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 increas-ing interest in gestures in the 18th century already as an answer to the threatening loss of the idea of the natural in modern society. Analyzing Rousseau, Kleist and Hofmannsthal the article wants to demon-strate how gestures always have served to at once elaborate and blurr the borders between the natural and the articfical.