Fulka, J., Když ruce mluví. Gesto a znakový jazyk v dějinách západního myšlení. Praha: FF UK. 2017.

The book of a philosopher, theoretician, and translator Josef Fulka interprets some, namely philosophical texts that in one way or another focus on the problem of gesture and sign language.
The introduction explains certain inevitable obstacles of such a project, namely the complexities of the relationship between gesture and sign language. During the 19th century, these two areas were not strictly separated, only in the 20th century, linguistics of sign languages began to develop independently.
The first two chapters focus on the two paradigms of interpreting deafness and sign language in the western thinking: the privative paradigm which interprets deafness as a deficit, and the differential paradigm which understands deafness as a kind of difference, e.g. as the presence of different communicative competencies and styles of perception.
The third chapter focuses on the language genealogies, namely on the Condillac's and Rousseau's. The final chapter explores the M. Merleau-Ponty's philosophy and his theory of the relationship between speech and gesture.