In Kleist's essay, On the Marionette Theater, Kleist presents a dialogue between himself and a marionette master concerning theater and the relation of the marionette to the human actor. The master voices the idea that even human actors display their souls not in their voices but in the bodies and their movements.
"Just look at that girl who dances Daphne", he went on. "Pursued by Apollo, she turns to look at him. At this moment her soul appears to be in the small of her back. As she bends, she look as if she's going to break, like a naiad after the school of Bernini. Or take that young fellow who dances Paris when he's standing among the three goddesses and offering the apple to Venus. His soul is in fact located (and it's a frightful thing to see) in his elbow."
These examples are not neutral - they gather and explode in his next passage:
" Misconceptions like this are unavoidable," he said, " now that we've eaten of the tree of knowledge. But Paradise is locked and bolted, and the cherubim stands behind us. We have to go on and make the journey round the world to see if it is perhaps open somewhere at the back."
That methodological circumnavigation, in search of the back door to paradise, is how the older hermeneutics, the taking of allegory seriously, the gnostic pickings at the lock of Biblical verses projected to the world at large, survived in the culture of bourgeois capitalism. Without paradise, or without scenting some paradise now closed to us, it becomes pointless, out of joint, a mere deathrattle from an automaton.
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