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Volume 48, Number 3 (144)
Research Article| November 01 2021
"The Time of That Other Interpretation": Gesture, Symptom, and Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Wayne Stables
Wayne Stables is a research fellow in the School of Literature, Language and Media at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.
New German Critique (2021) 48 (3 (144)): 165–198.
https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033X-9305533
Wayne Stables; "The Time of That Other Interpretation": Gesture, Symptom, and Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. New German Critique 1 November 2021; 48 (3 (144)): 165–198. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033X-9305533
Giorgio Agamben opens his lapidary essay "Notes on Gesture" with a striking claim: "By the end of the nineteenth century the gestures of the Western bourgeoisie were irretrievably lost." A little later we are presented with the consequences:
An era that has lost its gestures is, for that very reason, obsessed with them; for people who are bereft of all that is natural to them, every gesture becomes a fate. And the more the ease of these gestures was lost under the influence of invisible powers, the more life became indecipherable. It is at this stage that the bourgeoisie—which, only a few decades earlier, had still been firmly in possession of its symbols—falls a victim to interiority and entrusts itself to psychology.1
These words point to a paradox: how are we to acknowledge the loss of our gestures if they were never ours to possess?
One way to answer...
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