If we are content with simple beginnings, this chapter could be summarized with the question: why are people inclined to point with their fnger? It seems a mar- ginal topic where we could easily be content with a simple description of exter- nal features (movement of hand, outstretched fnger) and/or inner motivations. However, the gesture of pointing is also pervaded by a certain discrepancy, where it seems that the above question doesn’t sufciently articulate the problem. The intended meaning of pointing is framed by the overlapping of language and body. It could be interpreted as neither one nor the other, but something that emerges in the junction of both, in the movement from one to the other. The focus will therefore lie in establishing an overview of this peculiar habit and in unravelling its basic characteristics, but let’s begin with a detour: a commentary on a classical work of art. Commissioned as a fresco sequence on the public part of the Vatican apart- ments, Raphael’s Scuola di Atene is considered, together with Michelangelo’s fresco La creazione dell’uomo in the Sistine Chapel, as the pinnacle of the Renaissance era. And perhaps it isn’t a coincidence that both are designed around a certain gesture of habit.The center of the frst fresco (its vanishing point) is conveniently occupied by two prominent central fgures of ancient philosophy, Plato and Aristotle, who are commonly associated with two opposing modes of knowledge. Both are embodied in their gestures: one pointing at the sky’s limitlessness and the other pointing at the physicality of presentness. We are thus confronted with a split in knowledge: a fssure between ideas (ἰδέα) where our heads can quickly get entangled in clouds of error and thus miss the truth of heaven and potentialities (entelécheia) of logic that are ultimately structured as dirty empirical jokes to be repeated by whoever coincidentally stumbles upon them. 6 POINTING AT THE OTHER Goran Vraneševic´