MARQUADT The Erotic Doll A Modern Fetish Yale Uni

Marquard Smith is Director of Research and Doctoral Studies / the erotic doll: a modern fetish
marquard smith • the erotic doll: a modern fetish

in the School of Humanities at the Royal College of Art, London. marquard smith
He is Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Visual Culture.
Since the nineteenth century, dolls have served as commodities

but also as objects of possession and obsession, love and lust.
That century witnessed the emergence of the term ‘heterosexual’
as well as distinctly modern conceptions of fetishism, perversity
and animism. Their convergence, and the demands of a growing
consumer society resulted in a proliferation of waxworks, shop-
window dummies and customized love dolls, which also began
to appear in art. Oskar Kokoschka commissioned a life-sized doll
of his former lover Alma Mahler; Hans Bellmer crafted poupées;
and Marcel Duchamp fabricated a nude figure in his environmen-
tal tableau Étant donnés.
The Erotic Doll is the first book to explore men’s complex relation-
ships with such inanimate forms from historical, theoretical and
phenomenological perspectives. Challenging our commonsense
grasp of the relations between persons and things, Marquard
Smith examines these erotically charged human figures by inter-
weaving art history, visual culture, gender and sexuality studies
with the medical humanities, offering startling insights into het-
erosexual masculinity and its discontents.
Jacket design by +SUBTRACT
Jacket illustration: Raoul Ubac, Mannequin de Masson (detail), 1938.

Courtesy Vintage Works, Ltd (www.vintageworks.net,
phone: +1-215-822-5662). © ADAGP, Paris and DACS,
London 2013.
Printed in China
yale university press: new haven and london marquard smith • the erotic doll: a modern fetish
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m
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yale university press new haven and london
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Copyright © Marquard Smith 2013
All works by Hans Bellmer © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2013.
All works by Marcel Duchamp © Succession Marcel

Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2013.
All works by Oskar Kokoschka © Fondation Oskar Kokoschka / DACS 2013.
All rights reserved.

This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part,
in any form (beyond that copying permitted by
Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law
and except by reviewers for the public press),
without written permission from the publishers.
Designed by +SUBTRACT
Printed in China
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Smith, Marquard.
The erotic doll : a modern fetish / Marquard Smith.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-300-15202-9 (cl : alk. paper)
1. Fetishism in art. 2. Dolls in art. 3. Dolls--Psychological aspects. I. Title.
N8217.F43S65 2013
709.04--dc23
2013026515
A catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library
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/ contents
introduction: what does man want? 007
i
animism: coming to life 029
1 visions of pygmalion: ‘I know very well, but all the same . . .’ 031
2 the doll as fetish: perverse practices with fetishistic things 067
ii the integrity of the doll 107
3 touching: oskar kokoschka’s alma mahler 109
4 modernity’s outmodedness: surrealism’s mannequins

electric and shop-window dummies 137
5 the modern sex doll: participatory sexual devices 183
6 realdoll: intimacy, domesticity and brutality 225
iii given, the anagrammatical doll 253
7 marcel duchamp’s étant donnés: a distorting 255
8 hans bellmer’s poupées: anagrammatical desire 289
conclusion: vibrating matter energised: animism and thing theory 317
notes 328
acknowledgements 371
illustration credits 372
index 373
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non omnes eadem mirantur amantque
(all men do not admire and love the same things)
horace
The thing things.

martin heidegger
We need a concrete, materialist focus on the things closest

to us.
walter benjamin
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/ introduction:
what does man want?
I ran my tongue back and forth over the . . . ‘copyright

1966 Mattel Inc., Malaysia’ tattooed on her back. Tonguing
the tattoo drove Barbie crazy. She said it had something
to do with scar tissue being extremely sensitive.
A. M. Homes, ‘A Real Doll’1
What is the nature of man’s – or rather men’s – intimate and erotic relations

with inanimate human form?
Why do we wish that dolls and their siblings, including statues and man-
nequins, had the capacity to move, hold the promise of animacy? How and why
do we suspend our disbelief in the hope that this might be so? Why do we want
them to come to life, dream of them coming to life, even believe that they
possess the desire for life? From where do these fantasies of ours come and
how are they tied to matters of desire – to love, obsession, possession, eroti-
cism and perversity; to lust and carnality; to visuality, materiality and tactility,
to matter itself? What can such inanimate human form tell us about sexuality,
and especially that over-determined yet surprisingly under-articulated and
most polymorphous perverse sexuality: male heterosexuality? When, where
and why have human beings – usually, but by no means only, men – fallen in
love with statues and other inanimate things? What provokes or stirs them to
consummate that love erotically and what form does such consummating
take? How does it come to be that men establish these odd, perverse and
intimate relations with inanimate human form, and how do we make sense of
these relations historically, aesthetically, conceptually, phenomenologically
and literally?
In this book I attend to these questions, focusing on the figure of the erotic
doll as a fetish in the visual and material culture of modernity. More exactly, I
introduction / 7
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attend to the doll as it is figured erotically, as a fetish in modernity. I do this
in order to propose that dolls – and also statues, mannequins, automata,
waxworks, sculptural forms and artificial body parts – tell us fascinating and
challenging things about our intimate and erotic relations with them. While the
origins of these questions are found in earlier historical moments, in this book
it is in ‘classical’ and ‘late’ modernity that they bubble to the surface, impress
themselves, demanding to be asked in particular and particularly intriguing
ways. Concentrating on the period from the last quarter of the nineteenth
century until the present permits me to engage with them in all their uniquely
modern intricacies and by way of widely disparate encounters. Some of these
encounters are proper to the history of art, some are not proper to it and some
are not proper at all. These encounters involve, for instance, Oskar Kokoschka
and his doll of Alma Mahler, Hans Bellmer and his poupées, the Surrealists
and their mannequins and Marcel Duchamp and his figure in Étant donnés.
Such encounters in the history of art and visual culture are, I propose, con-
nected to encounters in capitalist modernity’s manufacturing and circulating
of inanimate human forms such as waxworks, shop-window dummies, sex
dolls, bespoke love dolls, and eroticised artificial body parts in our ever more
over-developed consumer culture. These forms raise questions that in turn
dovetail back into the province of art, and visual and material culture more
generally.
The persistence of the flows – historically, conceptually, aesthetically – of
these inanimate human forms between such encounters lets me ask: how and
why has the erotic doll, or the doll figured erotically, emerged and endured as
this powerful and provocative figure? I venture that this is the case because,
in the second decade of the twenty-first century, as human subjects we are
still in the hold of ways of becoming, structures of feeling, behaviours and
desires that, emerging in the late nineteenth century, led to these decidedly
modern manifestations and articulations. The desire at the heart of such
encounters has its roots in a coupling that persists to this day: an interest in
myths of Pygmalion, as it clashes with the invention of the erotomania called
Pygmalionism, a paraphilia found under the umbrella term Agalmatophilia, a
sexual attraction to figurative things.
In suggesting that the figure of the doll is a fetish, I am also suggesting that
it is a thing born of a decidedly modern complexity because, from the begin-
8 / the erotic doll
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ning, it has been tied to the anthropological (the religious fetish), the political
economy (the commodity fetish) and the psychiatric/psychoanalytic (the sexual
fetish). The doll as modern fetish emerges in and by way of these three distinct
yet inter-articulating discourses, and it does so historically, materially and in
terms of its historical and material singularity as a thing. The doll is then a
fetish, a thing, a commodity, a possession, an obsession, an object of desire,
an object of love, of worship, adoration, devotion, an object of lust and even an
object for sex. (In all these scenarios, I hope to come to an appreciation of how
the doll as a modern fetish is, in its encounters, often both a stand-in or sur-
rogate for other things and at the same time somehow an independent entity
or thing as such.) As such the doll is uniquely placed to tell us much about
our fixations on inanimate, human-made form (and forms), the epistemologi-
cal basis of our (especially erotic) relations with things and the ontology of
things themselves. It can tell us much about desire, what structures such
desire and how and why desires, articulated by way of behaviours, practices
and protocols, are given form. It is the necessary starting point for how in this
book I figure what the doll as fetish is, how it works and what it does.2
The word ‘doll’ is thought to come etymologically from the ancient Greek
eidōlon (‘image, idol’), from eidos (‘form’), from eidenai, idein (‘to know, see’).
As such, like the idol, the doll is an image of or material object representing
a deity; an image or material object of worship; an object of love, adoration,
devotion; a material thing embodying and articulating power, force, energy. As
such it is also an image or object of semblance, a simulation, a fantasy, a
sham. In addition it is also thought to come, via the Latin root, from pupa
(English puppet, French poupée, German puppe). Pupa can also mean little girl,
as does the Greek word for doll, kore; and pupa and kore both have etymological
links to ‘virgin’.3 A synonym of kore, glene, another word for doll, means both
girl and precious object.4
Emerging from this etymological thicket, the doll is any and all of these
things: idol, form, knowing, seeing, a material object of devotion, endowed with
a force; a little girl, virgin, virginity itself; a semblance, a surrogate, a substi-
tute, a stand-in; mimetic; yet also a precious object. For these reasons the doll
historically has magico-religious and occult significance and functions; it is
central to health, purification and fertility rituals and funeral rites; it is a sacred
talisman, a charm, a pagan fetish, a phallic symbol, a foreteller; a toy, a play-
introduction / 9
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thing, a commodity, a collectable, a fashion accessory, mere interior decora-
tion; it is both a representation and the embodiment of spirits. The doll is
inanimate, lifeless, non-living, dead, yet by way of modernity’s own animistic
impulse it also comes to life, is brought to life and possesses the desire for
life. As a fetish, it is an animated entity. It is manipulable, interactive and par-
ticipatory. It is also reciprocatory, demanding of modes of behaviour, acts,
practices. In today’s critical parlance, it is an ‘evocative object’, a ‘non-human
actant’, a ‘quasi-object’; it has material agency and vitality. In this book, I will
take advantage of all this.
The doll as a fetish is then a particular kind of historical, material, aesthetic,
ontological and epistemological thing. It is a thing to think about but, more
than that, it is a thing to think with, a starting point for thinking. In thinking
with the doll in ways that provoke and articulate unanticipated (phenomeno-
logical, morphological and literal) structures of seeing, feeling and knowing,
what such things do in their encounters, behaviours, practices and acts, rather
than what they might mean, is what makes them a form of inquiry, a form for
inquiry.
To begin unpicking these questions it is useful to detail the changes I made to

the book’s subtitle in the course of writing it. Its first subtitle was ‘A Tale of
Artificial Love’; then ‘Heterosexuality and its Discontents’; finally ‘A Modern
Fetish’. Each of these tells much about what I think shapes and drives the
book’s rationale and its argument, and each is representative of one of
the three interwoven threads that run through the book: the genealogical, the
phenomenological and the thing-ological.
This book has a genealogical thread: it tells a tale of artificial love or, to be
more precise, of the love of and for the artificial. (Artificial, from the nineteenth
century, meaning ‘made’, deriving from the Latin, artificialis, made by or
‘belonging to art’, from artificium, ‘artistry’, ‘craftsmanship’, is that which is
not natural or spontaneous but is, rather, brought forth by art and skill, and
might take the form of a device or manufactured thing.) Right from the begin-
ning I have been interested in a series of questions thrown up by the genealogy
of men’s intimate and erotic relations with inanimate man-made human form
10 / the erotic doll
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and forms. What are the origins and features of men’s attachment to inani-
mate, non-sentient human forms? How does this attachment become erotic?
Why and how is the doll – and by extension mannequins, statues, figurative
sculptural forms and casts of body parts – a distinct and distinctive articulation
of this eroticisation? What is the nature of this desire? This obsession? This
devotion? What is a man that the itinerary of his desire can create such
attachments?5
As a genealogical thread (where, as Michel Foucault would have it when
writing on Nietzsche, genealogy proves itself to be an activity, a descent
(Herkunft), an emergence (Entstehung), a tangle of events, of particular and
discontinuous forces), I take as my starting point our own historical moment.6
The figure of the erotic doll, the doll eroticised and its sibling forms appear
again and again across our cultural milieu: from the fine and plastic arts of
the Chapman Brothers, Louise Bourgeois, Robert Gober, Mike Kelley, Inez van
Lamsweerde, Sarah Lucas, Paul McCarthy, Takashi Murakami, Cindy Sherman
and Hanna Wilkes, to the televisual and cinematic cultures of Nip/Tuck, 30 Rock
and Lars and the Real Doll; from the commercial manufacturing of sex dolls
and other penetrable devices by the sex industry to their use in the privacy of
the domestic. Here, today, the doll is fetishistic, erotic, melancholic, queer,
critical, perverse, straight, parodic, banal, provocative – ubiquitous.
This starting point prompts me to ask: what does man want?
The intensification of curiosity about and use of the figure of the erotic doll
is an amplification, perhaps also a dénouement, of a legacy tracking back
through the avant-garde practices of Duchamp, Bellmer, the Surrealists and
Kokoschka, to the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This is the moment
when a convergence of evolutionary theory, proto-eugenics, pseudo-science,
sexology, theories of degeneration, nascent psychoanalysis and cultural activi-
ties conspire to ‘invent’ a unique yet pervasive paraphilic perversion that for
me shapes this legacy and out of which it emerges: Pygmalionism. A quintes-
sentially modern erotomania, Pygmalionism is a love for a thing of one’s own
creation, as well as a love for inanimate form and for the prospect of that form’s
animation.7 As such Pygmalionism is interesting for making sense of the
modern emergence of (especially male) heterosexuality, heterosexual desire
and (erotic) relations between the human and the non-human. Its impulse
persists from the last quarter of the nineteenth into the twenty-first century’s
introduction / 11
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bio-technological condition’s obsession with organic–inorganic, human–post-
human, human–inhuman, human–machine relations as demonstrated by
robots, synthetic biomorphic beings (cyborgs), cloning, self-organising and
regenerative living systems and artificial life.
This book’s first thread, then, involves tracking the genealogy of men’s love
of and for the artificial, their erotic relations with inanimate human form and
forms. Such relations can be, as will be seen, in their own distinctive ways as
tender, intense, pleasurable, satisfying, fraught, frustrating and generative of
discontent as are any relations between individuals or couples of any persua-
sion. In the end, a love of and for the artificial exposes how it is caught up in
dreams of fantasmatic omnipotence, progenitoring, narcissistic self-love and
much else besides.
The book’s second thread is phenomenological, telling by way of the erotic
doll, the doll eroticised as fetish in modernity, one of the many tangled and
discontinuous stories of the discontents of (male) heterosexuality. It is a pat-
terning of an experience of (male) heterosexuality and its discontents, both
historically and in contemporary (largely western) culture. It is an anatomy of
male heterosexuality’s invention, of embattled or hysterical, sometimes even
ridiculous, masculinity. At the same time – and these are not unconnected – it
is a tale of man’s surreptitious desires that are usually restricted to the private
sphere, although they are occasionally played out in public. Such a tale requires
a need to attend to the significance of behaviours and practices and protocols,
of why and how these desires are given a form, made tangible, and played
out on, across, and between bodies. It is both pressing and productive – 
historically, conceptually – to stress the centrality of such experience in
shaping these encounters between corporeal carnality and artificial forms, and
also, by way of such artificial forms, the connections between discontents and
the longing for contentment, contentedness, for becoming satisfied, however
futile such ambitions might be.
With its roots in the Greek, heterosexuality (heteros, ‘different’, ‘other’) indi-
cates the nature of relations with members of the opposite sex.8 This definition
can be extended to intimate any erotic relations with artificial, inanimate,
human-made, non-sentient form and forms if we consider that from the begin-
nings of the invention of ‘heterosexuality’ in the last quarter of the nineteenth
century as part of a more general and generalisable frenzy of taxonomic think-
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ing, it is marked as a sexual perversion proper. Putting to one side heterosexual
practices with a procreative and reproductive impulse, which are in the minor-
ity numerically, in the main by way of its diverse and strange behaviours and
protocols heterosexuality is ‘perverse’. It is always already perverse. This is to
understand male heterosexuality – men’s relations with both sentient and
non-sentient human form – as a term in which any erotic desire for and sexual
relations with an other (including human to human) that is driven by anything
other than the procreative impulse is considered, categorised and pathologised
as ‘perverse’. Almost all heterosexual practices are perverse, then, whether
masturbation, fetishism, bestiality or Pygmalionism, as well as any relations
with others, even simple foreplay, that do not culminate in breeding, procrea-
tion, replication. Straight behaviour and sexual practices in and of themselves,
and as an end in themselves, are always perverse and as such are considered
dangerous. (That heterosexuality is perverse is critical (historically and con-
ceptually) not because this makes it, and straight (male) sexual practices, in
any way transgressive – they are no more or less so than any other sexual
practice and to argue for this would be banal – but rather because it renders
perversity itself, and straight (male) perverse practices themselves, as com-
monplace, normal, conventional.) By extension this creates a context in which
intimate, erotic and sexual relations between the human and the non-human
can be located and distinguished. Such a distinguishing, a naming of for
instance Pygmalionism or Statue Love as one or two of the many kinds of
perverse erotic and sexual relations between humans and non-humans, leads
to a proliferation of their depiction in the late nineteenth century’s artistic, liter-
ary and theatrical imagination (although such depictions – to say nothing of
behaviours and practices themselves – were of course pervasive before these
erotomanias were named as such).
It is interesting that abiding intimate and erotic relations between humans
and inanimate human forms such as between men and dolls is, implausibly,
wholly typical, normal and normative, at least within the discourse of the inven-
tion of heterosexuality as perverse. This is an intriguing prospect, especially
for a book emerging out of a sustained critical engagement with Gender
Studies, Feminism and Queer Theory that because of this is hell-bent on
shining a harsh spotlight on (male) heterosexuality for a change. This spot-
lighting is necessary since there is nothing self-evident about (male) hetero-
introduction / 13
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sexuality, in precisely the same way that Gender Studies, Feminism, Queer
Theory, Disability Studies and the Medical Humanities argue that there is
nothing self-evident about so-called ‘marginalised’ bodies and erotic prac-
tices. Heterosexuality should not be taken as read or simply as the unacknowl-
edged, undifferentiated absent centre against which so-called marginalised
sexualities are defined.9
In putting the spotlight on (male) heterosexuality, the book’s second
thread – a phenomenality of behaviours and protocols – discloses how and
why doing so demands an attention to the ways in which men affirm, manage,
persist with and endure their intimate, erotic and sexual relations in the hope
of turning discontent into contentedness or, at worst, into common unhappi-
ness. The book’s second thread attends also to how doing so is articulated by
way of a series of intricate links and tensions between what men do, and what
they think they do and what and how that means.
Finally, The Erotic Doll has a third, thing-ological thread, an attention to the
epistemological and ontological nature of things. It is this that accounts for the
book’s actual subtitle, ‘A Modern Fetish’, where the doll is grasped first and
foremost as a modern fetish, a thing. The term ‘modern fetish’ is purloined
from the art historian Donald Kuspit’s Signs of Psyche in Modern and Postmodern
Art written almost twenty years ago.10 Kuspit addresses the ways in which
artists in the twentieth century engage with and challenge the psychoanalytic
fetish, and he quotes from the French psychoanalyst Janine Chasseguet-
Smirgel:
Puppets, mannequins, waxworks, automatons, dolls, painted scenery, plaster

casts, dummies, secret clockworks, mimesis, and illusion: all form a part of
the fetishist’s magic and artful universe. Lying between life and death, ani-
mated and mechanic, hybrid creatures and creatures to which hubris gave
birth, they all may be likened to fetishes. And, as fetishes, they give us, for a
while, the feeling that a world not ruled by our common laws does exist, a
marvellous and uncanny world.11
’A Modern Fetish’ is a phrase I like and this working definition from Chasseg-
uet-Smirgel, despite her deep conservativism, puts, provisionally, some but by
no means all of this book’s figures, propositions and tensions in place for me.
For Kuspit as an art historian and art critic, what matters is how the object as
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a (painted or drawn) fetish in the art work or the (sculptural) fetish as the art
work functions as intelligible. What concerns him is how the object as fetish
can by psychoanalysis be comprehended within the context of the world of art,
of representation. For me as a scholar of visual and material culture, while I
attend in this book to objects as fetishes in and as representation, and the
questions that they raise for representation, what matters more is how objects
as fetishes provoke questions beyond those particular to representation, that
are provoked by objects as fetishes circling beyond the sphere of art. This
allows me to move away from more formalist, aesthetic, methodological or
interpretive modalities in Art History that address objects as fetishes in or as
art, where the doll in or as art, sculpture and visual culture becomes an image
or object out of which one can ‘read’ into and out of, thereby coming to new
insights about, say, heterosexuality, desire, eroticism, perversity and so on. I
am not interested in the doll as symptom.12 What matters to me is how starting
from these things as fetishes – sometimes in art works, sometimes as art
works, but mostly as something else altogether – and the questions that these
things raise forces us to engage differently with matters of visuality, material-
ity, tactility, corporeality, phenomenology and literality that have been and are
shaped by the particularities of the intimate, intense erotic encounters between
men and their dolls in cultures of modernity. This is why it is important to move
beyond thinking of the fetish psychoanalytically; the ‘psychoanalytic’ fetish tells
only part of the story.
As I have intimated, what is provocative about the figure of the erotic doll,
the doll figured erotically, is that it must be engaged with by way of its figuring
of the interplay of the psychoanalytic fetish, the economic fetish and the
anthropological fetish, shot through with eroticism, economy and enchant-
ment, and tied to decidedly modern forms of intimacy, sexuality and desire,
thereby making it a unique and particular kind of thing.
For me the subtitle, ‘A Modern Fetish’, makes it clear that the book’s focus
is on the doll, that its starting point is the doll itself. I hope that it is possible
to tell the story of the erotic doll from and through the doll itself: the doll as
an inanimate object, an articulated and articulating object, a magical and erotic
object, and a commodity – the doll as a thing which seems to generate its own
laws and demands, even its own desires. It then becomes possible to explore
how the doll as an inanimate and artificial thing with such capacities and
introduction / 15
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capabilities raises questions intrinsic to its form that might challenge more
familiar epistemes of animism, anthropomorphism and mechanomorphism,
morphism in general, perhaps even of motion itself. For the doll is intertwined
in and engendering of fantasies of coming to life, of sentience, of autonomy; it
is thus generative, evocative and provocative. ‘The thing things’, wrote Martin
Heidegger in his essay ‘The Thing’, not of course about dolls, erotic or other-
wise, but his pithy statement points towards ways of thinking about, with, and
by way of dolls as things.13
So, what kind of thing is the erotic doll, the doll eroticised, as a modern
fetish?
To ask this question is to become embroiled in a recent series of discussions
in Cultural Studies, Anthropology, Material Culture Studies, Visual Culture
Studies, Phenomenology, Political Philosophy and the History of the Philoso-
phy of Science about the epistemological and ontological nature of things.14 At
their most interesting, these discussions move away from considerations of
things as part of a prejudicial subject–object dialectic, where the subject is
favoured. In that earlier paradigm, interrogating the social life of things, the
biographies or life stories of things, the secret or sexual life of things, things
in paintings and so on, things themselves were often simply a prelude. They
were what we look at, look through, to get to what interests us about our
lives – in short, us. Instead, these more recent discussions are moving towards,
as the critical theorist Bill Brown puts it, ‘objects asserting themselves as
things’, which is, he continues, ‘the story of a changed relation to the human
subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object than a
particular subject–object relation’.15 In the context of Thing Theory, which takes
many forms and is understood in different ways, here following Brown (follow-
ing the French poet Francis Ponge), we are ‘siding with things’ (le parti pris des
choses).16 We are moving beyond looking through or looking at things and are,
instead, being with them. We understand that the thing encountered is not the
thing comprehended.17 We are avoiding ‘things’ as a generality and focusing
on their specificities.18 Things are for Brown ‘what is excessive in objects, as
what exceeds their mere materialization as objects or their mere utilization as
objects – their force as a sensuous presence or as a metaphysical presence,
the magic by which objects become values, fetishes, idols, and totems’.19
Embracing this means attending to not just what things are but to ‘the work
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they perform’, how ‘inanimate objects constitute human subjects’,20 and ‘the
truth about what force things or the question of things might have’.21 It is an
attention to what Brown has called more recently ‘the ontology in things’.22
Thing Theory is an animism for the twenty-first century.
Much of Thing Theory emerges from Heidegger’s foregrounding of the thing,
the thing in itself, how and why it matters ‘to learn how to attend sufficiently
to the thing as thing’.23 This makes it possible for me to attend to what is
peculiar and proper to the doll qua doll, and to how, purloining a phrase from
Heidegger in his discourse on the jug, it ‘presences as a thing’.24 From the
beginning, then, to paraphrase Heidegger, ‘the thing [doll] is a thing insofar as
it things. The presence of something present such as the thing [doll] comes
into its own, appropriatively manifests and determines itself, only from the
thinging of the thing.’25 So, what kind of thing is the erotic doll as a modern
fetish? The erotic doll, the doll eroticised as a fetish – even with all the intrica-
cies of it being a psychoanalytic, a commodity and an anthropological fetish – in
the first instance as a thing seems too obvious, too self-evident, too perfect a
thing. It is a devotional idol, a stand-in for a lost love, the desired, the unat-
tainable. It is love unrequited. Simply put, it is what it is not. It is so obvious
that Thing Theory has passed it by. I would argue however that the erotic doll,
the doll eroticised, is actually more challenging because it seems too easy to
make sense of as a thing. Hence the need to think within the context of the
epistemology and ontology of the nature of things. Here the erotic doll, the doll
eroticised, is the kind of thing that needs attending to sufficiently as an histori-
cal, material, conceptual and phenomenological thing. It needs attending to as
a thing that things in a way that is proper to it (that each doll, each encounter,
can be singular): as an object asserting itself; that redefines the subject–object
relation. Being with rather than looking at the doll thus makes for an encounter
not readily comprehended, driven by an animating force (an ‘inexplicable vitality
or energy’, as the political theorist Jane Bennett describes the independence
of inanimate things) that somehow seems to generate its own laws, demands
and desires.26 What matters is what the doll does, the work that it performs,
rather than what it means. Here Heidegger’s thoughts on the thing are instruc-
tive again: ‘When and in what way do things appear as things? They do not
appear by means of human making. But neither do they appear without the
vigilance of mortals. The first step towards such vigilance is the step back from
introduction / 17
ED_int.indd 17 15/10/2013 5:06 PM

the thinking that merely represents – that is, explains – to the thinking that
responds and recalls.’27
Thus The Erotic Doll’s third and final thread – its thing-ological thread, its
attention to the epistemological and ontological nature of things – is why in
the end the book’s subtitle is ‘A Modern Fetish’. The book begins from the doll
and its animating promise or conditions of possibility. It does so as a thing, a
thing that things, an inanimate, artificial, synthetic, man-made thing, an ani-
mistic, anthropomorphic, mechanomorphic thing, as an animate thing with an
inexplicable vitality or energy, that articulates itself in curious and fascinating
ways, that seems to generate its own laws, demands and desire. Perhaps
because of this, in the end it shapes and transforms a man’s understanding
of his intimate and erotic attachment to such form or forms, the itinerary of
his own desire and, ultimately, himself. The Erotic Doll is about all these things,
all of which go some way towards engaging with the serious but obviously
somewhat mocking question: what does man want?
The Erotic Doll: A Modern Fetish’s three threads – the genealogical, the phe-
nomenological, and the thing-ological –interweave throughout the whole book.
The book is, though, divided into three sections: ‘Animism: Coming to Life’,
‘The Integrity of the Doll’ and ‘Given, the Anagrammatical Doll’.
In the first section, I deal with ‘animism’ (deriving from the Latin anima, ‘life’,
‘soul’), the belief that a force or spirit or soul dwells in and motivates, or directs
the energy that moves, inanimate objects and human forms and living beings
also. Such animating (from the Latin animatus, with etymological roots also
from anima) is both ‘to be filled with life and also to be disposed or inclined
towards an object or idea’. To be animate, then, as the art historian Lynda Nead
writes, ‘is not simply to be living but to possess the desire for life, as well as
its very essence or spirit’.28 I attend to the potential, the promise of animism’s
animating possibilities in order to consider how it shapes the invention and
re-visioning of the paradigmatic story of Pygmalion and his statue; and how it
does so uniquely within the historical, cultural and aesthetic networks of
modernity.
ED_int.indd 18 15/10/2013 5:06 PM

Beginning before Ovid’s Metamorphosis and persisting to this day, Pygmal-
ion’s story is an originary Western creation myth of the inanimate human form
becoming animate. I shall argue that sexuality, eroticism and perversion were
always at the root of the Pygmalion myth but that it is only through the emer-
gence in the late nineteenth century of a taxonomy of (largely heterosexual)
perversions that we come to realise this fully. By way of this taxonomy of poly-
morphous perversions, I propose, the human form, the statue, the sculpture
and other inanimate humanoid figures reveal their true selves. I further propose
that in their encounters with humans they raise questions of their intrinsic
energy and force, and because of this also raise questions of time, duration
and mutation that shape them, as they come into being as modern fetishes,
as animistic erotic fetishes; as hybrid and hubristic creatures; as surrogates
for other things; also as what Freud might call ‘inappropriate’ sexual objects
or things; and as things in and of themselves. I show that originary Western
creation myths of animism – particularly a belief in the fantasy of inanimate
forms coming to life, being brought to life, possessing the desire for life – are
about both falling in love with such forms and the process of their animating,
metaphorically but also literally. That is to say, this state of affairs comprises
four distinct albeit interconnected figurations: (1) falling in love with inanimate
forms; (2) the process of the inanimate coming to life; (3) the points at which
and the ways in which the erotic or lust is figured round still yet articulatable
things; and (4) articulatable things as they come into motion, into emotion. (It
is no coincidence that ‘emotion’ and ‘motion’ have the same ancient Greek
root, kinema.29) I propose that there is something both emphatically perverse
and yet distinctly heterosexual, straight, mundane, about this obsession with
a belief in the animistic fantasy of such creation myths, thus making the erotic
doll exemplary as a way of narrating this tale of (male) heterosexuality as both
polymorphously perverse and, not uncoincidentally, fairly banal.
The two chapters of the first section set the scene for the entire book. They
also put into play its terms, themes, tropes and arguments. In Chapter One, I
explore the myth of Pygmalion as a belief in the original fantasy of animating
human forms, particularly the male fantasy of sculpting a realistic statue in
order to shape woman. ‘I know very well, but all the same . . .’ as a phrase – it
is a wish, desire, a projection, a fantasy, it is hope, possibility itself – stresses
introduction / 19
ED_int.indd 19 15/10/2013 5:06 PM

the play of acknowledging and disavowing (1) animism itself, as well as (2) the
artifice that is representation and its victory over nature, and a willingness to
be deceived by such mimeticism and also (3) the possibility and means of
coming to life, of movement as such, that such form might possess the desire
for life, to say nothing of (4) the prospect of falling in love with inanimate form,
and of stirrings of lust that may or may not have anything to do with love.30
This chapter is a setting for metamorphoses (from the Greek meta and morphe,
‘changes of shape or form’) or transformations, and an exposing of such pro-
cesses as processes. It is a setting for the male fantasy of creating an object
of his desire – with Pygmalion himself as the artificer of life, of this artificial
act of divine creation – and of what it means to, and what happens when you,
fall in love with an object of your own creation (operisque sui concepit amorem).
It comes as no surprise that there is an etymological link between the artifi-
cer’s moulding and the moulding of the thing, the art of modelling, whether in
clay (plastice) or marble or ivory or wax or other materials. It is a cultural
practice, an artistic technē. Nor is it a surprise that such love is always of both
the process of creation and the thing created. And creation always has some-
thing libidinal to it.
Chapter One points to some of the ways in which an original act of creation,
and a belief in this fantasy, is a folly, a conceit, a deceit, a self-deceit and also
intrinsically an act of narcissistic self-projection. In this it is related of course
to the arrogant, self-satisfied, delusional, faintly homoerotic or auto-erotic
myth of Narcissus. As the artificer extends himself both conceptually and
materially into the thing, this act of making, which is also a making love,
affirms its inevitable auto-erotic qualities. It is as if Narcissus’ reflection were
to come to life and return his love.31 As such, inanimate human form can end
up figured as a stand-in or fetishistic surrogate for an other, for one’s self, for
one’s self as other, for the progenitor himself even, with such inanimate human
form reciprocating as a witness to such self-love. Crucial here is a belief in
the fantasy of reciprocity, of reciprocal relations, as well as the impossibility
of reciprocity between, say, human and form, persons and things, self and
other, self as other. Reciprocity is a theme that persists in this book.
The persistence of the story of Pygmalion and his statue into aesthetic
modernity has, I shall propose, much to do with the explosion of discussion in
the late nineteenth century around sexual perversions, perverse practices and
ED_int.indd 20 15/10/2013 5:06 PM

pleasure. The figures of Richard von Krafft-Ebbing, Havelock Ellis and Sigmund
Freud loom large, as does Iwan Bloch, the German sexologist who discovered
the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom and discussed at length conditions
such as Pygmalionism. Pygmalion and his statue as a story of romantic, erotic
and perverse love sets the scene, then, for a distinctly modern encounter: when
Pygmalion meets Pygmalionism.32
Given the questions raised by inanimate human form, that are intrinsic to
such form, in Chapter Two I argue that statues, dolls, mannequins and autom-
ata, caught up in the activities and processes of animism and the uncertain
tensions between motionlessness and motion, are erotic and perverse fetishes
of two particular kinds. Dolls are a particularly appropriate fetish form because
they allow me to trace a transition in modernity from inanimate human forms
figured as fetishistic objects that are stand-ins or surrogates for other things
to their figuring as erotic things as such that are capable of ‘independent activ-
ity’. I deal with motivating precedents – sacred sculptures, anatomical models,
wax figures – where inanimate human form is figured as both a stand-in and
the thing itself. I do so in order to examine how animism, mimeticism and
perversity come together and turn on inanimate human form as a fetishistic
thing that is both a representing, a rendering again of what preceded it and a
re-presenting, actually a presenting again, since it is not just a repetition but
actually and also an intensification. As in the last chapter, what provokes this
is an attending to mostly men’s desires or, rather, what structures such
desires, and how and why these desires are given form, in this case by way of
perverse practices with fetishistic things. Building on debates regarding the
modern fetish, I argue that Freud’s insistence that the fetish, such as a doll,
is an inappropriate sexual substitute for the ‘normal’ sexual object misses a
crucial component of perverse practices: that the doll is not simply a substitute
but may be also, or instead, itself the object of desire, the thing in and of itself,
and for its own ends.
In section II, I focus on the doll figured erotically as a fetishistic figure of
desire. This genealogy goes from late nineteenth-century commercial shop-
window dummies, Kokoschka’s doll and the Surrealist mannequins of the
1920s and 30s, to current (mass-produced but also bespoke) dolls and artificial
body parts manufactured by the sex industry, which themselves began to be
produced in the late nineteenth century. I shall concentrate on a genealogy in
introduction / 21
ED_int.indd 21 15/10/2013 5:06 PM

which there is a will-to-verisimilitude, an ongoing urgency for the doll to simu-
late the real. Here the doll must retain its sculptural logic, its coherence, its
integrity.
Throughout its history the doll as a thing to be crafted, manufactured,
looked at, felt, experienced, as something to be with, draws attention to a
particular series of (heterosexual) perverse sexual practices. It is worth noting
again that the doll as a fetish is identified as an ‘inappropriate’ sexual object
because it is a substitute for something absent, missing or lost. This section
puts forward a more disturbing proposition, arguing that fetishistic objects
such as dolls and their accompanying perverse practices are interesting in
and of themselves, as objects in auto-affective encounters. Here the erotic
doll is an object to be interacted with, utilised, engaged and played with in any
number of ways. Thus the doll is generative of pleasure in and of itself. The
object is the pleasure itself, the practice itself, the thing itself. I argue that the
real perverse nature of the fetish is not what it seeks to hide but rather what
it displays all too evidently and always has done: that we might be interested
in the fetish itself, for its own ends. The pleasures here are neither sexual nor
erotic, nor perverse in general. They are, rather, pleasures particular to prac-
tices that include those of auto-affection. With this in mind I suggest that the
idea of inanimate human form becoming animate – the doll, the Surrealist
mannequin, and more obviously the sex doll – are all fetishes of this kind. I
explore not what they are fetishes of – what they hide, cover over and so
on – but how fetishes signal the history of phenomenological encounters,
as often auto-affective or masturbatory encounters, with fetishistic things
qua things.
Chapter Three circles round Oskar Kokoschka’s commissioning of a cele-
brated if elusive fetish, well known by the Surrealists and Bellmer in particular,
a life-size doll of Alma Mahler. Kokoschka needed the doll to become, to be
Alma Mahler. Touch is key, I shall argue, for such deceit and delusions to be
realised. While today we may have come to think of fetishistic practices as
primarily visual, in the service of vision, we might remember Freud’s writing
of seeing as ‘an activity that is ultimately derived from touching’. Kokoschka’s
doll is, I will propose, an object of visual desire but also a thing of tactile desire.
His commitment was to both the look and the feel of the doll; as he remarked
ED_int.indd 22 15/10/2013 5:06 PM

to Hermione Moos, the dress- and doll-maker: ‘the woman of my dreams will
seem to come alive to my eyes and touch’. His devotion to the doll is, after all,
not just an attachment to it as a fetishistic object of desire but even more as
a desirous thing to be made use of. As such, his remarks on its tactile qualities
are not just another example of touching as seeing, the paradigm in which
touching is usually grasped. Rather, Kokoschka’s remarks, born of his phe-
nomenological obligation to the doll, are an instance of touching as touching.
In this chapter, I propose that Kokoschka’s doll becomes an occasion to con-
sider the tactile, textual or haptic qualities of fetishism and that this encounter
with ‘Alma’ is an encounter in which touching as touching exposes the true
heart of the fetishistic relationship: the auto-affective encounter with the thing
as thing.
Chapter Four begins with the Surrealists’ handling of dolls, mannequins and
artificial body parts in order to foreground a precise convergence between them
and a commercial context with which they were in frequent dialogue: the
fashion industry, which among other things manufactured dolls and manne-
quins for the shop windows of department stores. In this convergence the figure
and form of the doll, the mannequin and the artificial body part make manifest
and articulate differently the intimate ties between capitalism and fetishism. I
argue that this convergence is significant for what the shop-window dummy as
installation, and spectacle, as form, technology and thing – as commodity
fetish twice over, since it is both the bearer of commodities and a commodity
itself – tells us about capitalism and fetishism. While I am initially damning of
Surrealism’s use of such dolls, mannequins and artificial body parts to fetishise
women’s bodies as part of their formulaic ‘illustrations’ of psychoanalysis, in
the end a careful attending to the mannequin and the department-store
dummy’s historicity, materiality and technicity will be beneficial. For doing so
will aggravate productively a dialectical tension in modernity’s temporalities,
between Neuzeit (‘new time’) and the outmoded, a short-circuiting of the past
and the present by which the ‘undead’ of recent history as splinters of the past’s
potentialities is ripe for retroactive modification.
Section II’s final chapters concentrate on the distinctive intimacies between
men and commercial erotic (or sex) dolls. In Chapter Five I explore the idea of
the modern sex doll as a participatory sexual device and the function it serves,
introduction / 23
ED_int.indd 23 15/10/2013 5:06 PM

how it is shaped by a nexus of production, commerce and consumption. This
nexus delineates the doll’s mainstreaming in recent popular culture, formed
by and thus attached to many of capitalist modernity’s determining features,
from processes of industrialisation and technologisation, and the advent of
mass production and mass market-ification, to modernity itself as it is born of
intoxicating and fragmentary encounters with spectacle, entertainment and
novelty – and toys, in this instance sex toys. I ask, how and why has the sex
doll as an object, a device with a decidedly participatory relationship to con-
sumption and its potentialities entered popular culture and consciousness?
Why has it become part of fairly popular cultural practices – bearing in mind
that the subjects here are behaviours and acts, not representations – per-
formed largely although not exclusively by straight men? How is the human
bond with this doll, this mysterious, magical, fetishistic and artificial thing that
is the commodity as a social thing, driven by commerce and by desire? Finally,
by tracing in this chapter a somewhat itinerant genealogy of the modern sex
doll, I can ask: what and where are the origins of this mercantile thing, as well
as the foundations of its popularisation?
The subject of Chapter Six is the Agalmatophile, the one sexually attracted
to statues and by extension sibling inanimate human forms. He is thus the ‘wet
user’ of such participatory sexual devices. Chapter Six concludes discussions
of the figure of the doll as realistic and mimetic, as a marker of a particular
kind of erotic obsession, where the uncanny and perversity loom large and
where the doll is not simply a fetishistic object of desire but an object of desire
per se. It is not only a substitute for something or someone else, and, in fact,
with the advent of the bespoke sex doll, the sustained discourse of a will-to-
verisimilitude, the very ‘integrity’ of the doll itself, begins to spill over into a
hyper-realistic fantasy of perverse proportions. I focus specifically on RealDoll,
a top-of-the-range sex doll manufactured by Abyss Creations in San Diego,
California. RealDoll, following a precedent set by ever more realistic versions
of the blow-up doll, now craft the most convincing (and expensive) of dolls on
the market. That is to say, they manufacture the most convincing masturbatory
devices on the market. What, then, is to be made of the solitary ‘vice’ of mas-
turbation? If auto-affection is understood socially and psycho-sexually, as the
historian Thomas Laqueur has argued, as a ‘fundamentally asocial or socially
ED_int.indd 24 15/10/2013 5:06 PM

degenerate practice’ in which ‘healthy desire’ is channelled back into itself
rather than into the regulative hetero-normativity of socially productive forms
of heterosexual intercourse, what is to be made of the affirmative testimonies
of love, companionship and the benefits of artificial love by both men and
women who have purchased RealDolls?33 I argue that sex dolls function as
masturbatory devices but also take on the role of companion, lover and domes-
tic decorative feature. It is the tension in this combination that makes it pos-
sible to present the sex doll as both an object for desire and a love object, a
figure articulating a dialectic between sex and love, which is generative of a
new erotics of intimacy. This takes two forms, one of cruel brutality and one
of familial domesticity.
This book’s third and final section signals a divergent and contradictory
genealogy. Beginning with a chapter on Duchamp, himself following in the
wake of Hans Bellmer’s poupées which are discussed in the section’s second
chapter, the erotic doll or mannequin is held up not as a site of verisimilitude
and mimeticism but as a fabricated form organised or arranged, and under-
stood to draw attention to its own distorting, fragmentary, partial and ana-
grammatical nature. Here the figure of the erotic doll and the mannequin is
twisted out of shape, broken up. The concern is with a body composed of bits
and pieces or, perhaps even more interestingly, composed by way of distorting
or anagrammation. In this section I consider the body, the body fragment,
partial human form, the artificial body part – in a genealogy of the body in
modernity as an aesthetics of fragmentation that goes back at least to
Rodin – and, most importantly, the communicative potential of the distorting
and of the anagrammatical. I examine practices where the bodies of man-
made dolls and mannequins are taken apart and added to, or perhaps dem-
onstrate too many of one kind of body part or another. The mutability of the
doll and its erotic plasticity speak of logics beyond the polymorphously per-
verse fetishistic figuration of (heterosexual) sexuality. While still alluding to an
often ironic destructuring of the Western metaphysical human subject, its
configurations and disassembling of gender and sexuality and of the human
condition’s intense brutality, such non- or anti-mimeticism is generative, I
shall propose, of an altogether different order of heterosexual masculinity’s
intimate encounters with inanimate human form. These sculptural objects,
introduction / 25
ED_int.indd 25 15/10/2013 5:06 PM

these dolls and mannequins, these forms with their intrinsic energy and force,
by way of ‘mysterious generative forces’ may not come to life, may not be
brought to life, may not possess the desire for life. They offer, instead, distort-
ing and the anagrammatical as operations of and on the nature of time, eroti-
cism and transformation itself.
Duchamp’s Étant donnés, with its anatomically peculiar recumbent man-
nequin, is a distorting body made up of body parts interrogating its own partial-
ness, so to speak. In so being, it flags up human form as a body in bits and
pieces, highlighting the body part itself as part of a productive and generative
assemblage. Framed in this way, the erotic doll or mannequin impresses on
us the communicative potential of the distorting body – the body that is formed
from body parts as it itself undergoes transforming. Attending to the fabrica-
tion of its materials and the processes of its making and the contingencies of
that labouring, proffers modalities of assembly-like desire out of kilter with
those of psychoanalysis that have so far driven much of this tale of artificial
love. Thus Duchamp’s anatomically peculiar mannequin is exemplary as a
figure of anamorphic distortion or a distorting anamorphosis. This idea of
distorting as an activity in turn becomes a way of generating thought.
In the final chapter, I argue for the assembling–disassembling–reassem-
bling impulse of Bellmer’s poupées by focusing on his objects, images and
writings of the ‘physical unconscious’ and the ‘psychic mechanisms of the
human body’. By starting with the dolls, an attention to the mechanisms or
components or ideas built into and thus articulated by these things, their
intrinsic force, I look to make them incitements to thinking. Doing so – by
starting from the communicative potential of their anagrammatical bodies,
their bodies that are formed from another, from themselves even, by re-
arranging their composite parts – takes us from the doll as Surrealist Object
par excellence to the doll as an anagram, where the body is a sentence dis-
mantled and put back together differently. I suggest that there is a rhythm or
a logic to such assembling and that such a rhythm or logic is erotic. Bellmer’s
dolls are, then, progenitors. Their true content, always already in the process
of taking shape, is the invention, the inventor even, of new desires. What, then,
are these new desires? How does form form desire, and desire form form? In
such becoming, what form does animism’s animating possibilities, the condi-
ED_int.indd 26 15/10/2013 5:06 PM

tions for the possibility of motion, take as erotic? What, then, ultimately is a
man that the itinerary of his desire can create such attachments to such
inanimate human form?
Overall, in The Erotic Doll I am concerned with how men’s intimate and frequently
erotic relations with inanimate human form are constituted visually and
materially in historical, cultural and aesthetic networks of modernity. From the
present day to the end of the nineteenth century and back again, and with a
few digressions along the way, the genealogical threads I trace weave together
the story of Pygmalion and his statue with the erotomania known as
Pygmalionism. I do this in order to tell a story of the ‘invention’ of (male) hetero-
sexuality that is from the beginning both intrinsically ‘perverse’ (as well as
normative and banal) in its fantasies, desires, pleasures and practices, and
that, because it emerges out of modernity’s anthropo-psycho-sexual-capitalist
complex, offers up distinctively modern ways of thinking differently about
questions of animism’s animating possibilities, especially when put into motion
by the operations of eroticism and the friction of desire produced. Throughout,
I endeavour to foreground such inanimate human form with its intrinsic vitality
as the motor that propels these arguments; for the best way to make sense of
these things is tied to articulations of love, lust, desire, obsession, possession,
eroticism and perversity. It is, though, the distinctly modern nature of such
erotic relations between men and inanimate human form that offers new
insights into inanimate form, erotic relations, male heterosexual desire and
things themselves. Here, from and through the doll, things are understood
historically, visually, materially, in terms of touch, as matter itself, in terms of
their making and their doing. I start from such things in their singular-
ity – historical, material, aesthetic, ontological and epistemological – as things
to think about. More importantly, because of this singularity, they are distinct
(conceptual and theoretical) things to think with. Inanimate human form, such
as the doll, is something to ‘think with’ not in order to come to know what it
means but, rather, what it is, how it works and what it does. For in the end this
distinct and singular thing offers itself up as a form of inquiry, as imminent
introduction / 27
ED_int.indd 27 15/10/2013 5:06 PM

theory. By way of its genealogical thread (of artificial love, love of and for the
artificial), its phenomenological thread (of intimate relations, erotic and
otherwise, between men and inanimate human form) and its thing-ological
thread (an attention to the epistemological and ontological nature of inanimate
human form), I propose that inanimate human form with its intrinsic energy,
which somehow generates its own laws, demands and desires, provokes such
thinking. The thing things. The erotic doll things.
ED_int.indd 28 21/10/2013 3:25 PM

I animism: coming to life
The sculptor must make likenesses of the passions of the

soul by means of the form.
Socrates1
A statue must live; its flesh must come to life, its face and
expression must speak. We must believe that we touch it and
feel that it warms under our hands. We must see it stand
before us and feel that it speaks to us.
Johann Gottfried Herder2
[We might] hope to enter into the heart of a statue: specifically,

the heart of a statue who is in love.
Maurizio Bettini3
The affection that is felt for inanimate objects is not real love,
because there is no possibility of reciprocal feeling; there is
no way to desire the good of the object, which is an essential
attribute of love.
Jacques Ferrand4
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ED_int.indd 30 15/10/2013 5:06 PM

1 / visions of pygmalion:
‘i know very well, but all the same’
Pygmalion, how lucky you are with that statue: you have
enjoyed a thousand times what I would be glad to enjoy but
once.
Petrarch, Il Canzoniere 785
Her heart just begins to be moved, but it will not be long

before it is beating hard. What hands! What softness of
flesh! No, this is not marble; press it with your finger and
the material, which has lost its hardness, will yield to your
impression.
Denis Diderot6
Galatea never does quite like Pygmalion.

George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion, 19167
Did he [the poet Persius] not see that even the simulacra
and images of the gods made in gold and ivory by such
artists as Phidias, Euphranor and Polyclitus are nothing
other than big dolls?
Lactantius, The Divine Institutes8
There are numerous precedents in philosophy, aesthetics and literature – as

well as in the history of technological invention – for the idea of inanimate
human form or matter becoming animate. Especially, for my purposes here,
of the inanimate, crafted, artificial female figure, the sculpted sculptural form
coming to life, being brought to life, possessing the desire for life. Animation,
as noted in the Introduction, derives from the Latin root animare, from anima,
1 Electric Kiss, c.1800

Deutsches Museum, Munich,
visions of pygmalion / 31
ED_int.indd 31 15/10/2013 5:06 PM

meaning ‘life, soul, breath’ (spiritus in Latin, pneuma in Greek, rūach in Hebrew),
‘spirit’. Animation thus raises questions intrinsic to form itself, to its force,
energy, vitality. Inanimate form or matter has the potential, the capacity, to be
animate, to be animated. That such animation comes about is fascinating; how
such animating works is even more intriguing.
In the pan-Mediterranean world of classical antiquity, writings by Homer,
Pindar, Pliny and others spun legends of bronze, clay or wooden statues, often
female, being crafted and enchanted, becoming animate and articulate.9 (Artic-
ulate in the sense that they came to language, to enunciation, and that their
coming to motion was a jointed, segmented one.) Such possibilities make
sense when the ancient Greek zoon (‘living thing’) is statue, and s’ankh, the
ancient Egyptian for sculptor, is ‘he who makes live/alive’, and they may well
begin with Homer and Hesiod’s use of automaton to mean acting on one’s own
will, being inner-directed, a thing that acts for (not by) itself.10 No wonder
statues become untethered or untether themselves from their plinths, if they
were ever chained to them in the first place. In Book 18 of Homer’s Iliad (700
bce), for instance, Hephaestus, the god of mechanical arts, the ‘crippled’ son
of Zeus and Hera with his ‘unequal Gait’ and the husband of Aphrodite, the
foam-born goddess of love, beauty and sexuality, works his mechanical magic.11
In crafting Hermes’s winged helmet and sandals, Aphrodite’s girdle, Achilles’s
armour and Pandora and her box, Hephaestus is known to have been aided in
his labours by two living, breathing and articulate golden female statues:
The monarch’s steps two female forms uphold,

That mov’d and breath’d in animated gold;
To whom was voice, and sense, and science giv’n
Of Works divine (such wonders are in heav’n!)12
As the Greek lyric poet Pindar (b. 522 bce) writes in his Seventh Olympian Ode,
Hephaestus is likewise responsible, along with Daedalus (the primary human
inventor of automata) and the Rhodian Telchines, for making walking statues
that ‘seem to breathe in stone’. Such statues were ‘set up in the streets’ of
Rhodes, the ancient home of automata and mechanical engineering, and ‘the
roads carried them about’, which is to say that they ‘went their own way’.13
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romantic love: pygmalion and reciprocity
Long after, in the wake of Hephaestus’s divine magical powers for turning
inanimate matter into living beings came the medieval period’s prohibition
against idolatry which marks a clear distinction between man-made (mechani-
cal) creations and mirabilia or God’s true miracles. This is a period that abounds
with animating Christian materiality in the form of bodily relics (revered bodies
and parts of bodies), effluvial relics and the Eucharist, all of which are what
they present.14 Subsequently, the inventors of the Renaissance, riveted by the
mimetic, naturalistic and illusionistic, conjured up (largely female, usually
musical) articulating figures, mechanical automata. So did those of the Enlight-
enment and their philosophers. For example, in 1540 Gianello Torriano of
Cremona made for Charles v a life-size figure of a girl that could pluck the
strings of a lute.15 René Descartes, it is rumoured, travelled from the Nether-
lands to Sweden in 1649 to meet Queen Christina with an artificial female
companion called Francine that he himself had made out of metal and clock-
work. He is said to have claimed that Francine was his ‘daughter’ but his bona
fide daughter, also named Francine, had died many years earlier at the age of
five, which intimates that his travelling companion was another kind of progeny
altogether.16 Jacques de Vaucanson, an inventor whom Voltaire dubbed a ‘rival
to Prometheus’, while best known for the Digesting Duck (1739), had a year
earlier made an Automaton Flute Player.17 This list of Hephaestus’s Enlighten-
ment and post-Enlightenment progeny could go on to include the Austrian
Friedrich von Knaus’s ‘writing doll’ of 1760; the Swiss father and son Pierre
and Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz’s mechanical puppet of a female harpsichord
player made in 1773;18 Johann Nepomuk Maelezel’s 1823 invention of a doll
that could say ‘Ma-ma’ and ‘Pa-pa’; and Thomas Edison who in 1878 submitted
his first doll patent – the same year in which he invented the phonograph,
which incidentally he referred to as ‘my baby’ – for his Talking Doll which, as
a home entertainment system capable of emitting synthetic sound through the
perforated chest of its tin torso, could recite ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ (fig. 2).19
There is anecdotal evidence that Edison may well also have been looking for
‘large mechanical figures’ for himself; to what end we know not.20
I include this all too brief trawl through the Western history of the invention
of artificial life, of inanimate human form or matter becoming animate, because
in doing so I am able to pull out something about how such inanimate form or
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matter raises questions of its coming to life, its being brought to life, its pos-
sessing a desire for life, and also of how it raises questions intrinsic to such
form itself around the process of the transition from motionlessness to motion.
That ‘something’ concerns generativity, in this case paternity and the recur-
rence of familial progenising – note the references to babies, daughters,
mothers and fathers – as well as the occasional allusion to (erotic) relations
between creators and their dolls. (Some kind of pathogenesis, perhaps, made
up of theories of procreation in which men, creatively correcting nature [figured
as feminine, of course), can ensure their own paternity, can fantasise their own
self-birth even.) Where, though, in all this is the love, where is the erotic, the
perverse?
To answer this question I need to turn to the story that both comes before
and bridges these classical and modern histories of such technological inven-
tion. It is the foundation of the very idea of inanimate, man-made, artificial
form or matter becoming animate, and in particular of a female figure coming
to life, being brought to life, possessing the desire for life: the story of Pygmal-
ion and his statue.21 This story is the precedent that sets the scene for my
considerations of how animism’s animating possibilities work to articulate the
nature of a love and desire for inanimate form in general and the erotic doll,
the doll eroticised, in particular in the visual and material culture of modernity.
It is the originary and emblematic fantasy of creation, metamorphosis, anthro-
pomorphism; of turning inanimate human form into sentient, living, breathing,
corporeal beings; the male fantasy of sculpting, crafting, labouring to create a
statue in order to shape woman; a male fantasy of the creation of an object of
desire, an erotic thing as such. At its heart is not a mere substitution; it is a
transformation.
This story of Pygmalion finds its beginnings in the Hellenistic writer
Philostephanos of Styrene’s account in the Kypriaka (third century bce). No
longer extant, this pre-Ovidian version of the myth came down to us by way of
the Christian apologists Clement of Alexandria’s Protrepticus and Hellenus
(4.57) and Arnobius of Sicca’s Adversus nationes (The Case Against the Pagans;
6.22).22 I shall return to these versions later since they include crucial features
2 Edison’s Talking Doll,

cover of Scientific American
magazine, 26 April 1890.
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that were obscured in Ovid’s and most post-Ovidian iterations: blasphemy,
notably Pygmalion’s pagan idolatry; and perversity, his sexual act with the
statue as a statue.
The story is best known, and was given its permanent form, from its para-
digmatic telling in Book 10 (lines 243–97) of Ovid’s epic Metamorphoses, his
book of ‘transformations’ or ‘transmutations’ written some time between 2 and
8 ce.23 In ‘Pygmalion’, Pygmalion is desperate for a wife but horrified by the
natural lasciviousness of women. In particular he despises the lives led by the
Propoetides, the girls of Amathus who for daring to deny Venus’s divinity are
punished by being changed into the first prostitutes. In their shamelessness
they undergo a hardening, a petrifaction, and become ‘stones of flint’ (M, 242)
or ‘solid granite’ (R, 242). Against this backdrop and lacking the companionship
of married love, Pygmalion carves himself a ‘statue in ivory, white as snow’ (R,
248), ‘more beautiful than any woman born’ (M, 248–9). He sculpts his ideal
woman, whom he adores, idolises and desires. He showers her with gifts
(shells, polished stones, little birds, flowers, coloured balls) and adorns her
with robes, rings, a necklace and pearl earrings – all common practice, as will
be seen, among idolators dressing cult statues. Infatuated with his statue,
which is not given a name, he falls in love with his own creation (operisque sui
concepit amorem; R, 248–9):
It [the ivory] seemed to be alive,

