Der Grenzgang der Geste. Körperliche Ausdrucksformen zwischen 1800 und 1900

In his essay “On gesture” Giorgio Agamben argues that western society has lost its natural sense of gestures at the end of the 19th Century. This article examines the development of gestures from the 18th century onwards arguing that instead of a loss of the “natural gesture” one should consider the increasing interest in gestures in the 18th century already as an answer to the the threatening loss of the idea of the natural in modern society. Analyzing Rousseau, Kleist and Hofmannsthal the article wants to demonstrate how gestures always have servered to at once elaborate and blur the borders between the natural and the artificial.