Investigating the relationship between bodily movement and internal
dynamics, François Delsarte shows how, in the modern individual, the intus/foris correspondence is polluted by the intervention of ratio and habits that have
been consolidated over the development of civilisation. Yet there is a sort of
“true” and “sincere” kinetic language, although it is only present in a fragmentary manner in everyday reality and can only be grasped in an intuitive, nonintellectual way. These are gestures that escape the individual will and manifest
the affectus in its ideal and archetypal form. Consequently, Delsarte can compose
a phonetic-gestural dictionary in which every gesture becomes a perfect echo
of the inner activity. This procedure is functional to the training of the actor
and the construction of a phonetic-gestural score for a given character, but also,
more generally, it is aimed at building a “second nature”, that is, at shaping
“other” bodies, different from those contaminated by the historical nature of
man, close to the original and archetypal dimension of the human being.