Its face to be a real girl’s, a girl
Who wished to move – but modesty forbade.
Such art his art concealed. In admiration
His heart desires the body he had formed. (M, 249–53)
It seems so alive, so real, it so ‘wished to move’ that it is only modesty that

stops it from coming alive. It is such a good simulated body (simulati corporis,
253), as an idol, an imitation, as a representation, as a resembling, that when
Pygmalion – whose skill is so remarkable that it conceals the labour of his
crafting (‘Such art his art concealed’) – touches again and again its smooth
surface, it deceives him into believing that there is a softening. He ‘believes . . . [it]
yields’ (M, 255). When he kisses it on the lips he begins to believe that the lips
have kissed him in return. Touch makes him believe that the marble yields.
Through touch he creates flesh itself (Corpus erat!, ‘She was flesh!’, 289). It is
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‘moulded by caresses’.24 His passion exerts such pressure that he is concerned
that it might be bruised. He ‘imagined his fingers sinking into the limbs he
was/touching,/frightened of bruising those pure white arms as he/gripped
them tight’ (R, 256–7). It is as if Pygmalion is trying to will his statue to life by
touch, here both a marker of authoring and authenticating and a technique of
animation, an erotic and diagnostic one as well. Pygmalion’s relations with the
statue have from the beginning a visual but even more so a haptic component
to them: the ivory statue becomes body, is given form, materialised, material-
ises, largely by way of touch.25
This materialising is repeated again and again in intimate relations between
men and inanimate human forms that stir them physiologically, viscerally.
Long after Ovid, the French materialist philosopher Étienne Bonnot de Condil-
lac in his Treatise on the Sensations (1754) – his thought experiment with a
marble statue, inanimate but crafted internally to be like a living being, with
stops or plugs in its carapace for each of the senses so that he could observe
them individually or in combination – wrote on touch as a sense by which we
come to know that there are bodies other than ourselves, on touch as a means
of differentiation and identification. Thus by way of touch Pygmalion’s statue
is other than him but also is him, is of him; hence arises a narcissism born of
touching as well as of looking.26 (For, Pygmalion’s caressing, kissing, gripping
lavished on the statue of his own creation/progeny is also, in a way, lavished
on the man himself.) At the same time, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was also
detailing how by way of touch, self-touching, the statue becomes self-aware,
comes into self-awareness and begins reciprocatory relations. In his one-
scene lyric drama ‘Pygmalion scène lyrique’ (1762/70), in four swift sequential
haptic gestures the statue recognises itself, distinguishes itself from
inanimate form and then identifies its being as of Pygmalion: ‘She comes down
from the pedestal, touches herself once and utters her first word: “Moi”. She
touches herself again and says, “C’est moi”, then touches a marble, and
responds to the new sensation: “Ce n’est plus moi”. Her final words escape
when she touches Pygmalion: “Ah! Encore moi”.’27
Returning to Ovid’s Pygmalion, we find that he, afraid to ask Venus if this
statue might become his bride, prays to the goddess that she might make him
the next best thing: ‘“Vouchsafe/Oh Gods, if all things you can grant, my bride/
Shall be” – he dared not say my ivory girl – /“The living likeness of my ivory
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girl”‘ (M, 273–5). Why would he not ask her for a living likeness? This story is
after all, as the art historian Victor I. Stoichita writes in The Pygmalion Effect,
an ‘erotico-magic pneumatology’, an erotic and magical interaction between
humans and gods.28 Naturally, Venus, knowing ‘well the purpose of [Pygmal-
ion’s] prayer’ (M, 277), intervenes, granting him not just his wish – a living
likeness, a resembling – but a version of his actual desire: the thing itself as
a living likeness.29 The statue, the girl of ivory as flesh:
And he went home [from praying to Venus at the

festival in her honour],
home to his heart’s delight.
And kissed her as she lay, and she seemed warm;
Again he kissed her and with marvelling touch
Caressed her breast; beneath his touch the flesh
Grew soft, its ivory hardness vanishing,
And yielded to his hands, as in the sun
Wax of Hymettus softens and is shaped
By practised fingers into many forms,
And usefulness acquires by being used.
His heart was torn with wonder and misgiving,
Delight and terror that it was not true!
Again and yet again he tried his hopes –
She was alive! The pulse beat in her veins! (M, 279–90)
In an inverted echo of the Propoetides who, at Venus’s order, became petrified

because of their shamelessness (the very blood in their faces hardening, their
ability to blush petering out), thanks to Pygmalion’s faith in the goddess of love,
beauty and sexuality, his statue becomes, is, flesh. He hesitates, he doubts but
he must be willing, must struggle to believe in this metamorphosis. It all
depends on credas. He knows very well, but all the same . . . Blood begins to
pump through its veins, its lips redden as they are kissed, his fingers leave
imprints on its breasts as its skin becomes steadily softer. Blushing, the tactile
becomes visible. (This blushing is not because of the kiss Pygmalion presses
on his statue but because, argues the classicist Maurizio Bettini in The Portrait
of the Lover, in being brought to life she becomes aware, she can see him and
in this returning of his gaze, she is reciprocating his love.30) Likening the ivory
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from which he carves his statue to wax, with its pliability and capacity for reci-
procity, by way of moulding, touching, fashioning, by being worked by men’s
practised fingers, its ‘usefulness acquires by being used’. In being made,
worked and utilised, it takes on a use value that is also a misuse, an abuse
that is also an auto-erotic self-abuse. Its softening is, one can suppose,
matched by a hardening. Pygmalion’s desires and behaviour are endorsed by
Venus, the union is graced by the goddess of love and, ‘when the moon’s horns
had nine times been rounded into a full circle’, a daughter is born to them,
Paphos.31
I would like to note two things here, one perverse, the other blasphemous.
First, there is a hint that the statue, which still remains unnamed, is possessed
before it is made flesh or, to put it in another way, that what is possessed is not
a ‘living likeness’ but the statue as (if) flesh. The intimation in both cases is that
Pygmalion has sexual relations with the statue as such. Second, a statue, a thing
idolised, is generative of progeny. Despite or perhaps because of this solipsistic
eroticism, Pygmalion artificially fathers (conceives of) and mothers (gives birth
to) the statue. The statue is his offspring, his non-identical clone; they have
incestuous relations; Paphos is their offspring. Pygmalion is thus Paphos’s
father, her grandfather and, somehow, his own fertility specialist – typically
fucked-up daddy-mummy-me genetico-Freudian family relations.32
The story of Pygmalion is familiar in one version or another, by way of the
animating ekphrastic power of words and later its iconography, if not from
Philostephanos’s unoriginary origin then certainly from Ovid’s standard and
from a series of later post-Enlightenment re-inventions that persist in litera-
ture, theatre and the visual arts especially from the late eighteenth to the early
twentieth century. They coalesce most interestingly for my purposes around
the last quarter of the nineteenth century.33 This is where a thread of the
Western history of the technological, mechanical and magical invention of
artificial life in general becomes a historically specific constellation of condi-
tions in modernity from which emerge a distinctive erotics of intimate relations
between men and inanimate human form.
Such a constellation was anticipated somewhat by Enlightenment thinkers
initiating a re-emergence of the myth of the living sculpture as a direct chal-
lenge to the divine nature of the creation of human beings.34 This in turn con-
nects to beliefs about falling in love with living, breathing, animating, sentient
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beings. Such beliefs, responses to Descartes’s mind–body dualism, came out
of the widespread scientific attitude among late seventeenth and eighteenth-
century materialist philosophers including Condillac, Pierre Bayle and Julian
Offray de La Mettrie. This attitude advocates that, as the art historian and
classicist George L. Hersey writes, because all matter is made of the same
atoms, because all matter is animate, it is possible to animate dead or non-
living matter.35 To resuscitate it artificially. To rearrange atoms, even of marble.
Enlightenment physics recognises, Hersey goes on, the possibility of bringing
matter to life by any number of transforming energies, such as electricity,
magnetism, élan vital, cosmic influence (Milton), plunum (Descartes) and ether
(Newton). The human’s functioning, previously God-given, later comprehended
in terms of thermal and fluid dynamics, and operating through the matter by
which it is constituted, becomes a motion machine where the physiology of
humours is replaced by a physiology of the nerves, where the brain is a motor
that drives a complex organism with a circulatory system and a nervous system
circulating energy. (The entry for ‘nerve’ in Diderot’s Encyclopédie, published
between 1751 and 1772, claims that the ‘essence’ conveyed around the body
is referred to by some as ‘animal spirit’.36) No wonder it has been pointed out
that a statue, ‘in keeping with the language of physiology of the Enlightenment’,
is a ‘feeling’ statue and can be a ‘sensitive’, ‘irritable’ and ‘nervous’ statue.37 A
statue has an interiority, an inner life. The physiological, the neurological and
soon the electric put the networked circuit boards in place for a belief in the
idea of the body – human, sculptural – to (have the capacity to) be brought to
life.38 It is this system, and a grasp of it, which makes it possible to conceive
of and visualise the circulation of vital energy and forces and thus animation
itself – of the human and, by extension, the statue and, by further extension,
of the relations between human and inanimate form. Such a charge – force,
energy, vitality, electricity – sparks life (fig. 1). (This is not dissimilar to how
the early nineteenth century might appreciate that a chemistry and an alchemy
can come together to bring to life from parts of various corpses a Frankenstein
monster.)39 Not to forget magnetism; no wonder there is an attracting erotic
charge, a spark to ignite temptation, love, lust and the devotional promise of
reciprocal relations.
Persisting with these and other transforming forces, with a converging of
the divine, the magical and the imagination, often with modern science, tech-
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nology, and engineering, this belief in the animating of inanimate bodies and
forms, this conjuring up by Pygmalion or similar characters (not always with
love or lust on their minds), appears widely in philosophical (and other) trea-
tises. These include André François Boureau-Deslandes’s Pygmalion; ou, la
statue animée (1741), Condillac’s Treatise, Rousseau’s ‘Pygmalion scène
lyrique’, and La Mettrie’s Machine Man (1748). It also appears in literary and
theatrical texts such as Heinrich Kleist’s ‘Über das Marionetten Theater’
(1810), E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman (1817), the inspiration for Freud’s essay
on ‘The Uncanny’, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus (1818),
Léo Delibes’s ballet Coppélia (1870) and Carlo Collidi’s Pinocchio (1881).40 In
addition, in Champfleury’s ‘The Wax Figure Collection’ (‘L’Homme aux figures
de cire’, 1857) the lead Diart romances, beds and ultimately elopes with his
wax love, Julie.41 Also, in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam’s novel The Eve of the Future
(1886), through a process of transubstantiation the inventor Edison brings to
life for his friend Lord Ewald the ‘new, electro-human creature’ Hadaly (named
after the Arab word for ‘ideal’ and created by a woman, Any Sowana, who
‘incorporated herself, like a fluid vision, within’ this ‘magneto-electric Android’)
who is not human, non-human or post-human but, rather, ‘a kind of Being’,
‘a possibility’.42
Instances of inanimate or man-made human form or matter becoming
animate rendered in sculpture, painting and drawing include Jean Raoux’s
Pygmalion (1717) in which the statue is depicted in the process of coming to
life by the lack of colour in its feet and legs and its colourful upper body parts;
the Pre-Raphaelite Edward Burne-Jones’s Pygmalion and the Image cycles
(1868–9 and 1875–8; the French academician Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Pygmalion
et Galatée (c. 1890) series, one of which is perhaps the best-known visual
rendering of Pygmalion and his statue (fig. 3); and Auguste Rodin’s Galatée
(1889) and Pygmalion et Galatée (1908) where the human forms emerge out of
the unfinished marble.43
In early adventures in moving images, cases of inanimate human form
coming to life by technological conjuring include the animated still or ‘sequence’
photography of moving bodies in the experiments of Eadweard J. Muybridge
and Étienne-Jules Marey. These resonate with concomitant time-and-motion
studies such as the invention of the scientific management of efficiency in the
Taylorism of Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Fordism of Henry Ford. Attentive
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to the dangers of technological mechanisation of the human at the heart of
industrial capitalism were also Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) with its Evil Maria
automata and Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) with its mechanisation-
of-man thesis. Earlier still, Georges Méliès had made his 1898 trick film
version of Pygmalion and Galathea,44 his Coppélia: la poupée animée (1900, no
longer extant), Poupée vivante (1908), and in 1903 his production of Illusions
Extraordinaires (Extraordinary Illusions). As the cultural historian Michelle E.
Bloom points out, this refers to Pygmalion implicitly by featuring Méliès himself
‘as a magician who assembles dismembered body parts into a statue and then
transforms the statue into a woman’.45 Things coming into motion, into emotion,
do so by the cinematic tricks – cuts, fade-outs and so on – that prove that the
magic of transformation is built into the very apparatus, techniques and affect
of cinema. This is all closely tied, as Nead puts it, to a culture preoccupied
visually and technologically with life and motion: ‘It is historically consistent
that the story of Pygmalion enjoyed a renewed popularity in the visual arts late
in the nineteenth century, just when attempts to design machines to create
living pictures and moving images were escalating and had assumed a press-
ing momentum.’46 The cinema became, thus, the culmination of Muybridge and
Marey’s attempts to animate still photography by way of the sequence, an
interest in ‘serial motion’ that is found in waxwork museums, where, like tab-
leaux vivants, panoramas and dioramas, frozen scenes became proto-cine-
matic as participants mobilised the scenes by themselves moving through the
displays.
As these examples suggest, the forever growing interest in Pygmalion and
his statue from the late eighteenth century onwards, and specifically for my
purposes in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, was tied to transforma-
tive powers. These are matter, magic, the imagination, and, as just noted,
emerging ideas about first the physiological-isation, then the neurological-
isation, then the electric-ification and finally the technological machinisation
of the human. In the context of such transformations, our sense of the (human)
body is itself transformed, reconfigured from a bio-mechanical to a bio-
3 Jean-Léon Gérôme,
Pygmalion and Galatea, c.1890,
oil on canvas, 88.9 x 68.6 cm,
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
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electric or, better, a bio-technological system. Such artificialisation, such a
turn from Man as God-given to Man as bio-technological machinic system is
fundamental to the human body as it was transformed in and by modernity. It
was precisely encapsulated by Walter Benjamin in a fragment of The Arcades
Project where the technological supersedes the natural, leading to a dissolving
of the natural, the aesthetics of beauty, gender, sexuality and reproductivity
itself. It is telling that he fingered Hoffmann’s Olympia as emblematic: ‘The
extreme point in the technological organization of the world is the liquidation
of fertility. The frigid woman embodies the ideal of beauty in Jungendstil.
(Jungendstil sees in every woman not Helena but Olympia)’.47
Such fantasies of the idea of the ideal woman, and many others, are con-
nected with irreconcilable tensions brought on by a number of factors. These
include the emergence of feminism; the eugenicist fantasy of man-made per-
fection; a surfeit of figurations of woman as a sentimentalised and idealised
‘angel of the house’ to be worshipped or as an embodiment of gothic and
demonic carnality; the damning (but also revering) of the (artificialised) nature
of ‘woman’ in capitalist modernity’s bourgeois consumer culture as vacuous,
stupid and frivolous; and man’s decadent indulgence in erotic daydreaming
and fantasies of possession and their very opposite, a will to take flight from
such sexuality. If there is at modernity’s heart a ‘primacy of artifice over
nature’, according to the comparative literature scholar Charles Bernheimer
in his considerations of decadent aesthetics, I might propose that this is tied
to another ongoing friction, that between the primacy of artifice over nature,
the ‘artificification’ of nature, or even nature as artifice, and the invention of
(male heterosexual) sexuality as polymorphously perverse.48
While excessively wide-ranging, historically and in terms of their medium,
and grossly itemised for my purposes, these philosophical, literary, fictional,
poetic, theatrical, graphic, painterly, sculptural, photographic and early cine-
matic inventions and re-inventions of the myth of Pygmalion and his statue all
meld the magical, the imagination, modern science and technology. All include
a belief in the idea of inanimate human form or matter becoming animate,
coming to life, being brought to life, possessing the desire for life. All to a
greater or lesser extent stress this potential and the durational process by
which such animating works. This is where the creator, the animator, the
artificer, a modern-day Pygmalion makes, crafts, wills human form, inanimate
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matter, the artificial into life and falls in love with his own creation: operisque
sui concepit amorem. A desire to consummate such love is never far away. Yet
it is rarely explicit, usually only intimated. This accounts for the pervasive
assumption, erroneous to my mind, that ‘as long as the statue is marble Pyg-
malion’s desire can never be satisfied’.49 Tellingly, we have to look away from
these creative types if we want to see the point at which falling in love with
statues moves over to wanting to have sex with statues. It is not only to the
artificer, the animator, the creative genius, the modern-day Pygmalion that we
must turn but also to the ordinary man. In fact, to the ‘ignorant and uncultured’
ordinary man, although to the ‘educated’ man also, with a lust and desire for
inanimate matter as matter. This is where Pygmalion meets Pygmalionism.
perverse love: pygmalionism and

the auto-erotic instrumentarium
In many versions of the Pygmalion myth the leading man seeks, knowingly or
unknowingly, and in most instances finds a statue, a sculpture, a doll, an
automaton, a fetish, a thing that by way of magic, machinery or invention he
can bring to life, that comes to life, that possesses the desire for life and with
which he can fall in love. He is compelled to fall in love with inanimate form
and/or love animate form that was formerly inanimate. This is a loving and a
lusting, we should remember, for objects, things, form and matter per se, not
images. Here, as for Pygmalion and his statue, the question of the erotic, or
more specifically of sexual consummation, is a vexed one. In Ovid, Pygmalion
and his statue appear to consummate their union only after Venus has breathed
life into his statue, thereby answering not just his prayer for a living likeness
of his statue but a version of his actual desire: the thing itself as a living like-
ness, as flesh. There is some doubt, however, about what exactly it means for
Pygmalion to have ‘laid her [the statue] on a couch’ (M, 266) and to have done
so before he even prays to Venus. What perhaps interests Pygmalion, then, is
not so much the prospect and the process of the coming to life of the statue,
which may well be just a smokescreen, although it is this also, but the statue
itself, and the prospect and process of falling in love with it. Such love in post-
Enlightenment iterations of a belief in fantasies of such animating, and the
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desire to bring something to life – that such things possess the desire for
life – all too readily reveal themselves to be about the realising or consummat-
ing of such love as erotic desire. The statue, the thing, is an end in itself. The
story of Pygmalion is, thus, always about falling in love with a statue as such
and the need for such love to be consummated as a sex act, as an act of sex.
This is where the story of Pygmalion meets Pygmalionism. The meeting
shows the true colours of both the idolatrous Pygmalion-like artificer and the
libidinous Pygmalionist. It shows that an interest in animation, in animating
and in inanimate and man-made forms coming to life – this fetishisation of
objects and the falling in love with such things – is not just a fiction, an affecta-
tion reserved for aesthetes, but rather a wish for the erotic consummation of
such perverse desires. In the imagination of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries this obsession with the story of Pygmalion and his statue
is closely tied to the discursive explosion around sexuality, sexual perversions
and the taxonomic impulse to classify them. There takes place a distinctly
modern re-configuring of the constellation of bodies, sexualities and desires,
with the advent of the science of sexuality, Sexology (Sexualwissenschaft), the
Degeneration theories of Max Nordau and Cesare Lombroso, Darwinian evo-
lutionary theory, an emerging interest in the idea of man-made perfection and
a fascination with the possibility of an insidious biologically engineered eugen-
ics (invariably tied to questions of aesthetic, biological and racialised ‘imper-
fection’), as well as a nascent psychoanalysis. (All this is coupled with the fact
that words such as ‘normal’, ‘normalcy’, ‘norm’ and ‘abnormal’ in the modern
sense only entered European languages in the 1840s and 1850s.50) This con-
stellation sets the scene for a polymorphously perverse taxonomy of erotic
perversions, aberrations and abnormalities. Here paraphilias (disorderly cat-
egories of sexual arousal that deviate from the hetero-normative; para (‘beside’)
philia (‘love’)) such as Pygmalionism, Venus statuaria, Statuephilia, Statue love
or Statue rape were invented and flourished. They were all in one way or
another a falling in love with statues, a love of the inanimate, of the possibility
and process of animating and of a desire to consummate that love. Named,
taxonomised, pathologised and commented on disparagingly by German, Aus-
tro-German and English sexologists such as Iwan Bloch, Richard von Krafft-
Ebing and Havelock Ellis, such erotomanic encounters were in their writings
detected in their own historical moment. Such paraphilias are thus an integral
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part of the wider cultural fascination with Pygmalion. They are also linked
directly to, and corporeally and phenomenologically consistent with, practices
in the classical periods of the Graeco-Roman world.
Iwan Bloch, the German dermatologist, was a founder of Sexology, a con-
temporary of Freud and the discoverer of the manuscript of the marquis de
Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom. Besides a volume on the French libertine, he
also wrote books with such fantastically encyclopaedic titles as Anthropological
and Ethnological Studies in the Strangest Sex Acts in Modes of Love of All Races
Illustrated.51 In The Sexual Life of our Times (1907), following on from considera-
tions of sexual perversions in general and necrophilia in particular, Bloch
writes of Pygmalionism as a form of sexual aberration, a ‘utilisation of [the]
legend [of Pygmalion] for erotic ends’.52 In writing of ‘profane statue-love’ where
the statue is ‘taken for the living human being’, he describes ‘naked living
women . . . [standing] as “statues” upon suitable pedestals, [who] are watched
by the pygmalionist, whereupon they gradually come to life. The whole scheme
induces sexual enjoyment in the pygmalionist.’53 Such performative tableaux
vivants and poses plastiques were popular in the Victorian period. For Bloch it
is the sibling paraphilia called ‘Venus statuaria’, rather than Pygmalionism,
that best approximates the kinds of perverse acts I am looking to pin down; it
is a perverse paraphilia that involves ‘the love for and sexual intercourse with
statues and other representations of the human person’.54 (This is how I am
defining Pygmalionism more generally.) As Bloch writes in Strangest Sex Acts,
with reproductions of paintings and photographs illustrating intimations of the
Pygmalionist impulse (figs 4a and b), such acts had been widely reported by
authors of classical antiquity. This testifies to two facts: first, that there were
numerous instances of profane statue-love (or what he later calls ‘statue-
rape’55) and, second, that such acts were prompted by the aesthetic beauty and
mimetic quality of Greek statuary – since sculpture is best placed of all the
arts to render the illusion of life.56 This is a victory of mimetic artifice over
nature by evocations of the real things. Bloch distinguishes between cases that
involve ‘statues of exceptional artistic perfection’, which are perpetrated by
subjects with ‘certain aesthetic motives’, and the more common (in
both senses of that word) examples of Venus statuaria (what I am calling
Pygmalionism), which are driven by the same motives ‘that give rise to necro-
philia – sadistic, masochistic, and fetichistic [sic].’57 This is a distinction – a
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4a (above) ‘Pygmalionism’, illustrations from Iwan Bloch,
Anthropological and Ethnological Studies in the Strangest Sex
Acts in Modes of Love of All Races Illustrated, Falstaff Press,
New York, 1935 [1933], p. 19.
4b (facing) ‘Statue Worship’ of Olga Desmond (left) and

‘Antifetichistic hyper-eroticism’ (right), illustrations from Iwan
Bloch, Anthropological and Ethnological Studies in the Strangest
Sex Acts in Modes of Love of All Races Illustrated, Falstaff Press,
New York, 1935 [1933], p. 20.
wholly ideological one, I would say – between on the one hand the passing of
a refined judgement and on the other a rude and crude besmirching or sullying,
an iconophobic damaging or destructing of statues. Between an educated love
and a boorish lust. It is a distinction that Havelock Ellis also makes between
those with an ‘aesthetic sense’ and those who are ‘ignorant and uncultured’;
it is the latter who in finding statues erotic reveal their ignorance. Only the
ignorant would be foolish enough to fall for such fantasies of anthropomor-
phism in which, as Bloch puts it, ‘the statue is accepted in place of the human’.
(This suggests that, conversely, the ‘educated’ know exactly what they are doing
with statues as such.) Bloch writes that Venus statuaria involves ‘individuals
who are sexually extremely excitable, [for whom] a walk through a museum
containing many statues may suffice to give rise to libido’.58 He goes on to
assert that in profane (unlike religious) cultures, ‘statue-love . . . is taken for
the living human being, as in the celebrated case of the gardener who attempted
coitus with the statue of the Venus de Milo’.59 Constructing a genealogy
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for such (often exhibitionist) acts and practices, Bloch offers examples of Pyg-
malionism or, rather, Venus statuaria as he defines it, from the seventeenth to
the nineteenth centuries, as well as from the Graeco-Roman world. In Strang-
est Sex Acts he writes by way of Athenaeus, the Greek rhetorician, of ‘a man
who fell in love with a statue of Cupid, and performed the sex-act with it’.60
Bloch relays another example, of a ‘tribadic’ (‘lesbian’) sculpture, portraying
Venus and Aglaia, which acts the ‘rôle of seducer in the notorious novel, Julie,
ou j’ai sauvé ma rose (Paris, 1807).’61 Here Bloch explicitly makes a link to the
story of Pygmalion:
When the sexual excitation provoked by the statue is sufficiently strong, it

may even lead to copulation with it, although the latter may also occur in
consequence of powerful esthetic emotions. In this case the statue, or part
of it, becomes as fetich [sic] which replaces the living object, and in the mind
of the individual it becomes animated in the manner of Pygmalion’s Galatea.
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This form of immortality is diffused throughout the world in the form of
sexual intercourse with marble and stone idols connected with the worship
of the phallus, Priapus, Baal Peor, and in other ithyphallic cults.62
When Bloch writes of copulation and sexual intercourse, he is of course really

speaking about frottage, the rubbing, stroking, touching of bodies with and
against natural materials and man-made forms. From the Graeco-Roman
period through to the nineteenth century, this constituted the most widely
documented form of intimate erotic relations between men and inanimate
human form. (Bloch’s background as a dermatologist makes more than a
certain sense of this.) Such erotomanic encounters do not lead to sex proper
but, rather, intimate cases of masturbation, accompanied by a litany of what
Bloch calls ‘foreign bodies and objects’.63 In Strangest Sexual Acts he writes
about how youths confronted by the secrets of the human body for the first
time in the form of a statue are particularly susceptible: ‘This sudden stimula-
tion can induce an immediate sexual effect which may be expressed in the form
of masturbation in front of the statue’.64 Here he also mentions Monseigneur
Bouvier’s Manuel secret des confesseurs (c. 1875) in which a youth masturbates
in front of a statue of the Holy Virgin. (Indeed, statues and images of the Virgin,
like Christ in Crucifixion scenes, are themselves famous for moving, speaking,
weeping and bleeding miraculously in the company of devotees). Bloch also
recalls a scene from a pornographic book entitled Die Freuden der Wollust (no
author or date) in which ‘a young girl masturbates in a secluded room of a
museum in front of the statue of a boy with plainly modelled genitals.’65
Such frottage, stroking, touching – man on woman, man on man, woman on
woman – of bodies with and against natural materials and man-made forms
is part of a wider cornucopia of auto-affection. In The Sexual Life Bloch, follow-
ing Havelock Ellis, explains that such Pygmalionism and Venus statuaria
makes sense as the ‘involuntary’ ‘manifestations of the sexual impulse pecu-
liar to mankind, occurring without relation to the other sex’. He calls them
‘“auto-affection”: the phenomenon of spontaneous sexual excitement mani-
festing itself without a stimulus, direct or indirect, supplied by another person.’66
In the context of such auto-affection, and with the ‘artificial’ nature of such
intimate erotic relations between man and inanimate man-made form, Bloch
finds a contemporary equivalent. He discusses sex acts that are enabled by
purposefully artificial human beings, man-made devices or manufactured
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things or parts of human beings with incredible likenesses to the human. They
are called ‘fornicatory dolls’ by the catalogues in which they are marketed:
In this connexion we may refer to fornicatory acts effected with artificial

imitations of the human body, or of individual parts of that body. There exist
true Vaucansons in this province of pornographic technology, clever mechan-
ics who, from rubber and other plastic materials, prepare entire male and
female bodies, which, as hommes or dames de voyage, subserve fornicatory
purposes. More especially are the genital organs represented in a manner
true to nature. Even the secretion of Bartholin’s glands is imitated, by means
of a ‘pneumatic tube’ filled with oil. Similarly, by means of fluid and suitable
apparatus, the ejaculation of the semen is imitated. Such artificial human
beings are actually offered for sale in the catalogue of certain manufacturers
of ‘Parisian rubber articles’.67
For the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Pygmalionism was, as
the sexologist Cynthia Ann Moya has written recently in her cultural history of
penetrable sexual devices, ‘the usual motif through which early sexologists
presented attitudes and technologies of sex dolls’.68 These fornicatory dolls and
body parts, artificial imitations and simulations of and for both men and
women, are but some of many auto-erotic and sexual devices. Lest we think
that masturbating men are having all the fun with this artificial, man-made
and life-like pornographic technology, in this period sexologists such as Bloch
and Ellis were in fact for the most part discussing female ‘onanistic stimulatory
apparatus[es]’ – elaborately manufactured and used in equal measure by both
‘savage races’ and ‘civilized peoples’ – as tools in a larger sexual culture that
Bloch, referring to Ellis, calls the ‘auto-erotic instrumentarium’.69
Like Bloch, the Austro-German sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, espe-
cially in his Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), a founding text of Sexology, writes at
length of sexual perversions, including Pygmalionism. In the final section, on
punishable sexual crimes, entitled ‘Pathological Sexual Life Before the Crimi-
nal Forum’, he examines as perversions bestiality, necrophilia and incest in
the same breath as the acts which became known as Pygmalionism. (He does
not use the word Pygmalionism itself until the second edition of Psychopathia
Sexualis; he refers, though, to the sculptor Praxiteles’s Venus [Aphrodite] of
Knidos, the significance of which will become evident in a moment.)70 Between
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a consideration of frottage and voyeurism, respectively the most haptic and
most scopic of perversions, Krafft-Ebing considers the ‘violation of statues’.
Examples of such violations appear in both ancient and modern times, always
giving the impression, he writes,
of being pathological – like the story of a young man (related by Lucianus

and St. Clemens, of Alexandria) who made use of a Venus of Praxiteles for
the gratification of his lust; and the case of Clisyphus, who violated the statue
of a goddess in the Temple of Samos, after having placed a piece of meat
on a certain part. In modern times, the ‘Journal L’événement’ of 4 March
1877 relates the story of a gardener who fell in love with the statue of the
Venus of Milo, and was discovered attempting coitus with it.71
Earlier in Psychopathia Sexualis Krafft-Ebing writes at great length on fetish-

ism. He writes of the fetishist ‘mak[ing]’ a fetish from the ‘qualities’ of a person
or object, much like the ‘foreign bodies and objects’ of Bloch’s Pygmalionists,
and that the fetish does not appear to be ‘connected’ but is actually ‘associated’
with or is a ‘mnemonic symbol of’72 the person to whom it purportedly refers:
The word fetich signifies an object, or parts or attributes of objects, which

by virtue of association to sentimental personality, or absorbing ideas, exert
a charm (the Portugese ‘fetisso’) or at least produce a peculiar individual
impression which is in no wise connected with the external appearance of
the sign, symbol or fetich . . .
. . . Fetichism . . . may be explained by an empirical law of association, i.e.,
the relation existing between the notion itself and the parts thereof which
are essentially active in the production of pleasurable emotions. It is most
commonly found in religious and erotic spheres. Religious fetichism finds its
original motive in the delusion that its object, i.e., the idol, is not a mere
symbol, but possesses divine attributes, and ascribes to it peculiar wonder-
working (relics) or protective (amulets) virtues.
Erotic fetichism makes an idol of physical or mental qualities of a person
or even merely of objects used by that person, etc., because they awaken
mighty associations with the beloved person, thus originating strong emotions
of sexual pleasure. Analogies with religious fetichism are always discernible;
for, in the latter, the most insignificant objects (hair, nails, bones, etc.) become
at times fetiches which produce feelings of delight and even ecstasy.73
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I shall return to fetishism in the following chapter, for it is the pivotal devia-
tion in modernity’s production in the nineteenth century of perverse sexualities,
the perversion which speaks most actively of the dangers of active yet unpro-
ductive activities, where the fetish is a thing of that person (hair, nails, bones
and so on), on that person (shoes, boots, underwear, gloves and so on) or,
conceivably, wholly discrete. Meanwhile, what should here be kept in mind is
the critical question of the nature of this ‘association’ between the fetish and
the person for whom it is (purportedly) a mnemonic. Is it explicit, present but
latent, an accidental association born of a determining event, or might there
perhaps be no association at all? Krafft-Ebing also writes of the significance
in fetishism of ‘adornment, ornament and dress’, reasoning that ‘[c]ulture and
fashion have, to a certain extent, endowed woman with artificial sexual char-
acteristics’,74 like Pygmalion adorning his statue. Psychopathia Sexualis is pep-
pered, predictably, with cases of men loitering outside the shop windows of
women’s shoe shops (pp. 174, 179), boot shops (pp. 180, 181, 441), draper’s
(p. 252), and glove dealers (p. 279), looking at the wares, carrying out exhibi-
tionist (and in some cases onanistic) acts. Perhaps one or two of them are
even looking at the shop-window dummies themselves? When I return to
fetishism – as well as mannequins and shop-window dummies – I shall
include its interweaving in the religious sphere, the erotic sphere and also one
not mentioned by Krafft-Ebing, a surprising omission given the fetishist’s
monomaniacal over-fixation on shoes, boots, undergarments and gloves: the
economic sphere.
As with Krafft-Ebing, in Volume V of Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology
of Sex (1927), the English sexologist’s discussion of Pygmalionism is couched
in an exploration of erotic symbolism and the tendency to ‘treasure the relics
of a beloved person’, to take up objects that ‘possess a little of the same virtue,
the same emotional potency’ as the loved one him- or herself.75 Such tenden-
cies are completely normal for Ellis, in a way similar to Freud’s discussion of
‘fore-pleasure’ (as will be seen), unless the object comes to be ‘regarded as
essential even in the presence of the beloved person’.76 When it comes to erotic
symbolism, Ellis goes on to make useful distinctions between fetishistic ‘inani-
mate objects’ (gloves, shoes and stockings, garters, caps and aprons, hand-
kerchiefs and underlinen) and ‘impersonal objects’ which include ‘all the
various objects that may accidentally acquire the power of exciting sexual
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feeling in auto-erotism’. He concludes that ‘Pygmalionism may also be
included’. (Bloch’s discussions of men and women’s auto-affective relations
with statues and inanimate human forms bear this out.) Put simply, ‘inanimate
objects’ are erotic because they embody, personify or carry a trace of the quali-
ties or force of a loved one. ‘Impersonal objects’ such as the statues provoking
Pygmalionism are erotic both despite and because of the fact that the sexual
desire they incite in the human subject is accidental to that human subject.
Ellis goes on to write that ‘Pygmalionism or the love of statues’ is ‘a very
complete kind of erotic symbolism’ and is ‘exactly analogous to the child’s love
of a doll, which is also a form of sexual (though not erotic) symbolism’.77 Later
in Studies in the Psychology of Sex Ellis returns more fully to the sexual char-
acteristics of this erotomania with a definition less restricted than Bloch’s. He
is worth quoting at length:
Pygmalionism, or falling in love with statues, is a rare form of erotomania

founded on the sense of vision and closely related to the allurement of
beauty. (I here use ‘pygmalionism’ as a general term for the sexual love of
statues; it is sometimes restricted to cases in which a man requires of a
prostitute that she shall assume the part of a statue which gradually comes
to life, and finds sexual gratification in this performance alone . . . An emo-
tional interest in statues is by no means uncommon among young men
during adolescence . . . Youths have sometimes masturbated before statues,
and even before the image of the Virgin; such cases are known to priests and
mentioned in manuals for confessors. Pygmalionism appears to have been
not uncommon among the ancient Greeks, and this has been ascribed to
their aesthetic sense; but the manifestation is due rather to the absence than
to the presence of aesthetic feeling, and we may observe among ourselves
that it is the ignorant and uncultured who feel the indecency of statues and
thus betray their sense of the sex appeal of such objects. We have to remem-
ber that in Greece statues played a very prominent part in life, and also that
they were tinted, and thus more lifelike than with us. Lucian, Athenaeus,
Aelian, and others refer to cases of men who fell in love with statues.78 Tar-
nowsky (Sexual Instinct, English edition, p. 85) mentions the case of a young
man who was arrested in St. Petersburg for paying moonlight visits to the
statue of a nymph on the terrace of a country house, and Krafft-Ebing quotes
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from a French newspaper the case which occurred in Paris during the spring
of 1877 of a gardener who fell in love with a Venus in one of the parks.
Necrophily, or a sexual attraction for corpses, is sometimes regarded as
related to Pygmalionism. It is, however, a more profoundly morbid manifes-
tation, and may perhaps be regarded as a kind of perverted sadism.79
For Bloch, Krafft-Ebing and Ellis, then, among others, Pygmalionism as a

love of statues, a sexual love for statues and persons acting as statues which
then come to life, as well as the desire for such erotic encounters with inani-
mate human form, was wholly normative in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries’ ‘invention’ of (male) heterosexuality as polymorphously
perverse. It is an erotomania, a perversion of vision and touch, seeing and
stroking. Its erotics reside in a belief in the idea of fantasies of animating; of
its mnemonic symbolism; in fetishes figured associatively, accidentally, inde-
pendently; and also in its attention to inanimate man-made human form in
and of itself. Such eroticism leads, in all these cases, to auto-eroticism, where
auto-eroticism by way of a statue, a fornicatory doll or a self-caressing is a
victory of the primacy of artifice. While the sexologists write of Pygmalionism
disparagingly, it is, like other erotomanias, a necessary component in a com-
prehensive, general and generalisable frenzy of taxonomic thinking. It is an
integral part of sexual and erotic practices that make up the majority of (male)
heterosexual activities – aside from acts driven by procreative and reproductive
impulses – that comprise the auto-erotic instrumentarium. It is a normal,
normative perversion – this is not too much of a contradiction, albeit one that
is distinguished, like them all, as degenerate and degenerative. It is dangerous,
too, when and if it is a practice as an end in itself.
praxiteles’s aphrodite of knidos
The sexologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century re-tell many
stories of men (and sometimes women) falling in love with statues, rubbing
themselves up against them, trying to have sex with them, masturbating on
them. Bloch, Krafft-Ebing, Ellis and others combine stories from the contem-
porary world – case studies in the science of sexuality – with accounts from
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the ancient world, affirming the tie and therefore the continuity and persistence
of Pygmalion fantasies with Pygmalionist facts.80 For the sexologists, as for the
ancients, falling in love with statues was about love but more about lust, car-
nality, copulation and masturbation. Whether this is a love or lust for a belief
in the idea of the process of inanimate human form becoming animate, or a
love or lust for inanimate human form as such, such an erotics is born mostly
of the statue figured as both a stand-in for a loved one and as the thing itself.
Sometimes it is one, sometimes the other, sometimes both simultaneously.
For the sexologists, the exemplary story of Pygmalion or, to be more precise,
of a Pygmalion-like fantasy, is one from long before Ovid, re-told by Bloch.81
This is the starting point that states what is at stake in all these (and subse-
quent) visions and re-visions of the Pygmalion myth: the sculptor Praxiteles’s
statue of Aphrodite and the unnamed Greek who fell in love with it. It is signifi-
cant that it is not a story of inanimate human form coming to life, being brought
to life, possessing the desire for life.
Praxiteles’s statue is of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, beauty and
sexuality. As remarked before, it is she who grants Pygmalion not just his
prayer but his actual desire: a living likeness of his ivory girl, his statue as
flesh, thereby endorsing such desires and thus the possibility of intimate
reciprocal relations. A version of the story of Praxiteles’s statue is first told by
the Roman encyclopaedist Pliny the Elder (23–79 ce) in his Naturalis historiae
(36.20), later by Lucian/pseudo-Lucian (120–200) in his Imagines (4.263) and
Erotes (11–20) and subsequently by Arnobius, Valerius Maximus and others. It
is written that around 360–330 bce Praxiteles fashioned from Parian marble
two sculptures of Aphrodite. One sculpture was draped, the other naked. The
draped sculpture was purchased by the modest island of Kos, while the naked
one was obtained by the island of Knidos, whose inhabitants saw its tremen-
dous touristic potential and the ensuing financial benefits. Through Praxiteles’s
skill in rendering mimetically Aphrodite’s beauty, and since the ancient world
reserved its highest praise for the art of likeness, people including Lucian
sailed from far and wide on site-seeing trips to visit it. Pliny writes that it is
‘superior to all the works, not only of Praxiteles, but indeed in the whole
world’.82 A contemporary anonymous epigram reads: ‘Who gave soul to marble?
Who saw Cypris on earth? Who wrought such love-longing in stone?’83
Praxiteles’s Aphrodite of Knidos was so life-like, in fact – so believable, so
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authentic, so faithful to the original, so evocative of the real thing – that, Plato
Junior relates, Aphrodite herself expressed a cry of recognition when she came
as a tourist to see it:
Paphian Cythera came through the sea to Knidos

Wishing to see her own image.
Having gazed from every angle in that conspicuous
space
She cried: ‘Where did Praxiteles see me naked?’84
This statue introduced for the first time into classical Greek art a female
nude, in the round. It was just larger than life-size, unlike previous statues of
Aphrodite which, as part of the culture of Aphrodite, were colossi.85 Full of
naturalism, caught, as the figure is, in sudden motion, it worked from every
viewpoint. This was all the more evident because the temple in which it was
housed was open on all sides, so it could be seen and approached from all
vantage points – a solution Aphrodite herself favoured, it was believed.86 Sculp-
ture renders the illusion of life. No wonder Plato in the Republic condemns the
mimetic arts as deceptive since, in their imitation (of what they are not, that
is, reality itself) and thus affirmation of reality and their transcending of it, in
moving us away from the ideal, they have the capacity to distort and corrupt.87
Such mimeticism – in conjuring up forms that are inherently deceptive, not
least because in posing as ideal they exceed that very ideal – is dangerous. But
how? The story told in Pliny’s Naturalis historiae and also in Lucian/pseudo-
Lucian’s Erotes is that one night a young man from a distinguished family
attempts to copulate with a statue. The stains of his ejaculate betraying his
lust were found the next day on the statue’s buttocks, proving both the excel-
lence of the statue and the ignorance of the sacrilegious man ‘void of reason’.88
(A similar stain evidences the defiling by a certain Alcetas of Rhodes of a
marble Eros also carved by Praxiteles.89)
Praxiteles’s Aphrodite of Knidos brings me back to Pygmalion and his statue,
particularly pre-Ovidian versions of it. What is implicit in Ovid is explicit in these
earlier versions; later versions are always palimpsests. The story of Pygmalion
finds its beginnings in the Hellenistic writer Philostephanus of Styrene’s
account in the Kypriaka (as noted earlier). While no longer extant, this version
of the Pygmalion myth came down via two sources: the Christian apologists
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Clement of Alexandria’s Protrepticus and Hellenus (4.57) and Arnobius of Sicca’s
Adversus nationes (The Case Against the Pagans; 6.22). Both Clement of Alex-
andria and Arnobius, writing after Ovid but drawing from Philostephanus,
include features, of which they are critical, left fudged somewhat in Ovid’s
iteration. They point to, firstly, the blasphemy of Pygmalion’s pagan idola-
try – their denunciation of statues with their cultic and ritual function is clearly
motivated by the Second Commandment’s prohibition against graven
images – and secondly, the perversity of his sexual act with the statue as a
statue. Both of them tie Pygmalion directly to the Knidian Aphrodite by Prax-
iteles and write of the statue’s bad influence on young men: that they would,
put simply and clearly, ‘have intercourse with the stone’.90 It is telling that the
statue is of Aphrodite, not one of the lover’s own making. As Michelle E. Bloom
relates, recounting Clement of Alexandria from the Protrepticus:
[T]he well-known Pygmalion of Cyprus fell in love with an ivory statue; it was
of Aphrodite and was naked. The man of Cyprus was captivated by its shape-
liness and embraced the statue. This is related by Philostephanus. There is
also an Aphrodite in Cnidus, made of marble and beautiful. Another man fell
in love with this and had intercourse with the marble, as Posidippus relates.
The account of the first author is in his book on Cyprus; that of the second
is in his book on Cnidus. Such strength had art to beguile that it became for
amorous men a guide to the pit of destruction.91
As Arnobius has it:
His mind, his soul, the light of his reason, and his judgment were blinded,
and in his madness, as if it were his wife, he would lift up the divinity to the
couch, and enter into a union with her; embracing and kissing her and car-
rying out acts that, born of lust’s vain imaginings, could only be frustrated
by reality.92
From the Christian apologists of the ancient world to the Christians of the
Middle Ages, such a love for and a lusting after statues is some kind of pagan
amour maudit (damned love) where Pygmalion as an idolator, and others like
him, are gripped by or victim of a fol amour (erotic insanity). Against such
intimate, erotic encounters with statues, the Church Father Firmicus Maternus
(4th century), for instance, damns the deception of form, matter and materials,
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although he concedes that their intrinsic animistic possibilities are genuine
since the gods are the motivating and thus animating force intrinsic to form
and materials. He also berates Aphrodite herself for encouraging such love of
and lust for her, even doing so with impunity, and doing nothing to protect such
young men from their own mad passion:
And so I will ask further, if the powers of heaven and earth hide in bronze
and other materials from which statues are made, then how was it that this
Aphrodite [Pygmalion’s] or the other one [Praxiteles’s] did not punish this
impudent and shameless youth [Makarios], thrust him away from this
impious contact, and inflict torture on him? Or, if these goddesses are more
inclined toward softness and peace, what did they do to restrain the wretch’s
mad passion and bring him to his senses? Nothing, you must know. God-
desses of pleasure do not consider such a thing criminal. They are sympa-
thetic to it, and themselves experience human desires, for which let them
receive our freest insults. If these Aphrodites were truly inclined toward
peace, should they not have judged the behavior of these blind wretches,
judged it as they would have judged Jove himself, who corrupted his wife
and daughter, judged it till the Capitol itself was consumed with fire, and
the Thunderer, wherever he was, cried out?93
Possessed by mad desire or mad passion. Ignorant. Sacrilegious. Void of

reason. Impudent and shameless. Blind wretches. Clement of Alexandra
attaches another trait to the idolator, bringing together, as the sexologists did
later on, the Pygmalionist and the necrophile: he is a fool. ‘No man in his right
mind’, he writes, ‘would embrace a goddess, or wish to be interred with a dead
woman, or fall in love with a demon or a stone.’94 He is an uncultured fool to
boot, for only the uncultured would unintentionally mistake a statue for some-
thing living, surely?
Philostephanus, Clement of Alexandria and Arnobius of Sicca’s narratives
with their reference to the Aphrodite of Knidos give us men who are sexually
‘violating’ statues – inanimate human forms – and are thus different, it seems,
from Ovid’s Pygmalion, who creates his own statue and falls in love with it.
Since Pygmalion’s erotic encounters begin after the statue has been brought
to life, his act seems to avoid idolatrous blasphemy and perversity. The perverse
twists and turns of the pre-Ovidian version with its profane Pygmalionism
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before the fact appear to have been cut out of Ovid’s and later iterations. In
these earlier versions, Pygmalion falls in love with a statue of Venus, not of his
own making, so, firstly, his worshipping of a pre-existing statue is idolatrous
and, secondly, the narrative does not relate that the statue is animated, that it
comes to life, is brought to life, possesses the desire for life. Despite the
obscuring, though, I think this is also true for Ovid’s Pygmalion. On a close
enough reading, it is, like its predecessor, also blasphemous, idolatrous, per-
verse. Ovid’s Pygmalion, while falling in love with a statue, also consummates
that love – he ‘laid her on a couch’ (M, 266) – while the statue is still a statue,
before it becomes animate, sentient, mortal. This is before Pygmalion prays to
Venus at the festival in her honour, before she (not he) breathes life into it and
brings about the divine animation of the statue’s inanimate form, revealing that
she (not he) is wholly responsible for this act of creativity.95 Some scholars write
that in all of this Pygmalion does not know what he is doing. J. Hillis Miller, for
instance, writes that he ‘is taken in by his own fabrication’.96 I think Pygmalion
does know. He might not behave as if he does, but I think he knows full well.
He knows very well, but all the same . . .

From the beginning, intimate and erotic encounters between (usually but not
only) men with inanimate human form established a precedent. Encounters
recounting the stains on Praxiteles’s Aphrodite of Knidos, the perverse pre-
Ovidian and more romantic but still perverse Ovidian perversions of Pygmalion
and his statue and so on inaugurate a constellation of concerns that will reso-
nate throughout the rest of this book. They are:
Animism: there is an enduring belief in the idea that a force, spirit or soul
dwells in and motivates inanimate human forms; where an affective power is
innate or intrinsic, or transferred to such forms, objects or things. To hold the
promise or possibility of animism is to possess the essence or spirit of living,
the capacity for being brought to life, coming to life and the desire for life’s
energy, vitality. Even inanimate and artificial form somehow triggers a dis-
course on animism. That such form is capable of having life breathed into it,
that it possesses the desire for life, that it might contribute to encounters of
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romantic and erotic love, is testament to artifice’s mimetic victory over nature,
reality, the ideal.
The mimetic: mimesis is, like Eros, an animating force. Sculpture is best
placed of all the arts to render the illusion of life. Given statues’ cultic and
ritual function, the question of mimeticism, verisimilitude, realism, imitation,
resemblance and life-likeness come to the fore, leading to (apparently) sacri-
legious and (apparently) iconophobic acts. I think, though, that such prohibi-
tions against graven images, which is what motivates ancient denunciations
of statues, may well be redundant here or invalidated. For, while belief in the
possible dangers of the realism of Praxiteles’s Aphrodite or the idea of Pyg-
malion’s statue coming to life might well prove the victory of (the deceit of)
representation (as artificial) over nature, this evoking of the real thing is of no
concern to those uninterested in representation as representation. That is to
say, intimate and erotic relations between men (and women) and inanimate
human form do not breach as idolatrous the protocols of our relations with
images, with representation itself, since such encounters are relations with
things in which the question of what those things represent gives way to how
(by way of the tension intrinsic to concepts such as mimeticism) those things
re-present, present again, intensify even, our encounters with them. Such
things are a rendering again, neither repetition nor difference; they are an
intensifier. (Litholatry (the worship of a stone or stones) and theurgical prac-
tices (magical acts invoking deities, and animating statues among them)
suggest both that it might be the stone that matters and that such mattering
is a matter of presentation.)
Motion and making: because of the form such fantasies of animism take,
and how a force or spirit motivates inanimate human form, it is one task of
this book to expose such (magical) processes: how such transformations come
about, how such becomings are constituted, how they work, what they do. All
this is a presenting again. To expose such processes and their mechanisms is
to raise questions of motion that concern force, energy, vitality. What is the
innate or intrinsic force of inanimate human form’s metamorphosis, anthro-
pomorphism and mechanomorphism? Where does it reside? What are its
transformative or anamorphic conditions of possibility? How does it work? The
beginning of answers is that such force is caught up with how inanimate
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human form (including statues, dolls, mannequins and automata) raises ques-
tions intrinsic to such form about motionlessness and motion, and the process,
transition, movement or force from motionlessness to motion.97 Form, force,
motion are intrinsic to the process of making; to making as a process. Making
form makes motion. (Also, making form differently, making different form, also
makes motion differently. Not all things move, are moving, in the same ways.)
Two examples particularly fit this.
Praxiteles’s Aphrodite is modelled on at least two people: the facial features
of Crania and the body of Phryne, both courtesans with whom Praxiteles was
in love. The argument here is not that Praxiteles as the artificer extends
himself into the thing, that his love/lust for these women is in any way in the
statue or that falling in love with/lusting after a statue, with a thing of his own
creation, opens up the possibilities of auto-affective self-love (although such
speculations could hold water). The point is more practical, literal even: the
sculptor uses more than one model. Actually, three, because this scenario is
compounded by the proposition that parts of the statue’s back were modelled
on a man; this might explain why, in Lucian’s version of the story in Erotes,
there is an intimation that the decision to ejaculate on the statue’s backside
is not driven by a wholly heterosexual impulse. (As Lucian writes, Callicratides
points out to Charicles that the person behind this defiling act ‘dealt with the
statue as with a boy, thus proving he was not seeking the woman in front’.98)
Such a fragmentary or distorting or anagrammatical assemblage has con-
sequences and this is highlighted by the second example. Pygmalion’s statue
is jointed. Articulated. Given the practical complexities of modelling life-size
in ivory, Stoichita writes that ‘in all likelihood [Philostephanus and his com-
mentators] were referring to a chryselephantine work made up of jointed
pieces’.99 (The only other explanation is that Venus’s erotico-magic pneumatol-
ogy, in addition to bringing the statue to life, includes scaling it up to life-size.)
Such making, assembling a body from more than one body, from many bits of
bodies, jointed pieces, fragments folded into an inanimate human form, takes
us away from the figurative sculptural logic and bodily integrity that pervades
most of this book’s second section. Instead it anticipates the assemblage, the
distorting, the anagrammatical which permeate the book’s third section. While
neither Praxiteles’s Aphrodite nor Pygmalion’s statue may be wilfully drawing
attention to their own fragmentary nature or interrogating their own conditions
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of assembling possibility, it is certain that in these two founding moments for
a genealogy of figurations of intimate, erotic encounters between men and
inanimate human form, there is the beginning of a sense of human form as a
body in bits and pieces. From the beginning, then, even the mimetic figure was
composed via distorting as an activity, by the almost limitless combinations of
the anagram and as a productive and generative assemblage.
Narcissism: the story of Pygmalion and his statue is the story of an originary
act of creation – a love of both the process of creation and the thing
created – that is also a self-creation. Of love and of lust. The statue is a stand-
in for a person – an absent husband or wife, a lost love, and a substitute for
the self – and also an idol, a fetish, as well as a thing in and of itself. There
are two effects to such self-extending: the possibility and the impossibility of
reciprocal relations. As an act of auto-erotic narcissism, the artificer’s desire
is affirmed and thus confirmed by the statue – that is made by him, that is of
him – desiring him in return. The fantasy of reciprocity, of reciprocal relations,
must persist, however fragile: that the statue, the doll and so on returns his
desire and even might somehow desire him of its own accord, not just as a
returning of his desire but that its spirit or will might choose him, despite
having no option in the matter. The second effect is that neither Narcissus’
reflection nor Pygmalion’s statue can reciprocate their affections, yet that is
fine: auto-affection, shaped by touch, a self-touching, is in and of itself recip-
rocatory. As Hillis Miller writes, Pygmalion is not only guilty of narcissism and
incest but also of ‘a strange kind of onanism’.100 There is no punishment for
such self-love, at least not for Pygmalion; Narcissus, however, was trans-
formed into a flower.101
Falling in love: Pygmalion falls in love with his statue. To fall in love with
one’s own creation necessitates – certainly if creation has a libidinous element
to it – a degree of narcissism, of self-love. To fall in love is to see the artificer
extend himself conceptually and materially into the thing. Such acts of making
demand animism’s capacity ‘to magic’ reciprocal relations of one kind or
another, erotic or otherwise. (There may well be something intrinsic to the
form of the thing itself that motivates such reciprocity.) Love of or for inanimate
human form here, then, is threefold: firstly, it is a stand-in, a proxy, a fetishistic
surrogate (of a loved one, a wife, husband, partner, the object of an obsession);
secondly, it is an extension of the artificer as a surrogate of himself where to
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fall in love with himself necessitates a different order of erotic relations; thirdly,
simply, it is a love of inanimate human form as such.
Falling in lust (with a statue as a surrogate, with oneself, with the thing as
such): by way of Pygmalionism we come to see that Pygmalion falls in lust
with his statue, and aims to have it. Such desires are already there in Ovid’s
original. There is a need to consummate such desire, a desire that is usually
(but not exclusively) born of (male) heterosexual desire – which does not mean
that such desire is not also inflected homo-sexually, homo-erotically and
homo-socially. Such desire is conceived of through a decidedly (male) hetero-
sexual polymorphous perversity, of erotomanias such as Pygmalionism, among
others. It is driven by a masturbatory impulse, an auto-affection, of a rubbing
or a touching where touching as a technique or technology of animation is a
materialising, where it creates flesh; where it wills the statue to life, wills the
statue to desire and to desire desire. It is a mobilising of matter. Pygmalion’s
descendants initiate a wish for reciprocal erotic relations when they stroke
inanimate human form, rub it, rub themselves against it, copulate with it, use
it as an aid to or a device for auto-affection. Sometimes they desire this form
to become flesh. At other times they want it to remain ivory, marble, wax, wood,
rubber, silicone, with its ultra flesh-like feel, for it to maintain its coldness, its
hardness, its roughness, its smoothness, its pliability, its suppleness, its mal-
leability, affirming these things by way of acts and behaviours that make it so.
The human stains say it is so. There is no place for romantic love, fantasy or
magic here.
Materiality: what would it be like to have sex with a marble statue? Rough,
however smooth the marble. Uncomfortable. Awkward. Cold. Yet marble too
has a force to it, a force that is intrinsic to such form. It is, after all, a meta-
morphic rock, a form that is formed by the process of metamorphism (‘change
in form’); a rock in transition. (Likewise for ivory, a substance composed pri-
marily of dentin, calcified bodily tissue.) Throughout this book, I do my best to
attend carefully to the material composition of inanimate human forms,
because matter matters, the materiality of matter matters, and because its
materiality grasped historically, aesthetically and especially phenomenologi-
cally divulges curious and fascinating things about the (artificial, man-made)
nature of intimate, erotic encounters in their particularity.
The dead: that said, with all this talk of animacy must come talk of inani-
macy, non-sentience, inert matter, the absence of life, a certain lifelessness,
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where only the process of animating, metamorphosing, transforming can bring
about a change in the status of inanimate human form. Here we cannot but
intimate the dead and resurrection. Like re-animating artificially the dead,
non-living matter, a corpse; today, zombies are everywhere. Pygmalion’s
calling, his willing inanimate human form to become animate, all the more so
by way of touch, is a necromantic invocation. In making the dead speak – sum-
moning or speaking or reciprocating from beyond the grave, a prosopopeia, or
perhaps the more emotive apostrophe is closer – the spectre of death and the
spectre of the question of death, of the dead and of the dead eroticised haunts
inanimate human form, its non-sentient being. It is no coincidence, and no
surprise, that for sexologists Pygmalionism and necrophilia are proximate.
That inanimate form itself, as so much dead matter, might be provoking of an
erotics is an intriguing prospect.
Craving: make no mistake, inanimate human form elicits a craving and
provokes behaviours and acts. Such craving is born of love and lust, tenderness
and eroticism, the romantic and the carnal. It elicits a hunger, appetite;
perhaps also need, longing, a yearning for another, for the self, for the self as
other. It is inspired by the promise of animism’s animating possibilities, that
statues, dolls, mannequins, sculptural body parts have the potential to possess
both the essence of living, the capacity for coming to life, the desire for life,
and just to be, themselves, as such.
A belief in the fantasy of animating inanimate human form as the crux of the
story of Pygmalion and his statue, specifically as it meets Pygmalionism’s
emergence as an erotomania, tied to the rise of a more widespread interest in
Pygmalion, is the foundation of modernity’s figuring of the doll eroticised visually
and materially. In their particularly modern formation, intrinsic to such inani-
mate human form is, firstly, a desirous impulse to fall in love with it; secondly,
a lusting after its animating possibilities; and thirdly, a will to consummate such
desires for form as such. It is always a combination of these three. It is, then,
stories of a belief in the fantasy of a statue coming to life (wishing it, wanting it,
it happening and then falling in love, or already having been in love and wishing
it, wanting it) and sexual acts with statues (which as erotic things is an integral
part of their capacity to appeal, to demand, to reciprocate, to beguile) that
accounts for the Wisdom of Solomon’s claim that the invention of idols (and
their worship) as the beginning, the cause and the end of every evil, is the ‘origin
of porneia’.102
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2 / the doll as fetish: perverse practices
with fetishistic things
. . . a particularly favourable condition for awakening uncanny

feelings is created when there is intellectual uncertainty
whether an object is alive or not, and when an inanimate
object becomes too much like an animate one.
Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, 19191
All things . . . to which one attributes a miraculous force

foreign to their essence and contrary to the laws of nature,
must belong to fetishism.
J.-A. Dulaure, Histoire abrégée de differens cultes, 18252
Tout objet historique est fétiche.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, working note to Le Visible et
l’invisible, 19643
Plotting two interwoven genealogies, tangles of events, particular and discon-

tinuous forces, in the previous chapter I sketched two historical and conceptual
trajectories for inanimate human form eroticised: that of animism from the
ancient to the modern and that of Pygmalionism from the modern back to the
ancient. In doing so, I put in place an account of how inanimate human form
raises questions intrinsic to such form. In considering such ideas of the fantasy
of animism’s animating possibilities, I argued that because of form’s capacity
for movement it is imminently eroticis-able; and that the erotic is understood
to be somehow intrinsic to such inanimate form as inanimate.
How does all this actually work? In this chapter, I propose that inanimate
human forms are fetishes, erotic and perverse fetishes, albeit fetishes of a
particular kind. Given this they allow me to discern and trace a transition in
5 Workshop of Clemente Susini and Giuseppe

Ferrini, The Dismantled Venus, c.1798, wax, human
hair, pearls, rosewood and Venetian glass case,
Museo della Specola, Florence.
the doll as fetish / 67
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modernity: from inanimate human forms figured as fetishistic objects that are
stand-ins for other things, to their figuring as erotic things that are capable of
‘independent activity’. As The Erotic Doll: A Modern Fetish presses ahead, it will
become clear that in their particularity certain dolls, ways of thinking about
the doll and questions that the doll raises, demand that they be thought simul-
taneously as both stand-ins and independent things as such.
In this chapter, like the last, the spur is an attending to mostly men’s desires,
or rather what structures such desire, and how and why these desires, articu-
lated by way of behaviours, practices and protocols, are given form; especially
in this case by way of perverse practices with fetishistic things.
sacred sculptures, anatomical models and wax figures
To chart a genealogy of the doll as a fetishistic thing in and of modernity, it is

necessary to go back some way. For there are motivating precedents in which
inanimate human form is figured as both a stand-in for something else and
also the thing itself; or a stand-in that somehow becomes or is transformed
into the thing itself, or where it is the thing as such. Following on from the
mimetic statuary of the ancient world, considered in Chapter One, I am think-
ing here for instance of religious effigies, anatomical models and mannequins,
and wax figures, from votive sculptures in the Middle Ages to nineteenth-
century waxes in popular mass entertainment. In all cases, animism, mimeti-
cism, motionlessness/motion and eroticism come together and turn on
inanimate human form as a fetishistic thing that is both a stand-in for some-
thing and that very thing. It is also both a representing, a rendering again, of
what preceded it and a re-presenting, which is actually a presenting, since, as
etymology dictates, the Latin(ate) prefix re- signals not just a repetition, or a
repetition with difference, but also an intensification.4 Such an intensification
is a producing again. In this scenario, there is no fear of the danger that might
befall those mistaking or wilfully misrecognising the icon or idol as the thing
itself. There is no fear of the icon or idol, no fear of its likeness, its resem-
blance, its verisimilitude. No iconophobia or idolatry. Quite the opposite. This
is the realm of iconophilia, not only a love of the image, icon or object because
of what it represents or what it stands in for (symbolically, metaphorically,
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metonymically, synechdocally, figuratively, indexically or literally) but also a
love of the thing itself, with all the intensities that this entails. For the thing is
an intensifier.5
To get started, Spanish polychrome wood sculptures offer a gentle instance
of such iconophilia. In these early Baroque devotional works, crafted by sculp-
tors and painted by artists, the curator Xavier Bray writes that the ‘sacred [is]
made real’.6 The hyper-realism of these sculptures is a direct result of the
unique working relations between sculptors (members of the Guild of Carpen-
ters) and painters (members of the Guild of Painters), a necessity since the
guild system prohibited sculptors from painting their own sculptures. A sculp-
tor such as Jean de Mesa with his Cristo de la Buena Muerte (1620) would create
life-size statues some of which had glass eyes, ivory teeth, real hair for eye-
lashes, stubble, tears even. They were then painted in flesh tones using a
technique known as encarnación (incarnation; literally, ‘made flesh’); the
statues even had shadows painted onto their painted flesh (figs 6–8).7 Such
collaborations aspired to unprecedented levels of realism, although both
sculptor and artist as moulders of inanimate form continued to claim that, as
artificers or creators with a divine inheritance, their art was fundamental to
this process:
in an attempt to prove the superiority of their artistic inheritance, sculptors

claimed that the first artist on earth was a sculptor in the form of God
himself who according to the Book of Genesis created Adam out of clay. In
response to this, painters claimed that it was when God added colour to
Adam that he came to life.8
By combining sculpting and painting skills, such sculptures refined polychro-

matic practices that, while drawing on medieval European wood painting, date
back to pre-history. Indeed Praxiteles’s sculptures are mentioned in a tract by
the artist and writer on art Francisco Pacheco, entitled A los professors del’Arte
de la Pintura (1622; To the practitioners of the art of painting), as exemplary of
the realism of sculpture, specifically because the painter Nikias apparently
polychromed them.9 Much as for Praxiteles and his Aphrodite, in the discourse
of early polychromy there are stories that painters were so proficient at utilising
the illusions of three-dimensionality that their audiences mistook their paint-
ings for sculptures and that sculptures were mistaken for the divine itself. By
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6 (facing) Juan Martinez Montañés (attributed)
and unknown painter, Virgin of the Immaculate
Conception (detail), c.1628, painted and gilded wood,
144 x 49 x 53 cm, Church of the Anunciación,
University of Seville.
7 (above left) Pedro de Mena, Saint Francis standing in

Ecstasy (detail), 1663, painted wood, glass, cord, ivory
and human hair, Sacristy of the Cathedral, Toledo,
Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte.
8 (above right) José de Mora, The Virgin of Sorrows

(Mater Dolorosa), 1680s, polychrome wood, glass,
49 x 46 cm, Convento de Santa Isabel la Real, Granada.
way of the mimetic power of such illusionism, and the ecstatic (and thus
sometimes erotic) subject matter, the sacred is almost tangible. With these
miraculous wounded, bleeding and weeping statues, such efforts to make
sculpture simulate the divine, to increase the feeling and the impact of a sense
of divinity, were meant as a bridge between it and the faithful. Of course, the
danger (of such ambitions and veneration) was the potential for idolatry, a
breaking of the second Commandment. As Bray writes, ‘sculpture was treading
a thin line between the “representation” of a sacred subject and becoming the
sacred subject itself’.10
If the ‘sacred [is] made real’ by seventeenth-century Spanish polychrome
wood sculptures, the dead are brought back to life in the hyper-real illusionism
of eighteenth-century anatomical models and mannequins as stand-ins for
living bodies. Such three-dimensional anatomical studies, from the Renais-
sance onwards, also crafted in collaboration (this time between artists and
medical practitioners), reached saturation point in the eighteenth century.
Anatomical models and mannequins of bodies and body parts were assembled
using papier-mâché, plaster, stone, marble, bronze and especially wax which,
with its mimetic powers, is the material most closely resembling living human
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flesh and which, given its malleability, could be easily modified. Yet it could
also be liquefied all to easily – an irony for a material used to craft things that
were meant to endure.11 After a visit to La Specola, Florence’s anatomical wax
museum founded in 1775 (now its Museum of Zoology and Natural History),
Goethe wrote of artificial (what he called ‘plastic’) anatomy as ‘a worthy sur-
rogate that, ideally, substitutes reality by giving it a hand’.12
As a form of Enlightenment necromancy, where the cadaver had since Vesa-
lius undergone a process of ‘desacralisation’, these anatomical models, man-
nequins and body parts, as pedagogical devices for teaching medicine were
produced in the service of anatomy as a science of observation, a will to
knowledge.13 As a scrutinising. Fundamental to anatomy and dissection as
epistemological regimes, as techniques and technologies of coming-to-know
(rather than knowledge per se) by way of cutting, opening and eviscerating,
they are crafted to preserve, for purposes of examination and display. With an
attention to depicting or modelling the interior of the body in three dimensions,
these anatomical waxes feed into the idea of the possibility of the creation of
a transparent view of the living body (like trying to make sense of the internal
mechanisms at work in Pygmalion’s statue coming to life). They were also used
to render both normative and anomalous human anatomy to ideological ends.
Paris’s nineteenth-century Musée Dupuytren, for instance, held anatomically
pathological waxes that, as part of a more general moral crusade, spoke of
the terrible consequences of onanism, alcoholism and syphilis.14
Such anatomies are created in one of three ways: so called ‘natural anatomy’,
where a specimen or écorché is created from the actual remains of a body; the
wax or artificial model which is a reproduction or replication of the body or
body part; and mechanical or moving anatomy, which includes moving parts.15
In all cases the dead body is used literally or as a basis for that body’s re-
animating. Attending to the accurate rendering or reproduction of bodies and
body parts, to the extent that they might be stand-ins for or equivalences of
the living body – especially since they were often actually of the body or at least
a re-producing of it – positions the cadaver and dissection of the dead as the
very thing that makes it possible to depict the living. The anatomical wax is of
the corpse. As such, the wax is the condition of possibility for the life-like
simulation of that body, both suspended in time and given a voice as something
beyond or other than what Foucault in The Birth of the Clinic calls anatomy’s
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9 André Pierre Pinson, Anatomy of a Seated Woman,
late 18th century, coloured wax, 40 x 25 x 30 cm,
Laboratorie d’Anatomie Comparée, Musée national
d’Historie naturelle, Paris.
10 André Pierre Pinson, Woman with a Teardrop,

1784, coloured wax, 62 x 33 x 24 cm, Laboratorie
d’Anatomie Comparée, Musée national d’Historie
naturelle, Paris.
investigation into ‘mute, intemporal bodies’.16 By way of the magic of necro-

mancy and driven by a will to knowledge (a divination or search for insights
from beyond the grave), the ‘corpse’ is endowed, zombie-like, with the attrib-
utes of (undead) life. The dead is given life, resurrected.
Most noteworthy for my purposes are the wax anatomical models or man-
nequins of women that sit uncomfortably and uncannily as sculptures, por-
traits, anato-medical figures and alluring objects of desire and/or adoration.
André Pierre Pinson’s late eighteenth-century Seated Woman and Woman with
a Tear Drop are exemplary (figs 9 and 10).17 If male anatomical figures draw
their iconography from Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica (On the
Fabric of the Human Body; 1543) and elsewhere, where images of the dead are
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11 Workshop of Clemente Susini and Giuseppe
Ferrini, The Dismantled Venus, c.1798, wax, human
hair, pearls, rosewood and Venetian glass case,
Museo della Specola, Florence.
12 Cindy Sherman, Untitled # 261,

