agere / gerere in your practice: Agamben, ‘something is being endured and supported’ (p. 57). Sort a week of writing acts under Varro’s three verbs; write the manifesto paragraph the gerere column implies.
- The gag as method: the liver lady’s unscripted ‘Harder and harder to lift up’ (ch. 8); Agamben’s gag as ‘the actor’s improvisation meant to compensate a loss of memory’ (p. 59); Kleist’s ‘embarrassed gestures’ of those who ‘don’t rightly know what they wished to say’. Write a scene that breaks and gets its best line improvised.
Rabbit holes
Links as checked on the day of the reading.
- Gilles de la Tourette, Études cliniques et physiologiques sur la marche (1886), Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/tudescliniques00dela
- Ten panels from the Mnemosyne Atlas, Cornell University Library / Warburg Institute https://warburg.library.cornell.edu/
- Muybridge, The Science of Animal Locomotion (Zoopraxography), Project Gutenberg https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/39998
- Zadie Smith, ‘Two Paths for the Novel’, NYRB (2008) https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2008/11/20/two-paths-for-the-novel/
- Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, Project Gutenberg https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4352
To carry
“He was simply unable to repeat the same movement” — Heinrich von Kleist, ‘On the Theater of Marionettes’, trans. Peter Wortsman
Themes
authenticity · cinema · consciousness · facere/agere/gerere · gag · gesture · grace · marionette · mediality · Muybridge · re-enactment · repetition · second-hand · Spinario · Tourette · Warburg · weightlessness
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