The puppet gesture and the living gesture: Cleavage, illusion, complexity and disorder

Laboratoire d’Analyse d’Image en Pathologie Cellulaire, Centre Hayem, Hôpital Saint Louis, France.

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Published online: 29 April 2026

Abstract

The art of puppetry consists to moving the matter, to the point of making it seem that it comes to life by itself. This illusion is based on a complex interplay of figures of the double in which paradoxes, ambivalences, and equivocations are intertwined. The living comes to life on its own, self-poiesis, through a game of interpretation. This interpretive dimension originates from a separation between the internal and the external environment, a cleavage between an objective reality and a subjective reality. Thus the inevitable errors that make “take one thing for another”, the “qui pro quo”, are both a way of resisting the unpredictable and an opportunity for a redeployment of reality on other possibilities. Isn’t it also the vocation of art to invite the spectator to augment himself through otherness?