1992, 72,7 x 114.3 cm, chromogenic
colour plate, courtesy of the artist and
Metro Pictures.
endowed with the dynamic attributes of the living – standing, posing, walking,

doing a jig – female anatomical figures, usually Venus pudica, are coy, docile
and prone. They must be dead to give up their secrets, to be reborn as knowl-
edge. Following the graphic conventions of drawings and woodblocks from the
late Middle Ages and Renaissance depicting the opening up of women’s bodies,
these wax figures as systems of knowledge are a supposed antidote to women’s
withholding in life of inaccessible knowledge: of generation, reproduction and
sexuality. Hostile to the holding and withholding in life of such knowledge, they
undo her possessing of it. Here, hidden, uncertain and concealed knowl-
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edge – the specialised knowledge that makes up the ‘secrets of women’ – is
finally revealed and mastered and is comprehended, perhaps because it is in
death, as titillating, sexual, erotic.18 Such waxes, almost always demonstrating
women’s reproductive system, are often puzzle-like, such as Clemente Susini’s
well-known Venus figure with its abdominal layer that can be lifted and removed
to disclose its organs (fig. 11). (It is no surprise that this Venus has had rouge
applied to her face and has been garlanded with a pearl necklace. Such cus-
tomisation of waxes, mannequins and dolls, like Pygmalion adorning his statue
or Bloch’s Athenian youth bedecking his statue with ribbons and garlands,
became more and more endemic in modernity as consumer artifice.) This
puzzle-like quality is not restricted to the emplacement and re-arrangement
of the interior components of the body, for disassembling and reassembling,
but also dictates the entire form of the body as a reproductive body which often
appears simply as a monstrously truncated pelvis, its generative organs visible.
Like a Cindy Sherman before the fact (fig. 12).19 Notwithstanding such barbaric
anatomising, and more likely because of it, these female anatomical figures
are figured as erotic, pornographic even. The waxes’ pathology as a spectacle
of display is, I would argue, recognised as all the more erotic because of its
prone, corpse-like posture. That the anatomical wax is created from the actual
remains of the body, that it is of the corpse, is what makes the fantasy of its
would-be animation, its incarnation, its coming to life, being brought to life and
its possessing the desire for life even more tantalising.20 Remember that for
the sexologists, necrophilia is driven by the same motives that give rise to
Pygmalionism.
Wax is, as I have already noted, the most suitable material for making these
anatomical models, mannequins and body parts because of how it combines
the mimetic and the malleable in unique ways and to breathtaking ends. (Pyg-
malion, recall, likens the ivory from which he carves his statue to wax; ivory
as flesh; wax as flesh.) It is the ideal material with which to mould substitutes
for humans, as representations and also, more than this, as presentations,
intensifications, as a thing in and of itself, as the thing itself as such.
On the matter of its mimeticism, wax appears, is, real. It mimics the living
body, it resembles living beings, it demands a suspension of disbelief. Giorgio
Vasari, the first Italian art historian and author of the first artistic biography
Le Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori scultori, ed architettori (Lives of the Most Eminent
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Painters, Sculptors, and Architects; 1550) understood that ‘[wax] figures really
only lack, in a certain sense, the breath of life and words’.21 As a material and
a medium it has the appearance and feel and pliability of human flesh, it imi-
tates human tissue, which is why with its hyper-real effects, due in part to its
colouring, it is made use of in medieval effigies, eighteenth-century medical
anatomies and popularly by the nineteenth-century entertainment industry of
the wax museum. These wax figures, whether for votive rituals or entertain-
ment, are substitutes. They ‘stand in’ for a person. Some, cast or modelled
from either life or death masks, have an indexical ability, a corporeal presence,
something of the human in them. Yet, because of wax’s mimetic powers, its
resemblance to the living human body, to human skin, flesh, it both is and goes
beyond representation, beyond being similar to this or that. It is its verisimili-
tude that is key here, where verisimilitude (following the art historian David
Freedberg) is a likeness that can ‘[p]roduce again, not reflect, illustrate, portray,
or image’, the thing as such.22 This fact of wax ‘producing again’ was grasped
by Vasari when he claimed that the effigies in San Lorenzo in Florence are
‘lifelike and so well done that they represent not wax men but very live ones’.23
More recently, the art historian Georges Didi-Huberman has claimed that ‘wax
goes too far where resemblance is concerned’.24 It does so because, as he
contends elsewhere, ‘the resemblance it produces is so radical, so unmedi-
ated, that the “real” of the image obfuscates everything else’.25
On the matter of its materiality, wax’s ‘producing again’, its going too far, its
excess, its real-ness is integral to and generated by its very substance. As
material, as a medium, wax is organic. It can be worked; it can be put to work.
It softens and hardens, it can be heated and is prone to liquefaction (the
melting point of beeswax is 62° to 64° C). It changes state, it can be moulded
easily, it is solid and fragile. It lasts and is fleeting. Wax is, as Didi-Huberman
has written, ‘“malleable flesh” in its own right’.26 Affirming my comments in
the previous chapter on the creator’s desire to craft, to bring inanimate materi-
als to life, as well as on the nature of the material form that is transformed
by the enchanting power of human touch, and on the sculptor’s Pygmalion-ist
ambitions, Roberta Panzanelli writes of:
the dialectic between maker and material, the pliant yielding of hard matter
and the will of the creator. The modeling of wax incarnates the sculptor’s
identity as plastic form-giver: every wax sculptor is a Pygmalion, whose ivory
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creation metamorphosed into flesh. To be sure, Ovid’s description of the
process evokes wax: ‘soft, and more soft at ev’ry touch it grew/like pliant
wax, when chasing hands reduce/the former mass to form’. The transforma-
tion from hard matter to soft flesh, from material to matter must involve an
organic process of progressive suppleness and warmth: in order to become
flesh, ivory has to behave like wax, the ultimate organic simulacrum.27
Wax is made fit for use by being used. More than this, wax has I think a
mobile quality about its materiality, as a sculptural form, that is intrinsic to
such form. It has a quality of mobility, an ephemeral or, perhaps better, tran-
sitional and transformational quality, in keeping with Ovid’s attention to mat-
ter’s processes, the mechanisms of metamorphosis. As Sartre wrote, ‘[the]
viscous reveals itself as essentially shady, because its fluidity exists in slow
motion’; and later, ‘[i]n the apprehension of the viscous . . . there is something
like the haunting memory of a metamorphosis’.28 Didi-Huberman adds: ‘The
reality of the material [wax] turns out to be more troubling because it pos-
sesses a viscosity, a sort of activity and intrinsic force, which is a force of meta-
morphism, polymorphism’.29 Change is inherent within it. Such metamorphic
possibility, such activity and intrinsic force, is there in the etymological folds
of the word itself, in its verb form, to wax, which means both ‘to grow’ and ‘to
become’. These etymologies, combining with wax’s verisimilitude, its produc-
ing again and its materiality, its transformative-ness, speak of its rheological
movement, the sense of motion it has to it, that is a constituent of its very
material and thus its conditions of possibility. Wax has the question of time, of
duration, a sense of both the ephemeral and the enduring built into it, and the
forever ongoing appearance of such imminent metamorphoses. This activity,
its intrinsic force, is also integral to its capacity for reciprocity. Wax enters into
a responsive dialogue and in so doing is at one and the same time a material
that gives up its secrets, that gives the impression of animation and reveals
its own living, breathing artificiality.
It was in the late eighteenth century with the advent of new production
techniques, and its introduction into the entertainment and amusement indus-
tries, that wax came into its own. Simultaneously, this was also its death knell
as a material for grave matters. At this time, wax figures as popular cultural
spectacles declined in status and fashionability and began to fall into the cat-
egory of spectacle de curiosité. Like other itinerant spectacles they came to
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resemble circuses, fairs, freak shows, world’s fairs, panoramas and other
forms of early pre-cinematic mass-culture spectacles. Such a shift from wax
as a serious to a curious material can be tracked in, for instance, the practices
of Phillippe Curtius, the eighteenth-century Swiss physician, who began mod-
elling human anatomy, moved on to model the French nobility, then life-size
models of luminaries including Voltaire and Benjamin Franklin and finally
opened museums exhibiting waxes of criminals and murderers. Curtius trained
his niece (at least, she called him ‘uncle’) in wax modelling: she was Marie
Grosholtz, the future Madame Tussaud. Aware of wax modelling’s growing
popularity, Grosholtz too exhibited her figures, including some that, as Michelle
Bloom points out, could have been made using death masks taken from
decapitated heads, including those of Robespierre and Marie-Antoinette. Much
like the slightly earlier anatomical models, they are of the corpse.30
I will return to such wax-like figures with the various issues they raise about
their (surrogate) links to humans, and as humans as such, and their activity
and intrinsic force. These arise in part because the properties of wax are
closely kin to the properties of plastic. Etymologically the Greek verb plassein
is ‘to mould or shape a soft substance like clay or wax’ (the classical Latin
plasticus is ‘of or belonging to the art of modelling’), and plastic is, like wax
(more so even), malleable, pliant, modelled, moulded, transformative, col-
oured, artificial, superficial, impressionable and simulatory, during manufac-
ture. It has a plasticity to it.31 It would make sense, then, that wax as a natural,
organic substance would give way to plastic as an artificial, synthetic (yet still
often organic-based) substance. Also that in industrial modernity, plastic
would replace wax as the material of choice for manufacturing inanimate
human form, including anatomical mannequins or commercial shop-window
dummies. I shall return to the direct and other connections between nine-
teenth-century wax-work popular cultural spectacles and the situation of dolls
and mannequins in the culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries,
especially popular culture. Already at this stage, a meaningful shift – made
possible by the ‘invention’ and mass manufacture of rubber, plastic and sili-
cone – took place from the spectacular visibility of mass entertainment in the
public sphere to the re-situating of the doll in the comparative invisibility of
the private, domestic sphere, where the erotic intimacies of men with their
inanimate human forms can be played out more fully.
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jentsch’s uncanny doll, freud’s not uncanny doll
[W]e should hardly call it uncanny when Pygmalion’s beautiful

statue comes to life.
Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, 1919
What did these medieval religious effigies, Enlightenment anatomical models

and mannequins, and popular spectacles of wax figures inaugurate for dolls
to come? How might the doll be haunted or possessed by these earlier forms?
What might they say about the emergence of the doll in modernity visually and
materially; as an artistic, visual and material thing of modernity? What kind of
doll, fetish, thing, is it?
These effigies, models and mannequins, and wax figures set the terms by
which inanimate human form, dolls included, went on to be comprehended
and articulated philosophically, psychoanalytically, conceptually and aestheti-
cally from the nineteenth century onwards. They usher and put into place an
idea of inanimate human form as mimetic in a way that is both about imitating,
representing and reproducing and is also, more radically, a producing again,
where the sacred is made real, where things are mistaken for the divine and
become, are, sacred things themselves. Materially, such forms reckon inani-
mate human form as malleable, flexible and thus as metamorphic, anthropo-
morphic, transformative, where the human body is primed, constituted even,
as a recombinatory assemblage, of disassembling and re-assembling. Both
mimetically and materially, they make it known that, and how it is that, inani-
mate human form has built into it as its conditions of possibility, inanimacy
and stillness, as well as the active viscosities of time, duration and motion.
Change, this intrinsic force, is inherent to them.
Mimetic producing, material malleability, time’s viscosities all have a touch
of the uncanny about them. While we might not find the origins of this in
Freud’s uncanny – the inanimate human forms round which I have been cir-
cling are precursors, after all – we can certainly see the reasons why they are
nonetheless tethered to it, especially since the uncanny is itself tethered tightly
to fetishism and perversity. Because of this they put in place and in play an
erotics of sorts. Let me disentangle this by suggesting how and why mimeti-
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cism, materiality and time, which are intrinsic to the discourse of the doll and
which somehow motivate or compel it, might turn on questions of the uncanny
and, by extension, of fetishism and perversity.
It feels a bit hackneyed to write on the uncanny; its discourse is well known.32
However, given the content of this book it is unavoidable, necessary even, so I
turn to these discussions albeit from a somewhat different angle. I do this not
least because while ‘the uncanny’ as a term has been bandied about continu-
ously in considerations of dolls, mannequins and automata, it has rarely been
utilised in a sustained critical examination of the particularities of these inani-
mate human forms as visual and material things in and of modernity (a rare
exception being Hal Foster’s Compulsive Beauty of 1993). It strikes me that
starting from the doll and its particularities, especially given the ways I am
trying to re-frame it as part of a series of complex historical, conceptual and
aesthetic networks in modernity, will tell us something surprising about the
existing discourse of the uncanny.
Sigmund Freud does not write much on dolls. When he does it is to dismiss
them. His essay ‘The Uncanny’ (‘Das Unheimliche’, of 1919) is a critical engage-
ment with Ernst Jentsch’s essay ‘On the Psychology of the Uncanny’ (1906),
Jentsch’s reading of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s short story Der Sandmann (1816), and
his own re-reading of Hoffmann’s story.33 A doll is at the heart of Hoffmann’s
tale and Jentsch’s essay; not so for Freud. The story’s main protagonist, Nath-
aniel, betrothed to a young woman, Clara, is haunted by childhood nightmares
of the Sandman coming to tear out children’s eyes. Buying a new ‘pocket
perspective’ (perhaps glasses, an eye-glass, perhaps a small telescope) from
the optician Coppola, Nathaniel spies the beauty Olimpia. His vision enkindled,
he is enchanted and falls in love with her. Olimpia plays the piano, sings an
aria di brava and dances. Nathaniel, feeling her pulse beat, her lips warm,
rhapsodises about his love for her and she, looking up at him with love and
longing, listens with great reverence, sighing repeatedly, ‘Ach! Ach! Ach!’34
While Olimpia is the object of Nathaniel’s desire, for others she is apathetic,
taciturn, soulless, a lifeless statuesque; her eyes are fixed and devoid of life,
her hands cold.35 Nathaniel’s brother Siegmund calls her Miss Wax-face and
tells him that her singing and piano playing ‘has the disagreeably perfect, but
insensitive time of a singing machine, and her dancing is the same’.36 Why is
she so animate and yet so out of time and out of step? Olimpia, it transpires,
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may well be the progeny of Spalanzani but, while he may have fathered her,
hers is an unnatural genesis of clockwork. She is a doll-like automaton, with
eyes made by Coppola, the optician, who (as Coppelius) is also, it turns out, a
phantom of horror from Nathaniel’s childhood. Olimpia then is the daughter
of two men. In Hoffmann’s tale, unlike for Pygmalion, Venus does not intervene;
there is no breathing life into this doll-like automaton. Instead, Olimpia’s arti-
ficiality is revealed to Nathaniel when he sees Spalanzani and Coppola fighting
over her, pulling her this way and that. (In Offenbach’s opera The Tales of
Hoffmann, they actually pull her limb from limb.) Nor does the story end well
for Nathaniel: gripped by a second fit of madness and shouting ‘spin about’,
he flings himself from a tower to his death.
Before Freud gets to Hoffmann’s doll or, rather, before he dismisses it, he
sets the scene for his essay by observing that there are two ways of approach-
ing the uncanny, a subject related to what is frightening, arousing dread and
horror. The first is to trace the roots of its meaning etymologically. By way of
careful etymological excavation, he discerns that while the uncanny (unheim-
lich, the unhomely) might appear at first to be the opposite of heimlich (homely),
actually the uncanny is ‘that class of the frightening which leads back to what
is known of old and long familiar’.37 (This is so because, Freud discovers,
heimlich is both that which is ‘familiar and agreeable . . . [and] what is con-
cealed and kept out of sight’ (p. 345).) The same conclusion is reached by his
second approach: to discern what ‘properties of persons, things, sense-
impressions, experiences and situations arouse in us the feeling of uncannin-
ness, and to infer the unknown nature of the uncanny from what all these
examples have in common’ (p. 340). Following this route, Freud claims that
Jentsch ‘ascribes the essential factor in the production of the feeling of uncan-
ninness to intellectual uncertainty; so that the uncanny would always, as it
were, be something one does not know one’s way about in’ (p. 341). With such
uncertainty at the fore, Freud continues, Jentsch draws on an example that is
particularly relevant here: the doubt over ‘“whether an apparently animate
being is really alive; or, conversely, whether a lifeless object might be in fact
animate”‘ (p. 347). In connection to this, writes Freud, Jentsch refers ‘to the
impression made by waxwork figures, ingeniously constructed dolls and
automata’ (p. 347). Homely and unhomely? Familiar and unfamiliar? Known
and unknown? Certain and uncertain? An animate being, alive or not? A lifeless
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object, animate or not? The uncanny leaves us with such intellectual uncer-
tainty; the property of such a feeling is uncanny or, to be more precise, intel-
lectual uncertainty is born of the person or thing’s uncanniness. Waxworks,
dolls and automata, like (as Freud writes following Jentsch) epileptic fits and
manifestations of insanity, give us the impression of the ‘automatic, mechani-
cal processes at work behind the ordinary appearance of mental activity’
(p. 347).38
For Jentsch, the crux of the matter of the uncanny is the doll-like automaton
Olimpia and the way Hoffmann’s tale produces and maintains uncertainty with
regards to her. (Is she real or a simulacrum? Is she human or non-human?
An imitation or a travesty of humanity? Is she alive or not alive? Is she cold or
warm? Is she soulful or soulless? Is it that death has been brought to life, or
life that has become somehow dead? Death standing up or mummified life? Is
her activity motivated by will or the mechanical ingenuity and power of clock-
work? Is she, can she be in love with Nathaniel?) For Freud the crux of the
uncanny is not Olimpia. For him the doll ‘is to all appearances a living being,
[and as such] is [not] by any means the only, or indeed the most important,
element that must be held responsible for the quite unparallelled atmosphere
of uncanniness evoked by the story’ (p. 348). ‘Uncertainty’, writes Freud, as to
‘whether an object is living or inanimate, which admittedly applied to the doll
Olimpia, is’, he concludes, ‘quite irrelevant’ in connection with what he calls
‘this other, more striking instance of uncanniness’ (p. 351). For Freud, the main
theme of the story, what gives it its uncanniness, are the consequences of the
activities of the Sandman who tears out children’s eyes. Feelings of uncanni-
ness are brought about by anxiety over one’s eyes, a fear or threat of going
blind that is often a substitute for the dread of being castrated, a substitute or
stand-in of the eye for the male organ. Such substitutive relations are becom-
ing familiar. With castration anxiety on Freud’s mind, then, what matters more
is the vicious figure of the Sandman, repetition, a perhaps somewhat mechani-
cal repetition and the compulsion to repeat frightening things that have been
repressed and which then recur. The unheimlich becomes a part of this, ‘famil-
iar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it
only through the process of repression’ (pp. 363–4).
Freud’s turning away from the figure of the doll or the automaton may well
be a turning away from the fact that, as has been argued elsewhere, his atten-
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tion to Nathaniel’s castration anxiety is tied inextricably to the question of
woman, that in the end it is woman that is uncanny.39 I would go one step
further and propose that it is artificial woman, woman as artificial, artifice itself
even, that is unheimlich here.
Freud thus undermines and dismisses Jentsch’s stress on the uncanny’s
intellectual uncertainty as it is articulated by way of the figure of the doll ‘which
appears to be alive’ (p. 354). He does his best to undermine and dismiss the
doll or automaton as in any way important for an understanding of the uncanny.
Jentsch, he continues, ‘believes that a particularly favorable condition for
awakening uncanny feeling is created when there is intellectual uncertainty
whether an object is alive or not, and when an inanimate object becomes too
much like an animate one’ (p. 354). However, he continues, ‘dolls are of course
rather closely connected with childhood life. We remember that in their early
games children do not distinguish at all sharply between living and inanimate
objects, and that they are especially fond of treating their dolls like live people’
(pp. 354–5). So, concludes Freud, ‘while the Sand-Man story deals with the
arousing of an early childhood fear, the idea of a “living doll” excites no fear
at all: children have no fear of their dolls coming to life, they may even desire
it’ (pp. 355). Fair enough: for Freud, just because there is a collective fantasy
that dolls have the potential to come to life, this does not make them uncanny.
Nor is this inducing of fear; children merely believe it or wish it to be so. To
this end he utilises further evidence. Writing against the view that inanimate
objects coming to life are meant to be in the highest degree uncanny, he gives
the example of Hans Christian Andersen’s stories in which ‘household utensils,
furniture and tin soldiers are alive, yet nothing could well be more remote from
the uncanny’ (p. 369). Freud concludes, much in keeping with my efforts to
contextualise such deliberations and yet somehow contrary to the main thrust
of my argument, that ‘we should hardly call it uncanny when Pygmalion’s
beautiful statue comes to life’ (p. 369).
Freud tries to dismiss intellectual uncertainty, and the doll at the heart of
the uncanny, perhaps in an effort, as the philosopher Hélène Cixous argued,
to repress ‘the uncanny nature of animism (a living doll)’ itself.40 What if, she
asked, ‘the doll became a woman? What if she were alive? What if, in looking
at her, we animate her?’41 What if, similarly, the doll is a surrogate or substitute
or, as Cixous put it, ‘a detached complex of Nathaniel’?42 As an extension of
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himself, the doll becomes figured as an embodiment of narcissism and homo-
eroticism, where the fantasist falls in love with himself, loves himself, engages
in self-love – which will be observed again and again as the narrative of this
book unfolds. Put differently, as the psychoanalytic theorist Mladen Dolar
writes, ‘Olympia is both the Other to whom Nathaniel addresses his love and
his amatory discourse (like the Lady of courtly love) and his narcissistic sup-
plement (love can after all be seen as the attempt to make the Other the same,
to reconcile it with narcissism)’.43
Freud dismisses Jentsch’s account of intellectual uncertainty as the heart
of the uncanny. He moves away from the doll as a thing that is uncanny because
it teeters between a dialectic of being real–simulacra, animate–inanimate,
human–non-human and alive–not alive. In moving away from the figure of the
doll-as-uncanny, Freud moves towards something perhaps more disturbing:
the body part. He writes: ‘Dismembered limbs, a severed head, a hand cut off
at the wrist . . . feet which dance by themselves . . . all these have something
peculiarly uncanny about them, especially when, as in the last instance, they
prove capable of independent activity in addition’ (p. 366). That prove capable
of independent activity. Here, by way of fairy tales, Freud begins to conclude that
in addition to the figure of the Sandman, castration and repetition being key
ingredients of the uncanny, it is possible that ‘animism, magic and sorcery’ are
‘factors which turn something frightening into something uncanny’ (p. 365). (I
have already remarked that, in genealogies of the statue moving, magic,
machinery and invention are pivotal.) This is a new and distinct component of
the uncanny. It is not the doll per se, the inanimate human form, that is uncanny
because it holds the promise (mimetically, materially, temporally) of becoming
living. It is, rather, the body part and not simply the body part per se but the
body part that, in the last and perhaps even in the first instance, proves capable
of ‘independent activity’. This is crucial to pull out of Freud’s discussion, for in
folding this revelation back onto the doll, the mannequin or the automaton it
opens up the possibility conceptually that they, as well as the body part as
such, are capable of ‘independent activity’.
What if, then, as it is for children with their dolls, these questions of real–
simulacra, animate–inanimate and so on are not about uncanniness per se? I
propose tentatively, following Freud loosely, that there is nothing intrinsically
uncanny about the uncertainty of whether a statue, doll, mannequin or autom-
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aton becomes too much like an animate human form, being or thing. Rather,
what if one takes as a starting point for subsequent encounters with dolls,
mannequins, automata and other inanimate human form the proposition that
the idea of things coming to life, being brought to life, possessing the desire
for life is – as for children – not a fear, or uncanny even, but actually a wish,
a desire, a belief? Where does this leave the uncanny? Somewhere more inter-
esting still. For in the end what is uncanny about these things is that they prove
capable, at least conceptually, of ‘independent activity’. How might this all be
tied usefully, by way of mimeticism, materiality and time, to the fetish and
perversity?
the doll as unsuitable substitute versus

the doll as such
How is it that a thing – for example, a doll or a body part – works as a stand-

in? Conversely, how can such a thing appear to have a life of its own, be capable
of independent activity? How can it be both simultaneously? The answer to
these questions can be found in the similarities or relations – conceptual,
structural, morphological or operational – between and within the processual
dialectic of the uncanny, the fetish and perversion. It can be found in the fet-
ishistic form of both the doll and the body part, as fetishes with the capacity
for eroticism therein. The fetish, like the doll and the body part, is both a
stand-in for something else and some thing (capable of independent activity)
in and of itself. This is how we can get some way towards making sense of how
the doll metamorphosises or is transformed from a simple fetishistic object
to a fetishistic and erotic thing as such.
To start making sense of such transformations is to recognise the need to
contextualise the complex emergence of the fetish as a decidedly modern
thing. From the beginning the fetish, as I have mentioned, has been tied to the
anthropological (the religious fetish), political economy (the commodity fetish)
and the psychiatric/psychoanalytic (the sexual fetish). It emerges in and is
constituted – in terms of its historical and material particularity – by way of
these three distinct yet inter-articulating discourses. The ways these three
interweave – particularly around how fetishistic thinking as a relational system
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is structured and operates – is the necessary starting point for how I figure
what the doll as fetish is, how it works and what it does.
The fetish is an etymological, as a well as a linguistic, historical and material
thing. As such we come to know that it is from the beginning a making, a craft-
ing, a labouring, a fabricating: it is nature deceived by man-made artifice.44
Etymologically, the fetish derives linguistically from the Latin facticius or
facicius. As an adjective it is formed from the past participle of the verb facere,
‘to make’. In Pliny’s Natural History, facticius means ‘manufactured’ and char-
acterises ‘man-made commodities’. Facticum for Pliny means ‘artificial’. This
means, as the cultural historian William Pietz wrote in ‘The Problem of the
Fetish, II’, that it is ‘materially altered by human effort in order to deceive’. The
fetish is unnatural and deliberately false, as opposed to genuine, naturally
produced, natural, authentic or true.45 It is interesting that the etymologies of
‘fetishism’ and ‘artificial’ should be so connected; as I noted in the Introduction,
‘artificial’, deriving from the Latin artificialis, ‘belonging to art’, from artificium,
‘craftsmanship’, is that which is not natural, not spontaneous but is instead
brought forth by art and skill. So the fetish has the feel of human fabrication
about it, rather than of a natural substance or material.
It is also interesting that the fetish’s etymological origins are in making,
manufacturing, fabricating and falsification, when the idea of such artifice
seems at odds with the ways in which it has more generally been character-
ised, certainly since its articulation by Enlightenment intellectuals, usually as
contrary to reason, being caught up in the natural, the super-natural and the
idea of natural magic. Yet it is actually only by way of the persistence of the
mystery, the sacred and enchantment in modernity’s own magical thinking (as
itself a technique of animism) that the fetish even has a force, an energy
embodied in and articulated by the material thing bearing its name, through
which it is a force, an energy at the heart of the practices of which such mate-
rial things are a part. The modern fetish (the fetish is always modern) contin-
ues, it seems to me, to teeter between two extremes: as a thing that is both
made and made as truly divine.
How then does the fetish come to take on this more ‘natural’ sense? The
fetish entered the Portuguese language as feitiço, the past participle of the
Portuguese verb ‘to do, to make’; as a noun meaning form, figure, configura-
tion; as an adjective, artificial, fabrication and enchanted, deriving from the
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pidgin Fetisso. From the fifteenth century onwards, emerging as a ‘trans-cul-
tural’ thing from the intricate social and economic relations across trade,
religion and slavery, it was used by those sailing to West Africa in describing
the (religious) objects and practices they found there.46 The material thing
known as a fetish embodies ‘simultaneously and sequentially’ religious, eco-
nomic, sexual and aesthetic questions, as Pietz put it in ‘The Problem of the
Fetish, I’:
This novel situation [of the fetish] began with the formation of inhabited
intercultural spaces along the West African coast . . . whose function was to
translate and transvalue objects between radically different social systems.
Specifically . . . these spaces, which endured for several centuries, were tri-
angulated among Christian, feudal, African lineage, and merchant capitalist
social systems. It was within this situation that there emerged a new prob-
lematic concerning the capacity of the material object to embody – simul-
taneously and sequentially – religious, commercial, aesthetic, and sexual
values. My argument, then, is that the fetish could originate only in conjunc-
tion with the emergent articulation of the commodity form that defined itself
within and against the social values and religious ideologies of two radically
different kinds of non-capitalist society, as they encountered each other in
an ongoing cross-cultural situation.47
That is to say, in some sense the fetish really only came into being as a fetish,
attached as it is to stereotypical fantasies of primitive, irrational and magical
beliefs, because of European traders’ failing to understand (it is a misrecogni-
tion from the beginning) that these objects as objects of trade embodied
‘rational’ values unintelligible to them and which, as a consequence, forced the
traders to turn them into objects of religious practice.48 As the anthropologist
Peter Pels explains, following Pietz:
the fetish emerged [in the seventeenth century] from the hybrid wilds of West
African trade, allowing Dutch merchants to name those aspects of their
trading relationships with Africans that could not be understood in terms of
mercantile ideas of the rational calculation of value . . . Merchant ethnogra-
phers like Willem Bosman transformed the fetisso – an object functioning
within African trading relationships – into the fetish – the central feature of
‘African’ religion. This essentialization of the fetish tends to obscure that it
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was, in a sense, an uncontrollable object that burst the bounds of capitalist
calculation. Even though European ethnographers try to bring its hybrid
inexplicability under control by making the fetish into something essentially
‘African,’ this same discourse gave the fetish a life and a career that eventu-
ally allowed it to migrate from Africa and (un)settle down in two of the most
important intellectual landscapes of Western modernity, Marxism and
psychoanalysis.49
The neologism ‘fetishism’ (fétichisme), coined in 1757 by the French scholar

Charles de Brosses, is defined in his Du culte des dieux fétiches (1760) as the
worship of ‘terrestrial, material objects’.50 During the final quarter of the eight-
eenth century such religious fetishism – feitiço from the late medieval period
meaning magical practice or witchcraft51 – was discussed widely by historians
of religion as the earliest stage of religion. This definition of fetishism, coming
out of an Enlightenment philosophy of religion, is markedly pre-modern and
therefore comprehended as a ‘primitive’, irrational phenomenon in which indi-
vidualised (although apparently arbitrary) material things are attributed or
endowed with supernatural powers. (That is, they are made and yet somehow
their users ‘forget’ that they have made them.52) As a theory supported by
empirical proof it received widespread acceptance and was referred to by
English writers as early as 1801, when W. Taylor in a review of D. Heynig’s
critical history of religion entitled Sämmthchen Religions arten referred to it as
‘the worship of tools’.53
Fetishism is thus the worship of terrestrial, material objects, the worship of
tools. Why worship such objects or tools? Because as part of such ‘irrational’
and ‘primitive’ worship there is a tendency to embody, endow or personify
them. Not mere ornament, the fetish has a spiritual or supernatural force or
energy to it. It often serves an apotropaic purpose – diverting evil, as well as
attracting good – and is often tied to ‘pagan’ phallicism.54 Such force or energy
is not attached arbitrarily, nor does it have communicative power in general.
It is not symbolic or allegorical. It is, rather, ‘direct’. As Pietz put it, ‘Fétichisme
was the term de Brosses used for the cults and superstitions formed from this
“natural propensity” towards the nonallegorical personification of material
powers (which is what de Brosses means when he defines fetishism as a
“direct” cult of terrestrial things “sans figure”).’55 It is, more precisely, a direct,
specific, particular, singular thing, a non-arbitrary and non-generalisable
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thing, an individual thing that is attributed or endowed with supernatural
powers. A charm. Charming. A charming. It has an activity, an intrinsic force,
one might say. As Pels writes, the fetish ‘is the most aggressive expression of
the social life of things.’ ‘Fetishism’, he continues, ‘is animism with a venge-
ance. Its matter strikes back.’56 Not merely alive, it is, as the cultural anthro-
pologist Michael Taussig concludes, an ‘animated entit[y] that can dominate
persons’.57
Given this, the fetish is, perhaps somewhat unexpectedly, deeply historical
and material. It is an historical thing that takes material form, a material form
that is produced historically. Its historical production, and the process of that
production, give it its direct, unique material form. It is out of such labour, such
skill, and of how it comes to be attributed or endowed with (how it comes
materially to embody and articulate) such supernatural powers that it speaks
and acts; it strikes; it fights back. Its spiritual or super-natural force and
energy are tied to its historicity and materiality. That the fetish is material is
true of the anthropological fetish, the commodity fetish, the sexual fetish and
the fetish in/as art. Pietz writes of ‘the essential materiality of the fetish – that
is, the fetish is precisely not a material signifier referring beyond itself, but
acts as a material space gathering an otherwise unconnected multiplicity into
the unity of its enduring singularity’.58 He writes also of the fetish’s ‘irreducible
materiality’. ‘The truth of the fetish’, he claims, ‘resides in its status as a mate-
rial embodiment’, unlike the truth of the idol which ‘lies in its relation of iconic
resemblance to some immaterial model or entity’.59
The fetish and the idol? It is vital to distinguish them. From its etymological
roots, which present it somewhat counter-intuitively as ‘artificial’ rather than
‘natural’, the fetish is something that is made, manufactured. Its historicity and
materiality gives it its ‘direct’-ness, its activity, its intrinsic force, its possibility
of animating, articulating, acting. It has an ‘irreducible materiality’ to it, a form
(human, animal, vegetable, mineral, sidereal). It is a tool of and for worship,
an animated entity whose matter strikes back, that dominates persons; and
its truth lies in its status as a ‘material embodiment’. The idol? From the Greek
eidolon, ‘image’, from eidos, ‘form’, the idol is an image, a figure, a form, a
manufactured and thus an artificial thing also, but one that ‘represents’ a deity,
that is an object of worship, devotion, idolisation. As such it is a manufactured
simulacrum that, in and of and as itself, lacks essential truths. It is not a
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miraculous acheiropoieton, that is to say, it is not an icon not made by human
hands (unlike the Turin Shroud) but rather, as Francis Bacon states, a thing
formed by ‘the reciprocal intercourse of society of man with man’.60 Thus, the
idol is not direct; it is not personified; not an embodying. It has no force or
energy to it, other than what is attached to it arbitrarily. It is symbolic, allegori-
cal, but not in a way that refers beyond itself. Its truth, as Pietz writes and as
I have just noted, lies in its ‘iconic resemblance to some immaterial model or
entity’. To distinguish the idol from the fetish, the idol is a ‘freestanding statue’
representing a spiritual entity, where devotion is directed, a ‘performing
outward worship . . . before an image’, as John Locke put it;61 whereas the
feitiço (fetish, object, thing) has a proximity to the body (it might be worn, for
instance), is experienced phenomenologically and embodies an actual power.
The idol is a representing, whereas the fetish a re-presenting, an intensifica-
tion, an intensifier. The idol is false, lacking essential truths; whereas the fetish
is made, manufactured, made artifice, unnatural, deliberately false and all the
truer for it. The idol is a resemblance, a material object whose status becomes
that of the merely depicting image, mediating relations; whereas the fetish is
the thing itself as such.
Perhaps the idol’s most interesting feature is that its presence puts in place
the conditions for the possibility of idolatry, forbidden in the Abrahamic reli-
gions. The danger of the idol is that the worshipper may mistake the material
form for, that the material form may supplant, the divinity to which it refers.62
Because of how idolatry draws attention to the fraudulence of the idol, all idols
are always already false, thereby ensuring iconoclasm. Idolatry (from the Greek
eidolatria, also from eidolon (image or figure), and latris (worshipper)), then, is
the worshipping of (fraudulent) images and figures, since idols are representa-
tions and as such are mediators or substitutes for something else, ‘inappropri-
ate’ (a term used by Pietz) things created by persons (to be worshipped) rather
than the thing itself (the fetish as a tool of and for worship). The idol is idola-
trous because as a representing it has a ‘fraudulent’ resemblance to God. It is
mimetic, deceptive.63 The idol – perhaps all representing – is, then, always a
‘vain act of will’, because only God can create. Man can only manufacture.64
Hence warnings in Exodus (20:4), the Second Commandment’s prohibition
against graven images and again in Deuteronomy (5:8): ‘Thou shalt not make
thee any graven images, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above,
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or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the waters beneath the earth.’
Funnily enough, the idol ends up, at least within Christianity, as part of efforts
directed against ‘the false sacramental objects of superstition’ (in paganism,
witchcraft, fetishism and so on), when its own manufactured idolatrous resem-
blances are the true fraud.65 These objects stare back but they do so vacantly.
As Moses expresses his indignation at the Israelites regarding their building
and worship of the Golden Calf because it is the work of men’s hands:
‘[idols] . . . have mouths, but never speak, eyes, but never see, ears, but never
hear, nor is there any breath at all in their mouths’ (Psalm 135: 15–17). This
is why the idolater is ‘naïve and deluded’, caught up, as W. J. T. Mitchell puts
it, in iconoclasm’s ‘accusation of folly and vice, epistemological error and moral
depravity’.66 Much like the ancient Pygmalionists for the Christian apologists
Clement of Alexandria and Arnobius of Sicca; much like the modern Pygmal-
ionists for Krafft-Ebing and his ilk. All this does not mean, of course, that
people do not confuse fetishes with idols – quite the opposite – nor that their
erotic encounters with fetishes are not idolatrous.
Fetishism in the history of religion as a network of objects, persons and
practices that, from its origins in Enlightenment thought, came to constitute
a general theory of ‘primitive’ religions, was extended in the nineteenth century
into a comprehensive explanatory system. It was in the 1840s that the founder
of Sociology Auguste Comte published his theory of fetishism, integral to his
theory of positivism, in writings such as ‘First Theological Phase: Fetichism’
(1840) and ‘Positive Theory of the Age of Fetichism, or General Account of the
Spontaneous Regime of Humanity’ (1853). It was as early as 1842 that Marx,
aged twenty-four, having read de Brosses’s founding text on fetishism, Du culte
des dieux fétiches, and more than familiar with discourses of Anthropology and
Ethnology, defined fetishism as ‘the religion of sensuous desire’.67 Later, coin-
ciding with E. B. Tylor’s animistic explanation of fetishistic beliefs in ‘The Reli-
gion of Savages’ (1866) came Marx’s Capital (1867) with its discussion of com-
modity capitalism and his invocation of the fetish commodity form as a thing
with a life of its own.68
Let me unpick this. In chapter i of volume 1 of Capital entitled ‘The Com-
modity’, Marx writes about the commodity as ‘a thing which through its quali-
ties satisfies human needs of whatever kind . . . [where] . . . [t]he nature of
these needs, whether they arise, for example, from the stomach, or the imagi-
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nation, makes no difference’.69 For Marx, then, the commodity is not mysterious
when, as a use value, it is understood as the production of human labour and
its properties satisfy human needs. In the section subtitled ‘The Fetish Char-
acter of the Commodity and its Secret’, it is, however, mysterious and enig-
matic, a ‘very strange thing’, writes Marx, since its character arises not from
its use value but from the form itself, from how the form itself renders ‘the
social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the
products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these
things’.70 ‘Through this substitution’, Marx continues, ‘the products of labour
become commodities, sensuous things which are at the same time suprasen-
sible or social . . . the commodity-form, and the value-relation of the products
of labour within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the
physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out of
this’.71 Exchange is only possible because of this substitution of one form
(labour as a social form) for another (the commodity form), the appearance of
something as something else. One set of relations stands in for another. It is
only then that the commodity, produced as a commodity and for exchange,
begins to assume a value in relation to other commodities, begins to ‘speak’
with them. That this appears as a natural and objective property of the thing
itself – that there is something about the (social being of the) commodity that
relates neither to its use value nor its material form – is what leads to its
strangeness. This is its mystery, its enigma, its secret. Social ‘relation[s]
between men’ give way to ‘a relation between things’.72 Here Marx writes of
the sensuous wood that is made into a table which, as a commodity, tran-
scends sensuousness: ‘in relation to other commodities, it stands on its head,
and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than
if it were to begin dancing of its own free will’.73
To be clear: the commodity form for Marx has no relation to the physical
form of the commodity as such. As he writes, ‘[a]lthough the commodity takes
the shape of a physical thing, the “commodity-form” has absolutely no con-
nection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material [dinglich]
relations arising out of this’.74 This is not about consumer fetishism, as the
philosopher Peter Osborne calls it, the kind of fetishism seen in advertising,
pornography or fetish clubs as part of a regime of the circulation of goods and
images where the individual fixates on, desires and fetishises a commodity.
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Rather, Marx means a ‘fetishism that attaches itself to the products of labour
as soon as they are produced as commodities.’ This fetishism derives from the
social relations of production, as the (invisible) labour that goes into producing
commodities is substituted for the commodity form or things which might
‘appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter
into relations both with each other and with the human race.’75 Marx’s theory
of commodity fetishism is, then, to all intents and purposes a theory of the
human subject, of a certain mode of subjectification, of the human subject as
subjectification. At the same time it is a thing-ology in which the thing is both
a substitute (the disappearance of the social characteristics of labour) and
another autonomous figure endowed with a life of its own (the commodity
form).
That said, Marx is not averse to material things in their particularity; for him
the problem is the erasure under capitalism of that material particularity as it
is inscribed within the commodity form. (As the critical theorist and cultural
historian Peter Stallybrass puts it, ‘for Marx, fetishism is not the problem; the
problem is the fetishism of commodities.’76) It is by way of such particular-
ity – historically, conceptually and phenomenologically, as well as materi-
ally – that in this book I try to figure the doll as a fetish that sits among all this
uncomfortably, sometimes complicitly, sometimes critically and in an often
contradictory fashion.
At times, the doll is a consumer fetish, a commodity that as part of capitalist
modernity’s mass-manufacturing is fetishised by individual consumers and by
consumer culture in general. Here the doll, like the wax female anatomical
models, is coy and docile; yet, there is something interesting about the physical
form of the commodity and the material relations, erotic or otherwise, arising
out of it.
At other times, the doll has a more tangential relation to capitalist modernity.
This is so especially when it is part of a creative ambition driven by an obses-
sive impulse, as it is for Kokoschka’s doll of Alma Mahler, Duchamp’s Étant
donnes and Bellmer’s poupées. Here, these things (a companion; an anatomi-
cally peculiar recumbent mannequin; three dolls) are not produced as com-
modities, not produced for exchange. The social character of the labour of such
producing is not made invisible, is not substituted for another form. Quite the
opposite: it is documented and evidenced continuously in a highly detailed
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manner. It is an integral part of the making of these things as they take shape
and of the discourse around them. These social relations of labour are somehow
built into the figure of the doll itself – its animistic promise – and articulated
by it, whether these things or parts of them are hand-made, bought or found.
The material particularities of these things are, as will be seen, an integral,
valuable part of how they do what they do.
Then there are other times when the doll comes to be understood as one of
those autonomous figures endowed with a life of its own – with activity, an
intrinsic force – and which enters into relations with other autonomous things.
For dolls are not indifferent things. Wilful, rowdy, animism with a vengeance,
these things can dominate persons, can obsess and possess them. They can
in turn be possessed by them; they can even, perhaps, just for a moment, be
unwilling to be so. As Marx writes – and here I spill over into Chapter II of
Capital, something not done often enough – ‘[c]ommodities are things, and
therefore lack the power to resist man. If they are unwilling, he can use force;
in other words, he can take possession of them’.77 It is this unwillingness that
interests me here.
While fetishism entered the history and science of religion, anthropology,
philosophy and political economy from the late eighteenth century onwards by
way of a misrecognition of ‘primitive’ religious practices, it was not until the
1880s and 90s that it formally entered medicine and psychiatry.78 Psychiatry,
psychology, sexology and psychoanalysis shaped an understanding of, invented
even, a decidedly sexual and sexualised fetish as part of their research-based
scientific study of human sexuality. Such a discourse congregated around the
psychology of the individual, as a component in that era’s obsession with evi-
dencing and explaining (and thereby remedying) men’s impotence and exhaus-
tion (with a zeal not unconnected to anxieties over the dangers of onanism).
No wonder men were exhausted. Indeed it was in the 1870s that ‘fatigue’ itself
emerged as a medical term, as a modern and moral disorder, and warnings
abounded of the perils and evils of leading a sedentary life.79 It is not by chance
that the invention of the internal combustion engine coincided with struggles
to promote ‘appropriate’ forms of normative pneumatic or hydraulic sexual
practice. As part of a wholesale effort to encourage ‘heterogenital coitus’ as
the only ‘normal’ way of satisfying sexual desire, here linked to a wider effi-
ciency drive to manage the human as a productive citizen of mechanised
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industrial capitalism, sexual fetishism is from the beginning largely a male
(heterosexual) aberration. Such a ‘strict economy of reproduction’ is not ‘ame-
nable’, to use Foucault’s language, to ‘unproductive activities’.80 Hence the
dangers of active but unproductive labours.
If in Marx, fetishism as one of the basic elements of capitalism as an eco-
nomic system holds out the promise of a critique of that system, something
similar is at work, despite itself, in the patterning of sexual fetishism as an
emergent psychiatric-sexological-psychoanalytic network. Male heterosexual-
ity, with its plethora of non-procreative and thus non-productive practices and
behaviours, is perverse. Since ‘perversion’ is simply an alternation or deviation
from the pre-determined path to procreation and reproduction, and thereby a
corruption of it, such practices are dangerous expressly because they are
practices in and of themselves and for their own ends. All sexual fetishisms
are a smorgasbord of perverse practices, perfect perversions because for them
the fetish itself, not coitus, is the sexual aim. At the same time they are, as I
pointed out in the Introduction, wholly typical, normal, normative, at least
within the discourse of the invention of heterosexuality as perverse.
Sexual fetishisms have a strangely particular (although sometimes ‘acciden-
tal’) focus or fixation to them, despite their seemingly arbitrary and random
nature. This is because sexual fetishism is an erotomania. Its origins go back
to and emerge out of the advent of psychiatry in the late eighteenth century.
The human being whose ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ activities were understood
to be the result of internal and largely neurological processes was classified
into a system of mental diseases that (via an ever more specialised vocabulary
to establish its scientific authority) was overhauled throughout the nineteenth
century. It was part of the medicalisation of treating the insane – clinical
observation, diagnosis, treatment – where professionalisation and secularisa-
tion met the soothing and empathetic sensibility of pastoral care. The seeds
for recognising and making sense of erotomaniacal practices were sown by
the French psychiatrist Étienne Esquirol, a student of Philippe Pinel (the physi-
cian responsible for creating moral treatment as a psychiatric paradigm) who
around 1810 identified and named ‘monomania’ as a disease entity which
denotes an idée fixe. The historian Jan Goldstein called such monomaniacal
behaviour an ‘obsessive narrowing’.81 In 1819 Esquirol published an article
entitled ‘Monomania’ in the Dictionnaire des sciences médicales where he
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defined his neologism as ‘the type [of disease entity] intermediate between
mania and lypemania [his word for ‘melancholy’], it shares with lypemania the
fixity and concentration of ideas and with mania the exaltation of ideas and the
physical and mental activity’.82 Esquirol published Des Maladies mentales in
1838, in which he developed his notion of erotic monomania or erotomania, a
chronic cerebral affection connected mostly to men but also women, who, often
delusional, become pathologically preoccupied, overly focused or fixed on a
single and singular object of erotic desire or, as he put it, are ‘characterised
by an excessive sexual passion; now, for a known object; now, for, one
unknown.’83 For Esquirol, the fixations of the erotomaniac’s obsession around
which their behaviour congregates are often inanimate things; in this regard
he even refers to an instance (now familiar) of Pygmalionism avant la lettre:
The erotomaniac neither desires, nor dreams even, of the favors to which
he might aspire from the object of his insane tenderness; his love, some-
times, having for its object, things inanimate. Alcidias of Rhodes, is seized
with an erotic delirium for the Cupid of Praxiteles . . . In erotomania, the eyes
are lively and animated, the look passionate, the discourse tender, and the
actions expansive; but the subjects of it never pass the limits of propriety.
They, in some sort, forget themselves; vow a pure, and often secret devotion
to the object of their love; make themselves slaves to it; execute its orders
with a fidelity often puerile; and obey also the caprices that are connected
with it. While contemplating its often imaginary perfections, they are thrown
into ecstasies.84
Things may lack the power to resist man, as Marx writes, and if they are unwill-
ing, he can take possession of them. Yet, it seems, a man’s devotion can make
him a slave to it, bound to it, in bondage; it can take possession of him. Having
no choice but to give ourselves over to this kind of love is a persistent tendency
that goes back to the ancients, as Esquirol concludes: ‘The ancients, who
deified love, regarded this disease as one of the forms of revenge, which Cupid
and his mother were accustomed to take. Galen affirms, that love is the cause
of the greatest physical and moral disorders.’85
While monomania, including erotomania, as a diagnostic category had
largely disappeared by the mid-1850s, its affiliate behaviours and etiologies
re-materialised soon enough. A kindred physical and moral disorder of love
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was named as such by the psychologist Albert Binet, a student of the neurolo-
gist Jean-Martin Charcot, in an 1887 article, ‘Fetishism in Love’, a text that
uses contemporary literature and culture as evidence of a degenerate society
in order to critique that society, naming fetishism as an erotomania.86 It is the
first time that ‘sexual fetishism’ appears as a term. For Binet fetishism as an
erotomania takes the form of either ‘spiritual love’ or ‘plastic love’, where the
former is connected to and is a love of mental phenomena, while the latter (of
most interest here) is a love of manufactured objects (clothing, textures and
shoes) or body parts. The fetish has been waiting since time immemorial to
be the lead actor in this tale of artificial love. Fetishism became from then on
an amorous practice. Perverse but amorous. Such discussions of fetishism as
an erotomania were picked up soon enough, as has been seen, by Bloch,
Krafft-Ebing, Ellis and others, as well as Freud. In his Three Essays on the
Theory of Sexuality (1905), Freud confirms Binet’s assertion that all love is
fetishistic to some extent, contending that a ‘certain measure of fetishism is
found in normal love’.87 In the end, the line between the normal and the patho-
logical is simply one of degree.
As Foucault writes in The History of Sexuality, Volume I, fetishism is ‘the
guiding thread for analyzing all the other deviations’ in a common effort to
‘constitute a sexuality that is economically useful and politically conservative’.88
To this end, biology, medicine, psychiatry and psychology from the nineteenth
century onwards sought not a reduction but a production of perverse sexual
practices, ushering in ‘the age of multiplication: a dispersion of sexualities, a
strengthening of their disparate forms, a multiple implantation of “perver-
sions”.’ Our epoch, Foucault concludes, ‘has initiated sexual heterogeneities.’89
Male heterosexuality is but one of them, albeit an ur-perversion. As I have
begun to discern, such paradigms bring perverse practices into discourse.
They actively produce these practices as perverse. Even more so when, perhaps
by accident, such perversions are comprehended not as pathologies, errors in
need of correction, but as new ways of knowing, new intimacies and conjoin-
ings, as new ways of coming into (sexual) being. Arguments for the promotion
of ‘heterogenital coitus’ at the heart of this strict economy of reproduction, and
actively against the perceived dangers of non-procreative and thus non- or
un-productive activities (themselves being sought out to satisfy sexual desire),
whether onanistic, fetishistic or whatever, and evidenced by impotence, exhaus-
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tion, or whatever, buckle under the sheer weight of these heterogeneous and
perverse heterosexual practices. (This is not unconnected to Marx’s denuncia-
tions of the insatiable desire of capitalist’s greed that likewise, and like the
idolater’s desire, collapses into narcissism, emasculation, feminisation and
impotence.) It is this strict, restricted and restrictive economy of reproduction,
hell-bent on hydraulic, heterogenetic coitus that, discoursing on non- and un-
productive sexual encounters (as perverse), produces the conditions in which
erotic encounters and sexual gratification by other means come to the fore. All
of this begins to elucidate how for nineteenth-century biology, medicine, psy-
chiatry and sexology, it is (male) heterosexuality – not more apparently obvious
heinous perversions such as male homosexuality or lesbianism – and the
fragility of the ideology of the hetero-normative procreative impulse as it is
pressured by the nature, practices and pleasures of men’s perverse erotic
relations with inanimate human form that becomes the site for the most active
production of discourse concerning pathological and perverse sexuality. Male
heterosexuality is the most polymorphously perverse, is where occurs the most
extensive taxonomising of non-procreative (and thus dangerously non- or un-
productive, and thus perverse) practices.
There is much hand-wringing by proponents of the idea of (male) hetero-
sexuality as to how and why it is that the erotomaniac becomes fixated on,
obsessed by, falls in (plastic) love with and comes to desire particular (although
sometimes still ‘largely accidental’) inanimate things such as an object
(perhaps a shoe, fur or velvet) or a body part (perhaps a foot or a lock of hair).
How and why the focus on the desire for a particular inanimate thing? An
answer to these questions – following on from the previous chapter’s proposi-
tion that the fetish’s association with persons can be relational, mnemonic,
accidental and/or arbitrary – is found by tracking carefully through the work
of one of sexual fetishism’s most important discussants, Freud. He was critical
of Binet’s assumption that an erotomaniac’s fixation was ‘largely accidental’.
In his Three Essays he claims that there is actually a direct link between the
erotomaniac (and their sexual object) and the fetish, what he calls an ‘assign-
able relation’.90 (Perhaps somewhat like de Brosses’s affirmation that fetishism
is a ‘direct’ cult of terrestrial things ‘sans figure’.) For Freud the sexual instinct
and the sexual object are not necessarily largely accidental but can in fact be
direct, motivated or provoked by and provoking one another. They are ‘soldered
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together’ in particular and provocative kinds of ways.91 The nature of such
soldering is all the more interesting since the object of love, a substitute that
may be a body part or an inanimate object, is overvalued. It is no accident that
for Freud such overvaluation is characteristic of anaclitic or masculine forms
of loving.92
Freud first discusses fetishism in a section of his Three Essays entitled
‘Unsuitable Substitutes for the Sexual Object – Fetishism’. It involves ‘the
normal sexual object [being] replaced by another which bears some relation
to it, but is entirely unsuitable to serve the normal sexual aim’.93 That is to say,
for Freud in 1905 fetishes were aberrations of the sexual instinct in which the
sexual aim is abandoned and the fetishist becomes dependent on a ‘sexual
overvaluation’ of a substitute for that primary and proper sexual object. He
goes on:
What is substituted for the sexual object is some part of the body (such as
the foot or hair) which is in general very inappropriate for sexual purposes,
or some inanimate object which bears an assignable relation to the person
who it replaces and preferably to that person’s sexuality (e.g. a piece of
clothing or underlinen). Such substitutes are with some justice likened to
the fetishes in which savages believe that their gods are embodied.94
Like Binet’s erotomania, and the second component of its ‘sexual fetishist’
(‘plastic love’), for Freud the fetish is an ‘inappropriate’ body part or inanimate
object. The fetish as (synechdochal) substitute is, then, an unsuitable inani-
mate object that is displaced by or metonymically allied to the ‘proper’ object
of desire – although as will be seen the fetish might, even more so, be a con-
tiguity, a contingency, a coinciding, chance.95 For Freud, this substitution and
displacement of the original sexual object is seen to be inappropriate for sexual
purposes and, in abandoning the ‘normal’ sexual aim, its presence is destined
to lead the fetishist into the realms of non- and un-productive unpleasure and
frustration. In so abandoning the sexual aim, fetishism not only borders on the
pathological, it actually becomes pathological ‘when the [fetishist’s] longing for
the fetish passes beyond the point of being merely a necessary condition
attached to the sexual object and actually takes the place of the normal aim,
and, further, when the fetish becomes detached from a particular individual
and becomes the sole sexual object’.96
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To reiterate: the fetish has ‘taken the place’ of the normal sexual aim. It has
become detached from the primary and proper sexual object of desire to which
it might be synechdochally, metonymically, contiguously or contingently allied,
related by chance or accident. As a consequence it becomes the sole sexual
object of the fetishist’s attentions. Here fetishism is already understood and
fleshed out as a perversion in which the fetish as substitute, as a body part or
an inanimate object, not merely threatens to become but actually becomes the
sole sexual thing. Sometimes it has an assignable relation, sometimes not.
Frustration at or with the sexual object is thus replaced – willingly, gratefully,
voraciously – by the fetish itself as the thing of both desire and potential sat-
isfaction.97 (The ‘original’ sexual object may well have always been nothing
more than a ploy to get the debate to here.) Some of what I am claiming in the
book as a whole becomes clear here: the inappropriate, or unsuitable, and
overvalued object as stand-in takes the place of and, once detached, becomes
the sole sexual thing. It becomes an independent entity that proves capable of
independent activity, as Freud put it towards the end of his essay on the
uncanny. Body parts or inanimate objects – such as a doll – as sexual or erotic
fetishistic things work exactly in this way.98
In these early comments from Freud there is more than a germ of the argu-
ment that appeared in his fullest, albeit short, elaboration on fetishism in his
essay entitled ‘Fetishism’ (1927). Echoing his thoughts of twenty-two years
earlier, here the fetishist is a man whose object choice of sexual desire and
gratification is dominated not by a female sexual object per se but rather by a
fetish that is, more often than not, an inanimate or partial object that still bears
an assignable relation to her.99 (Here Freud again names objects or body parts
such as the foot or the shoe, fur, velvet and a piece of underclothing.) So far
so familiar. In this later essay, though, the perversion is explained as a result
of the castration complex that was by then at the heart of fetishism for Freud:
the boy child recognises and affirms while simultaneously repressing and
disavowing the sight of the absence of the woman’s phallus – her sexual dif-
ference, sexual difference itself, the play of difference more generally – which
heralds the possibility of its loss and thus the threat to his own. This echo of
Freud’s ‘The Uncanny’ essay resonates again in his essay ‘Medusa’s Head’
(1922; written between ‘The Uncanny’ and ‘Fetishism’ but not published until
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after his death) where ‘[t]o decapitate = to castrate’.100 While I do not particu-
larly hold with the castration complex – what right-thinking man would not try
to deny it? – I recognise its centrality to the rhetoric and imagery of the late
nineteenth century and of decadence, the very imagination out of which psy-
choanalysis emerged. Castration was the governing fantasy of the decadent
imagination and was, as I remarked in Chapter One following Charles Bern-
heimer, a victory of the primacy of artifice over nature. The fetish itself was
thus both the marker and the denial of castration. It is for Freud ‘a token of
triumph over the threat of castration and a protection against it.’101 (As such it
is a somewhat apotropaic magic object, like an amulet. It is totemic, dil-
donic.102) Hence the need, at least for psychoanalysis, for the fetish as
substitute.
The fetish, it is now clear, is a substitute for the absent female phallus –
Freud makes it clear that there is no reason why the fetishistic object or body
part that replaces this phallus needs to be in any way symbolic of the penis.
As Jacques Lacan stated in his re-writing of Freud, the penis and the phallus
are not the same, since the former is merely an individualised fleshy append-
age while the latter is a signifier, the structure of language, desire itself, in
which, certainly in a [male] heterosexual economy, men seem to ‘have’ the
phallus while women seem to ‘be’ the phallus.103 This absent female phallus
does not belong to any woman: as Freud claims, if ‘the fetish is a substitute
for the penis,’ then
it is not a substitute for any chance penis, but for a particular and quite
special penis that had been extremely important in early childhood but had
later been lost. That is to say, it should normally have been given up, but the
fetish is precisely designed to preserve it from extinction. To put it more
plainly: the fetish is a substitute for the woman’s (the mother’s) penis that
the little boy once believed in and – for reasons familiar to us – does not
want to give up.104
The fetish is a substitute for one of the original losses of psychoanalysis: the
mother’s special penis. It is more than this, in so far as the fetish is not just a
substitute but in fact an artificial stand-in for the mother’s imaginary phallus,
since the mother’s phallus is wholly imaginary. Thus, the fetish is a substitute
for an absence that was from the start never present. As the literary theorist
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Naomi Schor points out in her consideration of fetishism, ‘the substitute is
never the same as the original, and the original is a fiction’.105 Emily Apter,
another literary theorist, sums it up in her considerations of perversion:
In the case of fetishism, transvestism and zoophilia, inanimate or non-

human objects, living parts of the body treated as dead or partial objects
substituted for the whole are ‘surinvested’ (overvalued) to the exclusion of
all other targets of desire. (Freud, Three Essays, 1905, p. 16) The dismantled,
disembodied body (Lacan’s corps morcelé) is preferred to the integral or
totalised corpus because it presents, as it were, a body composed of pros-
thetic parts (already split or symbolically castrated) rather than a body at
risk of phallic loss. In each of these instances the choice of love-object is
neither arbitrary nor convertible. Functioning as an ambient fetish or pros-
thesis, figured as an idée fixe, this object-type both motivates the fantasm
and directs the questing path of the subject of perversion.106
There is nothing straightforward, then, about this substitution, the fetish as

substitute and thus the fetish as such; doll, body part, whatever. The complexity
of this is writ large by the ways in which the fetish is positioned as an unques-
tionable marker, a compensation or replacement for that which is lost. This is
the case both literally and metaphorically, whether the argument is pointing
to an instance of an actual missing part of the body or detailing one of those
more symbolic losses found at the heart of psychoanalysis such as the penis
substitute which stands in for and wards off castration anxiety. The substitution
is of an overvalued and inappropriate thing that is both a stand-in (prostheti-
cally, artificially, fictitiously) for that ‘normal’ thing and a ‘normal’ (prosthetic,
artificial, fictitious) thing itself, and which, as artifice, as a hiding therefore
draws attention to the nature of the mother’s phallus as a fiction. Being a
stand-in or prosthetic part, as Apter puts it, the fetish as substitute signifies
both that which it is replacing, the loss it hides and covers, thereby exposing
it anew, and reveals a dismantled body composed of prosthetic parts already
split or symbolically castrated, rather than a body at risk of phallic loss.
Perhaps even more than this, the fetish accounts for, as will be seen, an ana-
grammatic body, a body as a productive and generative assemblage, arranging
and re-arranging its composite parts to articulate its communicative
potential.
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Whether considering the fetish literally, metaphorically or metonymically,
one of the arguments of which I am critical in this book is that ‘the modern
fetish’ is an object (or part object) that marks an absence: a symbolic loss, a
traumatic loss or lack, the mother’s phallus, even as a fiction. In the discourses
that argue for the fetish as a stand-in or supplement that comes to replace
what is missing, as a compensation for or replacement of something that is
lost, it is always and only a substitute for some other thing; it is not a thing as
such. While this is one reason why the erotomaniac is pathologically fixated,
desirous of a single or singular inanimate thing, I suggest that there is a
second reason for this. It is that not only are fetishes often caught similarly in
this structure of substitution, detachability and replacement, but also that they
are always and already things themselves. Still more, they are particular kinds
of erotic things in their particularity, historically, materially, conceptually, theo-
retically, aesthetically and phenomenologically. Dolls, for instance, or body
parts, thus are both inappropriate or unsuitable sexual stand-ins or substitutes
and singular erotic things of and for desire and the satisfaction of that desire,
in and of themselves, qua things and for their own ends, which prove capable
of independent activity. This is the reason that it became necessary to attend
to why in the networks of modernity fetishes are invented as magical (anthro-
pological), mysterious (Marxian) and horrific (psychoanalytic). It is also why the
perverse practices accompanying fetishistic things are considered dangerous
and all the more interesting because of it.
I suggest at this point that the reason for this is that such perverse practices,
with fetishes or erotic things as markers of such perversity, are driven, shaped
and articulated by way of non- or un-productive, which is to say non-
reproductive, forms of sexual and erotic contact. That is, perverse practices
are figured by way of the very human shortcomings that the last quarter of the
nineteenth century, as I noted a few pages ago, tried hard to evidence, explain
and thereby remedy, such as impotence, exhaustion and, ultimately, anxieties
over the dangers of onanism. To abandon the ‘normal’ sexual aim, they worried,
would lead to unpleasure and frustration. The dangers of such an abandoning
had been at the basis of the definition of perversion for Freud from as early as
1905: ‘Perversions are sexual activities which either (a) extend, in an anatomi-
cal sense, beyond the regions of the body that are designed for sexual union,
or (b) linger over the intermediate relations to the sexual object which should
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normally be traversed rapidly on the path towards the final sexual aim.’107 By
1916, as Freud writes in his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, ‘the aban-
donment of the reproductive function is the common feature of all perversions.
We actually describe a sexual activity as perverse if it has given up the aim of
reproduction, and pursues the attainment of pleasure as an aim independent
of it.’108 Fetishistic practices are perverse, avowedly so, then, because, in
turning away from the ‘natural’ reproductive imperative of heterogenital coitus,
they turn towards non- or un-productive ‘artificial’ practices that are, it tran-
spires, productive of pleasures in and of themselves. Such practices and pleas-
ures are expenditures that are thus both surplus to a heterosexual reproductive
economy and the essentials of need, desire and enjoyment to heterosexuality
as perverse. The modern sexual subject becomes thus situated not in a
restricted or restrictive economy of heterogenital coitus – this capitalist
economy of accumulation and profit – but in a general economy of unproduc-
tive and non-recuperable polymorphously perverse practices. Here fatigue,
exhaustion, even impotence – the very stains of unproductive expenditure – are
markers of what is quintessentially male, heterosexual and modern. Not sur-
prisingly, it transpires that this is exactly what the erotomaniac, the sexual or
erotic fetishist, and the onanist, are after: to pursue pleasures and satisfactions
in and of themselves, and to do so by way of erotic encounters that both extend
the topography of the body’s forever and endlessly enfolding erotic-ness, and
perhaps to do so by lingering over the accoutrements of plastic love.
The fetish as such, then, provokes pleasure and satisfies desire and is dan-
gerous because of this. Such a line of argumentation is there in Freud, albeit
figured disparagingly, and familiar to readers of Foucault. It is also not dis-
similar to the philosopher Jacques Derrida’s well-known argument concerning
‘that dangerous supplement’, the substitute or prosthetic figuration par excel-
lence, that as an addition and a replacement, also an extension and an enhance-
ment, is vital to his consideration of Rousseau’s Emile (1762) in which the
dangerous supplement is itself the perversion of masturbation.109 The supple-
ment is dangerous specifically because of the manner by which the practice
seeks artificially (albeit dextrously) to substitute, supplant or enhance (thereby
abandoning) the reproductive imperatives of nature. Nature’s own productive
features are shown to be woefully unproductive when confronted by its artificial
converse: the laborious, productive pursuit and attainment of pleasure in and
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of itself by way of the fetish. The erotomaniac, the sexual or erotic fetishist and
the onanist know that such a pursuit of pleasure is time well spent, work worth
labouring over, is productive un- or non-productive expenditure. Perverse
practices with fetishistic things are in the pursuit and attainment of pleasure
in and of itself. And here pleasure, like the fetish, is not sexual, erotic or per-
verse in general. It is, on the contrary, historically, conceptually, aesthetically,
materially and phenonemologically particular to specific erotic encounters and
practices between men and inanimate human form.
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II the integrity of the doll
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3 / touching:
oskar kokoschka’s alma mahler
In 1918 the Austro-Hungarian artist Oskar Kokoschka commissioned for

himself a life-size doll of Alma Mahler. It was to become a celebrated if elusive
fetish, well known by the Surrealists and Hans Bellmer in particular. Koko-
schka commissioned the dressmaker Hermione Moos, who was also Mahler’s
dressmaker, to fashion the life-size doll a few years after the artist’s break-up
with Mahler. His amour fou, Mahler had aborted his unborn foetus in 1914 and
by August 1916 had moved on successfully from the relationship, returning to
and marrying the architect Walter Gropius, the man with whom she had had
an affair during her first marriage to Gustav Mahler.1 By 1918 Mahler and
Gropius had a child, a daughter, Manon Gropius. Kokoschka had not yet moved
on, though.2 He remained haunted by ghosts from his life in pre-war Vienna
and was for ever changed by his experiences during the First World War. As
his first biographer Edith Hoffmann wrote in Kokoschka: Life and Work (1947),
he found contact with human beings unbearable.3 The artist himself recol-
lected more than two decades later, in his 1971 autobiography My Life, that:
‘For years I could not physically stand the people who quietly conversed about
13 Photographer unknown, Oskar Kokoschka /

Hermione Moos, The Doll Maker Hermione Moos in
front of the Doll in her Parent’s Flat, Munich, 1919,
gelatin silver print, 17.8 x 24 cm, University of
Applied Arts Vienna Collection, University of
Applied Arts Vienna, Oskar Kokoschka-Center

Hermione Moos, The Doll next to a Head Study by
Kokoschka, Munich, 1919, gelatin silver print,
17.8 x 24 cm, University of Applied Arts Vienna
Collection, University of Applied Arts Vienna,
Oskar Kokoschka-Center

Hermione Moos, The Doll, Munich 1919, gelatin
silver print, 17.8 x 24 cm, University of Applied Arts
Vienna Collection, University of Applied Arts Vienna,
Oskar Kokoschka-Center
oskar kokoschka’s alma mahler / 109
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their war experiences, machine-gunning, throwing hand-grenades into advanc-
ing phalanxes of living flesh, or bayoneting, while they themselves again having
returned to their normal routine, went on living their sentimental lives.’4
Kokoschka, who had been severely wounded, also recalled that his death
was actually announced in the Viennese papers. During and after his conva-
lescence, by his own admission he had ‘lost all desire to go through the ordeal
of love again’.5 Estranged from his past, his sense of self, human kind in
general, women in particular and the entirety of the idea of love, he conceived
of what Hoffmann calls the ‘story of the doll’. She refers to this story as a ‘hor-
rific joke’; Kokoschka himself refers to it ‘as though it were a deed of valour’.6
touching as touching:
fingertips, feathers and fur
To counter his isolation, Kokoschka would have a doll made, his ideal woman.
She would be ever-present, discreet, taciturn, a woman to whom he could be
devoted. The doll would be his focus of attention and replace the real object
of his desire, Alma Mahler. It would be a stand-in or surrogate for his lost love,
a process in which what Freud would call ‘the normal sexual object’ is ‘replaced
by another which bears some relation to it, but is entirely unsuitable to serve
the normal sexual aim’.7 This is the lot of the erotic doll as modern fetish. The
doll would be a gift to Kokoschka himself, a gift of himself, a gift of life. Like
all gifts, as the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss remarked in The Gift:
Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (1923–4), it would not be
an ‘indifferent’ thing but a thing with ‘a name, a personality, a past’.8 The doll
would give Kokoschka what he needed: by its sheer mimeticism, its visual and
haptic verisimilitude, his stand-in would magically deceive him. In a letter to
Moos dated 22 July 1918 (the first of a series of letters that he and the dress-
maker exchanged between July 1918 and at least April 1919, a correspondence
of about nine months’ gestation), Kokoschka proclaimed that this sleight of
hand would make it possible ‘that the woman of my dreams will seem to come
alive to my eyes and touch’.9 Kokoschka has great expectations, perhaps too
great. Yet, he was willing to be deceived, actually needed to be tricked. The doll
would become, will be Alma Mahler, and his fantasy would be complete,
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however impossible he knew such a feat to be. As he wrote in the same letter
to Moos:
If you solve this task well and give me such an illusion that I can believe the
woman of my imagination to live when I look at her and touch her, my dear
Miss M., then I shall owe to your ingenuity and to your feminine sensibility
what you may have guessed vaguely during our conversation.
Please write and let me know for which part you need the next drawings.
I implore you not to let yourself to be distracted by anything, to employ your
whole feminine imagination uninterruptedly for this work and to finish it in
one go. Get feathers.
I am very, very intrigued.10
The reference to feathers is intriguing.

From the beginning of this correspondence Kokoschka continued to express
his excitement at the prospect of his surrogate Alma, and his conviction that
Moos could create a doll that, when he looks at it and touches it, will deceive
him into believing it is living. Kokoschka’s letters also reveal how clear an idea
he had of how he wanted the doll executed. His vision of his ideal woman is
extremely meticulous and carefully articulated, more extensively so than any
would-be Pygmalion considered thus far. To this end, Kokoschka sent Moos
drawings of the doll, some of which are integrated into the letters themselves;
these drawings are comparable formally to drawings that he was making at
the time (figs 16–17). At one point he even dispatched to her a life-size oil
sketch entitled Standing Female Nude, Alma Mahler (1918; fig. 18). By way of
these images Kokoschka was able to particularise his specifications in order
that Moos have an exact sense of the doll’s measurements, appearance and
disposition. By way of description, he attends to the contours of her body, the
uniqueness and individuality of her bone and sinew, adding white patches to
simulate muscle and fat, and requesting that Moos should hand-colour rather
than dye the delicate silks and linens she is prompted to use. Strangely,
though, there is no record that Kokoschka ever sent Moos photographs of Alma
Mahler, which would certainly have aided this endeavour.11
Thus, somewhere between his efforts to relay his memories of Alma Mahler’s
look, her manner and his sense of her, and what became the completed doll
itself, Kokoschka’s pragmatic attention to it concentrates on three priorities.
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16 Oskar Kokoschka letter to Hermione Moos, 1919,
private collection.
17 Oskar Kokoschka, The Doll, 1919, ink

on paper, 53 x 38 cm, Fondation Oskar Kokoschka,
Vevey.
18 Oskar Kokoschka, Standing Female Nude Alma

Mahler, 1918, 180 x 85 cm, private collection, London.
Courtesy Caroline Schmidt Fine Art llc.
They are its physiology, its likeness to Mahler herself and its feel, which is also
to say, the utility, responsiveness or interactive potential of the doll. Getting
both the look and the feel right is paramount. This detailing is borne out for
instance by Kokoschka’s third letter to Moos dated 20 August 1918, in which he
focuses carefully on the make-up of the doll’s body, his anticipation of what it
will be like to be with her physically and his sense of her non-sentient being-
ness. In particular, he concentrates on how efforts at fashioning the doll’s skin,
her consistency, will make her more human, bring her to life in order, among
other things, to capture the expression of her face which he ‘always desires but
never meets’. As Kokoschka writes:
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Dear Miss M.,
Yesterday I sent you through my friend Dr. P. a life-size picture of my
beloved one, which I beg you to imitate nicely and, mobilising all your patience
and sensuality, to transpose it into reality.
Mind the dimensions of the head and of the neck, the chest, the hips and
the limbs. And mind the contours of the body, for instance the line running
from the neck to the back, the curve of the belly. The second, slanting leg I
drew in only to let you see the shape from inside . . . Please make it possible
for the touch to enjoy these parts where fat or muscles suddenly give way
to sinews, and where the bone penetrates to the surface, like the shin-
bone . . .12
[The pelvis, the shoulder-blade, the collarbone, the arm joints. You will
get a good idea of position and grain of the muscle and fat layers from the
white patches, which I have applied for verisimilitude . . .13]
The head must be an entirely faithful representation; it shows exactly the
expression of the face which I always desire and never meet. The belly and
the stronger muscles on legs, back, etc., must have a certain firmness and
substance. The woman is supposed to be about 35–40 years old . . . The
figure need not be able to stand . . . Perhaps you can see me once more with
the sketch when the skeleton is finished. In order that we should understand
each other properly . . .14
[The skin will probably have to be made of the thinnest fabric available,
gossamer silk or the very finest linen, and will have to be built up in small
patches. I am trying to find out through a chemist whether silk can be treated
to adhere to cotton, without altering its structure and appearance.15]
If the drawing is not quite clear as to the position of a muscle, to a tension
[sic] or a bone, it is better not to consult a book of anatomy, but rather to
examine the place on your own body, which you must move with your hand
until you have the feeling of it warmly and distinctly. Often hands and finger
tips see more than eyes.16
Much like Kokoschka’s intriguing reference to feathers, it is a profound idea

that hands and fingertips often see more than eyes. (I simply note his seedy
appeal to Moos that she forgo consulting anatomy books and touch herself
instead.) This is testament to Kokoschka’s commitment above all to the feel of
the doll. His devotion to it, its value, is after all not just an attachment to it as
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a fetishistic object of desire per se but as a desirous thing to be made use of,
as a thing that satisfies needs.
As such the artist’s remarks are not just an example of touching as seeing.
This is a familiar paradigm in which touching is usually grasped in the dis-
course of the senses that goes back (at least) to the thought experiments of
Descartes’ La Dioptrique (1637), whose blind man ‘sees with [his] hands’,
William Molyneux’s ‘Letter to John Locke’ (1693) and Denis Diderot’s ‘Letter
on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See’ (1749) in which ‘the hypothetic blind
man’ reappears with his ‘seeing’ sticks that extend beyond his own bodily
capability, proving that touch, while unique, is little more than an extension of
seeing. 17 Rather, Kokoschka’s remarks, born of his phenomenological obliga-
tion to future encounters with the doll, are an instance of touching as touching.
When it comes to the doll, he privileges his sense of touch, anticipating touch’s
ability to take pleasure in the contours of bodies, identifying and personalising
the body’s exactitude as eroticised fragmented zones and parts as they come
together to constitute a body as body. When he writes that hands and fingertips
often see more than eyes, and that Moos should ‘make it possible for the touch
to enjoy these parts where fat or muscles suddenly give way to sinews, and
where the bone penetrates to the surface like the shinbone’, he is not just
asserting that touch is a species of vision or an adjunct to seeing but that touch
is itself a form of knowledge, and a research paradigm. It is as if touch itself
has the capacity to enjoy.
For Kokoschka, touch is characterful (attentive to the feel of the quality or
nature of materials), transformational (as the feel of the human form changes
as fat or muscle give way to sinew), surficial (by way of the kind of contact
across and between fingers, materials, curves and contours) and durational
(since only a sustained examining by way of touching will render accurately the
position of a muscle, ‘tension’ [tendon] or bone). Touch even has a temperature
to it – silk, linen and cotton are not Praxiteles’s Parian marble. So to want to
touch, to need to touch certain materials is telling. To want to bring close such
materials in their particularity is telling. Touch is also always situated between
things, it is and it figures a particular distance or the proximity between things,
it is ‘inter’: uniquely interactive, inter-personal (between people and people),
inter-species (between subjects and objects, persons and things) and inter-
animating. (All of which makes sense for a man who found contact with human
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beings unbearable.) As a form of knowledge, touch provokes. It provokes curi-
osity, fascination, anticipation, desire, eroticism, conjuring and animism – it is
Pygmalion’s touching the smooth surface of his statue that makes believe the
marble yield, that wills it to life. Touch has its own singular forms, features,
timbres, its own grammar.
This is a case of touching as a source of pleasure, also a potential danger,
even a perversion, if, as Freud warns – and this is the same for visual perver-
sions like voyeurism – the individual becomes preoccupied by ‘lingering over
the stage of touching’ at the expense of and to the extent that the ‘sexual act’
is no longer the desired outcome of any given encounter. This is not just about
how a sense of touch – nor how touching as such (or looking) – is merely a
preparation for the so-called normal sexual aim. At its most perverse, it is not
just a supplement to but in point of fact is, as detailed in Chapter Two, inde-
pendent of that normal sexual aim.18 Here touching as touching is understood
as something distinct from the privileging of the visual that plays itself out in
perversions that involve looking and being looked at – voyeurism, scopophilia,
exhibitionism and so on. Following on from the attention that these particular
perversions have received in the recent critical literature of psychoanalysis, Art
History, Film Studies and others, fetishistic practices have come to be seen as
primarily visual, and that the fetish is in the service of vision. Yet, as Freud
pointed out back in 1905, in what is I am sure an unintentional inversion of the
thought of Descartes, Molyneux and Diderot, seeing is ‘an activity that is ulti-
mately derived from touching’.19 Indeed, Kokoschka makes it possible to con-
sider the tactile, textual or haptic properties of fetishism; his encounter with
Alma is an encounter in which touching as touching dares to expose this as the
true heart of fetishistic relations. (The haptic, from the Greek haptikos, pertain-
ing to a sense of touch, derives from the verb haptesthai, to contact or to touch.)
It is the haptic properties of the fetishistic thing that are stressed here, over
the visual process of fetishism’s more regulative dialectic of recognition and
disavowal by way of sight.
As Kokoschka and Moos’s correspondence proceeds, as she busies herself
with the doll, his eagerness spills over into a desire for more and more detailed
information on the qualities and variegated nature of its skin. The skin should
be made up of the thinnest gossamer silk or finest linen and composed by way
of the thinnest patches, sutured together like some delicate Frankenstein’s
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monster. Such an attending to the skin, and the prospect of touching it, is all
in order to come to terms with the doll’s human-like qualities. As he says in a
letter of 22 July 1918, his interest is in finding out ‘. . . what [the skin] will be
like and how its texture will vary according to the nature of the part of the body
it belongs to – make the whole thing richer, tenderer, more human’.20 He is
similarly over-attentive to the variety of touching opportunities and sensory
rewards awaiting him, and the ensuing pleasures that touching different kinds
of skin, different parts of that body, will bring.
In a letter dated 10 December 1918, Kokoschka displays the full extent of
his excitement, his nerves, all of which is tied up in his obsession with the doll’s
skin. It becomes unmistakable that he has both a fascination for and also a
fear of touching this skin. It is the skin that is bothering him, inciting him,
consuming him, frustrating him. This is all the more captivating, mesmerising,
because of his enthusiastic and unreserved refusal to touch it. Which is to say,
while he is obsessed with the touch of the doll, until it is complete he is unable
to contemplate touching its material parts as materials, the bits and pieces
that make it up. To do so would be to fail to suspend his disbelief. To fail to
avoid the fact of the manufactured or fabricated nature of his fetish, to fail to
be deceived, is to prohibit the successful realisation of his fantasy. The material
needs to be transformed – and the traces of the making, the evidence of
human labour, made invisible – before he can contemplate touching it. Until
this transformation is complete, the doll is just silk, linen and sawdust. Just
rags:
I cannot get the skin as I do not want to touch with my hand anything that
is to be used for my fetish. You must get it yourself, otherwise I cannot believe
in it, and that is so important.
And now the photos. At first I was quite taken aback by the uncanny, life-
like appearance . . . Hands and feet must still be articulated. Take your own
hand as a model. Or think of a well-groomed Russian woman who is used
to riding. And the foot should be that of a dancer . . .
You must also remember that hand and foot are still attractive when
naked, not plump, but nervous. The size should be such that one can put on
an elegant shoe, as I have already bought a lot of beautiful underwear and
clothes for this purpose. As to the head, the expression is very, very strange
and should even be intensified, but all traces of the making should be extin-
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guished as far as possible. Can the mouth be opened? And has it got teeth
and a tongue? I should be happy.
The cut is good. When doing the eyes, do not try to stylise. Imitate your
own lid, pupil, eye-ball, eye-corner, etc., as much as possible. The cornea
could perhaps be glazed with nail varnish. It would be nice if one could shut
the eyes.
You will not understand, my dear Miss M., that I should have been tortured
for many years by letting those insidious real objects, such as cotton-wool,
cotton, chiffon and whatever the names of those horrible things may be,
obtrude in all their earthly concreteness, while now I hope to embrace with
my eyes a being which is real, yet not real, dead, yet living spirit. I hope that
you make rapid progress; I plan to go to Vienna in January; from there I hope
to go to the mountains where I want to hide, to forget disgusting reality and
to work. And as I can bear no living people but am often delivered to despair
when alone, I beg you again to use all your imagination, all your sensitive-
ness for the ghostly companion you are preparing for me and to breathe into
her such life that in the end, when you have finished the body, there is no
spot which does not radiate feeling, to which you have not applied yourself
to overcome by the most complex devices the dead material; then will all
the delicate and intimate gifts of nature displayed in the female body be
recalled to me in some desperate hour by some symbolic hieroglyph, or sign
with which you have secretly endowed that bundle of rags.21
Hermione Moos is to Kokoschka as Venus is to Pygmalion, as she breathes

such life into his doll of Alma Mahler (figs 13–15). As such, it is pressing that
she hide from him the traces of Alma’s making and hide the fact of its irreduc-
ible fabricated materiality, the dangerous real materials such as cotton wool,
cotton and chiffon, themselves tangible fetishes, these natural materials, these
commodities, the earthly concreteness of these ‘horrible things’. In their very
material fabricating, it is these formless raw materials that become ‘secretly
endowed’, transformed into ‘a being which is real, yet not real, dead, yet living
spirit’ that he can embrace with his eyes. (Kokoschka’s doll, endowed secretly
with the delicate and intimate gifts of nature displayed in the female body,
becomes a symbolic hieroglyph to be deciphered, resonating with Marx’s dis-
cussion of fetishism in which ‘every product of labour [is transformed by value]
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into a social hieroglyphic’. That is to say, by way of the commodity form, labour
as such becomes unrecognisable, and social relations are abstracted, alien-
ated and disappear.22) The being, this bundle of rags, is to overcome the dead-
ness of its material beginnings, and in Kokoschka’s being protected from the
fact of this being’s secret enchanting – a recognition and a disavowal – it
becomes an animate being with a real, living spirit: with an energy, an activity,
an intrinsic force. Moos has at her disposal the most complex devices to turn
dead material into a living doll, which recalls nature’s delicate and intimate
gifts, and whose body will radiate feeling. (It will be a living doll with Moos as
Venus but also as broker, as pimp, conjurer; a zombie with Moos as
Necromancer.)
Why Kokoschka would want to adorn his doll in gifts of beautiful underwear
and clothes is patent. In this he is no different from Pygmalion adorning his
statue, Krafft-Ebing writing of the significance for the fetishist of adornment,
ornament and dress, and, as I will demonstrate later, from so-called ‘idolla-
tors’ customising their bespoke erotic dolls. Why Kokoschka would want such
a being to have a mouth that will open, and teeth and a tongue, and why his
happiness might depend on this certainly sparks speculation. Suffice to say
that this might also be a matter of touching as touching, although mouths,
teeth and tongues are clearly not un-psychoanalytic.
It is also in this letter of 10 December 1918 that Kokoschka first mentions
photographs. These are, it can be assumed, the photographs Moos has taken
of the doll, and of herself with the doll, mindful of the drawings and oil sketch
he has sent her, so that he can get a real sense of its progress.23 If this is the
case, it is staggering that Kokoschka was ‘quite taken aback by [its] uncanny
life-like appearance’. Surely these photographs portray a doll that looks
nothing like Alma Mahler herself? It could not. This fetish could not be an
ideal woman fashioned from natural material and woven fabric, could it?
Whether pictured recumbent on an armchair being attended to by Moos, lying
on her left side, or sitting cross-legged, hand on heart, with the exception of
her face from the tops of her toes to the tips of her fingers, she is furry,
monstrously furry, a furry freak, wholly detached from Mahler herself, perhaps
closer to historical side-show ‘freaks’ such as the Mexican Digger Indian Julia
Pastrana (b. 1834), known as the ‘bearded and hairy lady’ (fig. 19), or the
Russian Fedor Jeftichew, better known as JoJo the Dog-Faced Boy (b. 1868).
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19 [right] Vinzenz Katzler, Julia Pastrana,
before 1900, lithograph.
20 [facing top] Oskar Kokoschka,

The Woman in Blue, 1919, oil on canvas,
Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.
21 [facing bottom] Oskar Kokoschka,

Painter with Doll, 1922, oil on canvas,
80 x 120 cm, Nationalgalerie, Staatliche
Museen zu Berlin.
Both of whom suffered from hypertrichosis, excessive hair growth, and were
exhibited in the USA and Europe respectively in the mid- to late nineteenth
century.24
Even though it is reported in the biographical literature on Kokoschka, albeit
only once, that he had provided Moos with photographs of Mahler, when it
comes to Moos’s decisions regarding the texture of the skin, there appears
little evidence that she referred to them.25 Rather, it looks as if she took as a
guide his 1918 oil sketch Standing Female Nude, Alma Mahler, the sketch that
he had crafted from memory and dispatched to her. If this is correct, she took
literally the white patches of paint he sketched to simulate muscle and fat,
attending to his application of paint and the paint itself as though these brush-
strokes, their expressive swirls and curls, are meant not just to signify but be
replicated faithfully, thereby coming to enliven the surface texture and feel of
the doll’s furry body. The painting is thus metamorphosed, not so much rep-
resented as literally presented again, into a doll. And then the doll is made
back – metamorphosed – into a painting, for the furriness of the doll’s skin
seems to re-materialise on the surface of works such as The Woman in Blue
(1919; fig. 20) and Painter with Doll (1922; fig. 21), where the artist is depicted
with his left hand resting on the doll’s knee and his right hand either poking
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its belly or pointing to its inadequate sexual and reproductive anatomy.26 Like-
wise, in At the Easel (1922) the artist touches or points to the doll’s inside left
thigh or thereabouts. Yet, books on Kokoschka do not mention the doll’s furry
skin, not even in passing.27 Furthermore, Kokoschka himself is taken aback
not by the doll’s furriness, or by its divergences from Alma Mahler, but by its
uncanny resemblance to her. The doll is unsettling not because it is horrific
and monstrous and freakish (causing ‘intellectual uncertainty’, anxiety or fear)
or because it threatens blindness, and everything that this entails, but because
it is so familiar given its life-like appearance. Kokoschka sees something of
her in the doll that I do not, or perhaps he anticipates coming to know some-
thing else, some kind of uncanny or enigmatic force that is intrinsic to its form,
born for instance of the way in which the materials have been ‘secretly
endowed’, turned into a being whose body will radiate feeling, reciprocate feel-
ings even, making it thereby capable of independent activity.
This unsettling feeling at first led me to believe that perhaps the photographs
mentioned in the letter of 10 December 1918, which also refers to photographs
taken months before the doll was delivered to Kokoschka, were thus of an
incomplete doll. These are photographs, I thought, of the doll in the process
of being made, fabricated, crafted, a progress report from Moos, you might
say, the doll stripped bare of her skin, even, revealing her underbelly, cotton
wool, cotton and sawdust, perhaps even the feathers that Kokoschka had been
intrigued by in his 22 July letter. These are all the ‘horrible things’ he cannot
bear to touch, that will shatter his illusion. Yet he is not horrified to see them.
I came to realise that it could also be the case that this is his reaction to the
completed doll, with its wrap of swanskin, and he is happy with it, not because
it looks like Mahler per se but because of what it is.28 Also that this is simply
what he wants. It is not a stand-in or a surrogate. He does not substitute a
fetish for reality. The fetish is reality. It is his fetishistic thing of both desire and
the promise of satisfaction. Hypertrichophilic, Kokoschka would want a doll
with excessive hair growth.29 This is not a man suffering from castration
anxiety – fearful of the fur and what it hides. He has after all written that he
would be happy for the doll to have teeth. Unless, that is, he is in total denial,
so much so that he is blind to the fact that this furry fetish is so absolutely
fetishistic, like Meret Oppenheim’s fur-covered cup entitled Object (1936), that
to embrace it fully is perhaps to refute it entirely. There is no demand for
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depilation of the doll, the removal of all the hair above the surface of the skin,
or epilation, no plea for what is now called a ‘de-fuzzing’. Kokosckha displays
no distress when confronted by these photographs, he does not even make
note of or question why this furry fetish is furry.
In the main, Kokoschka’s letters to Moos from late 1918 to early 1919 reflect
his concern with the doll’s life-likeness, and he continues to fret that it might
not live up to his expectations. While he mentions the doll’s furriness in a later
letter, written after the doll’s unveiling, there is only one brief, albeit crucial,
mention of it. In a letter dated 23 January 1919, in confidence he remarks on
his self-conscious, somewhat embarrassed devotion to the doll’s hairiness, at
least to a distinct part of it. Whether he is ashamed by this admission or not
–he says that he is – it does not preclude him from describing his requirements
for the shape and feel and look of the ‘parties honteuses’, that shameful body
part through which medieval commentators believed the cloven-hoofed devil
himself spoke:
Although I feel ashamed I must still write this, but it remains our secret (and
you are my confidante): the parties honteuses must be made perfect and
luxuriant and covered with hair, otherwise it is not to be a woman but a
monster. And only a woman can inspire me to create works of art, even when
she lives in my imagination only. I count the days until she will be ready to
greet me . . .30
It is the perfect, luxuriant, hairy parties honteuses, to be set with hair, not
embroidered, that stops the doll, what Kokoschka here calls a woman, from
being a monster. So, a monster’s parties honteuses are, presumably, not
perfect, not luxuriant, not covered with hair. The doll’s overall hairiness is not
monstrous for him; it is a marker, in fact, of its non-monstrous-ness.
In letters from January and February 1919, Kokoschka is beside himself with
anticipation and frustration. No longer even concerned with the doll’s likeness
to Mahler, he just wants his ‘goddess’, his ‘beloved’, to arrive. On 22 February
1919, for instance, he writes to Moos: ‘be assured that, whatever the doll may
look like, it will be more dear to me and more of a refuge than the whole of
reality of today’.31 In preparation for the arrival of what his household would
call the Schweigsame Frau (the Silent Woman), Kokoschka trains his landlord’s
housemaid, Hulda (whom he sometimes calls Reserl) how to wait on the doll.
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He buys Parisian clothes and underwear for her and he discusses with a
coachman the possible routes through town that would best display the most
impressive monuments, as if such things might matter to a doll.
things to be made use of
In April 1919 the doll arrives.32

From this point on, the chronology of events and the accounts of Kokoschka’s
reaction to the doll vary considerably. In 1947 Edith Hoffmann recounted the
earliest and fullest version of events, reporting that on the day of the doll’s
arrival, the artist threw a party and invited many of his friends to witness the
box’s delivery and the unveiling of its contents:
Kokoschka, triumphantly claiming that the lady whom they were now to see
would prove to them that beauty and perfection were no vain dreams, opened
the box. The anti-climax was terrible: from the careful packing emerged a
monster, studiously constructed according to Kokoschka’s most extravagant
demands, exactly corresponding with his detailed orders, covered with the
most delicate silks and skins, softly padded where softness was desired,
movable in all its limbs, carefully painted and neatly dressed – yet a monster,
ghostly in its faithfulness to life, grotesque in its lifelessness.33
Hoffmann’s account continues:
Kokoschka was stunned. His dream had become literally true, only to die in
its realisation. The doll, whom he had endowed with all the attributes of
grace, attractiveness and the glamour of a love-thirsty heart, was still a doll.
It was dead, comic and even less acceptable than the living woman of whom
he despaired. Meanwhile his friends jeered aloud, and Kokoschka grew
enraged. The doll was seized and carried out of the house into the garden
to be there buried.34
From Hoffmann’s account in 1947 of the unveiling of the doll to Alfred Wei-
dinger’s 1996 telling of it in Kokoschka and Alma Mahler, for the majority of
commentators the event is a huge anti-climax. Kokoschka is terribly disap-
pointed. The ‘monster’ that emerges is ghostly, grotesque, lifeless. It is a dead
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doll, if there is such a thing – no wonder it has to be buried. For Hoffmann,
the artist is stunned and all the more distressed because the doll appears
exactly as he requested it and, in its corresponding to his orders and its ulti-
mate lifelessness, his dream withers and dies in its realisation. For Weidinger,
the artist is utterly disappointed because for these reasons ‘[t]he doll could
scarcely fulfil Kokoschka’s erotic and sexual desires’.35 Kokoschka is enraged,
wrote Hoffmann, the doll is buried in the garden and the party continues as a
quartet plays classical music, the drink flows freely and his friends try to
console him.
Hoffmann continued her narrative by quoting Kokoschka from an unacknowl-
edged source: ‘The orgy lasted until the next morning when criminal investiga-
tion police, warned by a passer-by that a woman had been stripped and mur-
dered in that hidden place, put in an appearance and investigated the corpus
delicti now in full daylight in the tulip field, where it had lain forgotten.’36
This could be the end of the story of Kokoschka’s doll of Alma Mahler; Wei-
dinger even wrote that on that very morning ‘the refuse collectors removed’
it.37 Yet it is not. It is not the end of the range of accounts of the events, or of
the contradictory accounts of Kokoschka’s reaction to the doll, or of the ‘death’
of the doll itself. Although both Hoffmann and Weidinger wrote that Kokoschka
was disappointed, stunned, Weidinger contradicted himself two pages later,
quoting Kokoschka, who said he ‘was enraptured!’ when he saw the doll: ‘It
was as beautiful as Alma, even though its breasts and hips were stuffed with
sawdust.’38 To persist with and add to these inconsistencies, in his autobiog-
raphy of 1971 Kokoschka speaks of the unveiling of his doll thus:
As I lifted it [‘the effigy of Alma Mahler’] [out of the box and] into the light of
day, the image of her I had preserved in my memory stirred into life. The
light I saw at that moment was without precedent. It was as foreign to the
science of optics as it was to the techniques or theories of the Neo-
Impressionists.39
The various tellings of the unveiling of the doll are not the only contradictions
in the story of Kokoschka’s Alma. The artist goes on to reaffirm the facts of
Hoffmann’s story of a party but seems to offer an altogether different time-
frame, in which the party could not have taken place on the evening of the doll’s
arrival because he drew and painted it on numerous subsequent occasions:
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Finally, after I had drawn it and painted it over and over again, I decided to
do away with it. It had managed to cure me completely of my Passion. So I
gave a big champagne Party with chamber music, during which my maid
Hulda exhibited the doll in all its beautiful clothes for the last time. When
dawn broke – I was quite drunk, as was everyone else – I beheaded it out in
the garden and broke a bottle of red wine over its head.40
Reaffirming Hoffmann’s story of what took place at the party and at its finale,
Kokoschka writes that it was organised to ‘put an end to my inanimate
companion’:
Early the next morning, when the party was almost forgotten, the police
appeared at the door, investigating a report that a headless body had been
seen in the garden . . . ‘What sort of body?’ I asked. By now Dr Posse [Koko-
schka’s landlord] had been wakened too, and in our dressing-gowns we went
down to the garden, where the doll lay, headless and apparently drenched
in blood. Though the policemen had to laugh, they still reported me for
causing a public nuisance . . . [T]he public nuisance . . . had to be removed.
The dustcart came in the grey light of dawn, and carried away the dream of
Eurydice’s return. The doll was an image of a spent love that no Pygmalion
could bring to life.41
Unlike Hoffmann, both Kokoschka in his autobiography and the journalist

Suzanne Keegan in her book The Eye of God, who uses Hoffmann’s text, make
it clear that the artist hung on to the doll until the summer of 1920, more than
a year after its arrival. Keegan relates that it was at this point that Kokoschka
held the party in the doll’s honour, not on the day of its initial arrival. By the
time of the party in summer 1920, Keegan says that
his fantastical needs had been assuaged. The Silent Woman said her good-
byes at a champagne party thrown for her by the man who had conjured her
into existence. As a chamber orchestra from the opera played, she moved
among the guests on Reserl’s arm. During the course of the evening the
strain of being passed from drunken hand to drunken hand took its toll: her
head fell off and lay, symbolically, in a pool of red wine. The next day the
dustmen came in the grey light of dawn and carried her away. The dream of
Eurydice’s return was gone for ever. For Kokoschka, the exorcism of Alma
was now complete.42
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There are two contradictory time frames in play. If Weininger and even Hoff-
mann are incorrect and other accounts of the events, including Keegan’s, take
Kokoschka’s version as true, then the eighteen or so months of the doll’s life
are certainly worthy of note. Little concrete information is available regarding
Kokoschka’s doll during this time. For years there were rumours in Dresden
that he was seen around and about with his Schweigsame Frau, in carriages
on sunny days, in a box at the opera and so on.43 What is certain is that the
doll becomes his model, that he executes thirty pen and ink drawings of it and
it is acknowledged, as I have noted, as the model for his painting The Woman
in Blue (1919). Hoffmann says nothing of this interim period, however.
The story of Oskar Kokoschka and his doll is confused, then. There are
inconsistencies in accounts of the order of things, and their significance.
Reports on both the doll’s unveiling and Kokoschka’s reception of it – that he
was both stunned and enraptured – vary wildly. What is also significant are the
contradictory reports of Kokoschka’s own versions of the unveiling. This is of
interest because the time frame of events and his feelings towards the doll are
linked: the longer he hangs on to it, the more likely it is that he has uses for
it. What does this longer period have to do with the uses to which the doll is
put? What do these uses have to do with the doll as a doll, its fetishistic figur-
ing, its rendering, its materiality, its furriness, its monstrousness and ulti-
mately with touching as touching?
In order to attend to these questions, I turn to a letter as yet unmentioned.
It is the one Kokoschka sent Moos after the doll’s arrival, in which he admits
its furriness. While Hoffmann does not refer to any correspondence between
Kokoschka and Moos after the doll’s arrival, Keegan mentions a letter that the
artist ‘dashed off’ to write, on first setting eyes on the doll. It expresses his full
disappointment and is also the first time that Kokoschka speaks of, perhaps
even becomes aware of, the full implications of Alma’s furriness:
What shall we do now, your doll . . . has quite taken me aback. I was pre-
pared to make allowances to subtract from my fancy in favour of reality; but
in too many ways she belies what I demanded of her and expected of you.
The outer shell is a polar-bear pelt, suitable for a shaggy imitation bedside rug
rather than the soft and pliable skin of a woman . . . Then there is the skeleton.
I asked you repeatedly to reinforce it with glue or something of the kind; but
soon upon arrival it grew so soft that arms and legs now dangle like stock-
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ings stuffed with flour rather than resembling limbs of flesh and bone, an
effect I certainly had not looked for. Yet this was the crucial element to enable
me to use the doll as a model . . . indeed this was the very reason why I had
her made; but the whole thing collapses like a bundle of rags . . .
There are gaping holes along the back and the thighs, one of which already
hangs half loose, and one can clearly see the stuff of which the thing is
made. The needlework in those places where the fur ends is so careless as
to seem only basted . . . In closing this account of deficiencies, I must tell
you that my apprehensions about the discrepancies in the proportions as
against those shown in my drawing, proved to be only too well grounded.
The arms have no real shape, the upper arms and forearms being quite at
odds. The knees seem to be afflicted with elephantiasis, and the legs have
no style at all. The result is that I cannot even dress the doll, which you know
was my intention, let alone array her in delicate and precious robes. Even
attempting to pull on one stocking would be like asking a French dancing-
master to waltz with a polar bear.44
It is as though Kokoschka had never seen the photographs sent by the dress-
maker of the furry doll and is now seeing it for the first time. Finally! Finally
Kokoschka seems to have realised quite how furry it is. It has the pelt of a
polar-bear, a swanskin wrap, more appropriate for a rug than the skin of a
real woman. Perhaps even worse, ‘the stuff of which the thing is made’, the
‘earthly concreteness’ of ‘horrible things’, which should have been ‘secretly
endowed’ in order to magic an inanimate being into animating life itself, is all
too visible.
What to make of these contradictions and confusions and of Kokoschka’s final
letter to Moos? The simple answer is that the confusions are the result of minor
mis-communications between the artist and the dressmaker, evidence of
slightly inaccurate research, misinformation or faulty memory and as such are
of no real concern. I propose, in contrast, that there is something more disquiet-
ing afoot. I think that both Hoffmann and Weidinger are incorrect in their inter-
pretation of the situation: Kokoschka is not stunned because the doll is as a
ghost is to life and is as a grotesque is to lifelessness, as Hoffmann claims. Nor
is he disappointed because of the doll’s inability to fulfil his ‘erotic and sexual
desires’, as Weidinger puts it. I think quite the opposite: it is not just that the
doll embodies the idea of the fantasy, the possibility to act as a surrogate for
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his lost love, to be Mahler, but rather that the Silent Woman’s lifelessness is
the very thing that Kokoschka desires. Like Freud’s fetish, as a stand-in it takes
the place of the primary and proper sexual object and it actually becomes, is,
the primary and proper sexual thing. Yes, he is attached to it as a fetishistic
object of desire but also and all the more as a desirous thing to be made use
of. On this point in particular Kokoschka is perfectly aware that he is ordering
a doll from Moos, not a wife from Venus, and that, much like Pygmalion’s, this
doll is a faithful rendering of the doll as he has requested it in drawings, paint-
ings and numerous written descriptions, built to his exact specifications.
Hoffman writes that the doll is a monster and an anti-climax because it is just
a doll. I suggest that the artist is stunned because it is a doll, as such, and it is
rendered as per his request. His ‘illusion’ is prolonged but perhaps not in the
way he had anticipated. He never wanted Alma back. From the beginning he
wanted the doll; he just did not realise it. He thought he wanted a fetish of Alma
and that, having conjured it up as a conceptual extension of himself, a gift to
himself, it would be a substitute for or even be Mahler. In fact, all he wanted
was the doll. He is not disappointed because it was dead, ghost-like, grotesque,
lifeless, monstrous, as the literature indicates – who would be foolish enough
to claim that he had actually believed the doll could be alive? Rather, he is
stunned, enraptured because it was not alive. As has been seen, inanimate
human form itself provokes intimate and erotic relations.
Kokoschka’s affair with Mahler had lasted three years. His relations with the
doll lasted eighteenth months. This is impressive for someone who is sup-
posed to be stunned, which is to say, disappointed by the doll’s unveiling. His
willingness to keep the doll close to him, his over-valuing of it – as noted
earlier, for Freud the over-valuing of things is characteristic of masculine
forms of loving – suggests that he is committed to it in a number of ways; to
him it is more than just an artist’s model or a muse. Perhaps it is simply a
matter of him seeking to ‘be cured’ of his obsession with Mahler: again and
again authors claim that the man who conjured up his own creation into exist-
ence has now eased his need and is thus able to ‘exorcise’ this creature
spawned of his desire. Kokoschka himself writes that drawing and painting the
doll again and again ‘cured him of his passion’.45 (However, it is not clear if it
is the drawing and the painting of the doll or the doll itself that is the cure.)
Thus, perhaps the doll as a fetishistic surrogate for Mahler does the job until
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he has both recovered from Mahler, his amour fou, and become tired of her
replacement, the doll. (In any case, the fetishistic substitute is, to paraphrase
Schor, never the same as the original, proper, normal sexual object and the
original is itself a fiction.) Having kept the doll, enraptured, having drawn and
painted it again and again and again, having worn it out, beheaded it, drenched
it in red wine, it is, it always was, as he writes in his autobiography, an image
of ‘spent love that no Pygmalion could bring to life’ or, one might say, a spent
love that no Pygmalion could or would want to bring to life.
There is yet more to this state of affairs between Kokoschka and his doll.
Much as for the pre-Ovidian Pygmalion and his statue, it concerns the artist’s
sense of Alma as his bedfellow. In fact, Kokoschka himself recalls in his auto-
biography an encounter at his party when a Venetian courtesan, confronted by
the Silent Woman, asks him ‘whether [he] slept with the doll’.46 If he should
‘ever tire of keeping the doll warm’, she says, he is welcome to come to her
bedroom where she has a ‘tiger-skin lay at the foot of the bed’ that might
interest him. It is a nice analogy, especially given his own allusion to the doll’s
outer shell as akin to a polar-bear pelt suitable for a shaggy imitation bedside
rug, but the courtesan has missed the point. The Silent Woman is not like any
other dead, inanimate, furry object that can be substituted one for the
other – whether directly, mnemonically or by way of assignable relations. It is
not interchangeable with other dolls or tiger skins or polar-bear pelts. Nor is
it simply or merely a substitute for Mahler. Kokoschka does not substitute a
fetish for reality; the overvalued fetish is the thing the attachment to which
structures what man’s desire is. As such the doll as a thing, a thing that things,
shapes and transforms man’s understanding of his erotic attachment to such
form or forms, the itinerary of his own desire and, ultimately, himself. The doll
is deceitful, perhaps a semblance or a resembling, certainly also a making,
fabricating, a crafted artifice where labouring and hand-made material par-
ticularities are integral to what this inanimate human form is and how it does
what it does. By way of crafting, ingenious fingers, dexterity, touching, delicate
contact between human and natural and synthetic materials – as Kokoschka
puts it rather patronisingly, by Moos employing her ‘ingenuity’, her ‘feminine
sensibility’, her ‘whole feminine imagination’ – by way of the unfurling of both
this labouring and the materials themselves, of necessity intrinsic to such an
inanimate form as inanimate, there comes an erotic sensuality. Such a render-
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ing, a presenting again speaks to the doll’s neither mysterious nor enigmatic
use value but, rather, to the uses to which it is put. It is the producing of Moos’s
labour that satisfies Kokoschka’s needs. Kokoschka does not answer the cour-
tesan’s questions: does he sleep with the doll, does he keep her warm at night?
This silent refusal is telling.
What can be concluded from this? For me there are two conclusions.
The first is that Kokoschka’s erotic encounters with the doll, the idea of his
wishful desire for it, is an instance of touching as touching in which intimate
contact is sought with inanimate human form as such. From the beginning,
his attention to the touch and feel of it, his handling of it, its materiality, its
phenomenality and the perverse pleasures in such lingering touching oppor-
tunities are evidence of this. Such touching gets close to a paraphilia (Greek
para, ‘besides’, and philia, ‘love’), those perversions through which persons are
sexually aroused by contact with non-responsive or non-consenting subjects
or, more particularly for my purposes here, non-human or inanimate things.
This paraphilia could be frotteurism or frottage. Both are from the French verb
frotter, ‘to rub’, from frotteur, noun, ‘rubber’ or ‘one who rubs’, although the
former (frotteurism) is generally considered to prompt non-consensual activi-
ties while the latter (frottage, not to be confused with the Surrealist art tech-
nique of frottage or rubbing) is consensual. (For me, when it comes to inani-
mate things, the question of consent or non-consent is immaterial. For the
frotteur, it is not.) Here is a double fetishisation, where the rubber rubs, and
the rubbing that the rubber does is a rubbing of fur that, between them, may
just radiate feelings.
The second conclusion, coming out of the first, is that because Kokoschka’s
preoccupation with the doll is an exemplary model of touching as touching, as
an artificial practice productive of pleasure in and of itself, it is the hope of or
a search for a touching of oneself, an act of auto-affection, a solitary pleasure
that can, might, take place. As the French philosopher Luce Irigaray wrote, it
is for men that such a prospect can or might take place but even then only by
way of some kind of mediation, by way of a tool or an ‘instrument’. Irigaray
speaks of a hand, a device or a woman’s body. One might add a furry doll as
furry fetish. In the end, Irigaray concludes that (as the art historian Kelly
Dennis puts it) because of the way in which ‘male masturbation enforces [this]
distance from himself while touching himself’, this mediation means he ‘can
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only touch himself as other to himself’.47 As bleak, wretched and inhumane as
this might sound, the doll as fetish, tool or instrument does nonetheless func-
tion in interesting ways as a techne. It is a bringing forth, a revealing and a
challenging by way of touching as touching, much as it is for Pygmalion and
his bedfellow, for the young man from a distinguished family who (as relayed
by Pliny) copulated with the Aphrodite of Knidos, for Alcetas of Rhodes with a
marble Eros also carved by Praxiteles, for Cleisophus in the temple of Samos,
for the Greek at Delphi, for the gardener and his Venus de Milo and for many
others: as a masturbatory device.
Oskar Kokoschka’s doll of Alma Mahler was resurrected more than eighty
years after it was unceremoniously beheaded, soaked in red wine and taken
away with the rubbish. On 23 April 2005 it magically reappeared during a per-
formance at the private view of an exhibition curated by Suzie Plumb entitled
Guys’n’Dolls: Art, Science, Fashion & Relationships at the Brighton Museum &
Art Gallery on the south coast of England.48 The private view itself was opened
by the Director of Cultural Services for Brighton Council, who then went on to
introduce the evening’s opening event. The lights went down on two hundred
or so people crammed into the gallery. Stage left, a wounded man on a stretcher
is brought into the room. Kokoschka. There is a knock at the door and a woman
in a maid’s outfit enters – Reserl – with a precious package. After much to-ing
and fro-ing, she strips the box of its ropes and wrapping paper and its lid is
ripped off. Kokoschka is out of the line of vision but his Alma is revealed to us,
alive and well. Well, perhaps not so well. Reserl, as the stage directions tell
us, exclaims with horror and disgust: ‘Ughghghgh!’ ‘What an ugly monster!’
she goes on to say, ‘[t]hat’s a . . . Is that supposed to be a woman?’ Kokoschka
asks if the doll does not look like a woman, if it does not look alive? Reserl
replies that it, the doll, looks ‘rotten’ and ‘dreadful’ and ‘unhealthy’ as though
she has ‘some kind of skin disease’ that ‘reminds [her] of a polar-bear skin’.
She is ‘wrinkled’ and it looks as though she has ‘fatty deposits under her skin,
creating a revolting, irregular unevenness around her hips and buttocks. And
the same is true for the skin on her arms and back’. Finally, Kokoschka opens
his eyes and stares at the doll. Stage directions indicate that ‘[h]e whispers, in
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22 Paulus Manker as Oskar Kokoschka and Dana
Ofer as his chambermaid, Reserl, in Joshua
(Yehoshua) Sobol’s polydrama Alma, directed by
Paulus Manker, Jerusalem 2009.
what could be either bewilderment or dreadful disappointment, “Alma my soul,

my life! (Stretches out his arms) Come, my love! Let me embrace you. It’s been
so long since I last saw you. Where have you been all these years? No, don’t
say a word”‘ (fig. 22). Kokoschka embraces the doll and they dance. Finally, the
choreography comes to an end, the doll is laid down on the chaise longue, the
lights go down and there is applause, although no one quite knows what to
make of what they have just witnessed.49
The man playing Oskar Kokoschka is Paulus Manker, the Austrian director,
actor and performer who had arrived earlier in the day by way of London’s
Gatwick airport with the doll wrapped up and slung over his shoulder. With the
real doll unavailable for Plumb’s exhibition, Manker had kindly offered to lend
the curator his doll for the show, as well as proposing that the two of them
turn up in order to stage the performance on the opening night. The perfor-
mance that he staged is a scene taken from his theatrical spectacle, ‘Alma’.
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23 Installation of Guys ‘n Dolls: Art, Science, Fashion
and Relationships exhibition, Brighton Festival, 
Brighton Museum and Art Gallery,
23 April–12 June 2005.
His doll has played a central role in this drama since he had her made in 1996
as part of his own ongoing obsession with Alma Mahler. Between 1997 and
2001 the play ran for 140 performances at the Sanatorium Purkersdorf, Vienna,
before going on tour. In 2002 it transferred to Venice where it played at the
Palazzo Zenobio, on the Fondamenta del Soccorso, in 2003 to Lisbon where it
was performed at the Convento dos Inglesinhos and in 2004 in Los Angeles at
the Los Angeles Theater. In 2005 it found its way back to Austria, this time
staged at Castle Petronell. Manker himself plays Kokoschka, as he does in the
film version of his play entitled Alma: The Widow of the 4 Arts, for which he also
directed and wrote the script.50 (The script is based on a Polydrama by the
well-known Israeli playwright Joshua (Yehoshua) Sobol.) Thanks to Manker,
Kokoschka’s Alma Mark ii, Manker’s Alma, is alive and well.
It is a stroke of luck that Manker has his replica of Kokoschka’s doll, which
he had had for nine years, and that he was kind enough to make it available
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to the Guys’n’Dolls exhibition in Brighton. Following its performance, it remained
on the chaise longue for the duration of the exhibition, surrounded by photo-
graphs of Hermione Moos with Kokoschka’s doll, of the 1930s mannequin-
maker Lester Gaba with his doll Cynthia, and others taken by Morton Bartlett,
Elena Dorfman and Hans Bellmer (fig. 23).51 Plumb informed me that during
the private view and throughout the exhibition’s run, visitors could not stop
themselves from touching the doll, stroking it as it lay on its couch, and the
gallery guards were instructed to warn them against this. As the resurrection
of Kokoschka’s doll makes clear, when people want to know what something
feels like, touching as touching is never far away. Here, in our own desire to
bring life to Kokoschka’s doll, to Manker’s doll, in touching the doll and in
knowing what it feels like, we play out our own Pygmalion hubris. We touch,
we feel, we stroke, we caress, we may even sneak a rub, as our own paraphilic
frotteurism, as well as our own narcissistic auto-affection, comes to the fore.
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4 / modernity’s outmodedness:
surrealism’s mannequins electric
and shop-window dummies
‘Psychoanalysis is in fashion this winter.’

André Breton, 19221
‘[T]he Surrealist woman is a male forgery.’

Xavière Gauthier, 19712
‘[T]he mannequin is no longer an exact copy of nature, it has

more life.’
André Vigneau, 19253
‘This time I wanted flesh, artificial flesh, as anachronistic as

possible.’
Salvador Dalí, 19424
I do not like Surrealism, never have, never will. I feel the same way towards
Surrealism that the Austrian satirist Karl Krauss felt towards psychoanalysis:
it is the disease whose cure it purports to be. While I think that Krauss is wrong
on psychoanalysis, his aphorism exposes, when modified, the cliché that is the
nucleus of Surrealism: it discovers the unconscious consciously and then
illustrates it.
For me, Surrealism’s embracing of largely Freudian (also Jungian and Laca-
nian) figurations of sexuality, eroticism, perversity, dream interpretation, free
association, the uncanny, hysteria, narcissism, repetition, love, the pleasure
principle and the death drive, Eros and Thanatos, trauma, shock, castration
24 Maya Deren, Marcel Duchamp’s installation Lazy

Hardware, Gotham Book Mart, New York, 1945, Window
Design, Gotham Book Mart, New York, 1945, gelatin
silver print, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of
Jacqueline, Paul and Peter Matisse in memory of
their mother, Alexina Duchamp.
modernity’s outmodedness / 137
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and death (all as anti-rational) is rarely more than the superficial, self-evident
and insincere ruminating of grown men pretending to behave like pubescent
or adolescent boys.5 This is especially true of Surrealism’s fetishisation of
women’s bodies, particularly by way of dolls and mannequins. Here inquiries
into love, beauty, eroticism, what Woman is and what Woman wants, are
pretexts for generating stereotypical and archetypal renderings of the
de-humanised woman, woman as object, woman as object of male desire; as
castrating, as lacking, as substitute; woman as fetish. Surrealism’s psychoa-
nalysis produces conscious illustrations of the unconscious, products of the
conscious. Even its own figurations – of the marvellous, convulsive beauty,
mad love (amour fou), objective chance, the ‘play’ of the exquisite corpse, auto-
matic writing (écriture automatique), and so on – are for me an illustrating, an
applying. Surrealism, with its revolutionary pretensions, its bourgeois anti-
bourgeois political radicalism, its mining of the unconscious, its perverting of
sexuality and the erotic, its surrealising of the (ready-made) object, and its
eroticisation of inanimate human form never begins to engage critically with
psychoanalysis, to put pressure on it, to challenge it, to transform it, to tear it
asunder. Here I agree with Dr Georges Gatian de Clérambault who in 1929
dismissed Breton and his fellow Surrealists as a group concerned with ‘saving
themselves the trouble of thinking’.6
That said, given the subject of this book, it is impossible, and would be wrong,
to circumvent Surrealism. It is pivotal. The Surrealists are, after all, heirs to
earlier imaginative, mechanical and magical ideas about inanimate human
form, heirs to fantasies of man-made, artificial female figures becoming
animate and possessing the desire for life. Furthermore, they were succeeded
particularly, albeit often critically, by a sculptural turn in the 1980s–2000s to
dolls and mannequins, or human forms as dolls and mannequins, by sculptors,
photographers and installation and new media artists such as Louise Bour-
geois, the Chapman Brothers, Judy Fox, Robert Gober, Duane Hanson, Mike
Kelley, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Tony Ousler, Charles Ray, Cindy Sherman, Kiki
Smith and Cathy Wilkes.7
Much has been written on the Surrealist Object, the erotic object of and in
Surrealism, Surrealism’s utilisation and mobilisation of the figure of the doll,
the mannequin and the artificial body part.8 These writings are undoubtedly
more thoughtful than the works of which they speak. I shall return to Surreal-
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ism’s handling of dolls, mannequins and artificial body parts, and to the key
debates thereof. I shall do so in order to foreground the particular convergence
or encounter between them and a commercial context with which they were
in frequent dialogue and collusion: the nascent trade of manufacturing dolls
and mannequins for shop windows. In this convergence or encounter, the
figure and the form of the doll, the mannequin and the artificial body part make
manifest and articulate differently the intimate ties between capitalism and
fetishism. (This sets things up for the following two chapters, which concen-
trate wholly on the intimacies between men and commercial sex dolls in capi-
talist modernity.) I argue – this is my minor contribution to these debates on
Surrealism – that this convergence or encounter is more significant for what
the shop-window dummy as installation, display and spectacle, as form, tech-
nology and thing, and not the Surrealist object, imparts about capitalism and
fetishism. (For it is a commodity fetish twice over – both the bearer of com-
modities and itself a commodity.) It is the shop-window dummy rather than
the Surrealist mannequin, I suggest, that tells of capitalism’s capacity for
generating an erotics that, in creating the perceived conditions of its own
undermining, undoing and demise, affirms all the more so its means, power
and will. In the end, a close attending to the mannequin as such – to the his-
toricity, materiality and technicity of both the department-store dummy and
the Surrealist mannequin – will also activate necessarily consideration of a
dialectical tension in modernity’s temporalities, between the (present-ness of
the) time of the new and the charged energies of the outmoded.
the electric charge, the erotic spark:

‘mysterious generative forces’
Critics, historians and theorists have written at length of Surrealism’s com-

mitment to the doll, the mannequin and the artificial body part. It is an obses-
sion, a fixation that preoccupies Surrealism earlier even than André Breton’s
‘Manifesto of Surrealism’ (1924) in which he refers to ‘the modern mannequin’
as a manifestation of ‘the marvelous’.9 This interest emerges in part from the
Dadaist theatricalisation of dolls, mannequins and puppets by Hannah Höch
and Sophie Taeuber, for instance, and performative installations such as the
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First International Dada Fair at Otto Burchard’s gallery in Berlin in 1920 where
a pig-faced mannequin in military garb was suspended from the ceiling.10 It
circles around fetishism, perversity, eroticism, compulsive beauty, sexual dif-
ference, the phallus as signifier, lack and castration – all handy psychoanalytic
concerns that were grist to the Surrealists’ mill. It is because dolls, manne-
quins, automatons, dummies and waxworks are particular kinds of fetishistic
objects – examples of what Donald Kuspit calls the ‘modern fetish’ – that
Surrealist objects generate and articulate what Freud had identified, as has
been seen, as the uncanny feelings brought on by a sense that ‘automatic,
mechanical processes . . . are at work beneath the ordinary appearance of
animation’.11
Following on from Breton’s ‘Manifesto’, significant moments in Surrealist
and Surrealist-related engagements with dolls, mannequins and artificial body
parts include Man Ray’s photographic publication in La Révolution surréaliste
(1925; originally commissioned and published by Vogue) of the new range of
paradigm-shifting mannequins from V. N. Siégel on display at the fashion
pavilion of the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris;
Hans Bellmer’s photographs of his first poupée, which appeared in the pub-
lisher Albert Skira and Breton’s magazine Minotaure in December 1934;
Salvador Dalí’s installation Rainy Taxi (1938), the first work encountered on
arrival at the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme (fig. 25); further installa-
tions by Dalí in 1939, in both the vitrines of Manhattan’s Bonwit Teller depart-
ment store (following an earlier installation there in 1936) where a bisque-
faced old-fashioned mannequin lying in a bath full of dirty water and weeping
tears of blood is besieged by more than a hundred mannequin hands holding
mirrors up to its archaic features; and his ‘Dream of Venus’ pavilion at the New
York World Fair’s amusement zone, with its mannequin mermaids and semi-
naked living ‘liquid ladies’. Also significant is Duchamp’s headless mannequin
with a phallic, transvesticising faucet on its right thigh in his window display
Lazy Hardware at the Gotham Book Mart in New York City for the publication
of Breton’s Arcane 17 in 1945 (fig. 24); and his dioramic Étant donnés: 1° la chute
25 Raoul Ubac, Dalí’s Rainy Taxi,

1938, gelatin silver print, Collection
Timothy Baum, New York. © ADAGP,
Paris and DACS, London 2013.
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d’eau, 2° le gaz d’éclairage (‘Given: 1. the waterfall, 2. the illuminating gas’;
1946–66), a work to which I shall return.12 There are others, of course.
The highpoint of Surrealism’s use of mannequins, also a watershed and a
swansong, is the infamous 1938 Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme at the
Galerie des Beaux-Arts, 140 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, Paris.13 Breton,
Duchamp and the poet Paul Éluard organised the exhibition so that the first
sight in the courtyard was Dalí’s Rainy Taxi. Thanks to close-up photographs
documenting the exhibition by Denise Bellon and Raoul Ubac, the taxi’s two
mannequins can be seen in detail. One is seated in the front wearing goggles
and with a shark-jaw over its head, while the other is in the back with a
Lautréamontian sewing machine and an umbrella for company, an omelette
on its lap and Burgundy snails crawling all over it.14 The taxi’s interior was
drenched by water-sprinkling pipes. Once past Rainy Taxi, a corridor of man-
nequins comes into view. This ‘Mannequin Street’ with its ready-made sculp-
tures at the left is figured as a beauty contest. It is a Judgement of Paris, a
curb-crawl where mannequins as street walkers (one critic called them ‘une
espèce de putain’, ‘a species of whore’) – like the Propoetides, once turned
into public prostitutes, then petrified – are metaphorically favoured, selected
and brought into the whorehouse.15 The sixteen mannequins are outfitted and
decorated by (in order of appearance) Jean Arp, Yves Tanguy, Sonia Mossé (the
only mannequiniste), Duchamp, André Masson, Kurt Seligmann, Ernst, Joan
Miró, Augustín Espinoza, Wolfgang Paalen, Dalí, Maurice Henry, Man Ray,
Oscar Domínguez, Léo Malet and Marcel Jean. To the right of Arp’s mannequin,
against the wall, six photographs of Bellmer’s second poupée are hung in a
frame. Another such frame hangs at the end of the corridor to the left of Jean’s
mannequin. The corridor leads into the exhibition’s central gallery, its ‘grotto’,
or ‘brothel room’, with a bed in each corner and Duchamp’s 1200 coal sacks
hanging from its ceiling. The brothel room was so dark – the only light coming
from an artificially illuminated brazier (perhaps anticipating the illuminating
gas in Duchamp’s much later Étant donnés) – that visitors had to use flash-
lights to view the works. In this subterranean grotto, cackles of hysterical
laughter rang out and a recording from an insane asylum was played on a
hidden phonograph, as was German military music. The centrepiece was the
dancer Hélène Vanel clad in a ripped dressing-gown (the asylum garb of the
nineteenth-century hysteric) performing L’Acte manqué (‘Unconsummated
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Act’), a gyrating, wailing, hysterical presentational act of erotic ecstasy
postponed.16
That there is an affinity between the Surrealists and these mannequins is
clear. The writer and artist Georges Hugnet commented that the ‘artists all felt
they had the soul of Pygmalion. One could see the happy owners of manne-
quins . . . come in, furnished with mysterious little or big bundles, tokens for
their beloved, containing the most unlikely presents.’17 Such gift-giving con-
firms their all too familiar acquaintance with fetishism in psychoanalysis, and
how its tropes and modalities are articulated by way of commodity fetishism,
where ‘perversification’ by way of psychoanalytically fashionable gifts for the
mannequin, rather than the mannequin as such, are what figure it erotically.
The first mannequin has a black bag over its head. The next wears a belt. The
next is veiled. The next is a cross-dresser. The next sports a birdcage on its
shoulders encasing its head, a black or green velvet gag in its mouth, a flower
where its mouth should have been, and where its vagina should be a mirror
surrounded by tiger-eye stones, enhanced with two peacock feathers (fig. 26).
One has a handle-bar moustache. One has its left leg, torso and wrists wrapped,
and pins in its nipple, thigh and arm. Another has a knitted helmet and long
gloves. Another is blindfolded, wears one leather boot and has its right hand
missing (removed, amputated?). Masochism. Sadism. Beatings. Wounds. Fet-
ishism. Castration. Disavowal. Displaced body parts. And so on. Along with
their Pygmalion souls, in the Surrealists’ performative hysterical masculinity
one can discern echoes of Pygmalionism. These are the distinctly straight,
male, banal perversions, heterosexual (and heterosexist) fantasies of perver-
sity, transgression, orality and anality, of sexual exploitation, misogynistic vio-
lence, dismemberments and the uncanny return of its repressed castrating
anxieties. These are yet more crime scenes for these avid readers of crime
stories. There are also acts of molestation, with rape fantasy rhetoric and a
clear ‘no means yes’ policy. Given this gleefully wilful woman/mannequin con-
flation, it is no surprise that Man Ray claimed that the Surrealists had ‘violated’
their mannequins:
In 1938 nineteen nude young women were kidnapped from the windows of
the large stores and subjected to the frenzy of the surrealists who immedi-
ately deemed it their duty to violate them, each in his own original and
inimitable manner but without any consideration whatsoever for the feelings
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26 Raoul Ubac, Mannequin de Masson (detail), 1938.
Courtesy Vintage Works, Ltd (www.vintageworks.net, Phone:
+1-215-822-5662). © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2013.
27 Raoul Ubac, Mannequin de Duchamp, 1938.

© ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2013.
of the victims who nevertheless submitted with charming goodwill to the

homage and outrage that was inflicted on them.18
May Ray counts nineteen mannequins. I count eighteen: sixteen on the ‘Man-
nequin Street’ and two in Rainy Taxi. Maybe one is unaccounted for. No, that
one is the (only ‘male’) mannequin in the group, slumped at the feet of Ernst’s
mannequin, holding on to ‘her’ stockinged and gartered right thigh with its
gloved right hand, looking from behind up its semi-transparent cape, and
splattered in white paint. To add to Man Ray’s accounting, also in the exhibition
were two mannequin legs and one arm in Oscar Dominguez’s Never (1937),
four legs and two hands in Breton’s Object Chest (1938), a torso at the foot of
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the bed on which Hélène Vanel hystericises performatively, and other artificial
body parts besides. Does this jumble constitute one intact mannequin? More,
I fear.
At least as late as 1966, negatives were found of photographs taken of the
mannequins in 1938 by Man Ray. The fifteen negatives appeared as a limited
edition reprint, accompanied by an introductory statement alluding to his
sexual encounters with them: ‘[they were] so inspiring to . . . [him] that he
unbuttoned his pants and taking out his apparatus proceeded to record the
event without giving any further thought to the happening but that of his imme-
diate pleasure’.19 Here, as in the past, such interests in inanimate human form,
fantasies of the inanimate coming to life, being brought to life, having the desire
for life, are shaped by an auto-erotic impulse. (For all Surrealism’s claims to
be inspired and driven by love, at best this was a childish fantasy of romantic
love and thus inevitably unsatisfactory in its consummation. At worst it was
only ever self-love.) It was no different for the Surrealists, who in the first of
their ‘Recherches sur la sexualité’ (1928) discussed onanism at length, char-
acterising it (so psychoanalytically) as sad (Jacques Prévert), lack (Prévert and
Breton), compensation (Breton), plenitude (Tanguy), ideal (Man Ray) and loath-
some (Antonin Artaud). In the eighth ‘Recherches’, Jeannette Tanguy con-
cludes: ‘We are all great masturbators’.20
While the Surrealists were not content simply to shower their beloveds with
gifts (a not unprecedented gesture), more significant for me is the fact that
many of the mannequins on the ‘Mannequin Street’ were literally electrified.21
Breton later wrote that woman is a ‘conductor of mental electricity’ and it had
been proposed that the electrified mannequins perhaps suggest an erotic
‘charge’.22 Since for me the mannequins are just that – mannequins, inanimate
human form, things as such – and not proxy women (to be kidnapped, sub-
jected to frenzy, violated and willingly so), this idea of a ‘charge’ is suggestive.
For, because as a fantasy, but positively not as a metaphor, it signifies an erotic
charge or spark (the erotic as excitation) that perhaps triggers the ‘mysterious
generative forces’ that might energise the interior and internal mechanisms
of such inanimate human form, the processes of motion at work beneath the
ordinary appearance of animation, into (a fantasy of) movement. Such ‘mysteri-
ous generative forces’ are animism’s animating possibilities, where form
comes to life, is brought to life, possesses the desire for life. Tanguy’s man-
nequin wears a headlight. Masson’s mannequin, with its birdcage, black or
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green velvet gag, flowers, mirrors and feathers, is hooked up to two small
bulbs. Max Ernst’s mannequin was to have an electric bulb instead of genitals;
at Breton’s insistence it was amended. Espinoza’s mannequin, with a miniature
male mannequin attached to its waistband, has as part of its headgear a lit-up
sheep skull. Dalí’s mannequin holds a light bulb in its right hand. Dominguez’s
mannequin has a light on top of its iron spiral headgear.
Duchamp’s mannequin also sports a lit bulb, this time red, in its handker-
chief pocket (fig. 27). His ready-made cross-dressing sculpture, signed RR, a
reference to Rrose Sélavy, his alter-ego, is Rrose, rather than the artist himself
dressing up as Rrose, and, manifest in three-dimensional form, perhaps also
prefigures the ‘mannequin’ in his later Étant donnés. Even more so, the current
of the lit bulb also evokes the mechanical and mechanomorphic grinding of
the steam engine-powered machine that inspired Chocolate Grinder, No. 1
(1913) and Chocolate Grinder, No. 2 (1914), the force pulsating through the
network of his painting Network of Stoppages (1914), the grinding of the mas-
turbatory desiring machines in The Large Glass (1915–23), his spinning Rotary
Glass Plates (‘Precision Optics’) (1920), his Rotary Demisphere (‘Precision
Optics’) (1925; on display at the 1938 exhibition) and his rotating ‘Rotoreliefs’
(‘Optical Disks’; 1935).23 It also anticipates two of the ‘givens’ in Étant donnés:
the light bulb that makes its waterfall flow and the Bec Auer gas-burning lamp
(actually an electric light) that illuminates the highly artificial fabricated realism
of this illusionistic tableau-assemblage. Flowing and illuminating, these
‘givens’ are essential to a highlighting of the ‘intangibles’: what even in 1969,
the year of its installation, the curators Anne d’Harnoncourt and Walter Hopps
called ‘the mysterious generative forces playing beneath the surface – water,
gas, electricity, and as their human corollary, desire’. There is also here, as
will be grasped later, an insisting on the fourth or nth dimension, time, and its
confluence with, its coinciding as, not just desire per se but eroticism itself.24
superseding
As I have mentioned, in 1924 Breton wrote of ‘the modern mannequin’ as a

manifestation of ‘the marvelous’. While the marvellous is somewhat trans-
historical, the means by which it articulates itself, and the forms this articula-
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tion takes, are deeply historical. As Breton writes, ‘The marvelous is not the
same in every period of history: it partakes in some obscure way of a sort of
general revelation only the fragments of which come down to us: they are the
romantic ruins, the modern mannequin, or any other symbol capable of affect-
ing the human sensibility for a period of time.’25 Such historicity notwithstand-
ing, by the time of the 1938 ‘Mannequin Street’, Hugnet was writing that the
Surrealists were seeking a model of mannequin that best embodied the
‘Eternal Feminine’.26 In 1938, then, their choice of bland mannequins with slim
bodies, demure poses, long eyelashes and hairstyles à la mode is telling.
Unless such insipidness is at the heart of the Eternal Feminine, the mannequin
itself as a historical thing is a mere backdrop and only comes to embody the
Eternal Feminine as it is adorned by tokens, presents, gifts, transformed by
accoutrements, the paraphernalia in Surrealism’s box of polymorphous per-
versity. So as a symbolic form, as a manifestation of the marvellous, ‘the
modern mannequin’ is historical and yet it is trans-historical. As a manufac-
tured thing, its conditions of historical production become supplanted as it is
dressed up in conventional, stereotypical and archetypal signifiers of psycho-
analytically inflected eroticism masquerading as an embodiment of the Eternal
(which I take to mean generic) Feminine.
Breton’s 1924 idea of ‘the modern mannequin’ as a manifestation of the
trans-historical ‘marvellous’ does not, I think, refer to mannequins as such
that are modern or contemporary. I doubt, for instance, that it refers to the
batch of nineteen or so mannequins ‘kidnapped’ from the windows of the
grands magasins for the 1938 Surrealist exhibition.27 While in no way stolen – they
were supplied by the mannequin manufacturer PLEM28 – such a proximate
bond demonstrates their relations to the interlocking capitalist machineries of
the department store, mannequin manufacturing, the fashion industry, visual
merchandising and new forms of display that make these mannequins wholly
of their time. (However, this is not to say that they are necessarily at the height
of fashion, since by the late 1930s the department store had been superseded
by the boutique as the site for the display of the conspicuously fashionable.)
When I stress that the mannequins are modern or contemporary, I am refer-
ring to the mannequins themselves, their design, the process of their manu-
facturing, their manufactured form, their poses, disposition and so on, not to
what they are wearing, whether fashionable, fetching or fetishistic. Manne-
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quins as such are only ever historical, of their own time, which is to say
contemporary.
It is by way of the idea of what the attired mannequin as a Surrealist object
means, rather than what it actually is or might do because of it, that the Sur-
realists are wilfully complicit with the fashion industry.29 Hugnet dubs the
Surrealists ‘couturiers of eroticism’.30 Noting this complicity is nothing new,
yet doing so inserts them even more firmly into history proper. By the mid-
1930s fashion designers were using Surrealist props and collaborating with
Surrealist artists. May Ray was photographing models for mannequins for
Harper’s Bazaar. Reports of Surrealist exhibitions appeared in couture maga-
zines. Dalí was arranging shop-window installations in 1937, as well as col-
laborating on dress designs with Elsa Schiaparelli, the designer of the pink
knitted helmet worn by his mannequin on the ‘Mannequin Street’. This union
between Surrealism and the fashion industry is so comprehensive that by the
mid-1930s, as the art historian Lewis Kachur writes, ‘in Paris or New York, a
large Surrealist exhibition would set a theme for the season and be immedi-
ately reflected in the vitrines of department stores and in the press’.31 Denise
Bellon’s photographs of the ‘Mannequin Street’ appeared in a Vogue spread
and two were published in Paris Magazine next to photographs of nude models.32
The first issue of the London Bulletin published a piece on the relations in Paris
between Surrealist mannequins and fashion designers, next to, it is shocking,
a review of the Nazis’ 1937 Entartete Kunst (‘Degenerate Art’) exhibition in
Munich.33 In nearly all these cases the complicity between Surrealism and
fashion is born of a shared and undemanding sense of the appeal of the man-
nequin as an uncanny, fetishistic and perverse inanimate human form, tied to
mimeticism, materiality and time, but only ever in a non-specific way. In the
service of Surrealism, the mannequin is merely a hollowed-out bearer of
fashion, literally and metaphorically, which because of this will only ever tell
what it might signify, what it might be symptomatic of, what it might mean.
This imparts nothing of the mannequin as a thing, of what it is and what it
might be capable of doing.
Back then to the mannequins themselves. The batch from the 1938 Exposi-
tion, with their ‘range of hair colors and facial expressions’, are, as Kachur
writes, more ‘realistic’ than an earlier selection which had been rejected as
being ‘too maladroit and unlifelike’.34 In their choice of mannequin, Kachur
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remarks, the Surrealists ‘eschew[ed] both the stylised and the specific for the
simulacrum’ and ‘[w]ith the range of available and even up-to-date styles, the
mannequins decorated by [them] were rather conservative’.35 Kachur’s obser-
vations are telling: the Surrealists rejected mannequins that were maladroit,
unlifelike, stylised and specific, and turn instead to the realistic, the simula-
crum, those with a range of hair colours and facial expressions that, because
they are from a manufacturer who supplies the grands magasins, are consid-
ered wholly contemporary. Kachur argues that ‘[t]heir lifelikeness was the foil
for the artists to transgress or mutilate in an attempt to create a frisson in the
spectator’.36 That is, the more lifelike the mannequins, the more troubling their
perverting. I consider their choice differently and propose that the Surrealists’
selection of the lifelike simulacrum is a conservative decision for two reasons.
First, because their brand of transgression or mutilation, their ‘perverting’, is
only feasible, is even built on, straight, banal, hetero-normative figurations of
inanimate human form, all too obviously in line with that most pervasive will-
to-desire of and in commodity capitalism. Second, because by adorning and
transforming these contemporary (albeit slightly out of date) mannequins into
embodiments of the Eternal Feminine, they look to refute and disavow their
historicity, their materiality, their technicity, their thing-ness as such. How the
Surrealists’ mannequins end up looking on the ‘Mannequin Street’ and how
they mean because of this are not my prime interest. What concerns me is
that these contemporary, and yet somehow neither modern nor fashionable,
lifelike, realistic mannequin forms supersede the maladroit, the un-lifelike, the
stylised and the specific ones. It is the superseding, the process of displacing,
substituting, replacing, this ‘outmoding’ that provokes my curiosity.
I would like to make sense of this choice, an inevitable one (yet, it matters
not a jot whether it is conscious or unconscious), and consider what this
process of superseding might entail for what the mannequin, the doll and the
artificial body part as (sexual and commodity, and thus doubly erotic) fetishes
in modernity are and do.
Mannequins inhabit modernity. They are ur-forms, like the flâneur, the pros-
titute, the ragpicker, the sandwich-board man, the bourgeois shopper, the
window-shopper, the loiterer and the frotteur. They are types that populate and
thereby constitute modernity as a ‘mode of experience’, as Marshall Berman
has it. In so doing they are figures that present both the reifying (becoming
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thing-like) and alienating character of capitalist modernity where relations
between individuals are thing-like, as they are between persons and things,
and relations of criticality towards it.37 That is to say, on one side of the coin,
as signs, variously, the prostitute, Woman, the mannequin-woman and the
mannequin itself are commodities that consume in order to intensify and refine
their standing as commodities.38 Cosmetics are often a marker of this, praised
alongside fashion by Baudelaire as a ‘sublime deformation [or reformation] of
Nature’, rather than condemned, as they were in the case of the Propoetides,
the first prostitutes, who underwent a hardening. This is what in modernity
might be called an artificialisation or, better, a de-organicisation.39 On the
other side of the coin, at the same time the presence of such types is evidence
of critical possibility. Erotic life and sexuality as artefact, for instance, are
lauded by among others Walter Benjamin and Charles Baudelaire as inorganic
and artificial. Yet, they are not eulogised in and of themselves as such – Ben-
jamin’s sustained tarrying with commodity culture is a critique not a celebra-
tion of capitalism – but because of how, for example, Woman in and as a figure
of capitalist modernity comes to jeopardise the idea of the laws of nature, the
fantasy of love as natural, as biological necessity and thus ultimately of the
bourgeois family.40
Such complexities are embodied and articulated by the mannequin, the doll
and the artificial body part, then, as sexual and as commodity, thus as doubly
erotic fetishes. Concurrently, their superseding marks a dialectical tension in
modernity’s temporalities. Firstly, there is modernity’s Neuzeit (‘new time’), the
just-now-ness of the experience in historical time of the modern as it is
focused on the present and the future. Secondly, carried concurrently with and
within it, perhaps as a function of it, there is what Benjamin described as the
outmoded: this, to embellish, is a short-circuiting of the past and the present
where the present is shot through with the anachronistic, magical and
enchanted – these splinters of the past’s potentialities – and through which
the ‘undead’ of history is ripe for retroactive modification.41
Let me untangle this.
Modernité, ‘the quality of what is modern’, will, after the writings of Baude-
laire and Benjamin’s Baudelairean modernity, for ever be crystallised as a
world dominated by the phantasmagoria of capitalist commodity culture. It is
a structure of feeling of contemporary experience as the dazzling spectacle of
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capital, of capitalism’s spectacularisation of culture and, in modern life, of
cultures of ephemeral, contingent, dizzying, intoxicating, pathological and fren-
zied encountering, exchanging and consuming.42 (As Marx writes of commodity
fetishism where social relations assume ‘the phantasmagoric form of a rela-
tion between things’, so it is for Benjamin.) Modernity is the ‘city gorged with
dreams’ (‘cité pleine de rêves’, as Baudelaire put it in his poem ‘Les Sept
Vieillards’). It is the present in its ‘presentness’, an immersion in the ‘now’, the
sensuous present as immediacy, novelty, transitory and of how the eternal may
be distilled from this transitory-ness. As an epoch, as a material and corporeal
physiognomy and as a form of life, it presents modern, metropolitan encoun-
ters. Here the street as stimulating, intense and sensorial capitalist bazaar is
the setting for quintessentially new architectonic regimes of consumer culture.
It presents arcades, department stores, plate-glass windows, forms of window
display, interior night-time lighting and exterior street lighting, which as Ben-
jamin observed turns a boulevard into an intérieur, where artificial illuminating
and the erotic ‘charge’ meet yet again.43 In their different ways, it is the arcades
built during the Restoration and the reign of Louis-Philippe (c. 1814–48), the
magasin de nouveautés of the 1830s and 40s (precursors of the department
stores of the Second Empire, c. 1852–70) and later the exclusive small-scale
luxury boutiques that articulate the mannequin’s contemporary-ness in the
experience of urban modernity’s spectacle of consumer capitalism.44 Here
everything is modern: the merchandise, the range of stock, its organisation,
its marketing by way of new techniques and forms of display. The mannequin
is fundamental to how the (often redesigned) façades or surfaces of these
spaces, by way of their glass-plated shop-window (l’étalage) frontages and
‘show vitrine’ as framing devices presenting a theatrical stage or later a cin-
ematic screen, display the thing at the heart of modernity: the commodity.
Framed by these architectonic regimes, capitalist modernity enacts a double
desire: it actively produces desire and offers the promise of desire fulfilled. In
this spectacle, also a dreamworld, goods beckon. It is, one might say, a frenzy
of the material.45 The new, inorganic commodity beckons, entices, ensnares.
It is here that the commodity fetish and the sexual fetish constellate. Such a
beckoning transformed for ever our ways of looking and seeing, as well as
experiencing, as, caught in the ‘covetous and erotic’ gaze of modernity, in the
conspicuous-ness of conspicuous consumption, we see ourselves transposed
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onto the commodity form on the other side of the glass, which then in turn
reflects us back to ourselves, often in the shape of the commodity form itself.46
Indeed, window shopping as a term (in French, its original language, lèche-
vitrines, means literally ‘licking windows’) anticipates how the sexuality of
desire in consumer capitalist modernity is intensified all the more because
such seeing is fastened to an equally transformative touching. The prohibitive
distancing that is looking gives way to the intimate participatory proximity that
is touching. Window shopping is itself erotic, reflective and covetous, self-
covetous even.47
The shop-window dummy (mannequin de l’étalage) is in this scene the queen
of publicité (the ‘science’ of selling).48 This mannequin wears, carries, sits on,
looks at, points to the commodity itself. The mannequin stages the commodity.
In fact, the mannequin is in a sense a strawman for the commodity, merely a
way to it. It is the commodity around which desires and pleasures congregate;
it solicits and elicits them. The mannequin is not, nor should it be, desired,
pleasing. Hence, the mannequin moderne’s overly stylised form and fea-
tures – exemplified by V. N. Siégel’s mannequins at the 1925 Art Deco exhibi-
tion. These are what make it modern. It is stripped of verisimilitude, character,
personality, sexuality, allure, an erotic charge. It is by way of such stylisation,
it is proposed, that the consumer’s desirous gaze slides from the mannequin’s
inanimate human form (whether abstract, deco or decorative) to the vivacious
commodity as a thing more properly demanding of attention. ‘Mannequins
were defined as modern’, writes the scholar of visual and material culture Tag
Gronberg, ‘to the extent that they diverted desire from themselves to the
commodity’.49
This is what the mannequin is meant to do. Yet . . . while it does do this, does
it manage to do it completely? Not quite. Forget about the things it is wearing,
carrying, sitting on, looking at, pointing to; these things have their own stories.
What about the mannequin itself as erotic and commodity fetish? The claim
here is that the mannequin moderne is wholly historical, even as it seeks to
extricate itself from history, to obfuscate its historicity and by extension its
materiality and technicity. This stylised modern (faceless, abstract, nearly fea-
tureless) mannequin is only contemporary because it was fashionable in 1925,
yet it was almost unimaginable in 1924 and mostly anachronistic by 1926. What
does attending to the mannequin’s historicity, materiality and technicity
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impart? How are they tied to the mannequin’s not diverting desire, its failing
or refusing to divert desire from itself to the commodity?
When the mannequin is historicised, materialised, technologised, it becomes
emblematic of modernity, the time of modernity, of a dialectical tension in
modernity’s temporalities: Neuzeit and the outmoded.
The tensions between these two temporalities may be seen in the business
of consumer culture’s visual merchandising, which until the turn of the twen-
tieth century was a relatively amateur affair worked out by trial and error. Its
changing protocols and procedures regarding shop-window display, the
arrangement and rearrangement of goods, artificial lighting (from gas to elec-
tricity) and (in the show vitrines) both mannequins and live models all play
their part as the genealogy of visual merchandising shifts backwards and
forwards between the always new and the always imminently outmoded.50
These tensions between the dual temporalities may also be seen in the
contemporary mannequin that was already anachronistic. As a direct descend-
ent of European fashion dolls, with their wax and wood torsos and porcelain
faces, since the seventeenth century such dolls had toured Europe wearing
and popularising the latest fashions that were themselves already dated by the
time they arrived further afield and were taken up as new. It is a progeny too
of the eighteenth-century wax anatomical model and of waxes from the nine-
teenth-century entertainment industry, as well as from the tailor’s dress form,
that awkward assemblage of torso, attached legs, arms and head, with a face
designed by mask-makers, all attached to a pedestal to maintain its vertical-
ity.51 With an eye on the past achievements of their mimetic and malleable
capacities, these shop-window dummies were made of wax, wicker, soldered
wire and leather, with heads carved from wood and moulded papier-mâché.
Made always from the most contemporary of materials, they were all always
waiting to be superseded, only for their turn to come back again.
Furthermore, the tensions between these dual temporalities may be seen
in the industrial manufacturing of the mannequin in capitalist modernity as a
process that, driven by commercial and aesthetic factors, in looking to resolve
certain problems, raised new ones. The lifelike and the un-lifelike, the realistic
and the stylised, the maladroit and the graceful, the specific and the simula-
tion, the conservative and the fashionable, the wax (introduced by German
manufacturers at the 1889 Paris World Exposition), the papier-mâché (from
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the 1920s onwards) and the plaster composite (from the late 1920s and into
the 30s) and the plastic and the fibre-glass (in the 1940s and 50s) were all new.
They were also all already out of date, competing continuously for primacy, as
technologies, techniques, natural and synthetic materials, forms, poses and
gestures forever change, are modified and return with a vengeance.
Finally, these tensions may be seen in the relentless battle between the
mimetic and the stylised. Like many of their predecessors, earlier mannequins
in and emblematic of modernity had glass eyes, real eyelashes, realistic
enamel teeth and real hair which was sewn into the wax scalps hair by hair.
Even so, even because of this, they were not practical. They weighed three
hundred pounds (over 130 kilos) and, as window-display lighting became more
powerful and directed, they had a tendency to melt. In the 1920s these wax
mannequins gave way to the avowedly fashionable mannequin moderne whose
stylised design was actively against verisimilitude. The art commentator Guil-
luame Janneau was able to write in his review of the 1924 Salon of the impor-
tance of this transition. He contrasted the old wax mannequin as tiresome,
frightful and corpse-like because of its realism, disturbing in its mimeticism,
while the mannequin moderne was appealing particularly because of its lack
of verisimilitude: ‘Yet another new art, that of mannequins; one tires of those
frightful wax cadavers, disturbing facsimiles . . . Certain gilded mannequins
have been condemned. Why this restriction to the possibilities of stylization?
Aren’t these [figures] all the more arresting for their lack of verisimilitude?’52
While a hundred pounds lighter (some 45 kilos) and heat-resistant so that it
did not melt, this mannequin moderne was still vulnerable: made almost wholly
of papier-mâché, it was prone to becoming water-logged. (Also, with papier-
mâché it was difficult to achieve detailed features, unlike with wax, so the trend
towards the abstraction of mannequin features was in part driven by the prac-
ticalities of working with such materials.) The anachronistic mimetic wax man-
nequin and the fashionable stylised mannequin jockey for primacy during the
remainder of the 1920s and into the 1930s. From the late 1920s into the 30s,
in nourishing the mimetic impulse and perhaps also working actively against
the invasion from Europe of modern abstract Deco forms, the American man-
nequin and window dresser Cora Scovil began manufacturing mannequins
based on Hollywood stars such as Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford. Lester
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Gaba, known previously for modelling sculptures from soap, produced his
‘Gaba Girls’ based on young New York socialites of the day.53
Scovil and Gaba’s mannequins weighed in at twenty-five to a hundred pounds
(about 11 to 45 kilos), depending on whom you believe. Their plaster composite
form and the realistic detailing made possible by this material was in keeping
with the vogue for mannequins to have ‘personality’ and the appearance of
movement and activity. They combined some of the qualities of the detailed
(albeit ponderous) wax mannequins of the past with the refinement of the
modern mannequin, but without their abstraction. Plaster was waterproof but
it was brittle. (Gaba’s favourite ‘girl’ Cynthia’s demise is testament to this; while
being handled she slid from a chair and shattered.)54 The mimetic mannequin
and the stylised mannequin came in and out of fashion. In the 1940s and 50s
with the advent of plastics and fibre-glass the shop-window dummy took on
new forms, responding to the needs of mass production and the demise of
mostly hand-crafted individualisation, when ensuing standardisation led to
inevitable homogenising.
As a bearer of the commodity, the mannequin embodies and articulates
modernity’s Neuzeit, a sense of the quality of what is modern, of what it is to
be modern and to inhabit the experience of the spectacle of capital, of the new,
of novelty and fashion, in these newly constituted spaces of consumer culture
and all-consuming desires. Forever caught up in the ephemerality and the
superficiality of the cult of the new, it stands as a marker of capitalist moder-
nity’s spectacle of conspicuous consumerism, unmoving among the intensity
of the speed and the rhythms, the circulation, circuits and flows of encounter,
exchange, desire and seduction. Theatricalised by way of consumption’s obfus-
cation of production, as well as by an emerging fashion industry, nascent
mass-market paradigms, architectural regimes of consumer culture and their
virulent upholding of the new, the mannequin as a manufactured, artificial,
modern doll marks the convergence or encounter of capitalism and fetishism.
The mannequin may well be still but it is nevertheless still selling. Beckoning.
Seducing. The commodity is put to work.
At the same time, as a thing as such the mannequin embodies and articu-
lates modernity’s outmodedness. As techne its historicity, its materiality and
its technicity ‘speaks’ of an evolution, a design, a manufacturing that is always
already punctuated by and interposed between the forms, materials, tech-
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niques and technologies of its past’s potentialities. The unresolved, the half-
imagined, the barely glimpsed, the half-forgotten but still extant become modi-
fied retroactively and, in so being, the outmoded as a source of disruptive
‘revolutionary energ[y]’, as Benjamin put it in his essay on Surrealism, per-
vades and comes to haunt the modern as modern.
Put another way, the past is always already nestled in the present; this is
necessarily integral to the ‘new time’ of modernity, its formation as new, con-
temporary, modern and, given the quality (its now-ness) of its being present,
its imminent obsolescence. The present, and the thing, the commodity, the
fetish in the present, always carries within it the threat of the past, of past-ness
and of it becoming past. Even the commodity itself at the heart of all this, as
an inorganic, artificial form, with its shiny newness, its lustre, its allure,
its lure, is impelled and compelled by a pull that is simultaneously in the
present and also in and of the past. The pristine commodity and the bearer
of commodities – the mannequin is both a bearer of commodities since it
wears, carries, points to commodities that are actually for purchase, and is
itself a commodity, a fetish, a thing as such – is always on the brink of being
out of date. This is the case whether their form is realistic, lifelike, a simu-
lation, or maladroit, un-lifelike and specific. Conservative, modern or fash-
ionable. Wax or moulded papier-mâché or plaster composite. Whatever the
pose, the disposition, the gestures. How it comports itself. Whatever it is
selling. It is always already outdated, old-fashioned, obsolete, an anachronism.
If being modern, the qualities of its modern-ness, is built into the commodity
in capitalism’s cultures of consumption, as is its built-in (practical or style)
obsolescence, it thus has anachronicity also built into it. So, when in the end
social relations between persons, and between persons and things, give way
to relations between things, it is these things that, via their outmodedness,
expose the reality of capitalism (its modes and means of production, abstracted
labour, exploitation, reification and so on), thereby necessitating the emer-
gence of a historical consciousness in which such relations become ‘charged’
with ‘revolutionary’ potential. Anachronicity’s traces become modified retroac-
tively; the left and the left-over persist; these things come back with a
vengeance.
To note, modernity’s outmodedness is a way of addressing critically moder-
nity’s own processes of modernisation as Neuzeit. It is a mnemonic mechanism
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for remembering the processes and human costs of modernity: of
modernisation, industrialisation, Taylorism, technologisation, secularisation,
de-superstitionisation, commercialisation and bureaucratisation. It brings to
mind forcefully, for instance, the Haussmannisation of Paris, the alienating (an
estranging from our Gattungswesen or ‘species-being’) and reifying (becoming
thing-like) rationalisation of the human and the artifice of the inorganic
(fashion, passion, desire, the erotic). At the centre of it all is an idolising of the
thing that is the (man-made, hand-crafted, laboured over and abstracted)
commodity which, when brought forth, demands devotion, necessitates erotic
relations with inanimate form and forms.
The outmoded is a responding to this rationalisation of capitalist modernity
as a process of disenchantment that, in its very evocation of the past’s poten-
tialities, leads to a re-enchanting of modernity. Here Neuzeit, the culmination
of historical progress, what Benjamin in Thesis xiv of ‘Theses on the Philosophy
of History’ called ‘homogenous, empty time’, butts up against the outmoded.
It also, perhaps, meets head-on Jetztzeit (‘now-time’), ‘time filled by the pres-
ence of the now’, the time of constellations, contingencies, profane illumina-
tions where, as he put it in Thesis v, ‘[t]he past can be seized only as an image
which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized’.55 This is when, as
the Benjamin scholar Beatrice Hanssen puts it, alluding to his essay on Sur-
realism, ‘the sobering mysticism of things, a condition in which the revolution-
ary energies of objects, architecture, iron construction, fashion and so forth
burst forth’.56 The past, the world of past things, impress themselves. The
anachronistic, the magical and the enchanting sneak back in.
Three simple mannequin-related instances of this will suffice to make a case
for the charged ‘energies’ of the outmoded.
The first instance is from Benjamin’s Das Passagen-Werk (The Arcades
Project). His ungovernable, fragmentary and incomplete montage of moder-
nity’s phantasmagoria, this scrapbook of Baudelaire’s Paris, his dialectical
féerie (a supernatural theatrical spectacle rather than a fairyland per se) is
populated by dolls, mannequins and tailors’ dummies, as well as automatic
devices including references to automata, the mechanisms of clocks, Vaucan-
son’s experiments, the figure of the machine-woman, and mechanical motive
power as the essential element of the organism of a machine.57 In a section
(or ‘convolute’) entitled ‘Z [The Doll, The Automaton]’, a patchwork of quota-
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tions with references ranging across 130 years, teleological time flattens out
or is distributed through the Passagen-Werk’s intensified spacialised rhizom-
atic network. There is an encouraging ‘gesturing forward’, a short-circuiting,
where time/space – 2013, the 1930s, the 1880s, the classical period – erupt in
profound illumination, where the past bursts out, illuminating anew the earlier
discussions here of inanimate human form, Pygmalion and Pygmalionism.
Along with citations from Baudelaire, Marx and Roger Caillois, and from works
of cultural history, advertising and fiction, Benjamin also scraps a citation from
J.-K. Huysmans’s Croquis parisiens (1886) on shop-window mannequins. These
mannequins are truncated bodies, busts really, made out of a cotton fabric of
‘non-naturalistic’ colours. They are wholly non-mimetic mannequins that are
nonetheless praised for their lifelike behaviour, how they recall busts of clas-
sical sculptures in the Louvre and how the dreams of erotic encounter that
they provoke are far superior to their sculptural predecessors:
In a shop on the Rue Legendre, in Batignolles, a whole series of female

busts, without heads or legs, with curtain hooks in place of arms and a
percaline skin of arbitrary hue – bean brown, glaring pink, hard black – are
lined up like a row of onions, impaled on rods, or set out on tables . . . The
sight of this ebb tide of bosoms, this Musée Curtius of breasts, puts one
vaguely in mind of those vaults in the Louvre where classical sculptures are
housed, where one and the same torso, eternally repeated, beguiles the time
for those who look it over, with a yawn, on rainy days . . . How superior to
the dreary statues of Venus they are – these dress-makers’ mannequins,
with their lifelike comportment: how much more provocative these padded
busts, which, exposed there, bring on a train of reveries: libertine reveries,
inspired by ephebic nipples and slightly bruised bubs; charitable reveries,
recalling old breasts, shrivelled with chlorosis or bloated with fat. – For one
thinks of the sorrows of women who . . . experience the growing indifference
of a husband, or the imminent desertion of a lover, or the final disarming of
those charms which allowed them once to conquer, in the unavoidable
battles they wage for the closed-up wallet of the man.58
The second instance is from Dalí. In his autobiography Dalí writes of his 1939
double-window display at Bonwit’s, mentioned earlier, where, unlike in the
1938 ‘Mannequin Street’ with its contemporary mannequins, he used wax
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mannequins from the turn of the century because he saw the potential of the
realistic, the maladroit, the singular: the marvellous in anachronistic flesh:
I detested modern manikins, those horrible creatures, so hard, so inedible,

with their idiotically turned-up noses. This time I wanted flesh, artificial
flesh, as anachronistic as possible. We went and unearthed in the attic of an
old shop some frightful wax manikins of the 1900 period with long natural
dead woman’s hair. These manikins were marvelously covered with several
years’ dust and cobwebs.59
The third instance, helping to make fuller sense of the Benjamin and the
Dalí, is the case of the photography of Eugène Atget, much of which is popu-
lated by out-of-date mannequins.60 By way of the Surrealists, the writings of
Walter Benjamin and posthumous life, this French photographer has become
renowned for his photographs of Paris produced between the 1890s and the
1920s. He is celebrated especially for his photographs of the Avenue des Gob-
elins (1910–20) that document, record and evidence a city that feels as though
it is both frozen (in the past, in another time) and fading (as the luminous
artificial glow of modernity’s spectacularity loses its force). With his plate
camera and tripod, and his antiquated photographic techniques, making it
difficult to ‘control’ or ‘fix’ the surface of the image, Atget’s photographs with
all their documentary detail, perhaps because of it, are said to conjure up an
evocative, atmospheric, dream-like ambience. Things are vivid and strange.
Things are there. Not there. Concrete. Ephemeral. A city, forged with dreams.
Present, future, past. Still. Imminent. Events are past or to come. Paris’s city
streets, its architectural detailing, its menswear shops, its fashions, its wigs,
underwear and corsets. In preserving these dead things, these things from
another time, they resonate in (and for) the present, produce it differently. This
dream-like atmosphere, this irreality, was spotted by Bernice Abbott, then a
studio assistant to Man Ray, and in 1926 Man Ray asked Atget if he could use
one of his images, which appeared anonymously on the cover of La Révolution
surréaliste no. 7, dated 15 June 1926. The photograph, from 1911 or 1912, of a
group of people standing at the Place de la Bastille looking up at an eclipse,
is in its new context given an under-title: Les Dernières Conversions (‘The Last
Conversions’). A few more of Atget’s photographs appeared in this and subse-
quent issues of La Révolution surréaliste, affirming a shared urban iconography
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of the outmoded, including window frontages and displays, store dummies and
mannequins. Atget’s camera often comes to rest on the shallow interiors of
store fronts, where mannequins pepper the scene. They, like the bygone era
they populated and still populate, speak of their own anachronicity. They do so
by their strange arrangement, with an awkwardness befitting a visual mer-
chandising profession still in its infancy. Their bodies and glances are assem-
bled in ways that are wholly unfamiliar now, also because of the sheer weight
of their solid bodies, which are sometimes like wax cadavers. They are unfa-
miliar in their stiff demur, uncomfortable poses, awkward smiles, out of date
airs and graces. They are unfamiliar also in the often rows and rows of dis-
played truncated bodies, sometimes just heads or torsos selling undergar-
ments (for health purposes) such as girdles and stockings (fig. 28). They share
a sensibility corresponding perhaps to the fetishistic frotteur’s uncomfortable
loitering at shop windows, where loitering as a practice is itself both a con-
demnation of capitalism and an honouring of its produce.
Such scenes are reminiscent of Benjamin’s citing of Huysmans, and Benja-
min himself quickly discovered this strange quality in Atget’s photographs. He
wrote about them in both ‘A Short History of Photography’ (1931) and Section
vi of ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility’ (1936) where
he noted that they become ‘evidence for historical occurrences’ and likened
them to crime-scene photographs.61 In such photographs, the Surrealists and
Benjamin saw in the everyday an admixture of the real and the dream-like or
sur-real, the (banality of the) historical and the marvellous. Benjamin also
realised that this is articulated by way of the outmoded. He welcomed Surreal-
ism’s interest in this quality, when he wrote in his ‘Surrealism, the Last Snap-
shot of the European Intelligentsia’ (1929) of Breton that
he can boast an extraordinary discovery. He was the first to perceive the

revolutionary energies that appear in the ‘outmoded’, in the first iron con-
structions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photos, the objects that
28 Eugène Atget, Boulevard de Strasbourg, 1926,

silver printing-out paper print, 22 x 18 cm.
Courtesy of George Eastman House, International
Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester,
New York.
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have begun to be extinct, grand pianos, the dresses of five years ago, fash-
ionable restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from them. The rela-
tion to these things to revolution – no one can have a more exact concept of
it than these authors. No one before these visionaries and augurs perceived
how destitution – not only social but architectonic, the poverty of interiors,
enslaved and enslaving objects – can suddenly turn over [umschlagen] into
revolutionary nihilism.62
Benjamin’s discovery of this discovery by Surrealism of the outmoded might

redeem their project for me, at least a little; more for Benjamin, this praxis
was how Surrealism ‘win[s] the energies of intoxication for the revolution’.63
The outmoded, the most recent past, has then for Benjamin, for the Surreal-
ists, an intrinsic revolutionary energy, all the more so because it is manifest
in and articulated by way of the detritus of consumer capitalist modernity. The
outmoded, the slightly out of date, the just past, rises up. This is the animism
of modernity’s magical thinking. As seen from Benjamin, Dalí and Atget, the
figure of the outmoded mannequin, as such an enslaved and enslaving object,
might have a potency that short-circuits the present. It might be exemplary of
the outmoded. In the past coinciding with the present, the present with the
past, through this potency such things become ‘now-beings’ (Jetztseins), ‘wak-
ing-beings’, thereby achieving a ‘Now of Recognizability’.64 If we look closely
enough we recognise how the mannequin as a bearer of the commodity, but
also as the commodity itself, as a fetish, a thing as such, wears its historicity,
materiality and technicity. In so doing, in their sense of themselves as variously
modern, contemporary, fashionable, realistic, conservative, maladroit, unlife-
like, stylised, specific and out of date, continuity gives way to discontinuous
tensions, constellations for and against the present. There is an enacting or
clashing of the past and the present in which time, and the thing itself, takes
a stand, comes to a standstill, an interruptive zero-hour (Stillstellung) of and
for thinking. In this brief moment of interruption, an interrupting of the
mechanical processes of time, of history, of the continuity of things, in this
tear, this rupture, the dialectic’s interruption institutes an energy, a return.
This is not so much a memory as a rememoration or a remembering (Eingeden-
ken), an empathy with what has been which, in coming to the fore, introduces
genuine change.65
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*
In conclusion, what does all this amount to? Also, where is desire or the erotic
found, how is it comprised and to what end? In capitalist modernity’s consumer
culture, and also in aesthetic modernity, the mannequin, each in their own
way, exposes their own historicity, materiality and technicity. This is so, to
varying degrees, for Breton’s ‘modern mannequin’ as a manifestation of the
marvellous, the mannequins selected for the ‘Mannequin Street’ and then
dumped because they were too maladroit, un-lifelike and specific, and for the
ones that superseded them that were more realistic, simulatory, conservative.
It is also the case for any number of mannequins as Surrealist Objects in art
and installation, or used in collaborations with the fashion industry. Likewise
for commercial mannequin manufacturers, from the wax department-store
mannequin at the turn of the century to the stylised papier-mâché mannequin
at the 1925 Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels in Paris and the realistic
mannequins manufactured in the 1930s in the USA. As techne, they expose
their historicity, materiality and technicity, whether intentionally, knowingly,
unknowingly, despite themselves, even as they look to deny it. In doing so, with
complicity and criticality they expose capitalist modernity, and its sense of its
experience of itself, as it is constituted and enacted through the dialectical
tensions between the time of the new and the always already outmoded, which
as such returns with a vengeance. This is also to expose, I think, something of
the mechanisms of capitalism and in so doing to detail the conditions by which
to engage pointedly with modernity’s modernising, inorganicising and artifi-
cialising, and its historically specific modern erotics of the artificial thing;
Baudelaire grasped this all too well. The mannequin, we must never forget, is
both the thing that bears the commodity and the thing as such, the fetish, the
commodity, the perfectly charged thing for generating both adoration and
criticality. It both diverts desire from itself to the commodity and at the same
time keeps desire placed firmly on itself; soliciting, eliciting, bearing and pro-
voking, meaning and doing.
When it comes to the mannequin in Surrealism, its form, materiality, tech-
nology and thing-ness link it intimately with fashion, the fashion industry and
capitalist modernity. Here the mannequin is tied to the fetish – the mannequin
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is, the mannequin as, fetish. The mannequin is a sexual fetish and a commodity
fetish. As the art historian Joanna Malt argues, the question of fetishism in
Surrealism is not as simple as to describe a ‘relationship of the individual
subject to a sexual fixation or prop; a narcissistic delusion which the fetishist
is forced, increasingly desperately, to sustain in order to warn off sexual
anxiety’.66 Surrealists are not ‘mere fetishists’, defends Malt, and their works
should not be interpreted as ‘the expressions of individual sexual deviance
masquerading as a collective aesthetic’.67 For Malt, the Surrealist interest in
fetishism, with its dual structure of recognition and disavowal, familiarity and
estrangement, comes out of ‘the idea of the eroticised inanimate object’ and
what ‘the surrealists display in their fetishistic imaginery [sic] is a heightened
sensitivity to the erotic allure of the object as commodity’.68 For her, that ‘sexual
and commodity fetishism converge in the surrealist object’ evidences their
criticality towards (the structure, the logic and the operations of) the sexual
fetish and the commodity fetish in capitalist and aesthetic modernity.69
My feeling, I must admit, is that the mannequin in Surrealism, whether as
a sexual or commodity fetish, as a Surrealist Object purporting to embody
relations that are intrinsically critical, more often than not affirms the struc-
ture, mechanisms and logic of seduction, desire and consumerism in and of
capitalism. I still maintain that it is only in its adorning, as it comes to embody
the ‘Eternal Feminine’, that the mannequin assumes the character of a sexual
and commodity fetish. Accordingly, the Surrealist’s affinities with their man-
nequins, and their gift-giving, confirms an illustrative ‘perversification’ of psy-
choanalysis. It replicates and thereby affirms the (historically emergent and)
intrinsically hetero-normativity of psychoanalysis, heterosexuality and perver-
sity itself (and any erotics that might be attached to or come from it), which in
its mechanisms, potential and aesthetics are consistent with capitalist moder-
nity’s capacity to generate structures of desire. Capitalism creating the appar-
ent conditions of its own undermining and undoing – because in its perversity
Surrealism is meant to be anti-bourgeois, revolutionary, transgressive and
thus political – affirms all the more its means, power and will.
When, however, it comes to the dummy in the shop window, its intrinsically
explicit bonds with capitalism offer possibilities for more interesting relations
of criticality because of this very proximity. As something other than art, object,
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installation, which is where art’s critical capacities are meant to lie (that is, as
representation), the shop-window dummy is itself a thing that speaks of the
transition from the hand-crafted to the industrially designed and manufac-
tured. It is a presenting which, as discussed earlier, is not so much a repetition
as an intensification, a producing again: in this case, of the past’s potentialities,
of the history of making and doing, of social relations and of the charged ener-
gies of the outmoded. As bearer of the commodity and commodity itself, it
diverts desire from itself, thereby leading the way for the fulfilling of consuming
passions. At the same time, by keeping desire focused firmly on itself, it short-
circuits, it intervenes in the incessant flow of desire capitalised, and thus, in
holding the consumer’s gaze, as a sexual commodity fetish in and of itself,
plays out a series of intimate erotic (covetous, self-covetous) encounters. In its
form as pure capitalist object, as a commodity fetish, whether nineteenth- or
twentieth-century, wax or papier-mâché, realistic, maladroit or stylised, and
unlike the Surrealist mannequins which ‘refer’ symbolically or symptomatically
to any number of things including women, the discourse of psychoanalysis and
so on, the shop-window dummy is exemplary of commodity fetishism in capi-
talist modernity. As such, as pure artificiality (always at the height of fashion
and always slightly out of date) it presents, intensifies, produces again, albeit
differently, capitalism and so creates the conditions of criticality by opening
capitalism up to its own historicity, materiality and technicity.
Capitalist modernity has a propensity, almost despite itself, both to be on
time (its just-now-ness) and for its time to be out of joint, at the height of
fashion and always already slightly out of date. Thus with the concept of the
outmoded at the fore, where novelty becomes outmoded and the outmoded
comes back to irritate novelty, perhaps in the end even the Surrealist man-
nequin, as well as the shop-window dummy, has some critical potential. To
think this one has to ignore Surrealism’s ‘take’ on Freudian psychoanalytic
figurations of sexuality, eroticism and perversity, its fetishisation of women’s
bodies, its generating of conventional renderings of woman as object of desire,
their Pygmalion souls and Pygmalionist gift-giving. Instead, it is the supersed-
ing from one batch of mannequins to another that makes it possible to articu-
late how the outmoded in modernity has, if not revolutionary potential, then
certainly the capacity to short-circuit the present (to ‘do work’ in the present).
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Untimeliness becomes, as the political aesthetician Esther Leslie writes, ‘a
political-economic category’.70 Benjamin drawing for his Arcades Project from
the 1886 edition of Huysmans’s collection of prose poems first published in
1880, the artificial flesh of Dalí’s anachronistic mannequin and Atget’s photog-
raphy by way of Benjamin and the Surrealists are testament to this. Even the
‘Mannequin Street’ might also end up doing exactly this, though it was a mere
by-product of the Surrealists rejecting that earlier batch of mannequins as
maladroit, un-lifelike and specific and choosing instead the realistic and the
simulation, with a range of hair colours and facial expressions. The manne-
quins introduce a superseding that, because of their slight outmodedness,
exposes the historicity, materiality and technicity of these things, thereby
weakening claims for their potential as manifestations of the marvellous, as
ahistorical, as embodiments of the ‘Eternal Feminine’. In so doing they histori-
cise still further capitalism’s modes of production, desire and consum-
mation.
The Surrealist mannequin, unadorned, stripped of paraphernalia from its
dressing-up box of polymorphous perversity, as artificial, as fetish, as thing as
such, has an affinity to the shop-window dummy as a marker of the commer-
cial, sexual and erotic spectacle of capitalist modernity. As such, it makes
manifest the ties between capitalism and fetishism, especially around the
artificialisation of the sexual and the erotic (and the sexual and the erotic as
artificial) in and by capitalism. These ties are at the heart of this book’s tale of
artificial love, of men’s erotic relations with inanimate man-made human form
and forms, as a love of and for the artificial.
What becomes interesting is the purpose that the mannequin serves in
capitalist modernity. For there is a distinction or, rather, a lack of a clear dis-
tinction, between the mannequin’s function or purposiveness and what it is,
and thus has the capacity to do. Its function in the shop window is to bear,
which is to say, to endure, support, show and carry commodities, while in Sur-
realism it is to be adorned with ‘perverse’ gifts; in both instances it will only
tell us what it might signify, what it might be symptomatic of, what it might
mean. Yet what the mannequin is and what it does because of that are other
matters altogether. This distinction matters because attending to the man-
nequin itself, as a thing as such, sets up different relations to questions of
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historicity, materiality and technicity in capitalist modernity that have an
impact on the status of objects, commodities and fetishes, on the fetishistic
things of capitalist modernity that are absolutely artificial and therefore deeply
historical, material and technological. It makes it possible also to speak of and
argue for an erotics of artificiality in modernity which is neither wholly pro-
duced nor usurped by, nor complicit with, capitalism but which itself might
offer the beginnings of a critical questioning of it.
coda: elective affinities
As I wrote at the beginning of this chapter, in aesthetic modernity there has

been a sustained effort to interrogate critically the figure of the doll, the man-
nequin and the artificial body part as erotic fetishes; to ask how and why such
inanimate human form is fetishised erotically and eroticised fetishistically.
Many of the roots of this interrogation grew directly out of the trajectory
detailed in this chapter: from where the mannequin as Surrealist Object and
the shop-window dummy converge, overlap and diverge again as they question
such inanimate human form as object, as commodity, commodity fetish, as
sexual fetish, as doubly erotic fetishes in modernity that solicit and elicit, bear
and provoke, mean and do. These more recent practices, post-Surrealist, often
post-Bellmerian and post-Duchampian and with an interest in figurative
sculpture, play around with the imaginative, mechanical and magical ideas of
such inanimate human form. They play around with fantasies of artificial
figures coming to life, being brought to life, possessing the desire for life. With
the perverse, the uncanny and death. With the processes at work beneath the
ordinary appearance of animation. While often post-Surrealist, they are fre-
quently highly critical of Surrealism’s fetishisation of women’s bodies as
objects of desire and also, I add, the banality of its hetero-normative figuring
of sexuality, eroticism and perversity. This turn to figurative sculpture, reaching
its saturation point in the 1980s and 90s and extending into this century,
includes as I noted earlier in this chapter, work by sculptors, photographers
and installation and new media artists. There is also an older generation of
artists working with dolls, mannequins and artificial body parts including
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Jasper Johns, Edward Kienholz and Allen Jones. Jones is the most notorious
with his 1969 ‘Women as Furniture’ series, an interest to which he returned
most recently in 2011 and which had been anticipated, I think, in the 1938
Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme by Oscar Dominguez’s Never (1937),
Kurt Seligmann’s Ultra-Furniture (1938) and Breton’s Object Chest (1938). This
chapter has, I hope, gone some way towards creating a context in which these
more recent works, by way of their historicity, materiality and technicity, might
themselves raise questions for the commodity itself as a fetish, a thing, for
inanimate human form in capitalist modernity.
In the spirit of starting from things, siding with things, telling the story of
the erotic doll, the doll eroticised, from and through the doll itself, from how
the thing things, the doll things, of things doing critical work themselves, I
conclude this chapter with a picture gallery. It is the kind of photo-essay found
in John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972) or, more grandiosely, in the spirit of
Benjamin’s own Arcades Project whose ‘method’ he describes as ‘literary
montage’. (Adorno wrote that Benjamin’s intention in the Arcades Project was
‘to have the meanings [of the citations] emerge solely through a shocking
montage of material’.71] Or, equally, in the spirit of the montage-like panel
assemblages of disparate images in Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Altas (1924–)
in which the ‘elective affinities’ between these things resonate because of, as
Jane Bennett would put it, the ‘inexplicable vitality and energy’ of things. Ben-
jamin’s essay ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’ published in 1924, his critique (prop-
erly understood) of Goethe’s book Elective Affinities (1809), utilises this term
from the history of chemistry which describes the ‘force’ compelling chemical
compounds to interact, thereby causing chemical reactions. It is used by
Goethe to describe the way that the human passions are regulated or governed
by the laws of chemical affinity. (Perhaps Goethe uses the terms as a metaphor
but perhaps he uses it more literally as part of that post-Enlightenment belief
in transformative energies and vitalities, in the physiological, neurological,
electrical and later technological possibilities of all matter’s animism.) Like
the human passions – mysterious generative forces themselves (water, gas,
electricity and desire) – here these (images of) things generate elective affini-
ties that resonate with one another. They do so formally, aesthetically, critically
and, I think, historically with the Surrealist mannequins and shop-window
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dummies on display earlier in this chapter. There will always be reverberations
of the outmoded in the new. This reverberation is time and its non-identical
twin, eroticism. This is thinking, the flowing and the arresting of thoughts. This
is how material history is inaugurated.
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29 [facing top] Allen Jones, Hat Stand, 1969, painted
fibreglass, resin, mixed media and tailor made
accessories, 190.5 x 107 x 33 cm, Tate Modern,
London. © Allen Jones.
30 [facing bottom] Allen Jones, Table, 1969, painted

fibreglass, resin, mixed media, glass and tailor made
accessories, 61 x 130 x 76 cm, Tate Modern, London.
© Allen Jones.
31 [below] Allen Jones, Chair, 1969, painted

fibreglass, resin, Plexiglas, mixed media and tailor
made accessories, 78 x 96 x 57 cm, Tate Modern,
London. © Allen Jones.
32 [bottom] Jemima Stehli, Table 2, 1997–8, gelatin

silver print, 136.8 x 239.4 cm, courtesy of the artist.
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33 [top] Lynn Hershman Leeson, Wrapped, 2007,
77.5 x 60 cm.
34 [bottom] Amber Hawk Swanson, Las Vegas Wedding

Ceremony from Amber Doll Project, 2007, archival pigment
print, 53.3 x 35.5 cm, courtesy of the artist.
35 [facing] Laurie Simmons, The Love Doll/Day 14

(Candy), 2010, Fuji Matte print, 178 x 119 cm,
courtesy of the artist.
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36 Alex Sandwell Kliszynski, Object of Desire 1 and
Object of Desire 2, 2008.
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37 Charles Ray, Self-portrait, 1990, mixed media,
190.5 x 66 x 50.9 cm, © Charles Ray, courtesy of
Matthew Marks Gallery, New York. Note from the
artist: This work is a sculpture, and the artist’s
main interest is in its purely sculptural aspects.
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38 Charles Ray, Oh! Charley, Charley, Charley . . . ,
1992, mixed media, 183 x 457.2 x 457.2 cm,
© Charles Ray, courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery,
New York. Note from the artist: This work is a
sculpture, and the artist’s main interest is in its
purely sculptural aspects.
39 Jake and Dinos Chapman, Death I, 2003, painted

bronze, 77 x 218 x 95 cm. © Jake and Dinos Chapman.
Courtesy White Cube.
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40 John LeKay, Ring a Ring of Roses, 1990–1.
Courtesy of the artist.
41 Hannah Plumb, Reclining Miss World, 2003,

installation view. Courtesy of the artist.
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42 Richard Jackson, The Maid’s Room (detail), 2006–7, fibreglass,
wood, soap, steel, hardware and acrylic paint, 230 x 510 x 260 cm,
Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, Calif., and
Hauser & Wirth, Zurich, Switzerland.
43 Cindy Sherman, Untitled # 188, 1989, chromogenic colour print,

111.8 x 165.1 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures.
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44 Lynn Hershman Leeson, Olympia: Fictive Projections and
the Myth of the Real Doll, 2007–8, silicone RealDoll, chaise
longue, 35mm slide projector, fabric, curtain rod,
installation dimensions variable.
45 Robert Gober, Untitled (Man Coming Out of a Woman),

1993–4, beeswax, human hair, sock, leather shoe,
31.7 x 72.4 x 87.6 cm. © Robert Gober, Courtesy
Matthew Marks Gallery. Photo: Russell Kaye.
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46 Louise Bourgeois, CELL (CLOTHES), 1996,
wood, glass, fabric, rubber and mixed media,
210.8 x 441.9 x 365.7 cm, Collection Fondazione Prada, Milan.
© Louise Bourgeois Trust / VAGA, New York / DACS 2013.
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47 Sarah Lucas, NUD (16), 2009, tights, fluff, wire,
30 x 47 x 37 cm. Copyright: The Artist;
Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London.
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ED_int.indd 182 15/10/2013 5:06 PM
5 / the modern sex doll:
participatory sexual devices
If you need such aids and if you are not ashamed to employ
them, then you have lost all sense of personal dignity.
Paulo Mantegazza, Igiene dell’ amore, 18771
‘You know I’m really interested in you’, I said to Barbie.

‘Me too’, she said, and for a minute I wasn’t sure if she meant
she was interested in herself or me.
A. M. Homes, ‘A Real Doll’2
The idea of the modern sex doll, and the function it serves, is shaped by a
nexus of production, commerce and consumption – especially consumption. It
is a knot of desiring, purchasing, using, devouring, satisfying and discarding.
This nexus delineates the doll’s entry to the mainstream in recent popular
culture. It is formed by and thus attached to many of capitalist modernity’s
determining features, from processes of industrialisation and technologisa-
tion, and the advent of mass production and mass-marketification, to
modernity itself as a mode of experience born of intoxicating, fleeting and
fragmentary encounters with spectacle, entertainment and novelty, also with
toys, including sex toys.
This chapter’s subject is sex toys, understood here as participatory sexual
devices, both commercially and mass-produced, as well as amateur and hand-
crafted. Participatory sexual devices include penetrating sexual devices (such
as the dildo) and penetrable sexual devices, and I attend almost exclusively to
the latter. (Penetrable sexual devices is an umbrella term to designate devices
designed specifically for penetration by the male penis, from artificial vaginas
(cunnus succedaneus) to welded vinyl sex toys and on to bespoke RealDolls.)
48 Bubble Baba Challenge, 2011.

Courtesy of Bubble Baba Challenge.
the modern sex doll / 183
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I intend to make more complex the existing conversations on sex dolls couched
inadequately within discourses of the pornographic (doll as sex object), the
comical (doll as gag), or the therapeutic (doll as sex aid), by formulating a
somewhat itinerant genealogy of the modern sex doll. This genealogy moves
from the manufacture and commercialisation of the modern sex doll for indi-
vidual consumption to the rumour that Adolf Hitler was personally responsible
for introducing the modern sex doll as an element in the Nazi military-indus-
trial complex’s efforts to mould collective will and desire. It then descends to
Japan’s popular culture of cuteness (kawaii) with its ties to dolls in the com-
mercial sex industry. Finally, it emerges at the Dutch Wife, the label by which
the sex doll is known in Japan, where I alight at the mercantile-industrial
complex that is at the origins of this designation, which are also the origins
proper of the modern sex doll.
With the participatory sexual device centre stage, in this chapter I ask how
and why the sex doll with its decidedly participatory relationship to consump-
tion and its potentialities has entered into popular culture and consciousness.
Why has it become part of reasonably popular cultural practices – bearing in
mind that the subjects being tackled here are behaviours and acts, not repre-
sentations – performed largely, although not exclusively, by heterosexual
men? How is the human bond to this doll as a fetishistic and artificial thing
driven by commerce, trafficking and also by desire? Finally, what and, perhaps
more interestingly, where are the modern origins of this thing, for it is a mer-
cantile marine thing whose foundations are in amateur crafting and an uneco-
nomic ecology of social and erotic exchange?
mainstreaming: relatively popular culture
With regards to the emergence of desire, products and markets for participa-
tory sexual devices for men – dolls, sex toys and artificial body parts among
them – I begin this itinerant genealogy from within an economy of individual-
ised consumer-driven purchasing. I stay close to the individual, the ‘wet user’,
and his bond to his sex doll or artificial body part, a union or attachment figured
by capitalist desire and consumption. In this erotic encounter, men are both a
subject of and subject to participatory sexual devices. Such individual and
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individualising encounters are where the doll’s commercial potential, its popu-
larisation and thus its mainstreaming, is most valuably located. Situating our-
selves in relation to such encounters, the starting point is to note that individu-
als have been able to purchase penetrable sexual devices via advertisements
in magazines since at least the late nineteenth century.3 (Home-made penetra-
ble sex devices shaped by the amateur, and luxury devices fashioned by the
craftsman, have been to hand for longer, as will be discussed.) In the 1890s
as part of wider developments in printing technology, paper making and the
growth of advertising agencies, advertisements appeared in broadsheets and
magazines or as mail-order brochures or illustrated catalogues. Often from
Paris, they publicised products made probably from vulcanised rubber or some
kind of textile that had the form of women’s bodies, bellies with artificial
vaginas or free-standing body parts like artificial vaginas that all ‘simulate’ or
act as surrogates for real women.4 These penetrable sexual devices often had
silky pubic hair, intricately designed and detailed vulvas and mechanisms
whereby at the appropriate time the vaginal cavity could be made to release a
warmed-up liquid that simulated a woman’s lubricating secretions. They gave
‘the perfect illusion of reality’, then, apart from one fact: their appearance.
They were structured as a woman’s abdomen without the legs, without arms,
without a head. They are disembodied torsos:
FEMALE BELLY
With Artificial Vagina
Designed to give the man the perfect illusion of a real woman by providing
him with just as sweet and voluptuous sensations as she herself.
Outwardly, the apparatus represents a woman’s abdomen, minus the legs.
The secret parts, the pubis, covered with an abundance of silky hair, the
labia majora, the labia minora, and the clitoris offer themselves to his
covetous view in as temptingly rose-colored manner as the female love
temple itself.
The contact is soft and the pressure can be regulated by a pneumatic tube.
Furthermore [the apparatus includes] a lubricating mechanism, to be
previously filled with a warm and oily liquid, to be released by pressure
into the vagina at the critical moment, just as in the case of the natural
female glands.
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This female tummy with lubrication is the only apparatus that duplicates
exactly the copulatory organs of the woman [and is therefore the only one]
capable of giving the perfect illusion of reality.
Being readily inflatable and deflatable, the apparatus can be as easily hidden
in the pocket as a handkerchief or any other toilet article.
Complete apparatus 100 francs.5
Given the availability in this period of penetrable sexual devices, and this chap-
ter’s concentration on sex dolls and disembodied artificial body parts, it is
perhaps surprising that with the advent of Sexology in the late nineteenth
century, penetrating sexual devices and discourses about them are far more
prevalent.6 (The explanation for the rarity of penetrable sexual devices in dis-
course is their apparent redundancy: the argument goes that since both the
erection and the male orgasm are inevitable, such predictability obfuscates
their opposite: impotence, erectile dis-function and shame.) In the main, as
Cynthia Ann Moya writes, sexologists such as Ellis and Bloch in their discourse
on ‘onanistic stimulatory apparatus[es]’ focused largely on female auto-
eroticism; this was part of a larger debate, as I remarked earlier, that Bloch
described, referring to Ellis, as the ‘auto-erotic instrumentarium’.7 In The
Sexual Life of Our Time: In its Relations to Modern Civilization (1907), Bloch
claimed that he was well aware of the availability via catalogues of Parisian
Rubber Traders of the artificial penis (penis succedaneus) or phallus; what the
French call godemiché.8 Such a privileging in the science of Sexology of female
auto-eroticism and the penetrating sexual devices that seem to accompany it
hand in glove – which were used not only by women – institute a disparity. This
disparity both relegates penetrable sexual devices to the footnotes of the
history of sexual practices (something Maya has sought to rectify in her
research) and has even lead to inaccuracies of etymology. One such example
is how this favouring of penetrating devices has mutated the word ‘merkin’.
Now understood solely as a pubic wig, in the 1880s it was written about by Sir
Richard Francis Burton as an artificial vagina. Sexologist, explorer and Orien-
talist, Burton assisted in the translation of The Kama Sutra (1883) and trans-
lated The Arabian Nights Entertainments; or The Book of a Thousand Nights and
a Night (1885), so he knew his ars erotica. In his ‘Terminal Essay’ which appears
at the end of the ten-volume Arabian Nights, in Section D on ‘Pederasty’, in a
sub-section on debauchery in the ‘Sotadic Zone’ (what he called the area
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49 [left] Anon., Vaginal-Ersatz from a patient
at Hirschfeld’s Institut fur Sexualwissenschaft,
Berlin, Archiv des Instituts für Sexualwissen-
schaft, Dr Magnus Hirschfeld-Stiftung, Berlin.
Courtesy of Cynthia Ann Moya.
50 [right] Anon., Japanese sex-store

catalogue, 1930s/1940s. Courtesy of
Cynthia Ann Moya.
including China, ‘Turkistan’ and Japan), he wrote that ‘[f]or the men they have
the “merkin”, a heart-shaped article of thin skin stuffed with cotton and a slit
with an artificial vagina: two tapes at the top and one below lash it to the back
of the chair’.9 Penetrable sexual devices are, then, a crucial component in
scientia sexualis, as will become evident throughout this chapter; they just need
to be untangled and disclosed.
Returning to the nineteenth century, the advertisement for penetrable sexual
devices shows that there was already a retail market for the erotic consump-
tion of sex dolls and disembodied artificial body parts. They function in a
number of ways simultaneously: as surrogates, as surrogates for fetishists, as
haptic mana for rubber fetishists and as the perfect thing in and of itself for
‘parts fetishists’, as they are known for their pathological, paraphilic partial-
ism.10 Such a patterning of individualised and individualising experience per-
sists, as can be seen through a series of (slightly a-chronological) examples
of devices from the twentieth century: a stuffed artificial vagina akin to Burton’s
merkin from a German institute for sex research (pre-1928; fig. 49); a soft
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51 (left) Anon., mail order brochure for
artificial vagina, 1969, courtesy of Cynthia
Ann Moya.
52 (below) Mail-order brochure for Big

John male sex doll, 1970s, courtesy of
Cynthia Ann Moya.
53 (facing left) Anon., cover, Gay Sex

Devices magazine, 1974, courtesy of
Cynthia Ann Moya.
54 (facing right) Anon., Black artificial

vagina from The directory of adult pleasure
products, 1970s. Courtesy of Cynthia
Ann Moya.
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rubber ‘pocket pussy’ from Japan (c. 1930s; fig. 50); a flyer posted in Hollywood
for a strap-on artificial vagina (1969; fig. 51); a vibrating cylindrical rubber
sleeve or ‘gay sex device’ that appears on the cover of an encyclopaedia pub-
lished in Texas (1974; fig. 53); a magazine catalogue that features a ‘black can
be fantastically beautiful’ artificial vagina (1970s; fig. 54); and the ‘almost living
doll’ and ‘perfect male companion’ Big John, for solitary straight or queer,
couple or group activities (1970s; fig. 52).11
Whether amateur and hand-crafted or commercial and semi-mass-pro-
duced, this is a snapshot of how the ‘market’ for such artefacts and devices
expands, diversifies and begins to go mainstream. Such mainstreaming is the
upshot of particular factors. A first factor is the upsurge in the popularisation
of knowledge about sexual behaviour by way of Sexology and later through a
general therapeutic impulse, via Alfred Kinsey, pseudo-scientific publications,
sex education and Shere Hite, that looked to give psychological and practical
‘marital aid’. (It has been argued that the shift in nomenclature in the early
1980s from ‘sex devices’ or ‘marital aids’ to ‘sex toys’ was a response to the
rise of AIDS, as manufacturers acted to avoid their product as an ‘aid’ becoming
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confused in the popular imagination with a disease of the human immune
system.12)
A second factor in the mainstreaming of these devices is their availability.
As advertising shifted from the small-ads pages and catalogues that were
circulated covertly to the expansion of the publicly displayed men’s lifestyle and
soft-core magazine market, so did the product’s availability. At the same time,
the settings for purchasing them moved from clandestine brothels, porn
cinemas and other seedy environments to glossy high-street sex-shop chains,
which often target female consumers, and to the convenience of the
internet.
A third factor is the switch from text-based to image-based advertisements.
However, the glamorous photographs promoting life-size inflatable dolls such
as ‘Judy’ (fig. 55) whose flesh is ‘almost too human’, whose ‘body responds to
your every touch’ and who is ‘born to serve’, are, given the rudimentary vinyl
technology of the times, somewhat misleading. (Perhaps Judy’s manufacturers
knew this, since she could be returned in ten days if satisfaction was not
guaranteed.)
A fourth factor is that rubber and plastics technology improved in industrial
modernity. Dolls and other participatory devices – which came to be manufac-
tured on a semi-mass-produced basis – were transformed from rudimentary
rubber artefacts to cylindrical rubber sleeves; to vinyl dolls and strap-on vaginas
in the 1960s and 70s; by way of a series of ever more elaborate (and amusingly
named) futuristic and free-standing penetrable vibrating devices such as the
Suck-U-Lator, the Vibro-Rectum and the Orgo-Aid; and on to today’s sex dolls
at the top of the range with their high-tech design functionality.
Together these factors led to the upsurge in the market for penetrable sexual
devices and thus their mainstreaming into popular cultural practices. In the
American market for eroticised items, since the 1980s such devices have gone
from $1 out of every $1000 sold to $1 out of every $100.13 Perhaps the tipping
point for the sex doll’s mainstreaming (also the ultimate declaration of their
‘perfect illusion of reality’) came in 1997 when the American talk-show host
Howard Stern purportedly fucked his RealDoll, Celine, live on air, proclaiming:
55 Judy the Inflatable Love Maid,

newspaper advertisement, 1971.
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56 Nip/Tuck, medium shot of Kelly Carlson as
Kimberly sitting beside doll, 21 July 2004.
‘[B]est sex I ever had! I swear to God. This RealDoll is better than a real woman!
She is fantastic. I could fall in love with that thing! She is like a real one! I
swear to God and on my children’s heads!’14
Since then, the sex doll has travelled beyond the commercial sex industry
into contemporary cultures of fine art, photography, documentary, fashion, film
and television, trashy novels, popular visual culture and popular cultural prac-
tices (figs 56–57). This is a legacy of both the mainstreaming of the commercial
sex industry and the circulation of the work of Kokoschka, the Surrealists,
Duchamp, Bellmer and post-Surrealist practitioners as highlighted in the pre-
vious chapter’s coda. Today there are enough recent encounters between men
(and women for that matter) and sex dolls, as well as encounters with (non-
sex) dolls, and between dolls, for such mainstreaming to have reached critical
mass.15
In this chapter, though, I am focusing not so much on representations, on
the representational. Rather, I am concentrating on mainstreaming by way of
popular cultural practices themselves, on consumer-driven purchasing and
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57 Lars and the Real Girl, dir. Craig Gillespie, 2007.
© Kimmel Distribution, lcc, All Rights Reserved.
Courtesy of MGM Media Licensing
use of commercial penetrable sexual devices, on the attachment of the con-

sumer to (usually) his sex dolls and disembodied artificial body parts, torsos
and vulvas and vaginas, and the nature of his behaviours towards and acts with
them. Much like the enormous dildo market, the market for these rudimentary
dolls and artificial body parts offers a vast range for exclusively sexual pur-
poses. Here with men, doll and artificial body part – unlike between men and
their RealDolls discussed in the next chapter – there is no hint of companion-
ship, of a desire for shared intimacies and reciprocity, an acknowledgement
and disavowal of the doll’s veracity, of the doll as a stand-in or surrogate, a
sense of its capacity for compassion, its power to radiate feelings. These
moulded, inflatable or cast rudimentary dolls and (especially) artificial body
parts are what they are and nothing more. They expose most plainly what it
means for them to be ‘the perfect illusion of reality’. They are penetrable sexual
devices for sex, for masturbation.
Nowadays at the higher end of the market for artificial body parts are prod-
ucts such as RealDoll’s Flat Back Torso retailing at more than $1000, a torso
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without head or limbs, available in both male and female form. Yet more trun-
cated is RealDoll’s Female Torso retailing at nearly $600, a mould of the female
genital area from the top of the thighs to below the belly button. Both products
are lifelike but incomplete, credible but partial, not unlike the eighteenth-
century anatomical waxes that demonstrated woman’s reproductive system.
At the cheaper, more popular end of the market are products where the design
priority is still that they feel as well as look like flesh-and-blood women’s
bodies – although their look and feel is obviously much less mimetic – but are
nonetheless also partial, perhaps even less than partial. As such they are in
keeping with the arc of penetrable sexual devices that goes back to the nine-
teenth-century advertisement for a female belly with artificial vagina, that
‘perfect illusion of reality’. Exemplary of this is the Fleshlight (fig. 58), the top-
selling male sex toy in the world. Retailing for about $70, it is a contraption
shaped like a flashlight with an inconspicuous outward appearance. It is one
of a number of innocuous-seeming ‘social camouflaging’ products, much like
the female belly with artificial vagina that could be deflated and hidden easily
in the pocket as a handkerchief.16 The Fleshlight has a removable cap and an
inside chamber with an insert formed from an elastomeric gel that simulates
human flesh ‘of the type forming sexually receptive orifices’, and can accom-
modate a human male sex organ.17 In addition to being inexpensive and dis-
creet, advertising claims that it is the Fleshlight’s ‘feel-real superskin’ that is
its selling point. It comes in different models and the visible opening can be
configured to resemble facial lips, vaginal lips or an anus. In the original
American patent it is detailed that the device ‘may also include a small heating
element and a battery so that the elastomeric gel may be heated to approxi-
mately normal body temperature, to further increase the realistic feel of the
gel’. Hyperbole aside, the title of the patent divulges the product’s ignoble
selling point: like all penetrable sexual devices, it is a ‘device for discreet
sperm collection’.
Inventors have loftier ambitions, of course. The same patent-holder also
submitted a patent for a ‘female functioning mannequin’ (United States Patent
5,466,235), citing as the reasons for its invention the fact that women are cruel,
venal, superficial, that they humiliate and break the hearts of men and that
dolls on the contrary are reliable, compliant, companionable and loving. His
application goes on to say that such men may be suffering a break-up, be
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58 Fleshlight, designed and marketed by
Interactive Life Forms.
chronically shy, lonely, agoraphobic, premature ejaculators or have physical

disabilities. It adds that (here the patent-holder’s enthusiasm gets the better
of him) the invention may help decrease the transmission of aids, other sexually
transmitted diseases, prostitution and even rape and molestation.18 In making
considerable and altruistic claims for his ‘female functioning mannequin’, its
therapeutic and regulative value affirms the patent-holder’s moral conscience.
He is doing his civic duty for the psychiatric and mental health services, the
police services and the criminal justice, penal and prison system, as well as
lonely men everywhere (this is the sex toy as a therapeutic aid). Thus he cir-
cumvents the need to debate the fact that he is planning to shape, invent even,
a new paradigm of the lucrative commercial market for modern masturbatory
or penetrable sexual devices. That this mannequin never went into production
is neither here nor there. Along with the late nineteenth-century female belly
with artificial vagina, the Flat Back Torso, the Female Torso and the Fleshlight,
the commercial market in man-made body parts for sexual gratification is
forever propagating. If further proof of this were necessary, the reader need
only look to the numerous porn stars including Juli Ashton, Tyfanny Mynx, Kobe
Tai and Asia Carrera who have sanctioned the manufacture of synthetic geni-
talia – as well as complete dolls – allegedly moulded on their own genitals,
thereby giving the products their ultimate mimetic seal of approval.19
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The hard-nosed business of patents for the rights, design and distribution
of such hard-core products, whether their invention is altruistic or otherwise,
and the sexual practices to which they allude, in entering the mainstream un-
tethers the sex doll from its perverse moorings. Or, its perversity contaminates
the mainstream. Or both. Whichever is the case, because an erotic plaything
is after all an adult toy, such popularisation identifies it as a figure of novelty,
entertainment, spectacle and fun. Perhaps it always was and is thus quintes-
sentially of modernity. That such mainstreaming is even possible is because
of the numerous popular cultural practices to which it (or objects like it) was
or has become central. Its popularity has something to do with its inflatability
and its deflatability, its flaccidity, its tautness and its detumescence in an
endless eternal return. Are not nearly all things inflatable and deflatable – from
balloons to bouncy castles to Paul McCarthy and Jeff Koons’s inflatables to
low-end vinyl blow-up dolls – fun, pleasurable and comical? And often
somehow slightly naughty? This is the side of sex that is juvenile, silly, ridicu-
lous, a sensibility tied for instance to saucy British seaside cartoon postcards
popular from the early 1930s onwards, in fact to saucy graphic and animated
cartoons in general. The popular affection for the inflatable sex doll could be
tied to the idea that it finds its beginnings in the lilo, the inflatable, floating,
puncture-able raft also popularised in the 1930s, and perhaps a development
of the life-saver (or vice versa). Since the turn of the millennium, the lilo and
sex doll have been brought together in an annual event entitled the Bubble
Baba Challenge that takes place in the St Petersburg region of Russia (although
it was cancelled in 2012 because water levels were dangerously high) where
on the Vuoksa river hundreds of athletes using inflatable sex dolls as lilos
compete in a white-water rafting competition (fig. 48). If you do not have your
own, you can hire one.
This mainstreaming of the sex doll is indebted largely to the doll’s part in
the market for soft-core ‘adult novelties’, where it appears usually without
built-in penetrable apertures; because of this it has become integral to the
predominantly (although not always) harmless popular cultural practices of
‘frat’ parties and bachelor and bachelorette parties. Servicing such juvenile
frivolity are plenty of businesses including online companies such as Blowup-
doll101.com that sell inflatable dolls for such gatherings, supplying detailed
information on their products. These are tied to celebration in our ongoing
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59 ‘Bareback Mount Him’,
life-size inflatable doll,
TLC/Topco.
culture of celebrity – which itself amounts to so much hot air. Not unexpectedly

and in keeping with that culture’s superficiality, artificiality and hollowness,
came the recent emergence of the celebrity sex doll. Recalling the mimetic
impulse of Cora Scovil and Lester Gaba’s 1920s and 30s mannequins modelled
on socialites and Hollywood stars, companies such as Pipedream Productions
offer lines of inflatable toys that include a ‘Super Stars Series’ of inflatable
dolls that ‘look like’ American and Latina film, television and music personali-
ties such as Lindsay Lohan, Jessica Simpson, Sarah Jessica Parker, Jessica
Alba, Eva Longoria, Pamela Anderson, Christina Aguilera and Jennifer Lopez.20
Such hetero-normative economies are not wholly overriding the scene, though,
as is evidenced by products (for both gay and straight men, and women) such
as TLC’s ‘Bareback Mount Him’, a life-size inflatable male doll (a progeny of
Big John from the 1970s), which enables you to ‘create your own American
epic’. He comes with a free bandana (fig. 59).
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There have been occasions when the ‘fun’ part of this novelty industry in
penetrable sexual devices has gone awry, and this is usually for reasons of
religion. An inflatable sex doll named Mustafa, for instance, on sale in Britain
in Anne Summers sex shops in 2006, was withdrawn after protests from the
imam and elders of Manchester Central Mosque who pointed out that Al-
Mustafa in Arabic means ‘The Chosen One’.21 (A spokesperson for Ann Summers
said that they had not meant to cause offence and that the name was just a
play on words.) A Jesus sex doll, marketed as having American, Greek (that is,
anal, apparently) and stigmata openings, also available as a luxury version with
added natural hair, seems to have caused less public outcry.
Such a will-to-verisimilitude, whether those historical figures are film per-
sonalities, an epithet of Muhammad the prophet of God, or the son of God, is
not all-pervasive, however. At exactly the same time as Abyss Creation is
manufacturing the most lifelike dolls and when even the cheaper end of the
market continues to strive for realism and familiarity (celebrities, Jesus . . .)
or at least the best that it can do to keep production costs down, for other
companies a faithful replication of the human is no longer the only priority.
Realism and mimeticism give way to fantasy and the fantastical; the human
gives way to the non-human wherein the human form is transformed into a
certain non-human material formlessness. Abyss Creation’s sister company
boytoydolls, for example, specialise in designing dolls that are purposely
unreal. They are still made out of silicone, are anatomically correct, are posable
and have similar removable orifice systems to their more accurate siblings but,
while they use a RealDoll ‘skeleton system as a platform’, because they are
inspired by comic-book and anime characters they ‘step . . . outside the bounds
of realism and scale and proportions’. This is an anthropo- or zoomorphism.
Even more unrealistic are mlds (material love dolls) such as Teddy Babes.
These are stuffed, cuddly, huggable adult toys made from plush material (what
they call ‘pussy velour’) that look much like Hermione Moos’s doll of Alma
Mahler. They have a vaginal insert, although by some quirk of modesty they do
not feature oral or anal entries (fig. 60). The same company also sells furry
bunny and cheetah toys with removable silken orifices, which are manufac-
tured and available exclusively from Angelpaws. Products that similarly priori-
tise comfort are made in Japan, where inflatable love pillows (dakimakura,
‘hugging pillows’) often feature the faces of famous stars from popular culture
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60 Teddy Babes, courtesy of Eight Wonder, llc.
or porn, or anime characters with penetration holes in them, a version of which

was seen recently on the comedy series 30 Rock (fig. 61). The pinnacle, that is,
nadir of non-realistic or anthropomorphising penetrable sexual devices include
full-scale inflatable animals, perfect for the shy zoophile, with names such as
Luvin Lamb, Piggie and Elsie the Inflatable Cow who moos during sex.
Given that penetrative sexual devices – dolls and artificial body parts in
particular – are shaped by such a nexus of production, commerce and con-
sumption, and given the participatory behaviours that accompany them, and
the relatively popular cultural practices of which they are a part, it is no sur-
prise that their visibility is linked to a more general mainstreaming. This
mainstreaming includes pornography, the expansion of the internet as a plat-
form for uploading, archiving and disseminating photographic and video
imagery, and interactive webcam technologies. It is also no surprise that in
capitalist modernity’s ethos of mass production, and its discourse of popular
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61 30 ROCK, ‘Klaus and Greta’, Episode 409: (l–r)
Jeffrey Self as Randy Lemon, Tina Fey as Liz Lemon,
James Franco, Kimiko.
novelty, entertainment, spectacle and fun, there still persists this long-term
effort to create the ‘perfect illusion of reality’. The doll and the artificial body
part must retain their will-to-verisimilitude, even when that realism is unreal,
elf-like, plush, silken, two-dimensional and/or bestial. Whether mimetic or
unreal, the aesthetic that drives capitalism is just such a realism, albeit one
that fragments (form) and abstracts (labour). Such fragmenting and abstract-
ing constitute the aesthetic of modernity. All these penetrable sexual
devices – these fully formed artificial human bodies, these parts of bodies,
organs without bodies, moulds, artificial vaginas, disembodied torsos, inde-
pendent body parts for fetishists and ‘parts fetishists’ – are components of that
aesthetic. Further, such fragmenting and abstracting are constitutive of erotic
relations between men and inanimate form, between persons and things, and
such relations are composed in and by that capitalist consumer culture. As
devices, artefacts, commodities or objects, they are symptomatic also of the
ED_int.indd 200 15/10/2013 5:06 PM

internal logic of anthropological, economic and sexual processes of fetishisa-
tion, idolatrisation, reification and objectification. In this economy of individu-
alised consumer-driven purchasing, the desirous bond between men and sex
dolls and disembodied artificial body parts is an attachment in which he
becomes subject of and to such devices. For this reason, abstracting encoun-
ters, behaviours and acts between persons and things alienate subjects and
anthropomorphise objects, in turn anthropomorphising subjects as thing-like
and alienating objects from themselves and each other.
a brief interlude: hitler’s burghild
There is a consensus that the prototype for the modern sex doll was the mass
production and popularisation in the 1950s of the German Bild Lilli doll, based
on the comic-strip prostitute character Lilli created by Reinhard Beuthien for
Bild-Zeitung and reportedly an inspiration for Ruth Handler’s Barbie in 1959.22
However, there is a fascinating although almost surely apocryphal story that,
slightly earlier, Adolf Hitler was personally responsible for inaugurating the
age of the modern sex doll.23 A succinct account of this story appears in the
American author Chuck Palahniuk’s Snuff (2008), the promotional tour of which
saw Palahniuk photographed regularly with inflatable dolls (fig. 62).24 In Snuff,
Mr 72 is conversing with Ms Wright:
I asked, Did she know Adolf Hitler invented the blow-up sex doll?
And Ms. Wright’s black sunglasses turned to look at me.
During the First World War, I told her, Hitler had been a runner, delivering
messages between the German trenches, and he was disgusted by seeing
his fellow soldiers visit French brothels. To keep the Aryan bloodlines pure,
and prevent the spread of venereal disease, he commissioned an inflatable
doll that Nazi troops could take into battle. Hitler himself designed the dolls
to have blond hair and large breasts. The Allied firebombing of Dresden
destroyed the factory before the dolls could go into wide distribution.
True fact.25
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True fact? Not quite. Palahniuk is not the originator of this story which, while
based firmly in the realms of anecdote, myth and popular and trash culture,
bears some relation to historical fact. In 2005 the Italian newspaper Corriere
della Sera is supposed to have run a version of the story which was then dis-
seminated and bastardised by any number of internet websites.26 In this
version, it is rumoured that in 1941 Hitler charged the SS commander Heinrich
Himmler with initiating a sex-doll project. He in turn appointed the psychiatrist
Dr Rudolf Chargeheimer to develop a prototype, a venture that was also taken
up by the Danish doctor Olen Hannussen. This project was known variously
as Burghild, Borghild (the Danish equivalent) or ‘Feldhygienische Projekt’
(‘field-hygienic project’). Its brief was to design and manufacture workable
galvonoplastic dolls that would accompany SS soldiers into the field in ‘disin-
fection-trailers’ and be used to ward off their feelings of loneliness and isola-
tion.27 The dolls were also there to dissuade the soldiers from becoming ‘trai-
tors to their race’ by frequenting prostitutes (although medically supervised
brothels were established through the Reich territory), thus preventing the
contraction of venereal diseases, avoiding corruption by non-Aryan women or
women of ‘alien’ blood, nipping in the bud a squandering of their seed with
‘inferior’ ethnic groups and polluting the gene pool. They were also to discour-
age the seeking of sexual congress with one another.28 The project was an odd
mix of part moral purity, part eugenics, part draconian, regulative and punitive
regime. It was still about consumption, as were the encounters discussed
earlier between men and inanimate human form, although the emphasis
shifted from individual and individualised consumption to the military-
industrial complex’s collective consumptions (where the sex doll as a thing
moulds collective will and desire). It was driven partly also by a hetero-nor-
mative and procreative (but only appropriately procreative) imperative. The
dolls were for sex, pure and simple, certainly not for love; they were surrogates
for but in no way meant to replace the figure of the ideal Aryan wife and mother,
the ‘future mother’, in the domestic sphere.
In line with his Aryan aesthetic tastes, Hitler’s dolls would be blonde and
blue-eyed. To be more precise, there is a reference, although without a source,
to a story in a Norwegian newspaper, published before the article in Corriere
della Sera, stating that Hitler himself provided the measurements and design
for the doll. He is even quoted: ‘She should be a natural size with a pretty
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62 Chuck Palahuiuk publicity tour
for Snuff, 2008.
woman’s appearance with white skin, blond hair, blue eyes, 1.76 meters [5 ft 9]
high, with large lips and breasts.’29 Chargeheimer understood more fully the
need for verisimilitude and recognised that it was not just about how some-
thing looked but also – and here he is an heir to many others – how something
felt. In a letter to Hannussen, highlighting some production challenges, he
wrote: ‘no real men will prefer a doll to a real woman until our technicians
meet the following quality standards: the synthetic flesh has to feel the same
like [sic] real flesh. The doll’s body should be as agile and moveable as the real
body. The doll’s organ should feel absolutely realistic’.30
Additional information suggests that the dolls were to be built at the Hygiene
Museum in Dresden under the supervision of the technician Franz Tschakert.
Tschakert was known as Der Vater der Gläsernen Frau (‘the father of the glass
woman’) because at an international ‘Hygiene Exhibit’ in the 1930s (the latest
in a series of social and hygiene exhibitions that went back to the early twen-
tieth century) he had shown off the world’s first gynoid constructed entirely of
‘hygienic’ glass (although it was actually made of Cellon, a new translucent
plastic).31 In the first instance, the plan for the Burghild project was to take a
plaster cast from a living model. A number of German female athletes were
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invited to Tschakert’s studio, including Wilhelmina von Bremen and Annette
Walter, as was the National Socialist film star Kristina Söderbaum. (It was also
hoped that the doll might carry the ‘cheeky’ and seductive look of the actress
Käthe von Nagy but she declined their invitation and, anyway, Hannussen
thought that it was better for the doll to have a de-individualised ‘artificial face
of lust’ than for it to be modelled on a real, living person.) It was discovered,
though, that taking plaster casts from a living model always leads to a deformed
appearance so it was decided that the doll should be built in a modular way,
combining, as Tschakert said, the ‘best of all possible bodies’ (Zeuxis-like) into
a ‘perfect automaton of lust’.32
Tschakert’s dolls were to have movable arms and legs and were to be covered
with a skin-like material. He had already tried several materials based on
rubber or butyl-rubber from IG Farben, (a German chemical company who, in
addition to having a factory in Monowitz near Auschwitz and holding the patent
for Zyklon B, had realised in 1940–41 a number of ‘skin-friendly polymers’ with
high-tensile strength and elasticity for the SS) or from the Rheinischen Gummi-
und Celluloid Fabrik. In the end Tschakert planned to use elastolin for the
skeleton, while the doll itself, manufactured in a bronze mould, would be made
in galvinised plastic. Realised, and donning a boyish haircut to stress that this
‘field-whore’ was ‘part of the fighting forces’, early prototypes were tested on
soldiers at the barracks of Soldatenheim St Helier, but the results of Dr
Chargenheimer’s tests are not known. Rumour has it that production either
never started or that it was suspended in 1942. Three years later the Allies
bombed Dresden and the factory in which the dolls were due to be manufac-
tured was destroyed, along with any prototypes and documentation.33
japanese kawaii
If Hitler’s military-industrial complex is one (albeit probably fictional) origin for

the modern sex doll, mainstreamed by way of popular cultural forms, another
is Japan.34 After the USA, Japan is the country with a male heterosexual popu-
lation most firmly in the grip of the sex doll. Its popularity is tied to and best
understood by way of Japan’s longer-term interests in popular culture, kitsch,
novelty, miniaturisation and cuteness. This popularity is tied also to its own
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ancient doll culture (ningyō , the Japanese word for doll, composed of the Sino
characters for ‘man’ and ‘form’, literally means ‘human figure’) with its own
historically and culturally locatable fantasies of animism and anthropomor-
phism. Equally it is tied to Japan’s ongoing crisis in post-war straight mascu-
linity, which has led to the alienated and isolated finding solace in a sexually
violent visual culture.
Beginning in earnest with the imperialising drive instituted by the Meiji
Restoration (or Revolution) of 1868 with its importation, imposition and embrac-
ing of Western modernisation, combined with its colonising ambitions and
especially the speeding up of its industrialisation and thus mass production,
Japan generated the scale of mass market that is crucial for the development
of a popular culture. After the emergence of a modern popular culture in the
late nineteenth century, a sexualising mass society came into its own in the
1920s and 30s with its ‘erotic grotesque nonsense’ (ero guro nansensu) culture.35
Although porn-kitsch existed as far back as the 1910s, to say nothing of shunga
(the erotic drawings, woodcuts and calligraphy going back to the Edo period
and before, produced for private consumption), elements of the ‘erotic gro-
tesque nonsense’ culture persisted in the pulp entertainment magazines of
the post-war period and the rise of self-help and ‘how to’ sex manuals in the
1960s. This coincided with what is characterised as a post-war ‘flesh boom’
(nikutai būmu) due to a general celebration of physicality and sexuality, the
influence of American television’s sexualisation and commodification of the
body, and the US male presence in Vietnam (copies of Playboy in hand)
in the 1960s.36 Over the last few decades, as its reciprocal relationship with
America continues, Japan’s commitment to mass or popular culture has con-
tinued apace. This is evident especially with the globalising proliferation of its
animated films (anime), its comic books (manga, which have come to include
a huge adult comic-book industry), animated pornography (hentai anime) and
the rise more recently of its uniquely localised beauty industry.37
Japanese popular culture, while greatly sexualised, is censorious and censo-
rial, and simultaneously accused, perhaps too hastily, of being both infantilis-
ing and infantile. It did not allow until recently the depiction of pubic hair in
paint, pencil and engraving and still prohibits it in photography and film. In its
pornography industry the genital areas in explicit images are covered with
censorial mosaics or bars, using digital scrambling or ‘fogging’ to satisfy
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decency laws. At the same time, it is a culture with a fanatical interest in toys,
models and model figures, miniatures, trinkets, robots and AI’s ‘intelligent
agents’. It also has a long tradition of recreational participation with inanimate
objects that have human form, including dolls, figurines, puppets, mechanised
wind-up dolls (karakuri), realistic life-sized ‘living dolls’ (iki-ningyō ) and autom-
ata. So, perhaps, accusations of a broader obsession with the ludic potential
of all things miniature (and animistic, animatable or enlivenable) are closer to
the mark.38
Either way, it is not surprising that Japanese mass-produced and popular
culture became dominated in the 1980s and throughout the 90s by cuteness
(kawaii) and its Lolita aesthetic. Kawaii culture emerged in the 1970s from the
schoolgirl fashion for cutesy handwriting script (often described as koneko ji,
‘kitten writing’, or burikko ji, ‘fake-child writing’) that came to dominate every-
thing from magazines and television to street fashion, production design, the
music industry, even cuisine. The craze for cuteness is an embrace of the
pretty, the lovely, the gentle, the pathetic, an affection for all things that need
to have their ‘innocence’ protected, and is thereby connected to a more general
infantilisation of culture.39 This modern preoccupation with cuteness probably
finds its origins in early twentieth-century magazines for women which intro-
duced the figure of the Shōjo, a young woman with a disproportionately large
head and out-sized doe eyes that heralded for the graphic arts the advent of
a more ‘psychologically complex’ female character who could be ‘interpreted’
and thus elicit empathy from her readers. While not allowed to express her
sexuality as such, she offers an innocence and naivety that was always and is
now all the more easily sexualised.40 Such cuteness, with its contemporary
infantilisation and infantilism and when combined with ‘cosplay’ (costume
role-play or kosupure), is regularly transformed anew, diversifying into various
sub-cultural sub-categories. These include the self-explanatory Goth-Lolita
(gosurori); ‘kogals’ (kogyaru), girls sporting a high-school uniform look, often
accessorised to maximise their flagrant consumption; and the delinquent
school-girl look (sukeban) popularised outside Japan by the character Go Go
Yubari (played by Chiaki Kuriyama) in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill vol. 1 (2003).
Exemplary is Guro Lolita, also known as injured Lolita or injured idol (kegadol),
the ‘broken doll’ aesthetic made popular by the Japanese photographer Araki,
by Romain Slocombe’s photographs and more recently by the character
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Kobushi Abiru from the manga/anime series ‘Sayonara Zetsub ō Sensei’.41
Such cuteness and its mutations are embraced with equal vigour, albeit to
different ends, by young female consumers as a mark of their supposed self-
determination, and by male consumers of manga, anime and hentai anime with
a particular penchant for proto-paedophilic content. The culture of an attrac-
tion to underage girls has come collectively to be known as lolicon, roricon or
Lolita Complex.42
This Japanese obsession with cuteness makes a certain sense in the context
of a highly censorial and censorious culture that is, at the same time, a con-
sumerist economy enthralled by the commodification of the sexual in its
popular and mass-produced cultures. It has a thirst for novelty, toys and their
sexualised aesthetics and has placed a premium on domestic consumer goods
as signs of conspicuous consumption. Small wonder, then, that the sex doll in
all its forms would find a welcoming home here. In fact it has found four distinct
yet interconnected homes in Japanese culture: the first in popular culture
itself, the second in avant-garde visual arts practice from the 1960s onwards,
the third in visual arts’ extensive criticism of its own popular culture in the
1990s and after and the fourth in the commercial sex industry, where the
pervasiveness of sex dolls and their accoutrements indicates that it is integral
to and generative of a wide range of reasonably popular cultural practices.43 I
shall concentrate on the last two, in reverse order.
The commercial sex industry in Japan, much like the country’s popular
culture, as part of its popular culture even, is full of kawaii, toys and trinkets,
manga and anime, figurines and electronic goods, and sex dolls. Tokyo has sex
shops going back to at least the 1930s. Now they have sex shops that are
multi-storey, with floors dedicated to toys, magazines, DVDs and costumes,
and distinct sections for any and all speciality goods, right down to used
women’s panties and pantyhose.44 Some stores sell sex dolls exclusively.
Vending machines on the pavements of busy streets sell adult-themed capsule
toys with female figurines that are semi-naked, masturbating and trussed up
in bondage regalia (fig. 63). (There is even a vending machine called ‘Men’s
Golden Ticket’ which sells capsules with miniature sex toys for men such as
rubber vaginas and anal beads; fig. 64.45) There is a market for cloth sex dolls
like the material love dolls discussed earlier, for hentai dolls and for inflatable
love pillows.46 Specialist magazines for lovers of dolls include i-doloid Petie and
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63 Adult theme capsule toys,
Collection Demonbaby.
Aidroid; in 2006 the latter had a print-run of 10,000 copies.47 Japan also has a
thriving sub-theme of the love hotel, with Tokyo businesses such as Doru no
Mori (‘Doll Forest’) renting out sex dolls with rooms by the hour. There are
rental businesses that bring dolls to your home and even doll-exchange
parties.48
Given these developments in industry, technology and mass production,
along with the commercialisation of the sex industry and the ensuing rise and
diversification of consumer tastes and desires, by the 1960s and 70s penetra-
ble sexual devices in Japan began to be amassed in force. Already in the 1960s
the Japanese were reported to ‘have a special talent for producing [“silent
wives” made of wax or rubber] in most lifelike versions’.49 As one example, the
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64 Adult theme capsule toys,
Collection Demonbaby.
Orient Industry company began manufacturing high-end sex dolls around

1977, originally for men with physical disabilities.50 (By 2008 the company
claimed that there were twenty thousand doll users in Japan.) Over the years,
their dolls have become ever more sophisticated in terms of visual and tactile
verisimilitude. This can be glimpsed in the changing graphic design of the
company’s advertising campaigns and marketing strategies from the 1970s
onwards, and how they have presented changes in the industrial design of their
products, brought about by advances in synthetic and micro-electronic tech-
nology, in the look and feel of their dolls as they moved from saggy vinyl to
refined ball-jointedness. This progression is evident in a number of ways. In
terms of framing and mis-en-scène, in the early days (1977; fig. 65) an adver-
tisement for a rudimentary vinyl doll was designed to frame it, as if a portrait,
while a more recent advertisement (2001; fig. 66) creates a sense of being
taken from a real-life photo-shoot or a still from a film. Regarding the move
from part to whole, the 1977 advertisement draws the consumer’s attention to
the individual and individualised primary sexual and fetishistic characteristics
(the parts for the whole), while the 2001 shot offers more of a soft-core life-
style choice that belies the true purpose of the doll (the whole for the parts).
In informational terms, the earliest Oriental Industry advertisement for sex
dolls has its text in Japanese, while the more recent ones are bilingual, in
Japanese and English. The facial ‘aesthetic’ of the dolls themselves has
changed from a fairly Westernised appearance (1977) to a demure (1982, 1987,
1992, 1997; fig. 67) or even dour disposition, via cosplay (2000), culminating in
the slicked erotic-ecstatic (2001). Finally, in the realm of synthetic and micro-
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65 (left) Orient Industry, Orient Love Dolls –
Hohoeimi, 1977, Collection Kanojo Toys.
66 (right) Orient Industry, Orient Love Dolls –

Jewel, Collection Kanojo Toys.
electronic technology, Orient Industry, like other sex-doll manufacturers such

as 4Woods (with the A.I. Series) and Honey Dolls, is driven by a similar will-
to-verisimilitude, coupling the ‘smart materials’ and ‘intelligent textures’ of the
latest plastic, resin and silicone technology for the best possible reality effect
by state of the art micro-chip technology.51
Such transitions in industrial and product design, and in the graphic render-
ing of products in advertising campaigns, all work in the service of bringing to
market what the West would understand as efforts to conjure up the ‘perfect
illusion of reality’. This ideology of fantasies of inanimate human form coming
to life, being brought to life, possessing the desire for life might appear to be
tied to that realism and mimeticism dominating the roots of the West’s Pyg-
malionist desire for animism. Yet this is not wholly accurate in this context,
since Japan’s traditions of manufacturing dolls go back further than ancient
ED_int.indd 210 15/10/2013 5:06 PM

Greece, and the reasons for such manufacturing are manifold. Traditionally,
dolls served fertility, funeral, health and purification ritual purposes, as well
as being toys, gifts and souvenirs for collection and display; they were believed
to bring good fortune, prosperity and protection to their owners. Furthermore,
Shinto’s traditions of animism, where the doll acts as a stand-in, as a repre-
sentation or embodiment of spirits, are also wholly distinct. That said, the
Japanese sex industry that produces these dolls does so in the context of the
global dissemination of privileged Western myths and, as such, has adapted
and indeed surpassed them. So, while the manufacturing of dolls in Japan may
not have started out from such desires to desire animism as erotic, it is evident
in the marketing by companies including Orient Industry and Honey Dolls (such
as for their a.i.neo doll model) that there is now a promulgating of fantasies of
such Pygmalionist animism. The latter company utilises a rhetoric organised
around the composition of the doll’s character and its communicative potential
that is redolent of the story of Pygmalion and his statue: ‘Appreciate her
smooth bodyline, the extremely detailed parts that constitute her, her way of
moving similar to the human movement, and her face looking as if she really
had a sentiment . . . The strong personality of the doll will surely appeal to you
and make you feel as if you could really communicate with her.’52
What is decidedly Japanese is that, in addition to these more Pygmalionist
tendencies, Orient Industries, for example, track the full life-cycle of the doll’s
existence from conception to death and beyond – beyond obsolescence. When
the company is sent returned or unwanted sex dolls, rather than dumping or
burying them, twice a year they hold a Buddhist memorial service (kuyo) where,
it is reported, the ‘spirit’ (kami) or ‘soul’ of the dolls is consecrated. (In Shinto,
born out of its animistic traditions of spirituality, manufactured objects as well
as natural phenomena and individuals have kami, are kami and are worshipped
as kami.) This completes a perfect life-cycle for both man and doll. Such con-
secration is also prudent, since in Japan there is a concern that the spirit of
discarded dolls could come back to haunt their owners.53
A notable fact is that in the Japanese sex industry the dolls themselves have
over time come to look younger and younger, from adult to teenage to some-
times even pre-teenage (fig. 68). This, coupled with the explicit fantasies of
animism at the heart of Pygmalionism, to say nothing of the culturally specific
representations of sexual violence against young girls, is disturbing. Of Orient
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Industry’s five available doll models (Ange, Rosa, Jewel, Nano and Pure), the
last three are branded ‘petite’. Pure is the most obviously adolescent. (The
same is the case for 4Woods’s dolls, especially the neo-j model.) For advertis-
ing purposes, these dolls are often posed in ways reminiscent of real and
imagined teenage scenarios, from scenes of girls socialising with friends to
scenes where they are bathing one another. Here kawaii culture dovetails most
explicitly and troublingly with paedophilic fantasies; this is perhaps where the
logic of generating ‘the perfect illusion of reality’ ends. Japan’s obsession with
the infantile, infantilisation and miniaturisation reaches its limit when Lolita
dolls, with their innocent child-like faces and child-like bodies, jostle with
pubescent anime characters. Shōjo returns as a sex doll, as innocent as ever,
but knowingly so. There are doll products on the market with artificial hymens
waiting to be broken. The dolls manufactured by Pururu, including wholly
pubescent-looking ones, use pixellisation editing on the package design to
render censorial mosaics over the dolls’ genital areas as if they were taken
from photographic or cinematic sex scenes.54 For the briefest of moments one
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67 (facing) Orient Industry, Orient Love Dolls,
Collection Kanojo Toys.
68 (left) Cover, i-doloid Petie, vol. 6, Collection

Core Magazine.
senses the manufacturers acknowledging that they have gone too far, however
empty such a gesture might be, until one remembers that they are simply
adhering to the law, the same law that, in outlawing pubic hair, produces an
authorised aesthetics of infantile hairlessness. Such an interest in pubescent
dolls is not, of course, unique to Japan.55
In the 1990s and more recently, the converging of Japan’s commercial sex
industry and its popular culture provoked artists into responding critically,
including by using dolls as representative of this very confluence of cultures.
Takahiro Fujiwara’s installation Immunity Dolls (1992; fig. 69), for example,
displays a row of apparently mass-produced sex dolls, fetishistic objects that
in highlighting the artificiality and synthetic-ification of pleasure as ‘off the peg’
point to a culture of mass reproduction, repeatability and infinite replaceability.
In a work that anticipates chronologically and resonates formally with the rows
of RealDolls in the Abyss Creations factory (fig. 70), the corporeality of women,
their flesh and blood and bones and self-determination, are replaced by the
empty, non-productive, certainly not hetero-reproductive pleasures of faceless,
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69 Takahiro Fujiwara, Immunity Dolls, 1992, vinyl,
180 x 750 x 80 cm. © Fujiwara Takahiro, courtesy
Mizuma Art Gallery.
a-corporeal, synthetic vinyl.56 Miwa Yanagi’s Elevator Girl House 1F (1997; fig.
71) is a diptych the right half of which is a photograph not of dolls but of women
arranged like dolls, resembling living sculptures like a Victorian tableau vivant
or pose plastique, lined up in the faux shop windows of a department store.
Dressed like elevator girls in Japanese department stores, they are meant to
be perused and appraised via a travellator. Here it will be recalled that the
commercial shop-window mannequins from the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, along with Surrealist mannequins, highlight a similar
union of the doll, capitalism and sexuality, and an imminent critique of their
confluence.57 In Mayumi Lake’s ‘My Idol’ series (2006; fig. 72), Lake poses with
a sex doll in ways that resonate with this critique of capitalism’s objectifying
of sexuality, yet also perhaps affirm what in the next chapter I shall discuss
as an erotic intimacy of familial domesticity.
Such occasional aesthetic criticality notwithstanding, sex dolls in Japan
bring together perfectly this individualised obsession of a Pygmalionist
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70 Scene from production
line at RealDoll factory,
San Diego.
animism – a mutation of Shinto animism – with a desire for toys, models

figures and electronic goods; with what I have called the ludic potential of all
things miniature. They offer a commodified sexualisation of the artificial/
synthetic body, an unimpeded consumption without end and a ‘safe’ human-
like figure for the fulfilling of fantasmatic sexual desires – often violent, sadis-
tic and paedophilic – that can be satiated without impunity. Heterosexual
Japanese men using sex dolls, echoing the rhetoric of the patent holder
mentioned earlier, speak about their setbacks with real women, saying that
finding a partner can be difficult, that women cheat and betray and cannot be
owned, and that they turn to dolls for love, companionship, affection and sex.
Dolls are soothing (lyashi). This atmosphere is part of a widely reported per-
vasive sense of isolation and alienation among the male population, the per-
ception of their public collectivism at odds with their domestic individualism.
Such a climate has been labelled as a ‘degeneration’ of the [male] Japanese
‘race’, said to be a direct result of industrialisation and modernisation, leading
to the highest rate of suicide in the world, anxieties over impotence and the
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71 Miwa Yanagi, Elevator Girl House 1F
(2 Parts), Directprint, 1997. © Miwa Yanagi,
courtesy Loock Galerie, Berlin.
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72 Mayumi Lake, Imaginary Alice #0761 from
My Idol Series, 2006, lambdaflex print, 76 x 109 cm,
Collection M.Y. Art Prospects, New York.
© Mayumi Lake / Miyako Yoshinaga Gallery.
resultant mass market for Viagra and enthusiasm for internet porno-
graphy – and a devotion to hentai in particular. This is an obvious context in
which sex dolls as substitutes for flesh-and-blood women will flourish.
Into this milieu emerged the artist Takashi Murakami, founder in the 1990s
of an art movement influenced by manga and anime entitled sūpaafuratto
(‘superflat’). He has been linked to the Otaku, a subculture within Japan, many
of whom are socially withdrawn and spend their time at home playing Bishōjo
and hentai video games, download porn and play with figurines, models and
sex dolls; although interestingly the Otaku dissociate themselves from him, and
this strained proximity is a conscious element of his work. The Otaku as a type
has joined the well-known Japanese figure of the Salaryman, the linchpin of
bureaucratic capitalism from the Meiji period onwards. Recent times have
witnessed the rise of the Otaku Salaryman; by day the mild-mannered white-
collar worker, by night the obsessive fan of hentai, adult video games and any
and all other forms of popular culture. For the Otaku, the Otaku Salaryman and
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73 Takashi Murakami, My Lonesome Cowboy, 1998,
FRP resin, fibreglass, steel, oil, and acrylic,
228.6 x 144.8 x 109.2 cm,
Gagosian Gallery, New York.
© Takashi Murakami / Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd.
All Rights Reserved
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perhaps also for the Salaryman more generally, the sex doll – like hentai and
relations with forms such as virtual girlfriends that have been characterised
recently as ‘sexless love’ – has become not only a substitute but perhaps even
a model for actual sex.58 The sex doll is an option, a choice, a preference. Such
erotic relations articulate both a desire to anthropomorphise and animate
objects, and a wilful self-alienating. The individual can remain deeply
entrenched in and thus protective of sexual fantasy. It is a position that might
be both a capitulation to and an acknowledging of the components for the
desiring subject of the structuring of fantasy in capitalist modernity. Perhaps
it is even a defence against and a critique of it. Working with and against the
damaging forces of capitalism’s construction of and incursions into such
realms of fantasy at the expense of other modalities, such material contact,
even with (perhaps especially with) inanimate form, might allow for rela-
tions – between persons and persons, and persons and things – to be articu-
lable differently. Exemplary of this is Takashi Murakami’s life-size, manga-style
cartoon sculpture My Lonesome Cowboy (1998; fig. 73), a masturbating and
ejaculating doll-mannequin-sculpture, made from oil, acrylic and fibreglass.
Towards the end of the twentieth century it became simultaneously a symbol
of Otaku culture, a celebration of it and symptomatic of everything that was
wrong with Japan’s late-capitalist, consumerist, excessively economic, narcis-
sistic, superficial and self-indulgent culture. By bringing together two of the
distinct homes of the doll in recent Japanese culture – the sex industry and
the visual arts – as a nexus of production, commerce and consumption,
Murakami’s My Lonesome Cowboy may become a site of criticality. Compared
by the critic Dave Hickey to Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1647–52) for its
celebration of ‘sexual-spiritual ecstasy’, it offers an ironic embrace of popular
culture. With its reference to the American Wild West, it resonates with other
wry, yet not uncelebratory re-workings of the Western tradition from Andy
Warhol’s film Lonesome Cowboys (1968, directed with Paul Morrissey) to Amer-
ica’s own ‘Bareback Mount Him’ inflatable doll.59
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the dutch wife
Why in Japan is a sex doll referred to as a Dutch Wife? Asking this returns me
to one of the questions with which I began this chapter: what and, perhaps
more interestingly, where are the modern origins of the penetrable sexual
device? In particular, how did it transpire that it is a mercantile marine thing
and as such a function of the mercantile-industrial complex that gave it its
designation?
Coming to answer this question has involved a necessarily circuitous itiner-
ary. I began with the sex doll in Western modernity’s capitalist consumer
culture, then moved to evidence of Hitler’s doll project in Germany’s early
1940s military-industrial complex, instigated to prevent soldiers’ sexual con-
gress with locals or with one another, and ended with the animism of Japan’s
kitsch, infantile and perverse popular consumer cultures. I noted these pas-
sages – some driven by individual and individualising impulses, others shaped
and instituted by regimes of power/knowledge claiming to advance the collec-
tive’s welfare – because they lead to the modern origins of the sex doll. At least,
they lead to its origins as an amateur, man-made, hand-crafted penetrable
sexual device fashioned and used as a surrogate for masturbatory purposes.
This is where I find the answer to my question, for the origins of the term
‘Dutch Wife’ answers the what (interrogatively, genealogically) and the where
(geographically, cartographically) of the origins of the modern sex doll.
Based on rumour and innuendo, although nonetheless on evidence docu-
menting behaviours and acts, such origins can be found, going back hundreds
of years, in histories of maritime voyaging, conflict and trade. Whatever the
distinctions among life in the navy, in the merchant sea-trade and as a pirate,
there is at least one commonality: male camaraderie. At sea for sometimes
years at a time, men were removed from the company of women, who were
prohibited, at least by British navy regulations, from being carried on ships
because of their disruptive influence. They also perhaps actively sought the
isolated and self-contained environments that the sociologist Erving Goffman
might call ‘impermeable institutions’. This homosocial world of male camara-
derie created and creates an environment conducive to both existing desire
and new forms of yearning.60 This is an environment where disciplined and
regulative hyper-masculinity butts against sodomitic tendencies, opportunities
and practices. Hence a ship is rife with buggery. There were no explicit prohibi-
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tions, in the British navy for instance, against sodomy or other homosexual
acts, none of which implied homosexuality as such, certainly not homosexual-
ity as a pathological condition. The climate is right, then, for men to perform
sex acts with one another. Mutual masturbation or ‘sex-surrogacy masturba-
tion’ were perfect and frequent instances of this. Here same-sex activities
between, say, convicts and buccaneers were not about having sex so much as
using one another as masturbatory surrogates – much as men did later on
with their sex dolls.61 Such a climate is also, of course, conducive to men
performing sex acts by or to themselves.
In such a hothouse of homosociality and sodomy, two matters are worthy
of note. The first is the practice between pirates of matelotage. A term going
back to at least the middle of the fifteenth century, matelotage as it came to
be understood by pirates from the seventeenth century was a formal, often
contractual (although not always consensual) union between male compan-
ions tied together by economic and sexual necessities and obligations. Matelot-
age eventually gave us the word ‘mate’ (mat is also the root word for ‘meat’),
signifying male-to-male friendship. Here, I think, it can be extended (in its
noun form) to foreshadow the intimacies forged between men and their dolls,
and (in its verb form) the very acts of ‘mating’ that go on between them. The
second is that in the diverse maritime histories may be found references in
French to the dame de voyage, in Spanish to the dama de viaje, in German to
the Seemannbraut or Matrosenweib and in English, as I have already men-
tioned, the merkin. These terms all refer to the thing at the heart of the
practice of sailors fashioning from sewn cloth some kind of doll expressly for
masturbatory purposes. The variation on this in Japan is the ‘Dutch Wife’
(dacchi waifu), named after seventeeth-century Dutch seamen and traders who
formed and used hand-sewn leather puppets to this end. (In a piece of ety-
mological gender-bending, it is also possible that the ‘Dutch Wife’ as a puppet
or doll gets its name via the pre-seventeenth-century word for manikin or
mannequin, from the Dutch mannekijn, manneken, meaning little man or little
doll.)62 The seamen were away from home for long periods in the Dutch East
India Company, driven by the spice trade to colonise Indonesia and elsewhere.
This seems to be the earliest documented ecology in which some kind of doll
(as a penetrable sexual device) was fashioned and used as a surrogate or sex
aid for masturbatory purposes; although I am sure there were earlier ones.
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There is little information on whether men made their own puppets and kept
them to themselves for their own use or whether they shared; and whether
these rags were even in any way gendered, feminised, eroticised, or whether
the texture, the feel, the friction of the particular material was enough to do
the job. Either way, their ‘irreducible materiality’ was in the sociality of their
man-handling: their making, use and re-use; that they were private, might
have been shared, passed round and passed on. The non-alienating labour of
their making was an activity of desiring human beings with self-serving
thoughts in mind. The labour of their use was equally self-serving, albeit one
can assume more vigorous; even so, the yield was minor. (Such devices as aids
to masturbation satisfy desire yet, given masturbation’s unproductive expendi-
ture, the Dutch Wife was the creator and collector of so much waste.)
These Dutch seamen and merchants interacted with the Japanese on
Dejima, an artificial trade island in Nagasaki harbour, Japan’s only point of
contact with Europe for more than two hundred years and where the Dutch
East India Company opened a trading post in 1641. It was through this inter-
cultural post (incidentally, in the early years the principle imported item by the
Dutch was raw silk from Bengal and Tonkin in old North Vietnam) that the
Japanese took up Dutch Wives as their own.63 Yet, as a product, the Dutch Wife
was brought to Japan by default. This is to say, such rudimentary amateur
penetratable sexual devices were decidedly not commercial things, they were
not made for market, not merchandise to be imported and sold; rather they
were embedded in a social and sexual economy of reciprocity. There was no
economic exchange. This is also to say that the Dutch Wife, named as such,
did not exist prior to its adoption and adaption by the Japanese. (The Dutch do
not speak of participatory sexual devices as Dutch Wives, just as they do not
need Dutch courage.) Yet, perhaps in assuming this Westernised nomencla-
ture, being taken up into discourse, the Dutch Wife was inserted in an economy
whereby, in the form of crafted luxury goods, they entered a nexus of produc-
tion, commerce and consumption. That nexus, powered by a proto-colonising
and proto-capitalising impulse, was decidedly modern.
This does not mean, given Japan’s long traditions of eroticism and doll-
making, that for millennia they had not hand-crafted penetrable sexual devices;
they had. Their erotic ningyō was often crafted simply as a mere body part,
also to be taken on sea journeys. Artefacts assembled as penetrable sexual
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devices such as artificial vaginas (azumagata, a generic term for both simulated
vaginas and complete figures, is translated literally as ‘woman substitute’) are
recognisable as early as the eighth year of the Genroku era (1695) in Kōshokken
Ariwara no Narihira’s Kōshoku Tabimakura.64 This book, a ‘lascivious travelling
pillow’, surely a luxury predecessor to the popular contemporary dakimakura,
was made of thin tortoiseshell with an opening lined with velvet to mimic the
labia majora, and included details of numerous azumagata, formal and infor-
mal, made from velvet, raw silk, soft rubber and cotton. (Azumagata were also
made out of vegetable matter such as the edible root of the konnyaku, a type
of potato, or the makuwauri, the cantaloupe.) Such autonomous artificial body
parts were modified into entire female forms, described in the erotic work Jiiro
Haya Shinan (‘The Art of Quickly Seducing a Novice’) as a doll body (do-ningyō )
or, more vulgarly, as a travelling whore (tahi-jorō ). The do-ningyō , for instance,
a companion for upper-class travellers, was a ‘complete female puppet fash-
ioned to the size of a young girl, with a vagina of velvet’.65 In the eighteenth
century the Yamamoto and Takeda families in Osaka manufactured such sex
dolls for private entertainment, their realism enhanced by mechanised ele-
ments including, writes Alan Scott Pate, ‘a device that allowed warm water to
be poured inside the figure, giving it a greater verisimilitude’ – much like the
female belly with artificial vagina from the 1890s with which I began this
chapter – and ‘zenmai spring-driven mechanisms that allowed their arms and
legs to be moved’.66 It is no big leap from these amateur, hand-crafted, luxury
participatory sexual devices to the mass-produced, commercial penetrable
sexual devices such as those made of soft hollow rubber available via cata-
logues including The Key to the Sex Question, produced in Tokyo in the 1930s;
to devices sold openly in the Ginza district in Tokyo in the 1940s; or to high-end
sex dolls manufactured in today’s industrial capitalism by companies such as
Orient Industry.67
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6 / realdoll:
intimacy, domesticity and brutality
‘Alone: bad. Friend: good!’

The Monster, Bride of Frankenstein, 1935
‘[B]est sex I ever had! . . . I could fall in love with that thing!’
Howard Stern, 19971
If one’s choice of . . . object – man, woman, dog, part of the

body, inanimate thing, whatever – is motivated by the desire
to harm the object and is sensed as an act of revenge, then
the act is perverse.
Robert J. Stoller, Perversion: The Erotic
Form of Hatred, 19752
While the previous chapter offered a genealogy of participatory sexual devices,

including a biography of the modern sex doll, in this chapter the pivotal char-
acter is the agalmatophile. A desirer, a luster, an amatory figure, the agalmat-
ophile is sexually attracted to, desirous of, lustful for statues and, by extension,
their sibling inanimate human forms such as dolls, mannequins and artificial
body parts.3 In this chapter he – for it is almost always a he – takes centre
stage, as does his paraphilia, his being-with-things which (because it is a para,
besides, and a philia, love) is a living alongside love, along with love and con-
trary to love. It is the agalmatophile and his desires, evidenced and articulated
by way of his erotic encounters with inanimate human form, that have been a
leitmotif in this book. He is unmistakable from pre-Ovidian versions of
Pygmalion through to the erotomaniac, the fetishist, the paraphilic and the
frotteur. Like many other satisfied yet vilified types in modernity, together they
constitute the taxonomy of largely male heterosexual polymorphous perver-
sions in which men experience things as both ‘inappropriate’ stand-ins for the
primary and proper sexual object, and where those things can also become
the primary and proper sexual or erotic thing in and of themselves. It is his
realdoll / 225
ED_int.indd 225 15/10/2013 5:06 PM

desires that locate themselves in such form – as both object of desire, and
desired and desiring fetishistic thing. They do so in ways that are, as I have
been arguing, particular to the nature of distinct erotic encounters between
men and such form. Such inanimate human form makes itself most obviously
manifest, most literally so, in the case of dolls from the commercial sex indus-
try. Sex dolls are figured as both, function as both, provoke and elicit both. The
sex doll is fashioned or is ready-made for this explicit purpose: as an inanimate
human form conceived of and manufactured to satisfy desire, to satisfy lust,
for sex.
In attending to the agalmatophile, this explicit purpose of the sex doll recalls
(although because of this self-evident purposing it also modifies) a familiar
paradigm: the fantasy of inanimate human form coming to life, being brought
to life, possessing the desire for life, radiating feeling. Here there are three
distinct yet inter-articulating scenarios: that men have a desirous impulse to
fall in love with inanimate human form; that they lust after inanimate human
form’s animating possibilities; and that they want to consummate such desires
by provoking and being provoked into reciprocal erotic relations with such
things. With this is mind, in this chapter I primarily circle round men’s encoun-
ters with a specific brand of doll, the RealDoll, which is, as has been seen, a
top of the range, bespoke sex doll manufactured by Abyss Creations, based in
San Diego, California. The advent of the RealDoll is where the agalmatophile
comes into his own. It is the most expensive sex doll on the market. As the
most ‘convincing’ doll available à propos its look and feel, it follows a precedent
set by the Aphrodite of Knidos onwards to sculpt ever more mimetic, deceptive
sculptural renderings of the illusion of life. The RealDoll is the most fully
realised, comprehensive and accomplished articulation of this. Kokoschka
would have loved to have one; agalmatophiles do.
With the agalmatophile’s intimate erotic encounters with RealDolls at the
fore here, I ask how it is and how it works that for the agalmatophile something
as uncompromisingly self-evident as a sex doll is both a desired and desiring
thing, and an object of desire and of lust. How does the sex doll become a
contact site around which is acted out a dialectical tension between love and
sex? How can it be that there is both more to a sex doll than sex and nothing
more to a sex doll than sex? Out of such desires, for love, for sex, and in the
ED_int.indd 226 15/10/2013 5:06 PM

pursuit of the promise of such satisfaction, there comes, perhaps surprisingly,
an erotics. This erotics takes two forms, with all the likely intricate frictions
between them that one might expect. The first is an erotic intimacy of familial
domesticity; let me call it love. The second is an erotic intimacy of cruel brutal-
ity; let me call it eroticised hatred. I shall consider both, and both as intimate,
wherein intimacy, intimare, is to make known, to announce and to put or bring
into, to drive or press into; it is intimus, innermost, deepest; and is int-us,
within.
love, or my breath is inside you
Elena Dorfman’s documentary photographs from her series ‘Still Lovers’, pub-
lished in a book of the same name in 2005, provide a good starting point from
which to delve into the dialectical tension between love and sex, and how this
cleaving might be pinpointed as generative of an erotics of intimacy.4 Dorfman
began her project about men and their RealDolls in 1999 and the resulting
photographs have been shown at such venues as the Edwynn Houk Gallery in
New York (2005) and the Martha Schneider Gallery in Chicago (2006), as well
as at the Guys’n’Dolls exhibition (2005) in Brighton, mentioned earlier. They are
exemplary of the sex doll in a recent discourse of erotic intimacy of familial
domesticity. These photographs are usually taken, staged, in domestic settings
such as the kitchen, garden or bedroom (fig. 75). They are choreographed to
create banal everyday domestic scenes where man and doll can be found
together watching television, holding hands, sunbathing, playing video games,
having breakfast with the family or ordering dinner in a restaurant. Every now
and then the photographs depict more compromising intimacies such as
taking emotional comfort or engaging in foreplay (fig. 74). Dorfman and her
collaborator Elizabeth Alexandre interviewed more than twenty owners of
RealDolls, over half of whom are engineers or systems analysts. Somewhat
akin to the majority of men who historically have bought sex dolls – the disa-
bled, the agoraphobic, the chronically shy – many claim (in what is now becom-
ing a familiar refrain) that turning to them is a result of the cruelty of the nature
of flesh-and-blood women. As Alexandre writes:
realdoll / 227
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74 (above) Elena Dorfman, Rebecca I, from the
series ‘Still Lovers’, 2005, photograph, 76.2 x 76.2
cm, courtesy of the artist.
75 (facing] Elena Dorfman, Lily I, from the series

‘Still Lovers’, 2005, photograph, 76.2 x 76.2 cm,
courtesy of the artist.
Nearly all of them [the men] claimed to be victims of women’s venality and
superficiality, talked about broken hearts and humiliation, and spoke of their
adulation always followed by treason and desertion. Each spoke of his dis-
covery of Real Dolls with the same precision one uses when telling a love
story – the same sensation of dazzling certainty, the same conviction that
finally, this one is for keeps.5
ED_int.indd 228 15/10/2013 5:06 PM

realdoll / 229
ED_int.indd 229 15/10/2013 5:06 PM

The premise of ‘Still Lovers’ is that it portrays a love story, a fantasy fiction,
like many others. In the preface to the book Dorfman writes: ‘From the moment
a doll is lifted from her shipping crate, she becomes a vessel for the possibili-
ties of her owner’s imagination’ and that ‘[s]he rises to life with a breath of
imagination and hope’.6 Dorfman came to believe ‘that the silicon lovers can
communicate, and even offer a sublime, sustained sort-of passion’ and, having
spent time with them, she ‘grew to understand that there is more to a sex doll
than sex’.7
Dorfman’s rhetoric is typical of discussion in art criticism and popular
culture about the mainstreaming of the sex doll. It is, knowingly (I am sure),
steeped in myths of Pygmalion and Pygmalionist desire, with its lyrical waxing
of breath, imagination and hope, its sense that inanimate human form offers
communicative possibilities, reciprocity, radiates feeling and indeed even (a
sort-of) passion, as the photographer proposes that there is ‘more to a sex doll
than sex’. What is more than sex? Love, of course. How this love manifests
itself has to do with the intricate ways in which, writes Dorfman, we come to
‘believe in the owners’ vision of and love for their dolls’, their desirous impulse
to fall in love with inanimate human form and lust after its animating possibili-
ties, even while knowing the dolls to be inanimate, inorganic, synthetic, artifi-
cial.8 The dolls come to life, are brought to life, possess the desire for life, have
life breathed into them (not literally; these are not blow-up dolls) and are
furnished with the accoutrements of a loving intimacy. They are needed. They
are invested in emotionally and come to have complex personalities. They are
given names to establish familiarity and ownership. They are handled covet-
ously as possessions and are customised – adorned, ornamented, dressed – to
personalise them. Their owners are enamoured, devoted to them; they are
beloved. Furthermore, while this is delusional, bathetic, empathetic, pathetic
even, it gives an idea of how of late it has been easy to introduce the discourse
of intimacy into creating a context for the sex doll as a thing that provokes and
elicits love. Such wilful, wishful fantasies set the wheels in motion.
Like Dorfman’s photographs, the documentary Guys and Dolls (2006) directed
by Nick Holt draws out a similar sentimental and companionable erotic inti-
macy of familial domesticity.9 With testimonies from US- and UK-based
RealDoll owners, it relies on many of the same individuals featured in ‘Still
Lovers’. The documentary is likewise imbued with a rhetoric dripping with the
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cherished language of pathos, tinged with a silver lining of fantasy and promise.
There is hardly a mention of sex or, at least, this is how it seems at first. Guys
and Dolls follows four RealDoll owners – Davecat (Michigan, USA), Everard
(Dorset, England), Gordon (Virginia, USA) and Mike (Texas, USA) – as they
discuss with the interviewer the highs and lows of life with their dolls. The
documentary also takes in the RealDoll factory in California, including an
interview with the company’s founder Matt McCullen, with the office manager
Debra and with Slade Fiero, a repairer of RealDolls known as the ‘RealDoll
Doctor’, who is also the sculptor of Charlie, the original male RealDoll.
For these doll owners – agalmatophiles, or iDollators as some of them like
to call themselves – the doll is both a love thing, more than a sex doll, and
merely a sex doll. As far as the narrative of the documentary is concerned, in
the main it is the fact of the former rather than the latter that provides an
insight into erotic intimacy, that breaks new ground in viewers’ understanding
of and sympathy towards these individuals, how they manage their loneliness
and their sentimental attachment to inanimate human form. Time and again
the documentary raises issues that are key to this erotic intimacy: that the
dolls as gifts to themselves are tailor-made; that they offer companionship,
especially for men ‘allergic’ to real women; and that the majority of the men
believe that their dolls are capable of giving and receiving love without denying
that they are passive, inanimate. Compassion supersedes passion. That is to
say, the RealDoll’s capacity for compassion supersedes the iDollator’s passion
for her. The iDollators speak, for instance, of lying next to their dolls; massag-
ing their feet; being able to look into their eyes, regarding them and having
the dolls regard them in return. They know that the dolls are static, that they
‘just lie there’, but this ‘lying there’ is also a ‘being there’ for one another. They
take comfort from knowing what to expect (‘she is my anchor’). They acknowl-
edge that relationships with organic women are temporary, that it is easier
and more fulfilling to bond with inanimate things and that the doll brings a
sense of happiness and an improved quality of life – because, no matter what,
she will always love him. This is a sharing of intimacies, a mutual attachment,
a mutuality. Given this capacity for compassion, the iDollators are in turn
sensitive to their doll’s needs: Gordon is so considerate of his doll Ginger that
he has bought her another doll so that she ‘would have someone to keep her
company’ while he is at work.10 Davecat knows his doll Sh-chan so well that
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he is able to speak about her as at times ‘relentlessly perky’ and at others
‘manic-depressive’. He also observes that she is generally open-minded, can
be sarcastic on occasion and is ‘prone to narcolepsy and laziness’.11 Such
intimacies foreground the RealDoll as compassionate companion, an intimate.
Who would dare to deny that these are men who side with things, who are
being with them, who grasp that the thing encountered is not the thing com-
prehended, who attend sufficiently to the thing as thing, as it asserts itself,
and who know that the work these things perform constitutes these men as
human subjects, all as Thing Theory would have it? There is genuine empathy
here, what the Germans call Einfürlung, an entering into the feelings of an
other.
That said, there is a tension for the iDollators as they flit between wilful
delusions and the realism of the situation in which they find themselves with
their artificial inanimate human forms, their RealDolls. As Guys and Dolls takes
us as viewers through scenes of everyday domesticity, this tension is hinted at
every now and then as the disturbing underside of such familiar settings. For
the domestic is erotic. Any sense of the domestic is shaped by the settings or
environments of domesticity, which in turn determine the relations between
man and doll. In the iDollators’ homes, the domestic as a notion func-
tions – much like notions of the interior, privacy and intimacy itself as they
emerged in the nineteenth century – as a by-product of industrialisation, a
space for withdrawing from the disorders of public, civic life.12 Such withdraw-
ing is inevitably an incitement to eroticisation. In the documentary, the domes-
tic is an interior world of private fantasy, fetishism and furious frottage. This
is not a benign space but one of activity: of commerce, of photography, of play
and of sexual anticipation, arousal and satisfaction. It is a chance to cultivate
or indulge in moments of private activity – with an intimate, with the domestic,
the home-help, a handmaiden of sorts. For the doll is of course invariably an
elaborate masturbatory device. Withdrawing into the domestic has always
been perfect for the solitary vice of auto-affection that within discourses of
sexology, degeneration and psychoanalysis has been, in Laqueur’s account to
which I referred earlier, grasped as a ‘fundamentally asocial or socially degen-
erate practice’ in which ‘healthy desire’ is channelled back into itself rather
than into socially productive forms of heterosexual intercourse. Masturbation
is not, then, domesticated by the domestic interior; quite the opposite, it is
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rampant there. In fact, its being there behind closed doors in the private spaces
of withdrawing, our knowing that it is always there, as part of and along with
erotic intimacies, with the practices and pleasures of men with their inanimate
human forms, damages irreversibly the fantasy of the domestic interior as a
safe haven from the disorders of the public sphere.
The domestic is here tied, as often, to consumption. In addition to the private
avaricious consumption of the doll itself – many owners purchase more than
one doll – the iDollators spend much time shopping for their dolls, buying
them clothes, cosmetics and perfume. Adorning, ornamenting, dressing, like
Pygmalion, like ancient and modern Pygmalionists, like Krafft-Ebing’s fetish-
ists, like Oskar Kokoschka, the Surrealists and many others. Wigs and hair-
spray are bought too – hair fetishism or trichophilia is one obsession never far
from the surface. Many of the men are photographers, posing their RealDolls
in ordinary and everyday suburban settings: sitting in the garden or reading
(like much vernacular photography), posed in the bedroom (like much amateur
porn). In re-creating scenes from and for family albums, the dolls are given a
life, a history, which becomes that much more incongruous because the pres-
ence of the inanimate, artificial doll as commodity shows, doubly so, how
photography as a technology arrests and petrifies life.13
The domestic spawns the collector and the hoarder. If the collector in
orchestrating things exercises a semblance of control over the world they have
assembled for themselves, the hoarder ‘answers the call of things’ and is ‘pos-
sessed by them’.14 The RealDoll owner can be either or both. Akin to the
consumerist impulses of these hobbyists, their interest in dolls is often tied to
childhoods spent collecting, arranging, classifying, manipulating and playing
with GI Joes, Barbies, model humans or figurines and model aeroplanes; that
is, with toys, which as Roland Barthes wrote in his essay ‘Toys’, ‘literally pre-
figure the world of adult functions’.15 This spirit, this need for reassurances,
these repetitious acts of consuming and of play, were understood well by Jean
Baudrillard when he wrote of collecting: ‘it has about it the fragrance of the
harem, whose whole charm is that of a series of intimacies (always with a
preferred object) and of intimacy with a series’.16 (A collection of RealDolls will
certainly have the fragrance of the harem about it.) RealDolls hark back to
such earlier days, yet the significance of scale makes things far different now.
The doll’s house has been replaced by a house doll.17
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In the relative safety of the domestic sphere, with the iDollators out of the
closet and their dolls literally so, withdrawn yet out, they know that being alone
is not the same as being lonely. The doll is a companion right at home here (a
belonging) and also a commodity (a belonging). It is imbued, twice over, with
the pleasure of possession, where possession depends and derives, as Baudril-
lard put it, ‘on the one hand, from the absolute singularity of each element
[each item owned by the collector or the connoisseur], which makes it the
equivalent of [an animate being], and fundamentally of the subject himself;
and, on the other, from the possibility of a series, and thus of an infinite play
of substitutions’.18 It is a passion, a pleasure, a singular being and infinite
seriality, for life, for ever. Also for and in death. One iDollator (Gordon) muses
that he has thought about having his two dolls (Ginger and Kelley) buried with
him, so that they can turn to dust together.19 A necromantic lust, of sorts, till
death us do part. Such ordinary, perverse, decidedly heterosexual masculine
desires (recalling the sexologists’ views on the proximity of Pygmalionism and
necrophilia, and Kokoschka’s doll beheaded, bloodied and buried) are not
unconnected to the Buddhist memorial services (kuyo; mentioned in the previ-
ous chapter) and to the dark and dangerous desires of Bellmer who, as I shall
remark in Chapter Eight, imagined being buried with his second poupée.
Dorfman presents a theatricalised and hollowed out version of such high gothic
romance when she writes:
When dolls are thought to have reached the end of their lives, they bring an
owner the eternal question that lovers and murderers have: what to do with
the body. Sometimes they are just cast away at the dump. There, they gaze
emptily at a sky of seagulls, with the same sadness one notices in children’s
toys after an earthquake. But more often they receive in death the same
honor as all those who make their men happy. After taking off her face to
be placed on a new body, the owner buries the doll.20
In this hermetic utopia, with all this talk of intimacy, companionship, and
sentimentality, the domestic is both familial and brazen, and pleasures are
taken privately, a far cry from the earlier, more public (albeit surreptitious) acts
of affection/violation of statues, ancient and modern, to which I have referred.
They are equally intimate, though. Here the sex doll is a love thing, even as it
is reckoned as and used for sex. By way of banal, domestic, everyday scenes,
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a moving albeit sentimental discourse of intimacy between men and their dolls
emerges, even if it is one that is infused with the dark side of the domes-
tic – consuming, collecting, hoarding, death. With it emerges concurrently an
erotics, in which companionship and a capacity for empathy, compassion,
radiating – his, its – demonstrates that while they might be lonely, they are
never alone. Reverberating here are the lyrics to the second verse of Roxy
Music’s ‘In Every Dream House a Heartache’ (1973), exemplary in articulating
the relations of iDollator, sex doll, intimacy and the domestic:
Open plan living/Bungalow ranch style/All of its comforts/Seem so essential/I

bought you mail order/My plain wrapper baby/Your skin is like vinyl/The
perfect companion/You float in my new pool/De luxe and delightful/Inflatable
doll/My role is to serve you/Disposable darling/Can’t throw you away now/
Immortal and life size/My breath is inside you/I’ll dress you up daily/And keep
you till death sighs/Inflatable doll/Lover ungrateful/I blew up your body/But
you blew my mind/Oh those heartaches/Dreamhome heartaches.21
sex, brutality
Such familial domesticity, playing at having an ideal companion, even when

tinged as for Roxy Music with bittersweet sarcasm and a modicum of frank-
ness, is key to the intimate erotic encounters between men and their dolls.
‘[His] breath . . . inside her’ is the perfect description of this, for such intimacy
is a susurrating, a whispering or murmuring of sweet nothings. It is also an
expiring, a breathing of one’s life force (a breath that carries soul [animus] or
spirit [spiritus]), into another, an exhaling that is an inflating, an animating that
brings it life, giving it a form and making it fit for purpose. Here begins a waning
of empathy, for the purpose of all this effort is sex. Yet even here it can become
difficult to circumvent the Pygmalion fantasies, the reciprocity, the simpatico,
the lingering glances, the foot rubs, and to be left only with the fact of sex
alone. An extreme example that maintains this tension between the doll as a
desired and desiring fetishistic thing and as an object of desire – that there is
both more to a sex doll than sex and nothing more to a sex doll than sex – is given
by the RealDoll ‘doctor’ Slade Fiero. Speaking about one of the two occasions
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on which he had sex with a RealDoll – without specifying whether it was his
own or one he was repairing for a customer – he says:
This 100 lb doll came to life. It’s pushing back . . . I’m pushing on it and all
of a sudden it pushes back. It’s creating motion and friction. And the weight
of the product and how it behaves in this manner is very stimulating. It was
an amazing thing. Very life-like. Very realistic. Very odd . . . but it’s just a doll,
a very high form of masturbation.22
This is the crux of the matter: while Dorfman writes that ‘there is more to a
sex doll than sex’, the fact is that, as one iDollator puts it, RealDolls actually
provide zero companionship. Furthermore, the more realistic looking they are,
the better the sex and the sex is reportedly ‘incredible’. Despite the recent
discourse on the doll and the erotic intimacy of familial domesticity as articu-
lated in the photographs of Dorfman, the Guys and Dolls documentary and the
popularisation of dolls in mainstream television and cinema culture, in the
main testimonies from RealDoll owners are driven not so much by this rhetoric
of intimacy as by a more functional or pragmatic impulse. It is driven by the
nitty-gritty of purchasing and using a RealDoll for sex. In fact, RealDolls are
‘comforting’ because they provide ‘stress-free’ companions. They are ‘conveni-
ent’ because they are always ready and available. They are handy because they
are ‘willing’, willing to be made use of as a means to an end. This is their
explicit purpose. The inanimate human form at the heart of these erotic
encounters is after all a high-end sex doll – and a sex doll is really no more
than a sex aid, an aid in masturbation.
With all this in mind, here are some facts. RealDolls have been manufac-
tured since 1996 by Abyss Creations, a company founded by Matt McCullen.23
They are the most realistic sex dolls on the market. This is why they appear
regularly in visual arts practice, on television shows and in movies. Their dis-
tinction has seen them find a home in New York’s Museum of Sex, which has
two Perspex-encaged RealDolls and two RealDoll torsos. The Perspex vitrines
in which they reside have holes cut out at the level of the primary sexual
organs; stencilled on the Perspex is the invitation to ‘please touch gently’ (fig.
76). It takes about eighty man-hours to manufacture a RealDoll. The dolls
weigh between 78 and 115 pounds (some 35 and 52 kilos), can withstand 400
degrees of heat and support more than 400 pounds (some 180 kilos). At the
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time of writing (2013), ‘standard’ RealDolls are priced at $5999 (for both males
and females), excluding mailing costs. Who buys them? According to the
RealDoll website:
There is no ‘type’ of person who buys a RealDoll. Our customers include

futurists, artists, art collectors, photographers, film-makers, scientists,
health professionals, housewives, single men and women, couples seeking
to enhance their sex lives, people looking for exotic decorative art, adult
retailers who want the ultimate display mannequin, or anyone who desires
to possess the world’s most realistic love doll.
The earlier versions of RealDoll were made of solid latex with an interior skel-
eton but they now have a fully articulated PVC skeleton, steel joints and tin-
cure silicone flesh with an ultra-flesh feel. Since 2009 this has been ‘improved’
to the even higher – that is, even more lifelike – quality premium silicone.
(‘Regular’ sex dolls are usually made of welded vinyl.) The silicone rubber,
which has slight seam lines, does not rot, as does latex, and it has softness,
elasticity, a high degree of flexibility, is tear-resistant and has weight and shape
memory.24 Their flesh is almost odourless and while the sealer has an initial
fruit-fragrance, this dissipates. It has ‘no noticeable flavor’. The breasts use ‘a
special formulation of silicone which has a gelatinous consistency . . . to make
them look, feel, and bounce like real breasts’. RealDoll’s surfaces, contours
and folds are cold to the touch but, since silicone retains heat and does not
breathe, owners are known to put their dolls under electric blankets or in the
bath to warm them up, to create a semblance of body heat.25
RealDolls mimic the weight of real women and men (although that weight
may be distributed somewhat differently). Custom-made, there is a selection of
ten female body types from which to choose, with interchangeable faces, so the
customer can ‘craft [their] own ideal partner’. RealDoll also manufacture a
male doll, although the original ‘Charlie’ (fig. 77), has been replaced by three
interchangeable faces, ‘Nick’, ‘Michael’ and ‘Nate’, as well as making a Shemale
with both male and female genitals (fig. 78). ‘Factory imperfect doll[s]’ are also
76 [following pages]
RealDoll torsos. Courtesy of
the Museum of Sex, New York.
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77 (left) Charlie, male RealDoll.
78 (right) Shemale, RealDoll.
available via an online forum or shopping website. There is thus a profusion of

choice, optionality and combination. The dolls come with vaginal, anal and oral
cavities, depending on the model. (By special request a customer can be sup-
plied with smaller or larger inserts, which include ultra-realistic labia.) When
the cavities of female, male and Shemale RealDolls are penetrated, a vacuum
is formed within the entry mechanism that provides a powerful suction effect.
RealDolls do not have electronic features such as vibrators or rotating tongues
because the company believes that, while such features ‘enliven artificial-
feeling vinyl love dolls’, such additional artificial stimulation is unnecessary with
their product. (They do, though, encourage customers to use sex toys with their
RealDolls, especially since ‘silicone transfers vibration well’, and they point out
that the doll’s mouth canal can be customised with the introduction of a vibrator
for oral sex for women.)
When it comes to use, the weight and awkwardness of the RealDoll is a chal-
lenge easily overcome. It can be moved about in a wheelchair or via a ‘bridal’
lift in the arms. Since it cannot stand on its own, it can be suspended vertically
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via chains from a neck bolt, supported on a stand or in sitting positions and can
assume comfortably a number of sexual positions. The advice on having sex
doggy-style, for instance, is that a RealDoll owner should draw on everyday
domestic possessions that come to hand such as pillows, tables and sofas to
position and prop up the doll.
RealDolls come with a cleaning kit that includes a douche ball, anti-bacterial
soap and instructions since, once the dolls have been used, they need to have
their cavities flushed out. Given the nature of the product, RealDoll has a no-
return policy.
Customisation is key to the success of RealDolls as a product. As noted, the
dolls have interchangeable features such as faces, wigs and eyes, and the male
and Shemale dolls have interchangeable penises, with a selection of sizes. A
customer can purchase special upgrades: customised labia, nipples and penis;
skin tones and even tan lines; and freckles, birthmarks and other applied
details. ‘Fantasy dolls’ can be supplied with animal eyes, elf ears and fangs.
Dolls can be further ornamented with piercing of the ears and nipples, and
can be purchased with real hair eyebrows, human hair wigs and speciality
pubic hair. Echoing Kokoschka’s obsessive attention to the hirsute qualities of
his doll of Alma Mahler, for customers looking for extra pubic or armpit hair
the company can supply – with reservations, as I will indicate in a moment – hair
patches made from hand-knotted human hair which come in black, brunette,
auburn, red and blond. When asked in the questions section of their website
if such hair patches are available, RealDoll replies that the customer can ‘order
additional hair patches and adhesive from us to apply on your doll as you wish’,
indicating that such add-ons can be adhered to the doll anywhere and every-
where. Perversity is in the thing itself but also, like the devil, in the details, the
upgrades.
Those are the facts.
Given the company’s efforts to manufacture a most realistic sex doll that will
deceive knowingly with its mimetic artificiality and that is produced explicitly
to satisfy desire and to satiate lust, it is interesting that RealDolls can be gen-
erative of intimate erotic encounters. There is, undeniably, reciprocity, an
exchange of regards, a sharing of intimacies, a capacity for compassion, a
bonding, mutual attachment, an interdependence, a belonging, empathy, fidel-
ity and so on. That said, as well as such erotic intimacy of familial domesticity,
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there can easily be anticipated another kind of encounter. This is a more
formal, indifferent, colder sexual encounter that may also comprise a distinctly
intimate erotics, one born of a ferociously cruel brutality. Indeed, the company
RealDoll is concerned by a few of their customers’ behaviours and practices
with their dolls, as McCullen says:
I don’t have any control over what people do with their dolls after they leave
here. So, we can take say a Kaori doll [a very young-looking F13/B4 (face
type 13, body type 4)] and she looks fine to me. The customer gets her, he
gets a different wig with pig tails, and maybe he takes all of the lip color off
and puts on a more natural color, and takes some of the makeup off the
eyes, and does all this stuff himself, and I can’t control that. And there are
a lot of dolls out there that people have modified or changed, sometimes
ending up with just an ugly doll, other times ending up in a doll that looks
younger than when she left here.26
Empathy stumbles, falters. Brutality, hostility begins. iDollators sometimes

customise RealDolls to satisfy their paedophilic fantasies. They also play out
with them acts of sadistic violence. Fiero recalls that on one occasion he was
contacted by garbage collectors who found a RealDoll hacked to pieces in a
dumpster.27 Then there is the iDollators’ sadistic and sexual violence. Fiero was
on another occasion sent a doll in an eviscerated condition, he remembers:
‘The jaw in the doll was still in her skull, but behind her neck. Her hands were
ripped off and fingers were missing. Her left breast was hanging on by a thread
of skin, like your bra strap’.28 Then there is owners’ sadistic sexual violence.
This case is recounted by both Fiero and Alexandre in Still Lovers:
The owner of a one-year-old doll, an Asian undergraduate student at a

prestigious university in California, brought his doll to Fiero for repairs. Fiero
says the man told him that his parents bought him the doll so that he would
stay at home and study rather than go out chasing women. Fiero docu-
mented the doll’s injuries on his web site: her leg was torn off, revealing the
steel hardware of her hip joints; an arm hung by an inch of silicone flesh;
two fingers were severed; and the cleavage between her buttocks was torn
into a ragged crevasse.
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‘Her vagina was so blown out,’ he says. ‘I was appalled. I couldn’t believe
someone could fuck something like that up so quickly. It blew me away. How
could somebody be so callous?’
‘I was offended in so many ways. He put her feet behind her head and
reamed that doll with whatever cock he’s got. He fucked her violently. She
was achieving positions she shouldn’t achieve or be forced to try. Her vagina
and anus were a giant gaping hole.’29
Empathy breaks down entirely; brutality, hostility is overwhelming. What to

make of these brutal encounters? How might one conceive of this ferocious
brutality as an intimate erotics? What does it mean to want, I have to ask
myself, to discern in this brutality an intimate erotics?
Unsatisfactory as it is, let me try this argument. Such encounters make it
plain that agalmatophiles are not always and only benign perverts, lonely men
seeking comfort in and compassion from inanimate human form. Their eroto-
manias, fetishisms, and paraphilias may also be born from paedophilic, sadis-
tic and sexually sadistic desires and fantasies. ‘Perversion is hatred, eroticized
hatred’, wrote the psychoanalyst Robert J. Stoller, for whom such perverse
acts would be fantasies of revenge executed by the hostile, those filled with
hatred, that result in triumph, especially if they culminate in humiliation. This
is why for Freud the fetish is ‘a token of triumph over the threat of castration
and a protection against it’.30 While the violent results of such hatred, revenge
and triumph might occasionally become visible in the public domain by way of
the remains of the violated dolls, the acts of violence themselves, the practices
and behaviours through which they are choreographed, which give them form,
take place in the privacy of the domestic, a primal scene of childhood traumas
and anxieties orchestrated by their perpetrators. Little is known of their moti-
vation although, if such forms are being made use of as fetishistic stand-ins,
there is cause for concern. That this goes on behind closed doors – and we
can assume that many more acts of this kind go unreported – highlights yet
again the dangers of the domestic. In RealDoll World, this community, this
pornotopia that as a non-place networks men with their dolls, amateur pho-
tography and videography, with pornography on the internet, chatrooms and
photo-sharing sites, who can really know what nightmares and heartbreaks
are going on in the privacy of their homes, in the ordinary, everyday domestic
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spaces for withdrawing? While this is not domestic violence, it is a ferocious
brutality. The domestic sphere is not a safe place for dolls.31
Such brutal acts also make plain the shared delusion that is the fantasy of
the sentimental, companionable side of the erotics of intimacy. For if, as in
previous chapters and also here, there has been a tacit agreement, a con-
spiracy even, that men’s erotic relations with inanimate human form might be
shaped by love for a desired and desiring fetishistic thing, whether as stand-in
or in and of itself, now such acts insist that the doll was always and only ever
an object of desire, an object for sex. The idea of animism’s animating possi-
bilities – the idea of the fantasy of inanimate human form coming to life, being
brought to life, possessing the desire for life, reciprocity itself – was only ever
an ornate concealing of this fact of sex. Being in love was only ever an over-
elaborated being in sex. Further, if being in love was only ever and just being
in sex, such brutal acts both damage irreparably the idea of love and affirm
that even sex itself is only ever and just a form of auto-affection. This is where
the seeds of this brutality lie. For a solitary pleasure, while pleasurable indeed,
is tempered by a wretched recognition of the alienating distance of the agal-
matophile from himself. This is the anguished recognition (as for all narcis-
sists) that intrinsic to the structure of the form of auto-affection is a self-
alienating in which he can only ever ‘touch himself as other to himself’ by way
of dolls, tools, instruments, artificial women’s bodies, as mediations and re-
mediations. Beyond stand-in or simulation, beyond a belief in the fantasy of
inanimate human forms coming to life, the sex doll is, banally, just an object
of desire, for lust, for sex. As such this convincing masturbatory device becomes
a locus where a ferociously brutal erotics as a cruelty impressed on the doll,
intimately driven or pressed into it, is at the same time a cruelty directed at
the self.
This self-alienating, which is not quite a self-loathing, is evident, I think,
albeit implicitly, to the agalmatophile, to the company RealDoll and in Elena
Dorfman’s photographs. (Perhaps it is inherent even to the discourse of erotic
intimacy of familial domesticity.) It is a virulent comprehending of the absolute
object-ness of the doll. The doll is not a desired and desiring fetishistic thing.
There is actually nothing more to a sex doll than sex. Ultimately, the doll’s
will-to-verisimilitude, its hyper-realism, its deceptive mimetic artificiality is all
in the service of re-affirming that absolute object-ness. It affirms its own
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materiality and artificiality, specifically in this case its silicone-ness, much as
in the past inanimate human form affirmed its own ivory, marble, wax, wood
or rubber. This might be true of all inanimate human form. Men both recognise
and disavow but they do know. Perhaps I have been attending too closely to
the recognising. For it is a sex doll, an object, not, I repeat not, a woman. The
doll is realistic but it is not real. I have to be careful here, though, because part
of me wants to claim that the recognising of the doll as object makes it pos-
sible to tolerate the agalmatophile playing out his ‘callous’ and ‘offending’
paedophilic, sadistic and whatever other desires and fantasies on inanimate
human form as object. I feel uncomfortable claiming any such thing, though,
because I know that he may well want to be deceived into believing that the
doll is real; also (a worse admission) that such object-ness, such docility,
obedience, compliance, a bit of peace and quiet is actually what some men
want from flesh-and-blood women proper.
This is, then, no apology for the agalmatophile, or a condoning or a justifying
of these brutal acts but, more precisely, a reminder that for him an encounter
with the sex doll as inanimate human form might just be a bonding with an
object for the literal satisfaction of lust, and that there is not more to a sex doll
than sex. There are no fantasies of animism here. No interest in anima, life,
soul, breath, spirit. No interest in reciprocity, radiating feeling, mutual attach-
ment, mutuality. This leads me to believe that in the end encounters between
iDollators and their RealDolls – whether intimate, loving, compassionate and
sentimental, or brutal – are not caught up in animism’s animating possibilities
or the magical or supernatural rhetoric of the fetish. Rather, they are simply
a component in a more mundane, properly perverse erotics, with the object as
object. Whether intimate or brutal, these encounters articulate what is,
strangely, interestingly and perhaps not unexpectedly given their hetero-nor-
mativity, a most polymorphous configuration of perversity which is, for better
or worse (perhaps in this instance for worse) nothing more or less than unadul-
terated male heterosexuality itself. Make no mistake: the doll is not a she or
a he or a s/he but an it. If there is an opportunity for the emergence of an
erotics, whether it takes an intimate form that is domestic, everyday, familial
and cherished or indifferent, cold, cruel and brutal, this it-ness is the basis of
such human-synthetic (or non-human) contact. Perhaps it has always been
so. A belief in animism might only ever have been about encounters with
realdoll / 245
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objects as objects of desire, this fact of sex and, further, this fact of sex as a
form of auto-affection. What is certain is that some RealDoll owners are well
aware of this. Mike Kelly from Texas, for instance, refers to his dolls as ‘it’ and
knows that he ‘doesn’t have sex with them, he masturbates with them’. They
are, he concludes, ‘merely an aid in masturbation’.32 Such solitary pleasure
might, as I have remarked that discourses in the history of sexuality claim, be
dangerous because as a perversion it replaces heterogenital coitus with a
plethora of non-procreative practices and behaviours. In addition, and perhaps
even more disturbingly, masturbation as a perverse practice becomes, as I
have noted, a model for actual sex, the defining marker of heterosexuality, of
male heterosexuality per se.
That the company RealDoll somehow does not approve of men brutalising
their dolls and finds it distasteful, suggests that what is at stake involves their
sense of male heterosexuality, what it should and should not mean and do,
and how that ‘doing’ should be demonstrated and articulated. My feeling is
that they think of and want male heterosexuality to not be perverse. They want
it to be straight; they think it is straight. This is a mistake and is why I would
characterise their sense of disapproval as arising from a strangely puritanical
taxonomy of polymorphous perversity.
To clarify, RealDoll’s staff are concerned by and take offence at their custom-
ers’ ‘callous’ behaviour and they are disinclined to trust them because, as I
have just detailed, those customers sometimes play out paedophilic and sadis-
tic fantasies with their dolls and occasionally do violence and sexual violence
to them. Matt McCullen, Slade Fiero and the office manager Debra are not
convinced that their customers can tell the difference between a RealDoll and
a flesh-and-blood woman. No wonder they cannot be trusted to do right by
their dolls. Yet it strikes me that it might not just be RealDoll owners but also
RealDoll staff who struggle to distinguish between dolls as persons and as
things, and between things and objects, as straightforward albeit elaborate
aids to masturbation. There is a lingering sense from the dexterous creators
of RealDoll themselves that their products are, as the name suggests, real or
at least potentially so. Such a sense comes from their own inability to disabuse
themselves of their own animistic Pygmalion fantasies: the dolls can push
back, creating motion and friction, they are more than just a sex doll, and as
such need to be protected from those who would do them harm. Why else
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would such acts cause offence or be considered callous? In addition to the
contempt such acts demonstrate for the makers’ skilled labour, the RealDoll
staff are the custodians of their dolls. In expressing concerns that paedophilic
and extreme sexual fantasies and behaviours might spill over into the real
world, there is a failure or refusal on their part to acknowledge that the inani-
mate human form lovingly crafted by their own hands, which is manufactured
and then adorned even when it is eviscerated, might not be for the iDollator a
stand-in. It might not be mistaken for a real flesh-and-blood woman. It might
not be grasped as mimetic at all but, rather, taken (in both senses of the word),
at times cruelly and brutally, as an instrumental, fungible, violable object as
such.33
The RealDoll staff’s concern with their customers, coupled with a reluctance
to concede that there is nothing more to a sex doll than sex, is disquiet at their
customers’ ‘appropriate’ sexual behaviour with their dolls, which is by exten-
sion a concern over what for them constitutes proper heterosexual behaviour
per se. Customers’ pathological, paraphilic desires and their decidedly hetero-
sexual conduct seem to demand, at least for RealDoll staff, a need to differenti-
ate between what they see as normal (straight) and abnormal (perverse) per-
version, acceptable and unacceptable perverse desires and practices. Wielding
the rhetorical and ideological instruments of such regulatory regimes, they
position RealDoll owners as either legitimate or illegitimate desiring subjects.
This speaks of an inability or refusal to accept that doll-related desires, fetish-
isms, paraphilias, however ferocious, can be decidedly and particularly hetero-
sexual, born as they all are in that nineteenth-century age of the explosion of
multiplying eroticisms, that ordering of things by way of a taxonomy of poly-
morphous perversity that is the invention of male heterosexuality.
To unpick this, for RealDoll owners, which special upgrades are available
and which are not begins to single out the particular limits of the company’s
willingness to accommodate how a customer can customise their doll. Here,
there surfaces a tension not between love and sex, or between an erotics of
familial domesticity and one of ferocious brutality, however intimate, but rather
a tension, or a distinction, albeit confusing and contradictory, about the com-
pany’s compliance with or re-affirmation of certain regulative structures of
hetero-normative perversity. Commercially, but really ideologically, there is a
willingness to indulge certain paraphilias – sexual pathologies that fall outside
realdoll / 247
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their understanding of a regulative normality – but not others. This is a division
between a vigorous normalisation of certain forms of perverse sexuality and a
vilifying re-perversification of others. That is to say, on the one hand RealDoll
is willing to promote – given the products in their portfolio, this seems the right
word to use – certain perverse sexual practices, behaviours and fantasies
which through its very endorsement become normalised as practices, behav-
iours and fantasies.34 So, for instance, in addition to manufacturing female and
male dolls, RealDoll has in the past been willing to produce and supply her-
maphrodite or Shemale dolls (for the gynandromorphophile), as well as body
parts, additional penises and extra tongues and eyes. One can suppose that
for the company all these products (and others) are in line with ‘normal’ fet-
ishes, since nowadays the desire for fetishes, objects and part-objects, and
the inter-changeability of things, is part of straight, normalising, heterosexual
perversity; it has now even become hetero-normatively perverse. These prod-
ucts cater to recognisable markets for fetishists and are part of familiar tax-
onomies of heterosexual, fetishistic perversions that satisfy ‘normal’, standard,
hetero-normative perverse desire: a female doll for men and women; She-
males for men and women; Nick or Michael or Nate for men and women; and
body parts for ‘parts fetishists’, as they are known.
On the other hand, in making these products available and not others,
RealDoll persist in pathologising offensive and callous practices that they
consider harmful, aberrant, properly perverse and dangerously so. They will
not entertain requests for customised dolls that have any hint of paraphilias
or sexual pathologies or activities falling outside their understanding of such
normalcy. They draw the line at anything that has a whiff of erotomania (an
erotic paranoia), lactophilia (adult suckling), urolagnia (urine lust), apotemno-
philia (self-amputation), macrophilia (giants), trichophilia, Oedipality, zoophilia,
maiesiophilia (pregnancy), gerantophilia (the elderly), paedophilia and sadism.
Yet these are all standard, decidedly heterosexual paraphilic perversions iden-
tified historically in taxonomies of male heterosexual perversity; in fact, they
are the building blocks of which male heterosexuality is itself comprised.
RealDoll will not, for example, customise a doll to look exactly like a person
in a photograph – a celebrity, a model or someone’s partner or ex-part-
ner – without that person’s explicit consent (the law prohibits this anyway). As
McCullen says: ‘one [customer] wanted a facsimile of his own mother and
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offered thousands of pictures from which to work. Another wanted a woman
covered in apelike body hair. One chap even wanted a replica of a canine. He
offered me $50,000 to do it, Matt confided, “but y’know . . . I just couldn’t”.’35
McCullen also recalls that a surgical pathologist had once asked for a duplicate
of a vagina which he had brought along in a jar.36 Other such instances men-
tioned, this time by Debra, include being asked to supply a pregnant RealDoll,
a doll looking eighty years old and one with hair up to the belly-button and all
down the back. In the last case the customer was sold pubic hair patches by
the company and told he could ‘just put it anywhere you want!’ These are the
limits for the company RealDoll. Such refusals, especially for items as innocu-
ous as armpit hair, are odd, a strange assault on the more minoritarian inter-
ests of their customer base’s sexual culture, the very men and women to whom
particular perverse activities might appeal.
Such strict demarcations (what RealDoll is willing to sanction and what it is
not) between hetero-normative perversity and the numerous other paraphilias
that can be found readily in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’ tax-
onomies of heterosexual perversity flag up the company’s ‘moral’ concerns
about what their customers might go on to do with their RealDolls. The staff
advocate what amounts to their own playing out of a sentimental erotic inti-
macy of familial domesticity, while making, marketing and selling sex dolls
whose prime purpose is sex. They are willing to grant that they are masturba-
tory devices yet are disapproving of how their dolls get taken up in an erotics
of brutality. In distrusting their customers, they show themselves to be unable
to distinguish desires for and fantasies and practices with objects from desires,
fantasies and practices as such. In so doing, their actions enforce anew and
legitimise a segregation, and thus a discrimination, between an affirmation of
conventional hetero-normative polymorphous perversity and a condemnation
or de-legitimising of truly (although still decidedly male heterosexual) poly-
morphous perversities, even though they cater for and produce both. Their
confusing of where to draw the line and why ends up troubling or putting pres-
sure on these very categories and on category-making itself.
The agalmatophile is caught up in real and fantasmatic desires for inanimate
objects. Agalmatophilia is a paraphilia, as fetishism is a paraphilia, a being-
with-things which is a living alongside, along with and contrary to love. It is the
particular nature of the intimate erotic encounter with objects as objects – 
realdoll / 249
ED_int.indd 249 15/10/2013 5:06 PM

whether domestic or brutal, loving or sexual, a confirming both that there is
more to a sex doll than sex and nothing more to a sex doll than sex – out of
which the components of that intimate erotics are conceived, composed and
articulated. The company RealDoll’s distinctions between legitimate and ille-
gitimate practices of desire thus look increasingly odd; why cater to gynandro-
morphilia but not trichophilia? In any case, practices around sex dolls are
licensed (however brutal) because they are sex dolls, nothing more than sex. It
was always thus. Here, to seek or wreak revenge on a doll, an object, a doll as
object, is inconsequential. A fantasy of brutality is not brutality as such; such
hostility leads only to the obliteration of a doll.
That said, RealDolls are often put to work as sexual surrogates, as individu-
alised mimetic representations of someone or something, as a she, and then
it begins to become clear why as a company RealDoll refuses to make dolls of
people’s ex-partners, celebrities, customers’ mothers and so on. Any effort to
argue for the sex doll as an object that might read like legitimising ferocious
brutality is objectionable; hence my early dissatisfaction with the idea of trying
to argue for such brutality as generative of an intimate erotics, that anything
productive, let alone alluring, might come of it. Yet, if, following Stoller, perver-
sion is ‘the erotic form of hatred’ or ‘eroticised hatred’, there is still something
interesting here. And there is indeed every reason to be concerned. For a desire
to harm one’s sexual object, which is for Stoller at the heart of the perverse
act, is different in kind, not just degree, when that sexual object is inanimate
human form and when it is human. Likewise for revenge. In both cases dehu-
manisation ensues. Such harm is the absence of empathy, is a damaging of
the idea of love and also an articulation of love as deeply flawed. It is no wonder
that there is something profoundly dispiriting and desperate about such
harming, with its conjoined solitude and dissociation, this touching himself as
other to himself, this touching of necessity by way of inanimate human form,
and this cruel brutality that is both objectifying and deeply personal, that is
hostile, hatred, eroticised hatred, even as it results (perhaps because it results)
in triumphant revenge. For it speaks of the impossibility of intimacy as a form
of knowing, a coming to know, a making known (intimare) of the innermost
(intimus) nature of the self, of another, of a thing. Instead, the intimate becomes
an inditer, a denouncer, of all things. By way of such encounters, the agalmat-
ophile does not come to know, to intimate the soul or spirit of the doll and its
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radiating, reciprocal relations, or even catch a glimpse of the questions intrin-
sic to the mechanisms of the fundamental character of such form and its
transformative conditions of possibility. On the contrary, the agalmatophile
senses simply a forever dissociating reflection of his own narcissistic self-
alienating. In this he is no better or worse than the rest of us. All narcissists,
all fetishists, all perverts, all too human. Erotic encounters between men and
their dolls thus become a particular acting out of a generalisable state of affairs
formulated a long time ago, which reached its most accurate rendering in
modernity in a converging of Freud’s appraisal of perversion and Marx’s of
capitalism and the commodity form. Since Freud, as Stoller concluded, the
argument has been made that the ‘capacity for sexual pleasure in perversion
can be retained only with some sacrifice of the humanness of one’s object, and
by . . . one’s own. When one must reduce people to things, love – with its
binding of hatred – cannot persist’.37 Marx considered that, in personifying
things, inevitably we ourselves become, and begin to treat ourselves, as things
in turn.
realdoll / 251
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ED_int.indd 252 15/10/2013 5:06 PM
III given,
the anagrammatical doll
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ED_int.indd 254 15/10/2013 5:06 PM
7 / marcel duchamp’s étant donnés:
a distorting
given
. .
. the anatomically peculiar mannequin
In his 1977 autobiography Memoir of an Art Gallery, the New York art dealer
Julian Levy recalls an exchange with Marcel Duchamp in the lounge of the
transatlantic ocean liner Paris, travelling from New York to Le Havre in Febru-
ary 1927. Levy recounted:
Marcel toyed with two flexible pieces of wire, bending and twirling them,
occasionally tracing their outline on a piece of paper. He was, he told me,
devising a mechanical female apparatus . . . a life-size articulated dummy,
a mechanical woman whose vagina, contrived of meshed springs and ball
bearings, would be contractile, possibly self-lubricating, and activated from
a remote control, perhaps located in the head and connected by the leverage
of the two wires he was shaping. The apparatus might be used as a sort of
‘machine-onaniste’ without hands.1
79 Marcel Duchamp, Étant donnés, 1° la chute d’eau, 2° le

gaz d’éclairage . . . (Given 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating
Gas . . . ), 1946–66, mixed media assemblage: (exterior)
wooden door, iron nails, bricks, and stucco, 242.6 x 177.8 x
124.5 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of the Cassandra
Foundation, 1969.
80 Marcel Duchamp, Étant donnés, 1° la chute d’eau, 2° le

gaz d’éclairage . . . (Given 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating
Gas . . . ), 1946–66, mixed media assemblage: (interior)
bricks, velvet, wood, parchment over an armature of lead,
steel, brass, synthetic putties and adhesives, aluminum
sheet, welded steel-wire screen, and wood; Peg-Board, hair,
oil paint, plastic, steel binder clips, plastic clothespins, twigs,
leaves, glass, plywood, brass piano hinge, nails, screws,
cotton, collotype prints, acrylic varnish, chalk, graphite,
paper, cardboard, tape, pen ink, electric light fixtures, gas
lamp (Bec Auer type), foam rubber, cork, electric motor,
cookie tin, and linoleum, 242.6 x 177.8 x 124.5 cm.
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of the Cassandra
Foundation, 1969.
marcel duchamp’s étant donnés / 255
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This creation fantasy of an inanimate form’s animating possibilities might
seem much in keeping with the kinds of fantasies that have been described in
earlier chapters. If anything, Duchamp’s explicit plan to devise a mechanical
female apparatus – with a vagina that could shrink or become narrower, could
be self-lubricating and might even be used as an autonomous masturbating
machine – sounds closer to a sex toy, that is to commercial products, such as
a nineteenth-century inflatable female body with artificial vagina or a twenty-
first-century RealDoll, than it does to any earlier or later artistic projects. As
a mechanical female apparatus it is also a far cry from either Duchamp’s
low-key cross-dressing Rrose Sélavy mannequin for the 1938 Exposition Inter-
nationale du Surréalisme or the 1945 window display of the headless mannequin
with the transvesticising tap on its right leg exhibited at the Gotham Book Mart
in New York City. While this mechanical female apparatus was never made, it
is nonetheless not too much of a stretch of the imagination to suggest that,
more than forty years after the conversation with Levy, this life-size articulated
dummy, this machine-onaniste, may be unveiled, albeit considerably reconfig-
ured conceptually and operationally, as the recumbent mannequin in the art-
ist’s last, infamous work, Étant donnés.2
As is well known, in almost complete secrecy Duchamp’s Étant donnés was
assembled between 1946 and 1966, first at the artist’s studio, an annex of his
apartment at 210 West 14th Street in New York City, and then from 1965 in his
new studio at 80 East 11th Street. After Duchamp’s death in 1968, by 1969 Étant
donnés had been installed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art by the then
assistant curator Anne d’Harnoncourt, along with Paul Matisse, the son of the
artist’s wife.
As a two-room installation, Étant donnés begins in a viewing room (3.41 by
3.48 meters), itself part of the work. On one side of the room is a wall with a
surround of mortared bricks. Inserted into it is a reclaimed exterior barn door,
found, like the bricks, by Duchamp in the early 1960s in Cadaqués (fig. 79).
Embedded in the door are two eyeholes. Looking through them, the viewer
spies an interior aperture draped in black velvet and built from bricks which
Duchamp and his then wife, Alexina (Teeny) Duchamp (née Sattler), salvaged
in the 1960s from vacant lots and construction sites in Manhattan. Beyond it a
landscape is in view (fig. 80). The landscape is composed of a hyper-natural-
istic, three-dimensional scene, the backdrop of which is a collotype collage
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including blown-up photographs of Le Forestay waterfall in a Swiss ravine near
Puidoux, taken from 5 to 9 August 1946 by either the artist or his then long-
term companion Mary Reynolds. Here, located in the far right background, is
a trompe l’oeil waterfall, actually a relief of hardened glue, and behind it,
unseen, an electronic and motored mechanism gives the illusion of cascading
water. In the foreground of the scene there is a recumbent female manne-
quin – splayed, arms outstretched, legs akimbo, with its vaginal area (or rather
vulva) on display – holding in its left hand a glowing gas lamp. (It is meant to
be a Bec Auer gas burner, although it is in fact lit by electricity.) The mannequin
is precisely positioned on real, found materials: dead branches, twigs and
leaves once again gathered by Duchamp and Teeny, although this time on trips
to Central Park, the Hudson River Palisades, and in a wood near her house in
Lebanon, New Jersey.
In light of this brief description, here is the full title of the work: Étant donnés:
1 la chute d’eau, 2 le gaz d’éclairage, translated as Given: 1. The Waterfall 2. The
Illuminating Gas. I stress – and I shall return to this – that the title foregrounds
the premise that there are two ‘givens’ in the work, two factors that are taken
‘as given’, à donner. They are the waterfall that seems to flow and the illumi-
nating gas that glows, both by way of intricate electronic means. The title
comes from the Preface of Duchamp’s The Green Box (1934; fig. 81) and is
written on the upper right arm of the mannequin, actually a stump rather than
an arm as such, out of sight of the viewer, where Duchamp also signed and
dated the work. Although beyond our field of vision in Étant donnés itself, the
title, signature and date can be spied in one of the many Polariod photographs
taken by Duchamp and gathered in his Manual of Instructions (fig. 82). A first
iteration of the Manual is composed of detailed documentation that the artist
put together in late 1965 as an aide-mémoire before dis-assembling the work
at West 14th Street in order to re-assemble it at East 11th Street early in 1966.
In the second iteration of the Manual from 1966, the artist included the instruc-
tions, the photographs and also a three-dimensional folding cardboard model
of the actual installation. This version became in 1968/9 an aid for the Phila-
delphia Museum of Art’s installation of the work.3
As the Manual’s title page describes it, Étant donnés is an ‘approximation
démontable’. Michael R. Taylor, the former curator of modern and contempo-
rary art, in Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés, his book-length study published to
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coincide with the Museum’s exhibition celebrating the fortieth anniversary of
its installation, characterises this as ‘a nearly untranslatable phrase that sug-
gests a work to be taken apart and then reconstructed according to Duchamp’s
detailed operations, which allowed for “an ad libitum margin in the dismantling
and reassembling.”’4
Indeed as an assemblage, Étant donnés is a contrived viewing dispositif. Its
exterior door, its two embedded peepholes, its velvet-clad interior aperture
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81 (facing) Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by
Her Bachelors, Even (The Green Box) Préface, Étant donnés,
1° la chute d’eau, 2° le gaz d’éclairage” (Given 1. The
Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas), published by Edition
Rrose Selavy, Paris, 1934, 94 facsimiles of manuscript
notes, drawings and photographs, and one original
manuscript item, Broyeuse de Chocolat, contained in a
green flocked cardboard box, (box) 33.2 x 27.9 x 2.5 cm,
Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Louise and Walter
Arensberg Collection, 1950.
82 (above) Marcel Duchamp, Manual of Instructions for

the assembly of Étant donnés, 1° la chute d’eau, 2° le gaz
d’éclairage, 1966, black vinyl binder with gelatin silver
photographs, drawings, and manuscript notes on paper
and on photographs in graphite, coloured inks, and paint
in clear vinyl sheet protectors, (binder) 29.5 x 25 x 4.5 cm,
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of the Cassandra
Foundation, 1969.
and the disclosed three-dimensional scene beyond put the viewer’s voyeurism
itself ‘on stage’, as Chris Horrocks affirms, citing Rosalind Krauss.5 In this
regard, it is much like the mechanisms of a camera obscura, Albrecht Dürer’s
woodcut Der Zeichner des liegenden Weibes (1525), Samuel Hoogstraten’s Peep
Box (c. 1655–60), nineteenth-century optical devices such as stereoscopic pho-
tography and Gustave Courbet’s painting L’Origine du monde (The Origin of the
World; 1866). It is no surprise, then, that this multi-media installation is often
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written about in terms that articulate the intricate convergence of the inter-
woven mechanisms of voyeurism, the erotics of vision and violence; and of how
these mechanisms are forcefully made explicit by the work. This makes sense
not least because, as Duchamp explained to Man Ray, its inspiration came in
the 1920s from the ‘bride in booths’ stalls and wedding tableaux at country
fairs where dummies dressed as the bride and groom were targeted with balls
by spectators in an effort to decapitate them.6
This viewing dispositif, with its ‘tableau-assemblage’, as d’Harnoncourt and
the curator Walter Hopps had called it back in 1969, and its ‘hyper-real recum-
bent mannequin’, as the art historian David Hopkins has characterised its
central figure, is many things to many people.7 For instance, it is a fetishistic
and perverse peepshow, stereoscopic porn, an ‘obscene diorama’ and a crime
scene presenting a body, even a ‘sacrificial dummy’. This body is, according to
the extensive and paradoxical literature on the work, either anticipating the act
of love-making or in satiated post-coital bliss, or – diametrically opposed to
this – has been raped, soiled, mutilated and abandoned.8 Some have argued
that it is a three-dimensional embodiment of the bride from The Large Glass
finally stripped bare, its deferred sexual encounter which frustrates desire – 
where Duchamp castigates the wretched Bachelors for being trapped ‘rather
onanistically’ (as Hopkins puts it) in their distorted self-perfections – finally
consummated.9 Whether yet another ‘machine-onaniste’ or sex consummated
(perhaps these two acts have become one and the same), I shall now get closer
to this mannequin.
In his biography of Duchamp, the critic Calvin Tomkins offers an almost
pornographic description of it:
She is neither young nor old, this full-bodied nude. Although her skin is
smooth and taut, it has seen better days. A lock of blond hair falls across
her left shoulder, and there is blond fuzz under her arms as well, but not a
trace of it in the genital area. Fully exposed and opened by the position of
her legs, her hairless cunt draws the viewer’s gaze like a magnet. There is
something anatomically peculiar about this gaping orifice; it has no inner
labia, and on second or third view it begins to look disturbingly like a vertical,
speaking mouth [my italics].10
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83 (left) Marcel Duchamp, Étant donnés, 1° la chute d’eau,
2° le gaz d’éclairage . . . (Given 1. The Waterfall, 2. The
Illuminating Gas . . . ), 1946–66.
84 (right) Gustave Courbet, The Origin of the World, 1866,

oil on canvas, 46 x 55 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
Many writers other than Tomkins have attended to the mannequin’s ‘anatomi-
cally peculiar . . . gaping orifice’. One is the feminist art historian Amelia Jones
who has written of how her unease in front of Étant donnés, and the fact that
it is ‘embarrassingly “realistic”’, is born of what she calls the piece’s purposeful
‘exaggeration’. By this Jones means the way in which Duchamp utilises the
mechanisms of gendered and sexualised viewing and the ‘erotics of vision’ to
force the viewer to stare at the pudenda, which was itself an exaggerated or
distorted anatomy (fig. 83).11 This astute observation echoes earlier accusations
that the female anatomy in Courbet’s The Origin of the World (fig. 84) is also
‘incorrect’. (That painting was bought in 1955 by Lacan and his wife Sylvia, who
had been married to Bataille, and, in a way anticipating Duchamp’s Étant
donnés, was hung in a ‘secret’ viewing box hidden behind a sliding wooden
panel painting by the Surrealist André Masson.) As Virginie Monnier claims:
‘indeed it [The Origin] reproduces an anatomical inaccuracy that in Courbet had
caused outrage: the cleft of the vulva, as thin as a line, goes all the way to the
crease of the anus, ignoring the anatomical particularities of the female body’.12
No mention of Courbet’s Origin of the World, even a brief one, would be
complete without reference to the figure in the painting’s ‘excessive’ pubic hair.
Its furriness and the furriness of, say, Kokoschka’s doll of Alma Mahler make
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an acute contrast with the absence of hair on Duchamp’s mannequin: the one
fails to hide the inaccuracy, the other draws attention to it. Duchamp’s man-
nequin is characterised generally as ‘hairless’. Both Tomkins and Jones point
to its decidedly hairless nature – except for the wig on its head and the fuzz
under its arms. Arturo Schwarz suggested that the absence of pubic hair
indicates that the mannequin is meant to be ‘very young’.13 Tomkins writes that
Duchamp’s first wife of eight months (1927–8), Lydie Sarazin-Lavassor,
recounted her husband requesting that she remove her pubic hair because he
‘had an almost morbid horror of hair’.14 Others account for such hairless-ness
by proposing that the pubic hair is not absent so much as shaven. The French
painter François Rouan, for instance, speaks about the mannequin’s ‘spread
pudenda . . . [with its] hair shaven off leaving only traces’.15 Jean Clair writes,
as Jean-Michel Rabaté puts it, about the ‘shockingly-shaven sex’ and ties it to
his perception of the mannequin’s decapitation: aut vultus, aut vulva.16 Juan
Antonio Ramírez notes its ‘shaven pubic hair’ and discusses at some length
the historical and aesthetic vogue among Dada and Surrealist artists for cel-
ebrating a dearth of pubic hair.17 (He also notes that the mannequin in Étant
donnés has neither eyelashes nor eyebrows.18)
Somewhat similarly to Tomkins, and like Monnier on Courbet, Jones has
written about the ‘incorrect anatomy’ of the mannequin in Étant donnés and,
from close looking, affirms that:
there is no vulva to be seen at all. There are no ‘labia majora’, [or] ‘labia
minora’ in view; there is no vaginal vestibule or clitoris; but neither is the
figure Barbie-doll smooth and without genitals – no, it is even more unset-
tling than that. The strangely flaccid, not quite womanly body of the figure
lying in the bed of twigs is uncanny precisely because she has not a vagina
leading into her interior, her womb, but a shallow crevice with no exterior
lips at all. Aside from the beginnings of a small, puckered hole like a punc-
ture wound in the center of this crevice, there is, apparently, no deep internal
orifice here.19
Whether its pubic hair is absent or shaven, the mannequin is neither ‘Barbie-
doll smooth’ nor without genitals, yet – and unlike (one might imagine)
Duchamp’s 1927 fantasy of a ‘machine-onaniste’ – nor does it have a deep
internal orifice. It has but a shallow crevice. It is useless for more obviously
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onanistic purposes, although, remembering speculations about nineteenth-
century window shoppers, Oscar Kokoschka and owners of RealDolls, this
does not mean that it would not be receptive to rubbing relations.
Given this unsettling anatomy, Jones writes, ‘the body refuses, finally, the
penetration of vision, stopping the flow with its aggressively visible and gro-
tesque gash that goes nowhere’.20 For these and other reasons, she concludes:
‘[t]he denaturalized body of Étant donnés figures [a] repressed masculine
anxiety, brings it to the surface, by refusing to provide the viewer with a place
to go. He or she can only look, but this look is repelled by the hairless gap that
goes nowhere’.21 In the end for Jones, ‘[t]he nude figure of Étant donnés refuses
to hide her “lack,” her gaping castration wound’.22
Jean-François Lyotard also wrote about the anatomical peculiarities of the
mannequin’s genital area, tying it to the artist’s interest in ‘gender indetermi-
nacy’.23 In his classic text on Duchamp’s Étant donnés, he pursues the figure’s
incorrect anatomy, arguing that ‘the right breast and shoulder are those of a
man, and . . . between the vulva and the right of the groin, a swelling suggests
the birth of a scrotum’.24 This leads him to the possibility that the recumbent
mannequin, meant to signify as female, suggests a latent masculinity and/or
even – following the gender-bending of Duchamp’s 1938 cross-dressing Rrose
Sélavy mannequin and his 1945 headless transvesticising tap mannequin – a
hermaphroditic or androgynous impulse.
These descriptions and interpretations of Duchamp’s Étant donnés provide
me with the resources for my own argument about this tableau-assemblage.
For Duchamp’s mannequin is distinct from the previous dolls, mannequins and
artificial body parts considered so far, all of which, with their will-to-verisimil-
itude, affirm a hetero-normative perversity aligned to psychoanalysis’s figuring
of lack as a marker of sexual difference. Here, by contrast, the anatomical
peculiarities of Duchamp’s mannequin amount to a refusal to hide its lack or
‘gaping castration wound’ and its sexual indeterminacy. This has precise impli-
cations for the exposing (seriously, ironically) of repressed heterosexual mas-
culine anxiety. Working against the terms, tropes and modalities of psychoa-
nalysis, this mannequin does not embody what Hal Foster has called, referring
to the work of Robert Gober and others, a traumatic and traumatising ‘art of
missing parts’.25 In refusing to hide its ‘gaping castration wound’ the manne-
quin in Étant donnés does not come to figure what is not there. This mannequin
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does not become caught in an economy of surrogacy wherein dolls, manne-
quins and artificial body parts come to signify lack, loss and what is missing
by becoming manifest as a surrogate or analogy for particular human bodies,
for the idea of the human body more generally or for the human as such.26
Quite simply, Duchamp’s Étant donnés refuses the logic of the fetish as synech-
dochal substitute; that is, a logic wherein an ‘unsuitable’ inanimate object is
displaced by or metonymically allied to the ‘proper’ object of desire in a psycho-
analytically inflected discourse of sexual difference in such a way that parts
stand in for wholes, holes, absences. At this logic’s most straightforward,
Kokoschka’s doll of Alma Mahler ‘stood in for’ Alma Mahler. This operation has
made itself known time and time again, for which there is justification. Hal
Foster (in considering Gober’s work), quoting Freud, reminds readers that
while ‘“the finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it”’, at the same time
‘this refinding is forever a seeking: [for] the object cannot be regained because
it is fantasmatic, and desire cannot be satisfied because it is defined as lack’.27
This is, as Foster claims, ‘the paradoxical formula of the found object in Sur-
realism as well, its ruse if you like: a lost object, it is never recovered but forever
sought; always a substitute, it drives on its own search’.28
Duchamp’s anatomically peculiar mannequin, though, does not work with
and against such an economy of surrogacy. It does something else. In exposing
such heterosexual masculine anxiety, it works to parody, mock or queer Freud-
ian-inflected hetero-normative mechanisms of desire.29 That is to say, in refus-
ing to hide its lack, the anatomical peculiarities and partial human form of
Étant donnés leads the work to perform an ironic ridiculing of Freudian dreams
and fantasies, infantile traumas and castration complexes, and other such
childish and masculinist anxieties. Étant donnés’s wholesale performative
spectacularisation of the body is a radical de-fetishisation of the aesthetics of
the body as such in modernity. The relations between the mechanisms of
viewing and its ties to those of castration are distorted. More than this, Étant
donnés is a distorting machine for the perverting of vision, for the producing
of perverse vision and for purveying the visually perverse. It is an anti-retinal
visual distorting machine in line with Duchamp’s avowed hatred of the primacy
of the retinal regime in modernism. The criticality of the anatomical peculiari-
ties and partial human forms therein shifts paradigms away from this modern
order of desire by parodying and queering a desire directed towards the unat-
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tainable lost object qua lost, a desire that can never be satisfied, a desire that
is futile from the beginning. It is anti- or even post-psychoanalytic because,
perhaps, of these shifts. This is just the start and, as will become apparent,
Étant donnés moves towards an altogether different order of desire, one driven
by productive, generative flow and excess, part objects and distorting.30
given
. .
. time
[Duchamp’s] finest work is his use of time.

Henri-Pierre Roché31
Rather than concentrating on what is not there – apropos an economy of sur-

rogacy – I am intent, like Jones and Lyotard, on beginning with close looking
at the materiality of things, in this case the anatomically peculiar mannequin
in Duchamp’s Étant donnés. I shall also look at the other peculiarities of this
recumbent figure, the curious waterfall that flows and the gas that glows, and
the viewing experience of the work as such. Such close looking begins from
what is actually there, the things themselves, and how they come to be what
they are (and thus do what they do). For me, this is why there are actually four
givens to Étant donnés: the waterfall and illuminating gas that are named
plainly in the work’s title; but also the manipulation of the erotics of vision by
way of the fixed viewing experience and, fourth, the anatomically peculiar man-
nequin itself. I shall take each of these givens in turn. Through a close looking
at Étant donnés, I shall think them through the transformative mechanisms of
form’s animating possibilities. That is, I shall attend to how the generative
desire and eroticism given therein are figured (not via mimesis but) by way of
form energised, its materiality and the time of its making (as well as the
process of that concrete labouring), which is also the making of time. This is
feasible, I think, because of the notion of distorting: distorting as an activity. It
has already been seen how close looking discerns that the work is constituted
by a series of what I would call distortings: a distorting of viewing, of retinal
vision, of form, of the mannequin’s form, of its exaggerated anatomy, a distort-
ing of its gendering as singular, and of desire itself.
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Distorting (from Latin, distortus, to twist different ways, to become twisted
out of shape, or to twist apart, from the verb distorquere, from dis, ‘completely’
or ‘apart’, and torquere, ‘to twist’) is, as etymology and definition dictate, an
altering in form and character, a twisting, a contorting, a misshaping with parts
out of proportion, a drawing awry, a deforming and a perverting; it is a mis-
leading too. A distorting is usually conceived of as an undesirable change in,
for example, the form of electromagnetic and sound waves during processes
such as transmission and amplification, as that wave-form or signal passes
through (from input to output) a system or device, leading to poor quality of
reception and reproduction. In Étant donnes, though, such wave-forms – for
me the cascading waterfall, the illuminating gas, the viewing apparatus, the
mannequin itself – are a desirable change. Desirable because, I will argue, of
how they distort and, in so doing both hold perfectly in suspended animation
the complete system that is this tableau-assemblage, and render the flows of
desire that course through its circuit board. In this way, distorting becomes
the sine qua non of desire: this desirable change is a change of and in desire.
On this basis I will persist by arguing not just for Étant donnés but also for the
work’s mannequin itself as a distorting. I shall in fact propose that it is distort-
ing as an activity that is pivotal to the mannequin. From this I will tease out the
contention that the mannequin as a distorting (a changing – for change is the
action of and reaction to distorting – taking place over time and in time) is
constituted by and articulates the logics of time, eroticism and transformation
itself.
A customary position to hold on Étant donnés is that, as noted earlier, there
are two ‘givens’ to the work. They are 1. the waterfall and 2. the illuminating
gas. They are two previously arranged facts that are definite at the outset and
that thus affect all subsequent considerations. By means of their electronic
mechanisms, from the beginning these two ‘self-selected set of issues’ draw
attention to the highly artificial fabricated realism of Étant donnés as an illu-
sionistic tableau-assemblage. This is because the waterfall actually seems to
flow and the lamp actually glows.
Following on from the photographs of Le Forestay waterfall taken in 1946,
the origins of the procedure of the waterfall in Étant donnés is in Duchamp’s
Éclairage intérieur (‘Interior Lighting’, 1959; fig. 85), a block relief in gold-plated
zinc that is itself reproduced from a drawing in The Green Box. As Taylor writes:
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85 Marcel Duchamp, Éclairage intérieur (Interior
Lighting), 1959, gold-plated zinc block, 7.3 x 3.5 cm,
collection of Anne Sanouillet.
[t]he artist removed the linear, low-relief pattern, based on the sketch in The
Green Box, from the zinc block and placed the fragile filaments in front of
the lightbulb to disseminate the flickering light throughout the interior.
Embedded in the landscape backdrop and placed behind a small piece of
translucent plastic, the linear design is invisible from the eyeholes in the
wooded door, but without the presence of these filaments the waterfall
would lose its impression of cascading water.32
This impression of cascading water is enhanced, continues Taylor, by way of

‘a rotating perforated aluminium disk, activated by a small [electrically powered]
motor, [which] revolves in front of the lightbulb to create the illusion of a twin-
kling waterfall as it shines through the glue-covered hole’.33 This light bulb
along with the Bec Auer lamp (a version of which was sketched by Duchamp
as early as about 1902) are part of an elaborate and sophisticated lighting
system visible throughout the Manual of Instructions which actually glows. It
generates energy that illuminates the scene both from within and overall by
way of off-stage spotlights. Of this lighting, due to its oscillation, Duchamp
claimed that it maintained the phenomenon of ‘ultra-rapid exposure’ or ‘extra-
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rapid exposition’, offering up a snapshot of an instant within a sequence of
events. At the same time, due to the incessant distorting nature of the scene
itself, and the things therein, it presents itself differently again and again and
again. This means that, paradoxically, at one and the same time, a single scene
is presented and repeated differently. This makes all the more sense in relation
to the Preface of the The Green Box, which had given Étant donnés its title, in
which Duchamp writes of the conditions between a ‘State of Rest’ and ‘a choice
of Possibilities authorized by these laws and also determining them’.34 Each
encounter, each viewing, each glimpse framed by a blink, is both a frozen re-
iteration and a drawing back repeatedly of our attention to the scene. The scene
and its viewing sit precariously between the photographic and the becoming-
cinematic – stasis and movement simultaneously and experienced in time.
Thus by way of the electrical motor and lighting system, the nth dimension,
time, and movement in time, is introduced into Étant donnés.
The waterfall and the illuminating gas as fluid, formless and formulating
‘givens’ evidence Duchamp’s interest, going back at least to the Notes for the
Large Glass, in the mechanisms of fluids, that is in the behaviour of liquids and
gasses: ‘erotic liquid’, ‘secretion of love gasoline’ and ‘Planes of Flow’. These
‘givens’ allude to desire itself, and its functionings. Such words and phrases
are there, writes the art critic Bernard Marcadé, to ‘signify operations or
devices linked to an economy of fluxes and fluids’.35 Such an economy of water
and gas as natural forces (hydraulics, temperature, pressure, radiance and so
on), and the operations and devices therein, lubricate the machine. This is so
whether such lubricating is in the service of capitalist modernity’s more pro-
ductive machinery of industrialisation, technologisation and the hydraulics of
hetero-normativity, or the more non-productive general economy of the waste-
ful, the wasted, those excessive energies of, for instance, masturbation. For
masturbation pervades Duchamp’s oeuvre, from the Large Glass where its
illuminating gas permeates the Bachelor section (which was itself due to have
included a waterfall) as a sexual energy, to the chocolate itself (as Duchamp
puts it in The Green Box: ‘The bachelor grinds his chocolate himself’)36 and on to
his seminal Paysage fautif (Accidental Landscape; 1946). Such fluxes and fluids
are, then, the ‘driving force’ of the machinery that is the Large Glass and Étant
donnés, and that force is eroticism.
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For Tomkins, and for many others, there is a sexual charge in Étant donnés’s
lamp and the waterfall: ‘an accordance between the waterfall and the lighting
gas, female and male, Eros and Thanatos’.37 This is, though, an oversimplifica-
tion. More delicate and intricate, d’Harnoncourt and Hopps in their 1969 essay,
the first text written on Étant donnés, had noted that the waterfall and the gas,
and much else besides, are what fascinated Duchamp the most: they are what
they called the ‘intangibles’:
What fascinated Duchamp was what our five senses could not tell us about
any perceived object. The recurring themes are the intangibles: perspective
and the projection of an invisible fourth or n dimension, ‘the apparition of an
appearance’, the light from within, and the mysterious generative forces
playing beneath the surface – water, gas, electricity, and as their human
corollary, desire . . .
Robert Lebel has suggested that for Duchamp the invisible fourth dimen-
sion, which projects its image into the world we see, is eroticism itself.38
The art historian Molly Nesbit has written of Duchamp’s Étant donnés that
‘[e]rotic matter colors the air we breathe through the peephole, it is everywhere
everywhere everywhere now, in the darkness, in the velvet, not locked in the
tiresome theoretical stranglehold eyes have been made to have with, for
example, cunts’.39
On the intangible that is perspective and the projection of an invisible fourth
or n dimension, what we see is shaped (as a distorting) by how we see. This
is at the root of Étant donnés’s third ‘given’: Duchamp’s manipulation of the
erotics of viewing. As a contrived dispositif, the fixed viewing experience of Étant
donnés fabricates a de-naturalised viewpoint, a distorting at odds with a clas-
sical (Euclidean) paradigm of perspective, even as it is dependent on it.
Duchamp detested what he called ‘retinal vision’, so the previously arranged
fixed peepholes restrict us to a forced, anamorphic (from the Greek, ana, ‘back’
or ‘again’, and morphe, ‘shape’ or ‘form’) view of the hyper-real diorama. It
manipulates and exposes (by putting the viewer’s voyeurism on stage), thereby
damaging the narcissism of the specularity of the erotics of vision: an anamo-
rphic anamorphosis. Such anti-retinal vision as an operation is contrary to that
‘realistic’ way of looking or perceiving that had dominated Western visual
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culture since the middle of the nineteenth century, since Courbet. To think
anamorphosis in the same breath as Courbet and his Origin of the World, with
its secret viewing box and its anatomical inaccuracy, is to think of Lacan’s 1964
reading in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1973) of the dis-
torted skull in Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533).40 Here the French
psychoanalyst, moving or oscillating between two planes, sees the painting’s
skull first as an object flying through the air, then as a skull, then as a ‘trap
for the gaze’ and finally as a death’s-head, a memento mori. The skull is a
twisting, misshaping, an altering in form and character, it is transformed, and
that change is simultaneously ultra-rapid and yet continuous, a simultaneity
of stillness and movement in time, through time; much as it is for our viewing
of Duchamp’s scene, and the waterfall, the gas and the anatomically peculiar
mannequin therein. Of course, the difference between Holbein’s Ambassadors
and Duchamp’s Étant donnés vis-à-vis anamorphosis is that Lacan must hop
from one position to another so that a distorted two-dimensional shape can
be brought together into a recognisable three-dimensional shape. In Étant
donnés the viewing is fixed and it is the tableau-assemblage that moves, twists
its form and character from the third to (and as) the fourth or nth dimension.
Challenged by this space–time continuum, the retinal regime of modernism
with its objectifying, reifying and fetishising visual pleasures (in which, etymo-
logically, the pudenda is ‘shameful’) might give way to distorting (where the
idea of the pudenda as shameful is itself put to shame) as a desirous re-
carnalisation of looking (which is significant given that, etymologically, pudenda
are in fact the external genitalia of both women and men, thus confirming
Lyotard’s scrotum swelling). This is an erotics of distorting indeed but, perhaps
even more so, distorting as an erotics.
This brings me to Étant donnés’s fourth given: its peculiar mannequin.
Michael R. Taylor writes that ‘[a]lthough Duchamp was clearly conscious of
referencing the Surrealist vogue for dolls, mannequins and automatons in his
final work’, he believes that
reception of Étant donnés, with its emphasis on the female nude as victim of
a frenzied rape or sex murder, has pre-programmed us to unthinkingly
accept that we are the spectators of a sadistic act. More often than not the
lurid details attributed to Duchamp’s work do not match the actual scene
we witness, which seems to me to be completely devoid of trauma.41
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From extensive interviews with Duchamp’s family and friends, a careful
reading of Duchamp’s Manual of Instructions and its photographs, and as a
curator having direct access to Étant donnés itself, Taylor is able to focus in
detail on the mannequin. Of its complex making, I quote him at length:
The construction of the nude appears to have been a lengthy process that
took more than a decade to complete, beginning in the mid-1940s and car-
rying on until the late 1950s, and involving several stages of molding and
casting. Duchamp appears to have first made the form in clay.42 Following
standard sculpting procedures, he then made a plaster mold of this sculp-
ture, during the course of which the clay was destroyed. The artist then
poured plaster into the mold to make a cast, and attached a wooden base
to the bottom of the new piece by first hammering numerous nails into the
wood, and then pressing the nail-studded surface into the hardening plaster.
This resulted in a plaster sculpture mounted on a plywood support, the edge
of which he would later use for fastening the vellum skin to the nude.43 The
extended arm that holds the light fixture appears to have accidentally fallen
off at some stage, requiring a separate form that was cast from Teeny’s arm
and clasped hand in Cadaqués during the summer of 1959.44
....
Once the figure was complete, the plaster was painted and then covered
with vellum, which was stretched over the nude and nailed to the wooden
edge, which showed all around the periphery.45
....
In order to press the pliable calfskin into the hollows of the form Duchamp
used a number of plaster negatives, taken from pieces of the previously
discarded mold of the earlier nude, which when clamped in place would
force the vellum into the hard-to-reach creases and folds of her body. To aid
this process Duchamp would have constructed a wooden framework around
the nude, and mounted the negative molds onto this frame. After the vellum
had been attached all around the body, this device would have been lowered
into place to force the flexible calfskin into the hollows and crevices that
would otherwise have been missed.
Several years later, after the vellum had dried and become rigid, Duchamp
decided to paint it from underneath. He removed the skin from the plaster
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by first taking out all the peripheral nails and then by lifting it off with great
difficulty. In the process the original plaster was destroyed. The free-floating
vellum sculpture was then painted from the inside to obtain a hyper-realistic
effect of human skin. Finally, Duchamp constructed a new armature for this
painted form, made out of steel and wire, and held together with gray epoxy
cement. When the new armature was complete he attached the vellum skin
by screwing it into the new epoxy edge with countless small brass screws.
This would all have taken place in the late 1950s. By the end of that decade
the mannequin’s torso and her bucolic environment were completed to his
satisfaction, and the only thing that Duchamp added to her form after that
time was a few dabs of paint to cover up some cracks that had started to
appear in the vellum.46
Taylor’s exceptional account sheds new light on the complex making of the
peculiar mannequin in Duchamp’s Étant donnés: how it was made, what it was
made from, and the materials and processes of that concrete labouring. This
all becomes a spur for further thinking.
I begin with the ‘plaster negatives’ that Taylor mentions. These ‘wedge-like
forms’ are exemplary as material embodiments of how artificial body parts or
partial human forms drive an order of desire of productive, generative flow and
excess, part objects and, ultimately, distorting. The wedge-like forms, actually
copper-electroplated plaster casts, while connected intimately to the contour-
ing of the mannequin in Étant donnés, also have a life of their own as the so-
called ‘erotic objects’ that Duchamp produced in the early 1950s. There are
86 Marcel Duchamp, Feuille de vigne femelle (Female

Fig Leaf), 1950, electroplated copper over plaster,
8.6 x 13.3 x 12.7 cm, The Museum of Modern Art,
New York, Gift of Jasper Johns.
87 Marcel Duchamp, Objet-dard (Dart-object), 1962

(cast of 1951 copper-electroplated plaster original),
bronze with inlaid lead rib, 7.3 x 24.1 x 13 cm,
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Arne Ekstrom,
1981.
88 Marcel Duchamp, Coin de chasteté (Wedge of

Chastity), 1963 (replica of 1954 original), sculpture
in two sections, bronze and dental plastic,
6.3 x 8.7 x 4.2 cm, Tate Modern, London.
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three (or four) of them: Feuille de vigne femelle (Female Fig Leaf,1950; fig. 86)
is the negative cast or inverse of an anatomically incorrect pudenda. The
ridiculously (albeit detumescent) phallic-looking Objet-dard (Dart-Object,
1951/62; fig. 87) is a galvanised plaster cast, coloured metallic brown, excised
from a mould of the gap beneath a breast. Coin de chasteté (Wedge of Chastity,
1954/63; fig. 88) is a mass of dental plastic which has had fitted into it a wedge
of brown-coloured plaster (which is itself a separate erotic object entitled Not
a Shoe, 1950). These three (or four) wedge-like forms, soon editioned, repeated
again and again, appeared in the public domain in the early 1950s as autono-
mous (sculptural) erotic objects, and had a long (independent) life that well
predates the unveiling of Étant donnés, although they also foretold and antici-
pated its imminent realisation.47
What is particularly interesting about the ‘erotic objects’ of the early 1950s,
and something one comes to understand through Taylor’s account, is that while
these wedge-like forms may all look like moulds or casts, they are ‘not taken
from life’.48 They are taken from, born of, the body or form of a lost plaster
mannequin (fig. 89). However, they do not derive from the mannequin in Étant
donnés but are more exactly, as Taylor writes, ‘taken from pieces of the previ-
ous discarded mold of the earlier [and slightly smaller] nude’. Materialising
from what is left over, from what remains after the mould’s breaking up, these
erotic objects as artificial body parts are ‘residual products’, as the curator
Helen Molesworth has called them.49 It is for this reason that, as Taylor puts
it, there are curious ‘discrepancies in the sizes and materials of these erotic
objects’.50 As these things are pressured into the later mannequin’s ‘hollows
and crevices’ of the ‘flexible calfskin’ which would ‘otherwise have been
missed’, they go on to create the very ‘anatomical peculiarities’ that are at the
centre of this chapter.
In the end, the mannequin’s anatomical inaccuracies, its exaggerated or
distorted or distorting anatomy, its lack of a vagina and of pubic hair, and the
implications of this ‘grotesque gash’ that ‘goes nowhere’ and ‘refuses to hide
[its] “lack,” [its] gaping castration wound’ thereby refusing ‘the penetration of
vision’, are due to the fact that these wedge-like forms were cast from the
parts of a smaller mannequin. They were then used (as clamps to hold
the skin in place which as a consequence then go on) to shape the parts of the
larger mannequin of Étant donnés. It is, then, not necessarily that the man-
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89 Marcel Duchamp, Plaster study for the figure in
‘Étant donnés, 1º la chute d’eau, 2º le gaz d’éclairage’,
1949, gelatin silver print, 23.5 x 19.1 cm, collection
of Norman and Noah Stone, San Francisco.
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nequin is meant to be very young, that Duchamp had a morbid horror of pubic
hair, that its pubic hair is shaven, that it is a continuation of the Dada and
Surrealist vogue for celebrating a dearth of pubic hair. Nor is it the case that
its lack of a vulva, labia majora, labia minora, its shallow crevice going nowhere,
its gaping castration wound, figure a repressed masculine anxiety; although,
it might do this also. Rather, the mannequin is incorrect anatomically because
of the process of its making, and the materials and processes of that making.
This anti-climax is ultimately the answer to the question of the mannequin’s
anatomical peculiarities. To press this type of point home still further, Taylor
writes that the casting process itself can lead to accidents:
We know that Duchamp melted lead ingots to create armatures for his body
castings in poured plaster, and then made casts of the broken molds to
heighten the gender ambiguity of these objects. This casting process surely
accounts for the anatomical inaccuracies of the mannequin’s vagina, as well
as its lack of pubic hair, as opposed to any morbid fascination that Duchamp
may have had with mutilated or deformed female genitalia.51
What emerges from Taylor’s detailed account is that these erotic objects as
artificial body parts are greater (in and of themselves) than the whole
(body) – and they are not answerable to it. As parts, they are part of that wider
formal preoccupation with the ‘partial figure’ (a will-to-abstraction through the
fragment and fragmentation, of the body truncated into torso, hand, breast,
penis in the work of, say, Rodin, Maillol and Brancusi) in the aesthetics of
modernity or, better, in which the body part or fragment drives the aesthetic
of modernity.52 They can also be located in the domain of the part object, which
determines our relations to all other things, following that Kleinian and post-
Kleinian logic of introjection/projection, a logic where the part articulates a
desirous logic of fusion between part objects in and through their difference,
where organs are attached and attach themselves and fuse.53 These erotic
objects as parts also serve as self-generating and semi-autonomous (and yet
still dependent) parts brought together independently and simultaneously with
yet more parts to fabricate, by way of affirmative and productive force, flows
and desire, the later anatomically peculiar mannequin in Étant donnés as
peculiar, incorrect, exaggerated and anamorphic. As a distorting.
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In terms of form, Duchamp’s ‘erotic objects’ – born as plaster negatives,
taken from pieces of the previously discarded mould of the earlier mannequin,
pressed and clamped into place in order to force the parchment into hard-to-
reach creases and folds – occupy this negative space and, in so doing, give
their own shape to the mannequin. This is not a logic of mimesis, or repre-
sentation, but of the production of imprinted form as a distorting of form.
In terms of time, the erotic objects come into being as pieces of a previously
discarded mould and as such exist before, during and after the fact of the
making and display of Étant donnés. They come before it; they come after it;
they come from the process of its making; and they comprise it too. The work
emerges, then, from the multiple temporalities of these part objects seeking
out, attaching, fusing and flowing. Yet there is also a simultaneity to these
temporalities since the tableau-assemblage as a complete system comes to
be held in suspended animation which, as it is encountered, is also, by way of
the currents of gas, water, electricity and desire, an altering in form and char-
acter; a distorting.
In terms of matter energised, if there is a logic to these erotic objects it is
the logic of the fusion of part objects, or better the ‘logic of the mold’, as the
art historian David Joselit puts it nicely in writing about them. When consider-
ing the ‘procedures for organizing matter into form’, Joselit writes of how
‘matter emerges into form . . . out of immanent flows as, conversely, form
structures matter’.54 Substance (quasi-molecular units), he continues, ‘aspires
to form . . . as form generates substance’. These flows energised between
matter and form, form and matter, are movement in time of the materialisating
of Duchamp’s erotic objects. Also, the flow’s surging functions as does a
swarm. Flows as processes are temporal, spatial and material; they have
tempo, rhythm, contours; they have direction and purpose. As ‘a principle of
combination’, as Joselit states, ‘[t]he swarm suggests an emergent order that
arises out of immanent flows of matter . . . The swarm engulfs the mold as the
mold articulates the swarm’.55 The swarm is an order that comes out of the
flows or the movement in time that structure and generate form-into-matter
and matter-into-form, a combining to constitute the erotic objects. In the terms
I have been laying out, of distorting as an activity, swarming has movement-
in-time and stillness-in-space within it. The immanent flows of matter that
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come together at a standstill, even if only momentarily, in order to constitute
a form, account for the way in which in Étant donnés the waterfall, the light
and the viewing apparatus are composed and function. That is to say, there is
movement and stillness in the time of each given’s making, and in an encoun-
tering of them. This swarming can also, I think, be grasped in terms of desire:
as a multiple and simultaneous vibrating of matter energised. Much like the
question of form and time in the erotic objects, this simultaneous multiplica-
tion of matter in the swarm, in its distorting, intimates the functioning of desire
in Duchamp’s mannequin and in Étant donnés itself. Independently and together,
swarming, as a swarm, the ‘givens’ contrive to create the conditions by which
Étant donnés’s form distorts, and in so doing distends the laws of desire, eroti-
cism, and time itself as transformation.
The peculiar aspects of Duchamp’s peculiar mannequin are not here about
castration anxiety, repressed male anxiety or gender indeterminacy. Rather,
they are about the peculiar, incorrect, exaggerated, distorted, anamorphic
mannequin’s form itself. Much like the semi-autonomous (albeit dependent)
erotic objects, born of their materiality, casting and the accidents of making,
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90 (facing) Marcel Duchamp, Network of Stoppages,
1914, oil and pencil on canvas, 148.9 x 198.7 cm,
The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
91 (left) Marcel Duchamp, Study for Étant donnés, 1º

la chute d’eau, 2º le gaz d’éclairage, 1946-48, pigment
and graphite on leather over plaster with velvet,
50.2 x 31.1 cm, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Gift,
1985, dedicated to Ulf Linde from Tomas Fischer.
so it is for the mannequin itself. The mannequin as a distorting delineates the

very possibility of the idea of the semi-autonomous body part, of self-
generating objects made up of bits and pieces, and thus has distortion – better,
distorting as an (erotic) activity – built into its very constitution. This is a conse-
quence of the accumulation (of matter structuring form, of form structuring
matter) and assembling over time of part upon part upon part of semi-
autonomous and self-generating things capable of independent activity. Dif-
ferent parts of different bodies, and the process of assembling, spawn many
additional fragments, body parts and partial human forms that themselves
come before and after it, that arrange it, that shape it and are shaped by it in
turn. By way of the process of their concrete labouring, and the contingency
of this work, the whole is now greater than the sum of its parts, as things
become fastened to one another in the fashioning of sometimes smoother and
sometimes less smooth hinges, grafts and fusions.
To be more explanatory, earlier works by Duchamp foreshadowed Étant
donnés: his sketch of the Bec Auer lamp around 1902; the Large Glass; and
Network of Stoppages (1914; fig. 90) which, vibrated by the reflexes of the future,
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includes, I am convinced, a ghost of its peculiar mannequin overlaid by the
network of capillary tubes that became the malic moulds introducing gas to
the Bachelors of the Large Glass. (It is a human form that also appears as a
ghost out of the formless forms of his ejaculatory stain that is Paysage fautif.)56
There is also Rrose Sélavy, his mannequin for the ‘Exposition Internationale
du Surréalisme’, and the dummy in his shop-window display installation. More
obviously decipherable, there are studies for Étant donnés, all named as such,
that incorporate the form of Maria Martins, known to Duchamp from the early
1940s. They include a preliminary drawing dated 1947, a photocollage (c. 1946),
a study made from pigment and graphite on leather over plaster with velvet (c.
1946–8; fig. 91) and a cast plaster that is no longer extant (1949).57 Then there
is the making of the mannequin’s torso itself that, while conforming to Mar-
tins’s proportions, had to be re-built because it became damaged, cracked; its
left arm and hand are now disproportionately large since they were made from
a later plaster cast of Teeny Duchamp. There are also contingencies, wilful or
otherwise, since the mannequin’s left leg and left arm are jointed (detachable
and attachable); the anatomy of its erogenous zones oscillate; and even its
head is assembled from two concave pieces of plastic. Then there is the abun-
dance of parts themselves, yet more previously arranged facts, that are given
and that are left over: the parchment body fragments (one of the upper torso,
one of the genital region) painted in any number of shades of pink on both
recto and verso (figs 92 and 93); the free-floating leather sculpture; a Plexiglas
template; three positive, plaster body parts (including another lower torso); a
left leg; a left arm; a negative plaster mould in two parts; the two wrought-iron
nails that fit into the eyeholes that are embedded in the door; those three (or
four) ‘plaster negatives’ that were cast from pieces of the previously discarded
mould of the earlier smaller mannequin (to say nothing of that lost plaster
mannequin itself) and ‘later recycled or recast or remanufactured [as] erotic
objects’; and the five further erotic objects that join them.58
This detailing of the amassing of the mannequin’s matter, materiality and
making shows that its distorting takes place in many ways. It takes place
through its surface, skin and sexual difference (male, female, transvestite,
hermaphrodite). It takes place through its materials (steel wire, aluminium and
talc solder, brass screws, parchment, lead, wood, Peg-Board putty, hair and
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so on) and through its making (matter turning into form over time). It takes
place through the operations by which its sex organs become rotated – recto
and verso, verso and recto, cunt and arse, cunt as arse, arse as cunt – overlap-
ping, combining, merging, fusing, swarming.59
The mannequin itself is a form figured as already distorting: through
abstracting, fusion, flows. It is distorting, jointed, articulated, an assemblage:
Zeuxis-like, like Pygmalion’s statue, like Praxiteles’s Aphrodite. The figure is a
distorted form, a form that distorts, a form that is composed out of such dis-
torting (as an activity). This is because, as I have been arguing, the figure is a
thing with an intrinsic force, an activity, matter energised. Like wax, change is
inherent within it. This is so because the ‘givens’ – the waterfall, the illuminat-
ing gas, the viewing apparatus, partial form, desire itself – are given as anamo-
rphic, where anamorphosis is a distortion, a deformation, a transformation and
also a transforming (form) back again. Form, forming, labouring, time and
contingency are folded into and back out of it. As a thing, it is itself constituted
by many other things, which are themselves matter, form, formed, materials
laboured over. It is movement in time, a distorting, a swarming, another
moment in which the n dimension demonstrates by way of metamorphism, a
morph in time, over time, as time. It is an operation of time that operates time
itself. This is a distorting figure, a figure distorting, a figure that is formed by
way of the swarming of matter as form; and the abstracting, fusing and flows
of these vibrating, humming parts.
As such the mannequin draws attention both to itself and to the body part
itself as part of its own productive assemblage. In so doing it raises questions
intrinsic to itself, thereby interrogating the mechanisms of its own composition
and the processes of its operations; organised as it is with distorting as an
activity of assemblage, flows, excess and the generative forces that are built
into and out of that very process of its making. These are the distorting figure’s
conditions of communicative possibility.
Such issues, embedded in the matter of the form itself, are raised by the
mannequin’s making and its materials. For Duchamp, there was a forensic
attention paid to the employing of particular and particularly apposite materi-
als. To engage the work of Duchamp should necessitate a will to imagine what
it means to begin from and with such a figure, such forms, and artificial body
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92 (top) Marcel Duchamp, Untitled (Skin for
Upper Torso of the Étant donnés Figure),
c.1948–9, parchment with green string,
26 x 72.7 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art,
Gift of Mme Marcel Duchamp,1969.
93 (bottom) Marcel Duchamp, Untitled (Skin

for Lower Torso of the Étant donnés Figure),
c.1948–9, parchment with paint, graphite,
wax, and resin, 29.8 x 29.8 cm, Philadelphia
Museum of Art, Gift of Mme Marcel
Duchamp, 1969.
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parts, from the distinctiveness of the labour of their making as it dovetails with
their materiality. Also a will to ask what they are, what they are made of, how
they are put together and how they work or do what they do. By doing so, dolls,
mannequins and artificial body parts impress themselves on us. Things insist
themselves on us: such a form, form itself, sets theorising in motion. This is
why it has been my aim to use close looking at the materiality of things as a
useful way to think with them. I have thus been guided by Étant donnés’s man-
nequin rather than by theory as such; hence my leaning heavily on Taylor’s
meticulous detailing of the mannequin’s making and materials. By doing so,
it is the mannequin itself that does the work. It is the mannequin itself that,
because of the process of its making (its hand-crafting, its moulding and so
on) and the essential and irreducible materiality of the materials of that
making, raises questions of human form, of the human as such, and of form
itself as (driving the activity of) distorting, which thus becomes a prelude to
thinking. Furthermore, because the force and motion of matter is intrinsic to
such form, the mannequin’s distorting as an activity takes us away from rep-
resentation as such, from the retinal regime’s mimeticism, and to a presenting
again, an altering in form and character that ‘incorporat[es] movement in
time’.60
By way of such movement, which is also the emergence of both a subjectiva-
tion and a non-human form of subjectivity – perhaps a more mature Deleuzian
formulation of Thing Theory’s evocative objects or non-human actants – it
incorporates and affirms movement in time. Étant donnés’s four ‘givens’ – the
waterfall and the gas/electricity as mysterious generative forces intimating
time and thus (non-mimetic) eroticism itself, the viewing apparatus where the
viewer’s voyeurism is put on stage (thereby undermining the secret pleasures
of looking endorsed by realism) and the peculiar mannequin with distorting as
an activity built into its very constitution – engender and confirm the presence
of the nth dimension, the fourth dimension, movement, time itself.61 Duchamp
had said in 1920 that he wanted to ‘distend the laws of physics’ and that
‘[t]here is an elastic side to time that changes everything’.62 Étant donnés evi-
dences this and thus also distends the laws of eroticism – this is time as erotic
and an erotics of time – which itself has an elastic as well as a plastic side
and which, in turn, itself changes everything.
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coda: evisceration or a disturbance of vision on
norton street, los angeles, california
Even after all this, it might be tempting to argue that Marcel Duchamp’s Étant
donnés is an elaborate ruse, that its ‘givens’ are tricks: that the waterfall is an
illusion, that the gas lamp is electric, that its fixed viewing perspective affirms
voyeuristic specularity and that, because of its distortion, the mannequin itself
is enmeshed in a paradigm of Pygmalionist and fetishistic fantasies of animism,
motion, transformation. Perhaps the mannequin is yet another one of Pygmal-
ion’s progeny, a deluding fantasy of animism’s animating possibilities, of form
coming to life, being brought to life, possessing the desire for life. Also that,
like many of its forebears – and as a nature morte – it hints at a necromantic
animacy, a desire to raise the dead, to glean divine knowledge, perhaps even
to satiate necrophilic yearnings. The idea of Étant donnés perpetrating such a
ruse is not unappealing. For a split second, disbelief is suspended. Yet, even
in that briefest of moments, I am reminded again of the futility of such fantasies
of animism, and the narcissism of Pygmalion proportions that drives this
promise of creative transformation; as well as the foolishness of being taken
in by recent discourse that ontologises inanimate objects as things.
I mention the possibility of this ruse because I want to conclude this chapter
by highlighting an undercurrent in discussions of Duchamp’s Étant donnés: a
fascination with such moments of mistaken recognition or misrecognition
(méconnaissance). (Recall that ‘distorting’ is also a mis-leading.) These are
moments when mannequins are mistaken for the dead, the dead are mistaken
for mannequins and when mannequins are mistaken for the living. Such
moments are familiar, historically and conceptually, in modernity’s paradigm
of animism’s animating possibilities, as I have highlighted in previous parts of
this book. This moment of mistaken recognition comes in a split second in
which a profound disturbance or unsettling of the field of vision takes place, a
second that is profound because it is the instance both when we suspend our
disbelief and when, as Freud says of the uncanny, there is created ‘intellectual
uncertainty [as to] whether an object is alive or not, and when an inanimate
object becomes too much like an animate one’.63 It is the moment when the
breach between veracity and duplicity, the presentation and the representation
of the world, is open to question. It is the moment when our sense of some
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thing like a real body and some thing other than a real body can become con-
fused. It is also, beyond Freud’s discussion of the uncanny, an instance of how
the peculiarity of a mannequin, a body, a human form whose distorting assem-
blage, with its anamorphic, desirous, semi-autonomous body parts might be
seen to be (although it absolutely is not by me) a precondition for such
misrecognising.
Duchamp’s Étant donnés seems ideal for such moments of misrecognition.
Its self-consciously perverse viewing apparatus, its real, found materials,
bricks and door and leaves and branches, together with its hyper-realistic
photographic backdrop of a Swiss ravine and the effect of a trompe l’oeil water-
fall are testament to this. It is epitomised in the recumbent mannequin. Litera-
ture on the figure insists – whether thoughtlessly or by a sleight of hand – on
magicking it into life by gendering and humanising it (her arm, her hair, her
cunt). In so doing, in ontologising it, that literature attributes to it animistic or
vitalist or thing-like qualities that by extension make it feasible to argue on
behalf of the kinds of erotics underpinning perverse necromantic desire.
A recent instance of a failure to distinguish or, perhaps, a wilful willingness
to conflate body with a rendering of a body is instructive here. In the last few
years a number of scholars have independently made a direct connection
(historical, biographical, iconographical, interpretive) between the recumbent
mannequin in Duchamp’s Étant donnés and the remains of a body, a corpse,
as it was photographed at a crime scene.64 They refer to a few of an archive of
hundreds of forensic – almost proto-cinematic – photographs that display the
remains (of the remains) of the body of Elizabeth Short. Her mutilated body
was found on 15 January 1947 on an open lot on Norton Street, Los Angeles,
California. Her body had been cut in two. It had been drained of blood at the
murder site and a hysterectomy had been performed. The body had been
washed meticulously and then it had been moved to the dump-site, where it
had then been carefully and somewhat theatrically posed.65
Elizabeth Short was an aspiring actress in LA and is better known as the
Black Dahlia. In James Ellroy’s 1987 book The Black Dahlia, the American
author offered a disturbingly corporeal, monstrously vivid description – a por-
nographic description even, which echoes Calvin Tomkins’s description that I
quoted earlier of the mannequin in Duchamp’s Étant donnés – of what remains
of the remains of her body:
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It was the nude, mutilated body of a young woman, cut in half at the waist.
The bottom half lay in the weeds a few feet away from the top, legs wide
open. A large triangle had been gouged out from the left thigh, and there
was a long wide cut running from the dissection point down to the top of the
pubic hair. The flaps of skin beside the gash were pulled back; there were
no organs inside. The top half was worse: the breasts were dotted with ciga-
rette burns, the right one hanging loose, attached to the torso only by shreds
of skin; the left one slashed around the nipple. The cuts went all the way
down to the bone, but the worst of the worst was the girl’s face. It was one
huge purpled bruise, the nose crushed deep into the facial cavity, the mouth
cut ear to ear into a smile that leered up at you, somehow mocking the rest
of the brutality inflicted. I know I would carry that smile with me to my grave.66
The remains of the remains of Elizabeth Short’s corpse were so unrecognisable

that the body was mistaken for a mannequin by a passer-by. Seeing the severed
torso and skin that was ‘white as a lily’, this eyewitness believed that it had come
from a department store.67 They did not know it had been exsanguinated.
While I am suspicious of the connection that these scholars have made
between Duchamp’s recumbent mannequin and the remains of Elizabeth
Short – it is crude and boorish – it puts in play, however, some interesting
correspondences between a series of apparently unrelated images, objects
and forms. In addition to the more biographical and historical hypothesis that
during his trip to LA in 1947 Duchamp might have seen these photographs, via
Man Ray’s access to them as they were circulated illicitly among members of
the LA police force, there are also a number of more formal, iconographic
equivalences. First is the arrangement of the bodies and how they have been
positioned in the landscape. They are splayed, arms outstretched, legs akimbo,
with vulvas on display for all to see. They are also partly hidden, obscured, by
the undergrowth, twigs and the viewing apparatus itself. Second, there are
coincidences in the distorting or partial nature of these bodies: these are
bodies that are formed – that come to be known and understood – by the
arranging of their composite parts. Third, Ellroy’s mention of Short’s ‘mouth
cut from ear to ear into a smile that leered up’ is echoed in Tomkins’s observa-
tion that the figure in Étant donnés has an ‘anatomically peculiar’ gaping orifice
which in his mind is transformed into a ‘vertical, speaking mouth’. (Similes
and analogies always do violence but it should not be surprising that male
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scholars can be this blasé about the ‘magical’ displacement and relocation of
a sexual organ.) Fourth is (to return to Tomkins’s phrase) the mannequin’s
anatomically peculiar (that is to say, unfuckable) nature. One such so-called
anatomical peculiarity referred to in the autopsy reports on Elizabeth Short is
that her ‘pubic area was underdeveloped’.68 This appears to account for what
Ellroy describes as a ‘long wide cut running from the dissection point down to
the top of the pubic hair’, since detectives and crime experts believe that the
killer carved the gash in her torso so that he could simulate vaginal inter-
course.
None of this, incidentally, necessarily accounts for why a small, square-
shaped piece of skin from her thigh (in fact, a small rose tattoo) had been cut
out and shoved far into her vagina or why she was sodomised post-mortem or
why her stomach was filled with (I quote from the autopsy reports) ‘greenish
brown granular matter, mostly faeces and other particles that could not be
identified’ or, for that matter, why no sperm was found anywhere on the body.
This is upsetting, properly upsetting.
Even as I try to account for such iconographic correspondences between the
form of the mannequin in Étant donnés and what remains of the remains of
Elizabeth Short, and to try to make it productive for this book’s argument, in
the end this for me is a speculative leap too far. Such speculations are not
dampened down when art historians such as Ramírez write that the photo-
graphs of the mannequin in Duchamp’s Manual of Instructions accompanying
Étant donnés ‘is a mutilated doll, or the innards of a human being placed on a
sacrificial alter’.69 I have tried to be against analogy, simile and metaphor. I am
more literal, which means that for me mannequins and dolls are not human,
they cannot come to life, they cannot be brought to life, they do not have the
desire for life. They cannot desire. They cannot be post-coital or raped. They
cannot be mutilated. They cannot die or be killed. As Nesbit puts it simply, ‘the
lady [in Étant donnés] is not one, of course, she is a doll’.70 This is why it matters
that the mannequin in Duchamp’s Étant donnés is understood as a mannequin
and why I have tried hard to engage with it as such – in terms of its materials,
its labouring and the processes of its making – rather than as a surrogate, a
metaphor, as some thing lifelike, that can be in any way alive. To do other-
wise – to misrecognise or confuse person with thing, body with a depiction or
figuration of body – is at best shoddy and at worst inexcusable. It matters to
affirm definitively the distinction between persons and things.
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ED_int.indd 288 15/10/2013 5:06 PM
8 / hans bellmer’s poupées:
anagrammatical desire
[T]he body resembles a sentence that seems to invite us to

dismantle it into its component letters, so that its true
meanings may be revealed anew through an endless stream
of anagrams.
Hans Bellmer, ‘A Brief Anatomy of the Physical
Unconscious or The Anatomy of the Image’ (1957)1
I am going to construct an artificial girl with anatomical

possibilities which are capable of re-creating the heights of
passion, even of inventing new desires.
Hans Bellmer2
[S]ensuality . . . is awoken not only by the presence but by a

modification of the object desired.
Georges Bataille, La Littérature et le mal (1957)3
The mannequin in Duchamp’s Étant donnés is strangely familiar. We as viewers

know it, even if we cannot see it quite as or for what it is, and even if we have
never seen it in the flesh before at all. We know Duchamp’s mannequin, its
anatomical peculiarities, its anagrammatical nature, its arrangement of com-
posite parts, how it is situated, partially hidden, in this landscape. We know it
by way of Hans Bellmer’s poupées, in particular his second poupée as it
appears in photographs from the mid-1930s (fig. 96).4
By way of Bellmer’s poupées, as an echo ricocheting backwards from the
future, we come to see residual traces of Duchamp’s mannequin from Étant
donnés in all female ‘nudes in landscapes’ in the history of art, perhaps in all
female nudes. These nudes in turn can be seen in Duchamp’s mannequin and
94 Hans Bellmer, Die Puppe (The Doll), 1934,

gelatin silver contact print, 9 x 6 cm,
private collection.
hans bellmer’s poupées / 289
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95 (left) Marcel Duchamp, Étant donnés, 1° la
chute d’eau, 2° le gaz d’éclairage . . . (Given 1.
The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas . . . ), 1946–66.
96 (right) Hans Bellmer, La Poupée (The Doll),

1936–8, black-and-white vintage gelatin silver print,
14.2 x 14.5 cm, blindstamped by the artist’s estate,
courtesy of Ubu Gallery, New York, and
Galerie Berinson, Berlin.
in Bellmer’s poupées. Such circularity and retroactivity between Duchamp’s

mannequin and Bellmer’s poupées, these forms, figures, images, these bodies
at rest and in motion, generate our capacity to see each one of them as an
individualised assemblage that forms part of a larger patterning. Contempo-
raneously, these forms, figures and images are anticipated and enfolded back
into a constellation of images, objects and environments. These include Francis
Picabia’s Fille née sans mère (Girl Born without a Mother, 1916–17), René
Magritte’s L’assassin menace (1926), Man Ray’s Minotaur (1936) and La Jumelle
(1939), Alberto Giacometti’s Woman with Throat Cut (1932), Denise Bellon’s
Nu (1936) and Bellmer’s own Bourzutschky No. 3 (c. 1938; fig. 97). Max Ernst’s
Les Hommes n’en sauront rien (1923) also resonates here, even more so his
image that may end up being the linchpin and certainly makes sense of this
patterning between Duchamp and Bellmer: Die Anatomie (als Braut) (1921; fig.
98), a collage which, like all collage, was born of an impulse to assemble, to
dis-assemble and to assemble again.
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97 [left] Hans Bellmer, Bourzutschky No. 3, c.1938,
pencil on paper, 20 x 14 cm, private collection, Geneva.
98 [right] Max Ernst, Die Anatomie (als Braut), 1921,

photographic enlargement of collage mounted on paperboard,
10.7x 0.78 cm, Musée national de l’art moderne, Centre
Georges Pompidou, Paris. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS,
London 2013.
With Bellmer’s poupées at the fore, I shall argue that the rhythm or logic of
these forms, figures, images, objects and environments has an assembling–
disassembling–re-assembling impulse. As such, how they comprehend and
articulate the human form owes less to Freud’s melancholic thinking on
trauma, anxiety, loss, lack and disavowal (taken up and cheerfully staged by
the Surrealists with their mannequins) or to Lacan’s corps morcelé or even to
Klein’s part-object relations, as I touched on in the previous chapter. Bellmer’s
poupées are instead most indebted to his own (often outlandish) objects,
images and writings – the poupées and his ideas of the ‘physical unconscious’
and the ‘psychic mechanisms of the human body’ – albeit as an ongoing strug-
gle with and against these Freudian and post-Freudian terms, techniques and
technologies. As such, I shall return to and start with the doll, from the things
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themselves. This is a thinking with them that attends to the ideas and mecha-
nisms and operations built into and thus articulated by them, which makes
these very things themselves incitements to thinking. Doing this will take me
from the doll as a Surrealist Object par excellence, as it was lauded as early
as 1936, to the doll as an anagram, with its anagrammatic anatomy, where the
body is a sentence which, as you dismantle and put it back together differently,
its true contents may take shape.5 Assemble, dis-assemble, re-assemble.
Again and again and again. Not only that but I shall also suggest that the
assembling–disassembling–re-assembling impulse of these forms, figures,
images, objects and environments has a rhythm or a logic that is erotic. With
this abundant but by no means limitless series of anagrams, Bellmer’s doll as
a thing is the progenitor, where its true contents, already in the process of an
ongoing taking shape, is the invention, the inventor even, of new desires. What,
then, are these new desires? How does form form desire, and desire form
form? In such becoming, what form does animism, animating, the conditions
for motion’s possibility take here as erotic and how is it articulated?
doll 1 and doll 2 and doll 3
Hans Bellmer produced three dolls: the first begun in 1933, the second in 1935
and a third conceived, sketched and painted in 1936 and 1937 but only fully
realised over 1961–8 as Mitrailleuse en état de grâce (The Machine-Gun[neress]
in a State of Grace).6
The first doll, known as Die Puppe, no longer extant, stood about fifty-six
inches tall (about 142 centimetres). It was produced in Berlin in 1933. As is
evidenced reasonably clearly in Untitled (1934; fig. 99), one of a series of photo-
graphs of the doll taken by Bellmer in which its parts are all laid out like those
of a plastic model or toolkit. Its torso is fashioned from flax fibre, glue and
plaster of Paris – as is its head – over a hollow carcass or frame of wood and
99 Hans Bellmer La Poupée (The Doll), 1934, vintage

gelatin silver print affixed to original mount, 29.5 x 19.1
cm, signed in pink ink on recto. Ubu Gallery, New York,
and Galerie Berinson, Berlin.
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metal.7 It has glass eyes and a long-haired wig. Its two legs are made from
broom handles or dowel rods, with limbs hinged via wooden and/or metal
joints. The right leg is wholly encased in plaster with hinges at the knee and
ankle. The left leg’s mechanisms are wholly visible with exposed hip, knee and
ankle joints, and a club-like prosthetic foot. Its two feet and one hand are
carved out of wood. What look like its two arms, which could also have been
made from broom handles or dowel rods with similar wooden and/or metal
hinges at the elbow and wrist, appear in the photograph also.
This first doll is only properly known in a series of thirty photographs taken
by Bellmer between 1934 and 1938, eighteen of which were published as early
as 1934 with no accompanying text in the sixth, winter issue of Albert Skira’s
Surrealist periodical Minotaure, under the title ‘Poupée: Variations sur le
montage d’une mineure articulée’ (‘Doll. Variations on the Assemblage [or
Montage] of an Articulated Minor’; fig. 100).8 Some of these photographs show
the doll under construction, along with accompanying sketches, while others
have it arranged more like a portrait or still life with the doll assembled, dis-
assembled, re-assembled, in whole or in part, in various scenes that in mood
are said to be in equal parts seductive, innocent, vulnerable and downcast.
Throughout, it is posed as a nature morte, a pose plastique or as part of a tableau
vivant, as part of either a still life or a moving picture.
In 1934 Bellmer published Die Puppe, printed by Thomas Eckstein in
Karlsruhe, which, with an introductory text entitled ‘Memories of the Doll
Theme’, includes a collection of ten photographs of the doll, along with a
linocut. In 1936, La Poupée, in a translation by Robert Valançay, was published
by Guy Lévis-Mano in Paris.9
From the photo-documentation and Bellmer’s ‘Memories of the Doll Theme’,
to which I shall return, we can see and read that in this first doll’s belly, open
like a huge gaping wound, with its working mechanism laid bare, was to be
situated an intimate, spectacular panorama, in the shape of a ring ‘doughnut’
(fig.99).10 Made up of and functioning as a rotating panorama, this mechanism
had six compartments, each of which was to be lit by an electrically charged
torch bulb and which would hold a variety of objects including, reportedly,
kitsch colour images, sweets and a handkerchief covered in little girls’ spittle.11
Its on/off switch was apparently in the doll’s left nipple which when pressed
was to activate the rotating; however, this is only clearly visible from Bellmer’s
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100 Hans Bellmer, ‘Poupée, variations
sur le montage d’une mineure articulée’,
in Minoutaure 6, winter 1934–5,
pp. 30–31.
cartoon-like linocut of the doll (fig. 101). This linocut shows that once the doll’s
belly had been completed, with the gaping wound covered over, the navel would
act as a voyeuristic peephole through which to view the panorama.12
Conceptually, mechanically, erotically even, the charge of this rotating pano-
rama sits somewhere among the rotating of Duchamp’s Chocolate Grinder No.
1 (Broyeuse de chocolat no 1, 1913) and Chocolate Grinder No. 2 (Broyeuse de
chocolat no 2, 1914), the Network of Stoppages (1914) that twists ‘as it pleases’,
the chocolate grinders in the Large Glass (1915–23) and the flowing electro-
mechanical waterfall that cascades ceaselessly in the background to that later
panorama also with its own peephole, Étant donnés.
Bellmer’s second poupée was more elaborate than the first – it had more
joints, limbs and parts – and accordingly is far more hinged and thus unhinged
than its earlier sibling. Completed in 1935, this doll is constructed round a
swivelling ball joint, what Malcolm Green characterises rightly, following
Bellmer himself, as an ‘abdominal sphere’ in the form of a female torso, which
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101 [facing] Hans Bellmer, the panorama
mechanism of Die Puppe, 1934, linocut on
pink paper, 16.7 x 12.8 cm.
102 (above) Hans Bellmer, La Poupée (The Doll),

1935, vintage gelatin silver print overpainted with white
gouache & affixed to original mount, 65.8 x 65.5 cm,
pencil notations in artist’s hand on verso. Ubu Gallery,
New York, and Galerie Berinson, Berlin.
is the central cog around which the rest of the doll as an operating system
pivots (fig. 102).13. Attached are, variously, two pelvises, with two pairs of legs
that could be attached to either end, four breasts, two pairs of feet, a head, a
black wig, a blond wig, a toupée, short socks and a pair of black strap-shoes.
Its surface or skin, made of tissue paper and glue, is painted ‘flesh pink’.
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Individual parts have the potential, then, to be attached to any other individual
parts, making for an almost infinite anagrammatical assemblage. Further-
more, some body parts are in and of themselves multiple, reversible.14 (The
doll is, as Green well puts it, ‘over-complete’.15) With its numerous wooden
ball-joints, at the pelvis, the knee and so on, there is the potential for a still
further anagrammation of parts of the body to combine to create bodies in an
almost endless anagram, to dismantle it and to assemble it anew. By way of
this potentially limitless yet finitely interchangeable series of anagrams, its
true content, its invention of new desires, begins to take shape.
The doll itself, with the title Jointure de boules, was first shown in 1936 in
Paris at the Exposition Surréaliste d’Objects at the Galerie Charles Ratton and
in the same year reproduced photographically in both Minotaure and Cahiers
d’art.16 This second poupée spawned more than a hundred black and white or
hand-coloured photographs. It is through this series of photographs, with the
artificial body parts arranged in many ways, that one can best see its anagram-
matical potential. These photographs stage a series of encounters with the
doll in familiar environments, in which, as the art historian Agnès de la
Beaumille writes, Bellmer ‘compose[s] and dramatise[s] the backdrop accord-
ing to the results of erotic scenography: each photograph is like a tableau vivant
where limbs, familiar settings (bedroom, kitchen, forest), everyday furniture
(tables, seats, beds) and alternatively innocuous (sweets), fragile (jugs) or even
troubling objects (rope and tools) come into play’.17
Such erotic scenographies, often cluttered with the prosaic accoutrements
of domestic mis-en-scene, will be familiar to readers from previous encounters
with RealDolls in staged photographs by their owners. In Bellmer’s, though,
they are given a sinister twist and, with their interiors, landscapes and forests,
resonate not least with the (theatrical, artificial) environments of Duchamp’s
Étant donnés, as well as such more recent environments populated by dolls,
mannequins and artificial body parts as the work by Sherman, Gober and
Bourgeois. With their dramatic and sinister narratives, with their implied vio-
lence, with the doll shown bound, beaten, tied and hung, these photographs
evidence a nightmare of voyeurism, sadism, misogyny, masochistic fantasies
and castration anxiety, of the wound of female castration that no excess of
multiple limbs can disavow. Of these often quasi-documentary photographs,
this series or this sequence that animate the narrative of the doll, it has been
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written that ‘[t]he arbitrary, violently erotic positions of the disjointed body, the
layout of limbs and objects against a constantly changing backdrop, and the
raw artificial lighting combine to produce photos resembling reconstructions
of a crime scene’.18
In 1938 Bellmer exhibited photographs and drawings of the second doll at
the International Exhibition of Surrealism, an event best remembered, it will be
recalled, for its row of life-size Surrealist mannequins. Bellmer’s is the proto-
type of the Surrealist mannequin, epitomising Breton’s idea of ‘convulsive
beauty’, imaginatively, creatively, procreatively even. The influence of Bellmer’s
second doll on its contemporaries, at least to all appearances, could not have
been more pronounced.
A decade or so later, in 1949 Les Jeux de la poupée was published by Heinz
Berggruen’s Editions Premières, which included Bellmer’s essay ‘Notes on the
Subject of the Ball Joint’ and its drawings and diagrams, along with fifteen
photographs from this series. Some are in black and white, some tinted, some
hand-coloured with pale yet somehow fluorescent purple and mauve, blue,
green, orange and yellow aniline dyes – colour flecks that resonate with the
migrating erogenous zones of (Charcotian or Freudian) hysterical symptoma-
tologies – a technique creating an artificial effect that was used in old and
especially erotic postcards. The photographs are accompanied by fourteen
verses or prose poems by Bellmer’s friend the Surrealist poet Paul Éluard,
who himself collected tinted postcards.19 Another decade on, from December
1959 to February 1960 the doll was hung from the ceiling at the International
Exhibition of Surrealism at the Galerie Cordier. Then in November 1971 La
Poupée, or rather what was left of it – the central ball joint, a torso, the head,
a pair of legs, a single arm – appeared on a bed of black velvet, along with a
series of enlarged photographs, 20 paintings, more than 100 drawings, 10 sets
of engravings and 6 sculptures, in a retrospective at the Centre National d’Art
Contemporain in Paris. The documentation presents not a few echoes of
Duchamp’s Étant donnés. In the year of that exhibition, four years before Bellm-
er’s death, his devotion to his poupée was persisting. Bellmer claimed that he
wanted it buried with him, showing a commitment and obsession akin to
Kokoschka before him and, as has been seen, to owners of RealDolls after him
and to Japanese owners with their practices of consecrating their sex dolls
through cremation. These divulge a necromantic or thanatalogical desire, to
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103 Hans Bellmer, Mitrailleuseen état de grâce
(The Machine-Gunneress in a State of Grace), 1937,
construction of wood on metal, 78.5 x 75.5 x 34.5 cm, on
wood base 12 x 40 x 29.9 cm. The Museum of Modern Art,
New York, Advisory Committee Fund.
extend and satisfy in perpetuity the desire to lust after their object of desire
or, perhaps, to put to rest a sentient being, now dead, like an ancient Egyptian
human sacrifice, for all eternity.20 Following the retrospective, rather than have
the doll accompany Bellmer to the grave, he donated La Poupée, much the
worse for wear, to the French state.
In 1936 Bellmer began work on his third poupée. He produced sketches and
paintings of it – it resembles paintings by his Parisian colleagues such as Juan
Miró’s Woman (1934) and Pablo Picasso’s Woman seated in a Red Armchair
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(1934) – and it took shape in 1937 as a sculptural form/sculpture-object.
Bellmer worked on a construction three feet high (about one metre), crafted
from wood and papier mâché, towards a fully mechanised, articulate assem-
blage. To this end, he utilised broom handles, metal rods, anatomical parts
made in the same way as they had been for the second poupée. The whole
thing, as Peter Webb and Robert Short have written, is ‘articulated around a
small central sphere, and about twelve nut-and-bolt joints enabled the
constituent parts to be moved into a variety of positions’.21 (Of the three pho-
tographs taken of it by Bellmer in 1937, two show the poupée in different posi-
tions, thereby evidencing its potential articulated-ness.) In 1938 when he
moved from Berlin to France, he left it behind, abandoned. It was only much
later that part of it was recovered. In 1961, working with these few surviving
elements – the 1937 photographs and the central ‘abdominal sphere’ from the
second doll – he resumed building the third iteration of his poupée. Bellmer
went to work on his ‘articulated object’ and the anthropomorphic and mecha-
nomorphic La Mitrailleuse en état de grace (1937/68; fig. 103), the ultimate war
machine as erotic fetish, was completed and shown in New York at the Museum
of Modern Art’s (MoMA) exhibition Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage, curated
by William Rubin, from 27 March to 9 June 1968. It was bought by MoMA in
that year of Duchamp’s death, a year before Étant donnés was revealed to the
public at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.22
freud, psychoanalysis and fetishism
Contextualising historically the origins of Bellmer’s three dolls, de la Beaumille

writes:
By creating Die Puppe (The Doll), Bellmer was of course perpetuating the
unusual vogue for mannequins, automata, puppets, marionettes and dolls
that flourished in Europe, and particularly in Germany, between 1910 and
1920, in response to the horrors of the First World War. These included
Giorgio de Chirico’s prophetic mannequins that acted as vehicles for
contemporary anxieties, his friend Lotte Pritzel’s famous dolls and the
enchanting fantasies praised by Rilke. Equally important were Dadaist
Sophie Taeuber’s wooden marionettes and George Grosz, Raoul Hauss-
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mann, Otto Dix and John Heartfield’s little ironic theatre with violently satiri-
cal robots that simulated mechanical humanity at the mercy of multiple
powers (like money and the military).23
Bellmer’s poupées indeed emerged out of the specifics of the historical context
of the Germanic tradition of doll making and doll thinking. In wanting to make
a doll, Bellmer sought advice from the doll maker Lotte Pritzel, whom he had
met in 1925, and her husband Dr Gerhart Pagel, who told him about Koko-
schka’s Alma, as well as Rainer Maria Rilke’s fascination for, and poems and
essays on, dolls. (It was Pagel who had referred Kokoschka to Pritzel, who in
turn had introduced him to Alma’s creator Moos. Rilke was himself already
familiar with Pritzel’s wax dolls and his doll writings published in 1914 are
entitled ‘Puppen: Puppen von Lotte Pritzel’ [‘Dolls: On the Wax Dolls of Lotte
Pritzel’]).24 Pritzel, who exhibited her dolls first in department stores and later
in galleries, also directed Bellmer towards any number of texts on dolls and
other anthropomorphic figures, and probably took him to see a pair of articu-
lated puppets (a naked man, a naked woman) crafted by a member of Dürer’s
circle at the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin. (Movable at the neck, shoul-
ders, elbows, wrists, knuckles, waist, hips, knees, ankles and toes, these
puppets’ proto-ball-joint articulation was central to the design of Bellmer’s
second poupée and allowed it, unlike the first doll, to ‘go beyond the narrow
limits of naturalistic representation’ – from the inflexibility of the first to a
flexibility that went beyond the limitations of the human body as such.25) Further
combining this mix of the artistic, commercial and ludic, in addition to Sophie
Taeuber-Arp’s marionettes from the late 1910s, Bellmer became acquainted
with the sewn fabric dolls of Hannah Höch and the wooden dolls of Emmy
Hennings from the 1910s and 20s, the mannequins of Grosz and Herztfeld at
the Dada Fair in Berlin in 1920, the automatons of Rudolf Wacker and Rudolf
Schlichter, Umbro’s photographs of mannequins, the dolls’ heads of the
Bauhaus student Xanti Schawinsky and Paul Citroën’s and Werner Rhode’s
store-window dummies. Bellmer was also reading Theodor Däubler’s article
on dolls in Das Puppenbuch (The Doll Book, 1921), the writings of J. K. Huys-
mans, the psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn’s Bildnerei die Geisteskranken (Artistry
of the Mentally Ill, 1922) and, a little later, Paul Schilder’s Images and Appear-
ances of the Human Body (1935).26
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As has become more and more obvious, the origins of Bellmer’s poupées,
his impulse to craft such things, are a historian’s dream but even more a
psychoanalyst’s dream, a psycho-pathologist’s dream, a biographer’s dream,
a dream for anyone intent on wielding psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic theory
for interpretive ends. Bellmer was, after all, historically a subject of psycho-
analysis and therefore subject to it, was familiar with Freud’s writings and
wielded knowingly the terms and techniques of psychoanalytic thinking. Like-
wise, his work is of psychoanalysis, of psychoanalytic theory. He and his art
are uncommonly proper to psychoanalysis; they work unusually well with it.
Too well, perhaps. The autobiographical facts leading to the creation of the
dolls are well known and are emphasised incessantly to the point of becoming
themselves an originary myth of genesis. Bellmer was in revolt against his
tyrannical Prussian father’s Nazi authority. He kicked against the relentless
rise of National Socialism with its hostility towards ‘degenerate’ bodies and its
adulation and celebration of ideal human form and (procreative) femininity
personified in work by, for example, the painter Ivo Saliger and the sculptor
Arno Breker.27 He conducted studies in higher mathematics, engineering and
the laws of geometry, which, coupled with his childhood familiarity with the
multi-armed Hindu goddess Kali, lead to such anagrammatical form. In 1931
Bellmer’s mother sent him a box of his childhood toys, including broken dolls,
and this reawakened nostalgic and melancholic feelings for his adolescence.
He attended, in Berlin’s Grosses Schauspielhaus, Max Reinhardt’s 1932
production of Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffmann with its doll-like autom-
aton Olympia who (with an affirmative ‘oui’ at the heart of her restricted
vocabulary) seduces the main protagonist (Nathaniel in the story, Hoffmann in
the opera) and to whom he in turn becomes devoted. Finally, Bellmer had
paedophilic fantasies and lusted after adolescent girls, especially his cousin
Ursula Naguschewski. Bellmer’s psychopathology, his obsessions, anxieties,
repetitive (metaphorical) violence and perversions, his family dramas, primal
fantasies, frustrated Oedipal rebellion, incestuous desires and castration fears
are all grist for the mill. So are those paedophilic fantasies which, while circling
palpably around the dolls and photographs themselves, were most starkly
recorded in his ‘Memoirs of the Doll Theme’, the text in Die Puppe (1934). Here
Bellmer’s thoughts, observations and fantasies speak – with talk of ‘girlish
secrets’, ‘pink pleats’, the ever elusive ‘pink realm’, and the ‘inquisitive con-
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tours’ of such ‘baroque confections’ – thereby affirming later accusations of
his paedophilic desire.28 This is confirmed still further by the following often
cited damning question posed by Bellmer, in which, because in the end his
‘desire for [the] charms’ of ‘young girls’ is a desire that cannot in fact be trans-
formed into ‘either destructive or creative action’, the doll becomes an answer
to such thwarted desire: And ‘didn’t the doll, which lived solely through the
thoughts projected onto it, and which despite its unlimited pliancy could be
maddeningly stand-offish, didn’t the very creation of its dollishness contain the
desire and intensity sought in it by the imagination?’29 And more: ‘Didn’t it [the
doll] amount to the final triumph over these young girls – with their wide eyes
and averted looks – when a conscious gaze plundered its charms, when
aggressive fingers searching for something malleable allowed the distillates
of mind and senses slowly to take form, limb by limb?’30 And still more: ‘Above
all, one must not stop short of the interior, of stripping away coy girlish
thoughts so that their foundations become visible, best of all through the navel,
deep within the belly in the form of a panorama electrically illuminated by
coloured lights.’31
Damning. Enough said. I am no Bellmer apologist.
The majority of scholars pathographising Bellmer grant particular attention
by way of psychoanalysis to questions of perversion, sadism, seduction, incest,
paedophilia, fantasy, fetishism, the uncanny, death, loss, masochism and her-
maphroditism as they pertain to the business of (a denial of) sexual difference,
castration anxiety, murderous Oedipal wishes,and the repression of homoe-
rotic desires. Who would not? Bellmer’s second poupée, epitomising the Sur-
realist’s concept of ‘convulsive beauty’, is the art world’s most infamous doll
because it embodies quintessentially and most purely many of the challenges
(of and for representation, the mimetic and the uncanny) raised by and at stake
in the figure of the erotic doll, the doll eroticised as a modern fetish, and at its
most perverse psychoanalytically. It has a sinister childlike eroticism and dis-
position which have lead to accusations of acknowledging and stirring paedo-
philic sympathies. Its all too numerous limbs, which speak of castrating anxi-
eties and their fetishistic defence compensated for by way of multiplied phallic
substitutes, writ large and plentiful, disorientate viewers into metamorphic
free-fall. (On this, Krauss has written that each new combination or anagram
of the doll is a ‘construction as dismemberment’, a phrase which, for Foster,
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‘signals both castration [in the disconnection of body parts] and its fetishistic
defence [in the manipulation of these parts as phallic substitutes]’; however,
Foster confirms that the phrase does not imply ‘a fixing of desire [as in the
Freudian account of fetishism]; rather its shifting drives the many recombina-
tions of the dolls’.32) It is the violence of such dismemberment, a feeling that
this unyielding sadistic art practice is in every respect inhuman. It is the arti-
ficial (fetishistic) nature of the whole enterprise, its persistent construction and
destructuration, its fabrication and disassemblage. It is the out and out life-
lessness of the human figure; a death drive that is perhaps not so much a
return to the inorganic as a turn to the always already inorganic, synthetic,
artificial. It is the hinted-at sentience of this artifice, the expressive potential
of its jointed and dis-jointed body, the fact that the doll is always on the brink
of uncanny self-animation; its animistic impulse to come to life, to be brought
to life, that it possesses the desire for life. It is also its desire to reciprocate.
Perverse, fetishistic, nostalgic, sexual, sentimental, man-made, seductive,
narcissistic, auto-erotic, tender, vulnerable, voyeuristic, sensual, distorted,
disjunctive, fragmentary, disfiguring, distorting, chock-a-block with aesthetic
contradictions and corporeal insecurity, Bellmer’s contorted poupée is all of
these things. Its convulsive beauty is a monument to tortured asymmetry.33
For these historical, psycho-pathological, and psychoanalytic reasons the
doll’s status as a fetish is certain. It is a commodity fetish (a possession pos-
sessed), a paraphilic fetish (an obsession), and an idolatrous fetish (worshipped
as one would a false god, a foreign object, an artificial figure), as well as a
surrogate for his cousin Ursula Naguschewski, in the same way that Koko-
schka’s doll is a surrogate for Alma Mahler. It is also a transitional object,
Bellmer’s alter-ego, and even, it has been argued, a stand-in for his daughter,
his sister, or his mother.34
Such historicising and pathographising fit well with arguments for Bellmer’s
poupées, his fetishistic articulated objects, as an addition to the pantheon of
paraphilic Pygmalionism. They are part of that ongoing if uneven process of
the eroticisation of inanimate human form and forms where, while agalmat-
ophilia is a love of or sexual/erotic attraction in general to statues, dolls and
mannequins, Pygmalionism is a love for an object of one’s own creation.
Perhaps it fits too well and we should be wary? Yet all these stories of Bellmer
and his doll, both biographical as well as his own philosophising, coupled with
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his familiarity with Freud’s ‘The Uncanny’, fuel the artist’s own ‘nascent Pyg-
malionism’, as Green puts it.35 Bellmer’s poupées, like many sculptures, dolls,
and mannequins before and since, and representations of them, is situated
squarely in that Pygmalion genealogy, with self-creation, creation, yearning,
desire, animism and reciprocity at its core. Bellmer scholars situate the doll
thus, without necessarily referring explicitly, like Green, to Pygmalion; that
does not mean that the story is not alluded to again and again. Bellmer’s ‘great
obsession’, as Wieland Schmied for example wrote, was ‘the creating of an
artificial being – a doll – onto which he could project his hopes, longings, and
desires’.36 Alain Sayag writes that the artist is ‘determined to breathe life into
this artificial creature’.37 Schmied, again, wrote that it was a ‘perfect artificial
being whose seductive power captivated him’ and concluded that ‘once it had
been made, it developed its own laws and demands’.38
Since this is Hans Bellmer, there are added twists to the Pygmalion story of
creativity, with allusions to further perversity born of narcissism: the doll’s
combinatory potential holds a masturbatory promise, and fantasies take shape
of human and non-human impregnation, and even of self-impregnation. On
masturbation, the art historian Sue Taylor recounts somewhat incredulously
an occasion when she was asked if Bellmer ever used his doll for masturbatory
purposes. In reply she cites Webb and Short who intimated as much by claim-
ing that the artist’s desire ‘could be fulfilled by means of the Doll as it could
never be fulfilled legally in real life’.39 For Taylor such a comment affirms that
‘Bellmer’s doll is a kind of sex toy’, which ties his fixation all too nicely to
RealDoll owners and to that confluence of amateurism, bespoking, obsession
and ownership.40 Bellmer indeed wrote in ‘Memories of the Doll Theme’ of his
desire to possess the doll; that such possession should be grasped as an
enchanting, a belonging and a ravaging: ‘It was worth all my obsessive efforts,
when, amid the smell of glue and wet plaster, the essence of all that is impres-
sive would take shape and become a real object to be possessed’.41 On human/
non-human impregnation and self-impregnation, Taylor observes that the
linocut of the first doll looks pregnant and that in many photographs so does
the second doll, with the ball joint as interuterine. The claim here is that
Bellmer as Pygmalion-like father metaphorically impregnates his own progeny
or, if one takes into account his drawings and paintings of girls with phalluses,
that they impregnate themselves.42 The doll’s navel as homo umbilicus mocks
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the organicism of natural, biological reproduction, instead attesting to the
inorganic origins of this non-sentient, artificial being and its patrilinearity.43
ball joints, motion and the fashioning of things
Bellmer’s nascent Pygmalionism, in fact his fascination with nascence more

generally, seems at first to position his obsession with the doll as a fetish in
a marvellous and uncanny world of the inanimate and the animate, the machinic
and the human, life and death, where common laws of existence do not apply.
This would be a world shaped by the intellectual uncertainty as to whether an
apparently animate being is alive or whether a lifeless object might not in fact
be animate. By way of this uncannyness, Freud takes us back to ‘the old, ani-
mistic conception of the universe’ and claims that ‘everything which now
strikes us as “uncanny” fulfils the condition of touching those residues of
animistic mental activity within us and bringing them to expression’.44 This is
a universe populated, as noted earlier, by dismembered limbs, severed heads,
hands cut off at the wrists and feet which dance by themselves, proving ‘capable
of independent activity’.45 Yet these are the now common laws of psychoanaly-
sis. Here the story of Pygmalion as a story of creation and self-creation, and
of the uncanny as a particular feeling of uncertainty – where movement in or
of the uncanny is located in a return, in how the animistic things, persons and
sensations that are secretly familiar have been repressed and then have
returned from that repression – are wholly familiar since they work within its
cyclical logic. In fact, they were for Freud all too familiar. Even in ‘The Uncanny’
itself, in his one reference to Pygmalion’s statue coming to life he writes dis-
paragingly and mockingly that ‘we should hardly call [this] uncanny’ since even
children want their dolls to come to life, wish it, desire it.46
There is, then, little left to say about Bellmer and his poupées in the context
of Surrealism and psychoanalysis per se. The task thus becomes one of seeing
if it is possible to take his dolls away from their status as Surrealist Objects
par excellence and from their enactment of psychoanalytic eroticism and
perversion. I admit that I was never particularly interested in Bellmer as a
subject of psychoanalysis, or in the dolls themselves as symptoms of his Oedipal
revolt against parental authority, his regressive melancholia brought on by his
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mother’s gift of his childhood toys, his sublimation of frustrated male desire,
or his paedophilic desires. Nor was I interested in the dolls articulating
themselves as symptoms, as living, breathing, seductive, captivating creatures
speaking their own laws and demands in mute signs. Their ability to articulate
their own desires only goes so far; the dolls are, after all, only dolls, they are
not sentient, they have no human subjectivity, no unconscious, no symptoms,
no psycho-sexual traumas of their own.
There is, though, something else at work in Bellmer’s poupées, in his hopes
and ambitions for them. This is best expressed in his own writings, as prepos-
terous as they sometimes are. In them, and with and against psychoanalysis,
through a different logic of the conditions of possibility for motion in animism’s
capacity for animating, human form (the body, the doll, artificial body parts) is
the inventor of an anagrammation, and its erotics, by which new desires take
shape.
Likening his activities to the conjurer and the confectioner, Bellmer, it is
clear from ‘Memories of the Doll Theme’ (1934), was interested in a new kind
of curiosity (based on non-knowledge, mystery, chance, play) that is generative
of new desires and a new eroticism by way of a distinct grasp and handling of
motion, and thus emotion. He writes, for instance, about the glass marble, with
a view of its interior ‘in which one could behold the frozen ecstasy of its
spirals’.47 While this is yet again a gesture towards his fantasies of young
girls – for him the marble’s spirals and the pink pleats of girlish secrets were
one – putting to one side as best one can such analogies, there is something
else going on here. It concerns Bellmer’s sense of the sphere as a geometrical
object embedded in three-dimensional Euclidean space, and his unique brand
of materialist animism. It is a unique kind of motion, driven by the pull of gravity
and its inner tensions, that, as representational form opens itself out to the
fourth dimension, the doll might come to personify and articulate.
For Bellmer, like the sphere, the ball joint becomes central. Soon after his
second poupée with its swivelling ball joint/abdominal sphere, the central cog
around which the rest of the doll as an operating system pivots, in the essay
‘Notes on the Subject of the Ball Joint’ (written between 1937 and 1945 and
published in 1949) he begins to define the conditions – historically, conceptu-
ally, erotically – under which the ball joint sets the scene for later and more
comprehensive considerations of the body as anagram. He also begins to
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outline what he calls his thoughts on the physical unconscious and the psychic
mechanisms of the human body.48
Here Bellmer writes about the function of toys, and soon enough dolls, as
‘poetic stimulators’ or ‘provocative objects’.49 ‘The best sort of game does not
aim so much at a specific goal but draws its excitement from the thought of
its own unforeseeable sequels – as if spurred on by an enticing promise’ (p.
59). He affirms that the best toys do not have a ‘pre-determined, unchanging
function’ but are ‘rich in chance and possibilities’.50 When the game is erotic,
as it always is, and the doll is understood as an anagram – a sequence of any
and many possible anagrams not determined in advance, composed of ana-
grammatical possibility itself, of arrangements of bodies or of body parts, of
assembling–disassembling–re-assembling to come – its true contents may
take shape, and with that the inventing of new desires.
For Bellmer, a doll’s function of articulating the intellectual uncertainty of
whether a thing is both lifelike and lifeless simultaneously (significant for Sur-
realist interest in dolls, mannequins and automata) was less crucial than its
functioning. He writes:
Whether it be located at the furthest outposts of confusion or closer by – fluc-

tuating as it does between the poles of the animate and the inanimate – we
will always be looking at a mobile, passive and incomplete thing that can be
personified, and in the final analysis, within the broad framework in which
the principle of the articulated object seems to meet these demands, we
shall be dealing with the mechanical factor behind its mobility: the UNIVERSAL
JOINT. [p. 60]
It is therefore not the doll as an articulated object per se that drives this taking
shape, this inventing of new desires. Rather it is the ball joint as the mechani-
cal factor behind its mobility, the mechanical – and I would say also the con-
ceptual and the erotic – factor that is built into the doll, both literally and
metaphorically, before the fact. How so and what of this?
In ‘The Ball-Joint’ essay Bellmer turns to the inventor Gerolamo Cardano
and his modification in the sixeenth century of what is now known as the
Cardan or universal joint or U joint. The universal joint is based on the design
of the gimbal, a single-axis pivoted support whose design allows for the rota-
tion of an object. (A compass, for instance, remains immobile because it is
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mounted in or suspended on an axis attached to a gimbal that is in turn
attached to the axis of another gimbal.) Bellmer writes of Cardano’s effort to
maintain his own psychological equilibrium, and how such balance is repli-
cated in the universal joint as an ‘“arrangement of rings which, swivelling
crossways, support an object at their centre in a constant state of equilibrium,
undisturbed by outside oscillations”’ (p. 60). ‘The idea of a body that is isolated
from all outside forces except gravity’, Bellmer goes on,
seems the perfect symbol of egocentricity; yet curiously it is reversible.

Rather than the object being suspended at the centre of a system of rings
connected to the outside world by its periphery, the outside world can be
put at the centre of this system in place of the object, and thus the object at
its periphery. When we consider that in the first case the distance between
the object’s centre of gravity and the centre of the rings can be reduced to
zero, and in the second case may be infinitely large, we arrive at an astonish-
ing conclusion: the ring system is located between two fundamentally con-
flicting demands, it tends both towards concentricity and eccentricity. In
short: between two opponents whose interchangeability seems at first
incomprehensible . . . [pp. 60–61]
Bellmer would have the universe itself turn inside out.

In need of some psychological equilibrium himself, Bellmer recognises the
need to give his reader some concrete examples. His first, also identifying
the origins of such gimbal-like mechanisms, is from Philo of Byzantium. The
Greek engineer from the 3rd century bce, in Chapter 56 of his Pneumatics
discusses the devising of a multi-sided inkwell that – whether octahedral,
hexahedral, tetrahedral or pentahedral – could be used with any of the faces
uppermost without the ink spilling from any of the other holes. (Such an inkwell
is an example of early writing technology that is itself anagrammatical.) Bellm-
er’s second example is from the marginalia of Philo’s manuscript in an
‘unknown Arab hand’ which states that this mobile inkwell resembles the
throne of Solomon: ‘“Those familiar with the throne may ascend it and sit
thereon, and remain seated, while those unfamiliar with it will fall on the floor
on attempting to take their seat. This is most delightful”’ (p. 62). The third
example is from Karl May, the German author of late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century children’s adventure stories set in North America and the
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Middle East. May writes about the Henry Carbine (Henrystutzen), a fictional
repeating rifle, like the slightly earlier and better known Gatling gun, that had
a piece of iron at its core which, when filed, became a sphere operating with
an eccentric motion so that as each shot was fired, the next cartridge entered
the breach. It is a procedure that repeated twenty-five times without the need
to reload (p. 63). Bellmer’s third poupée, Mitrailleuse en état de grâce (The
Machine-Gun[neress] in a State of Grace) is surely a descendant.
The fourth and final example Bellmer gives of the universal joint, as the
mechanical factor behind the articulated object – the doll is for him such an
articulated object, in a constant state of equilibrium between two fundamen-
tally conflicting demands, tending interchangeably both towards concentricity
and eccentricity – is Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs. In a sub-section of ‘The Ball-Joint’
entitled ‘Counteraction and forcible reconciliation of concentricity and eccen-
tricity’, Bellmer writes of how in the shape of the Rotoreliefs, concentricity and
eccentricity are pushed to the extreme point where they are ‘mutually resolved’
(p. 63). Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs are for Bellmer a ‘theoretically scandalous con-
tradiction’ which, while resulting from an illusion (because of their ‘false’
centres), produce an ‘optical miracle’ whereby ‘the surface of the circles rises
up . . . only to collapse and rise again at periodic intervals’ (p. 64). Here the
affinity I alluded to earlier between Bellmer’s first poupée and Duchamp’s
grinders, his electric cables and his waterfall is firmed up, although the shift
is seismic from the first doll’s panoramic machine for seeing rotation to the
second doll’s universal joint of concentricity/eccentricity. Such affinity makes
yet more sense of Bellmer’s over-fixation on balls, hoops, marbles, especially
the delicate (for him erotically charged) single and double ribbon (or divided
core) marbles, and spinning tops, all with the mechanical factor built into their
conditions of assorted mobility.51
In fact, putting forward such examples of the functioning that forms and
drives the articulated object is in the service, writes Bellmer, of discovering
‘what occurs when symmetry and motion encounter each other’.52 As it is for
Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs and, Malcolm Green writes, the spinning top with ‘its
centrifugal motion that produces a centripetal force at its tip’, so it is for form,
the doll and the human as such.53 Thus in representation, but more similarly
in language and dreams, with their arbitrary relations between signifier and
signified, and by way of the laws of geometry and arithmetic, human form (the
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body, the doll) ‘can capriciously displace the centre of its own images’ gravity,
and does so constantly’.54 The body transforms itself, morphs, transmogrifies.
Body parts move independently around the body’s anatomy interchangeably.
Body parts are replaced by inanimate objects, and vice versa, so that equiva-
lences and disparity are produced. Even arousals (sexual, erotic, unconscious,
deliberate, endured) jostle for attention, supplant one another, chase one
another across and around and into and out of the body’s surfaces, curvatures
and folds. Like language, like dreams, in displacing the centre of its own gravity
the body prepares the ground for its performance of ‘condensations’, ‘super-
impositions’, ‘proofs of analogies’, ‘ambiguities’, ‘puns’ and . . . ‘calculations of
probability’.55 This produces ‘new planes’ via methods of ‘multi-clause sen-
tences, dismantlement, permutation, fusion, the cross-section, the creation of
mosaics, colouring, [and] substitution’.56 This is the poetry of language, the
poetry of the body, the body as a poetic stimulator or provocative object. Con-
firming and confounding the laws of geometry and arithmetic, it dismantles
itself, multiplies itself, anatomically, becomes interchangeable, anagrammati-
cises; it is by way of these permutations that its true contents take shape,
inventing new desires along the way.
These earlier writings and their propositions are distilled and elaborated in
Bellmer’s ‘A Brief Anatomy of the Physical Unconscious or The Anatomy of the
Image’ (1942–54, published 1957).57 Here Bellmer again writes about the body
physiologically, as well as geometrically and arithmetically, as a living system,
a mechanical, physical and bio-chemical system. The body as this kind of
system Bellmer calls the ‘physical unconscious’; and it is by way of the doll’s
manipulating and functioning that this is revealed and takes shape. It is in, out
of and all along the concavities and convexities of this material physiology that
the ‘physical unconscious’ permeates and plays out erotically its desires across
the ‘physical mechanisms of the human body’. In arguing this, Bellmer weaves
in and out of discussing how categories of expressing such as ‘posture, move-
ment, gestures, actions, tone, word, writing, drawing, and the fashioning of
objects . . . are born of one and the same mechanism, and that their origins
demonstrate the same structure’.58 This mechanism is ‘the reflex’ and, Bellmer
goes on to ask, ‘to what physical need or impulse might this correspond?’59
The needs or impulses of the body, its desires, its eroticism are thus consti-
tuted by processes (akin to those at work in words, metaphors, analogies and
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anagrams) of doublings and divisions and re-combinations, multiplications and
multiple meanings, transferences, migrations, fluctuations, superimpositions,
reversibilities and, ultimately, externalisations by which, as Bellmer writes,
psychical phenomena manifest themselves outwardly.60
We need an example. Bellmer gives the example of a toothache. The tooth-
ache sparks a reflex, in this case our fingers and hands that claw painfully at
our faces to somehow stop the pain, to share it, displace it, dissipate it, take
it on as their own. In this example, the toothache is the real (the so-called
objective); the painful clawing is the virtual (the so-called subjective). The
toothache is the real focus of arousal and the painful clawing is the artificial
or virtual focus of arousal but in countering it the clawing also produces: it
produces itself as a virtual toothache. The toothache thus divides, doubles,
transfers, migrates, fluctuates, superimposes, much like a hysterical symp-
tomatology or better, as Taylor puts it, ‘a series of shifting, interchangeable
erogenous zones’. As Bellmer writes, in being grasped forwards and back-
wards, this way and that, ‘virtual and real intermingl[e] by means of their
superimposition’, themselves taking pleasure in such simulating.61 In such
scenarios, a process of equivalence is at work also, and this equivalence is
reversible: the arm, for instance, takes pleasure in simulating a leg and vice
versa. A sex organ projects itself onto an armpit. A leg onto an arm. A foot onto
a hand. Toes onto fingers. A man becomes an armchair; he becomes a woman.
A woman’s finger, arm or leg would be equivalent to a man’s penis. And so on.
Such intermingling, superimpositions and reversibility – as portrayed in his
drawings for Oeillades ciselëes en branche (Glances/Bunches cut on the Branch,
1939; fig. 104) – lead Bellmer to write of ‘an axis of reversibility between real
and virtual centres of arousal’.62 By way of these superimpositions, intermin-
glings, divisions and multiplications, a tension emerges between a ‘principle
of sensitivity’ and a ‘principle of motoricity’ where the ego ‘experiences arousal’
and ‘produces arousal’. A reunion takes place, where there is a merging of ‘the
real and virtual components into a new whole’.63 Bellmer proclaims this,
quoting an old adage:
OPPOSITES ARE NECESSARY FOR THINGS TO EXIST

AND FOR A THIRD REALITY TO ENSUE64
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Here, at the heart of the mechanisms of the physical unconscious, and the
psychic mechanisms of the human body, with a re-union of multiplication and
interchangeability, there is an extroversion. Bellmer writes that ‘our image of
the body experiences a curious compulsion to move from within to without, as
if the interior of the organism wished to evert itself’.65 Then he quotes the
French poet Joë Bousquet, an influence on Deleuze, from his work Le Mal
d’enfance:
Unfolding like wings between what previously had been shoulders, arms and
legs are the rich draperies of the lungs; the labyrinthine passage that con-
nects the mouth with the rectum, the gullet followed by the stomach and the
intestines, this inner surface appears to penetrate the body to its very depths
in order to become, like an everted glove, the epidermis bathed in bright light.
In place of the first vertebra, the skull, is a set of teeth crowning the whole.66
In the mechanisms of the physical unconscious and the psychic mechanisms

of the human body, real and virtual components merge into a new whole. Ten-
sions between a principle of sensitivity and a principle of motoricity through
that dialectic produce arousal, desire. This is the third reality. Each anagram
of the doll – Bellmer’s doll, perhaps any doll – each multiplication, each inter-
changeability, and the friction generated by the tensions intrinsic to such
processes, is a new third reality. An extroversion, an everting, perhaps even an
extimacy marks what Bellmer calls ‘a deep-rooted inquisitiveness taken to the
extreme. It embraces everything that belongs to human drives, the wish to see
and scandalously expose the inside, that inside which is constantly hidden and
can only ever be guessed at behind the superimposed layers of our construc-
tion and behind its last unknown.’67
If the doll is a locus for – or, better, a network of – desire, this is because
of its (and the human form’s) mechanisms, its inner workings, its mechanical
qualities, and forces; and the friction that is desire produced. As a unique
motion, with its evocative powers the ball joint as the mechanical factor behind
104 Hans Bellmer, illustration for Oeillades ciselëes

en branche, 1939, Éditions Jeanne Bucker, Paris,
13.5 x 9.5 x 0.8 cm. Scottish National Gallery of
Modern Art.
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the articulated object drives the body as anagram, the anagrammatical body,
and the new desires that are articulated by it, which both come to the fore and
are not predetermined by it. Out of the rhythms and logics of multiplication
and interchangeability, eroticism is the motor and the motor is eroticism. The
anatomy of the body’s true content, always in the process of an ongoing taking
shape, is the inventor of these new desires. It is the unanticipated shifting of
desire that drives the anagram; and each new anagram thus becomes the
inventor of these new desires.
(This is why it strikes me that desire is a matter of what the doll does rather
than what it means. That is, driven by the assembling–disassembling–
re-assembling impulse, it matters less that the doll is about making meaning,
about what it means or does not mean as a symbol, a symptom, as sympto-
matic of this or that, as an interpretive machine for meaning making. Nor does
it matter much that, as Krauss well puts it, with its composite parts as signi-
fiers, it operates ‘in a way that allows them to slide along the signifying chain,
creating the kind of slippage that is meant, precisely, to blur their meaning,
rather than reify it, or, better, to create meaning itself as blurred’.68)
Anagrammatical anatomy is the basis of anagrammatical desire, an anatomy
of desire, a desire whose force is provoked by and drives the rhythm and logic
of the doll as an assemblage, as its human form is assembled, dis-assembled
and re-assembled anew. It is through this arranging of the doll’s conditions of
anagrammatical possibility that desire is generated and flows. Desire is pro-
duced by and in motion, in motion as, within (the friction produced by) each
combination or anagram, and one after another, time becomes warped and
space is convulsed through four dimensions.69 Out of this is thus born a new
kind of curiosity, of non-knowledge, mystery, chance, of play, where for
Bellmer, as Webb and Short write, knowledge itself ‘derives from the migra-
tions of desire, from desire’s detours, evasions, masks, feints, halts and
leaps’.70 Desire then takes as its point of departure both the body’s physiology
as a living system as such and the detail, for instance the limb, the organ, the
zone, partial human form; which prove capable of independent activity or, as
Bellmer puts it, ‘lead [their] own life of sovereign triumph’.71 Desire is sparked
by singular details in particular encounters, sparked by the friction intrinsic to
processes of intermingling, superimpositions and reversibility, and it is the
tendency of desire, as Webb and Short note, ‘to multiply the things it loves’.72
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/ conclusion:
vibrating matter energised:
animism and thing theory
panta rhei (‘everything flows’)

Simplicius
Animism had endowed things with souls; industrialism makes

souls into things.
Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer,
Dialectic of Enlightenment1
Near the beginning of his 1853 essay ‘The Philosophy of Toys’, Charles Baude-
laire recounts an autobiographical anecdote in which as a child he was taken
by his mother to visit a certain Madame Panchoucke whose ‘very peaceful
mansion’ was known to be ‘very hospitable’.2 Madame Panchoucke, wearing
velvet and fur, Baudelaire remembers, said to the young Charles: ‘Here is a
little boy to whom I would like to give something – to remember me by’. She
then invited him into a chamber lined with toys – her ‘children’s treasure trove’,
she told him. Madame Panchoucke continued: ‘when a nice little boy comes to
see me, I bring him here so that he can take away a souvenir of me. Now
choose.’ Charles chose ‘the newest, the most beautiful, the most expensive, the
most garish, the most original toy in sight’. His mother, exclaiming at his indis-
cretion, obstinately refused to let him take this prize away with him and encour-
aged him to content himself with ‘some entirely mediocre choice’. For the sake
of harmony, Charles ‘resigned himself to a happy medium’. As a result of this
episode, Baudelaire writes, ‘I can never stop in front of a toy shop . . . without
thinking of the lady in velvet and fur who appeared to me as the Fairy Queen of
toys’. One does not have to be a psychoanalyst to grasp the significance of the
generous hospitality of this velvet-and-fur-wearing Madame, who forever
haunted Baudelaire’s relations to childish things.
conclusion / 317
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Towards the end of this essay, Baudelaire writes:
The overriding desire of most little brats . . . is to get at and see the soul of
their toys . . . It is on the more or less swift invasion of this desire that depends
the length of life of a toy. I do not find it in myself to blame this infantile mania;
it is a first metaphysical tendency. When this desire has implanted itself in
the child’s cerebral marrow, it fills his fingers and nails with an extraordinary
agility and strength. The child twists and turns his toy, scratches it, shakes
it, bumps it against the walls, throws it to the ground. From time to time, he
makes it restart its mechanical motions, sometimes in the opposite direction.
Its marvellous life comes to a stop. The child . . . makes a supreme effort; at
last he opens it up, he is the stronger. But where is the soul? This is the begin-
ning of melancholy and gloom.3
What of the soul of toys? Of course such things, childish or otherwise, have no
soul. There is no soul. Only curiosity. We know this. I would venture that the
child knows this, certainly a child who is born into the post-Enlightenment’s
disenchanting of the world, into capitalist modernity’s manufacturing and con-
sumer culture, into our bio-technological post-human condition. Indeed, the
child’s overriding desire, I would venture further, was never to look for the toy’s
soul but, instead, to get at the thing itself. The child desires the twisting and
the turning, the scratching and the shaking, the bumping it into walls and the
throwing it to the ground, the starting and stopping and re-starting of its
mechanical motions, to see what it is, how it works and why – none of which
can be determined in advance – and does so by opening it up, cracking it,
breaking it, shattering it, destroying it. All this is the pleasure of curiosity, of
curiosity as a process, as a will-to-knowing. These are the practices that indi-
cate the reasoning behind our very desire to be curious, linked as they are to
a sense of wonder, the excitement of discovery and the dangers therein. It is
no coincidence that I stress curiosity as a mode of encounter. Curiosity finds
its early protocols in Hephaestus’s crafting from water and earth of Pandora,
the first woman, endowed with the gifts of the gods. Pandora’s curiosity leads
her to release from her jar all humankind’s evils, retaining for them hope
which, while apparently affirmative, proves itself, as Nietzsche wrote in Human,
All Too Human, ‘the most evil of evils because it prolongs man’s torment’.4
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Curiosity also, as Foucault wrote, ‘evokes “concern” . . . the care one takes for
what exists and could exist; a readiness to find strange and singular what sur-
rounds us; a certain relentlessness to break up our familiarities and to regard
otherwise the same things’.5 Curiosity is a practice, a will, a desire. As such it
is better to let the mysteries of the unknown out into the world, for it is here,
rather than in our imagination or in the thing itself, that coming-to-know
becomes an invitation to further curiosity, wonder, research and thinking.6 The
beginning of melancholy and gloom is not, then, because the toy, this thing,
has no soul or that its soul cannot be found but simply because it no longer
works, it no longer does what it does. Regardless, curiosity, desire, this will-
to-know will persist.
Baudelaire went on, though, to hint at something less metaphysical and
more thing-ological: ‘I believe that children in general act upon their toys; in
other words, that their choice is governed by their disposition and desires,
vague, if you wish, and by no means formulated, but very real. However, I would
not deny that the contrary can occur – that the toy can sometimes act upon
the child.’7
In writing of the ‘defiance’ of the child’s toy, Baudelaire was coinciding with
Marx’s discussion of things in Capital. As remarked earlier, for Marx there is an
invocation of the fetish commodity form as a thing with an apparent life of its
own. That is, for Marx the commodity is mysterious and enigmatic, a ‘very
strange thing’ indeed, since its character arises from the form (or the properties
of the form) itself and, once labour as a social form is replaced by the com-
modity form and comes to assume a value in relation to other commodities, it
begins to ‘speak’ with them. While Marx uses this wondrous rhetoric of animism,
his tongue is firmly in his cheek. That said, this does not weaken the assertion
that in capitalist modernity, there emerges a new and distinctive network of
relations between persons and things. Persons can possess things but they can
also come to be obsessed and even possessed by them – like Baudelaire’s
belief that children act on their toys and that their toys act on them. While
persons dominate things, things can dominate persons. Things have a will that,
just for a moment, makes them unwilling to be possessed, as Marx wrote:
‘[c]ommodities are things, and therefore lack the power to resist man. If they
are unwilling, he can use force; in other words, he can take possession of
them’.8
conclusion / 319
ED_int.indd 319 15/10/2013 5:06 PM

A thing’s will in capitalist modernity is a tangible successor, while different
in both kind and degree, to its motivation and functioning for the Ancients who,
believing that the gods were motivating things, were willing to concede the
intrinsic animistic possibilities of matter, materials and form. Aristotle in Nico-
machaean Ethics wrote that the ‘soul is indeed, as it were, a life-giving principle
in animate things’, citing as evidence for this its materiality and its techne. Then
Thomas Aquinas, quoting him in his ‘Commentary on Aristotle’s “De Anima”’,
identified animism as the soul’s defining quality, calling it ‘the starting point
of all motion in things which live’.9 Thus a virtuous circle is born: the ensouled
power inhering in the thing as sacred warrants veneration and such veneration
confirms the thing’s status as ensouled, vibrant and sacred. No wonder men
idolise things, such inanimate human form: things of worship, adoration, devo-
tion, things which they desire and with which they fall in love and lust after;
those poor wretched victims of fol amour.
This virtuous circle persisted into the medieval period with its animating
Christian materiality embodied in the form of bodily relics all of which are what
they present, and on into the post-medieval period by way of forms such as
religious effigies, anatomical models and mannequins, and wax figures. Here
also, animism was tied to matter’s capacity as form for motion and thus life-
giving because, whether in the interests of religion, science or entertainment,
such matter as form (stone, wood and wax) had motion intrinsic to it. This
forming from animating matter, with its viscosities of time, duration and
motion, set the terms by which it, especially inanimate human form including
dolls (with this intrinsic force of change inherent to them), came later to be
comprehended in capitalist modernity.
That such thinking persists in modernity is due to its particular shaping of
relations between persons, between persons and things, and between things
and things. Such relations are constituted by the discourse of the fetish, a
distinctly modern converging of enchanting, economy and erotics, which is why
we can speak of capitalist modernity’s magical thinking. It is the fetish as a
thing – and its concomitant confusing of persons and things – that both re-
invents animism, and conspires to make us complicit with and collude in the
provocations and evocations of its new laws and demands and desire. So what
does the soul become? Or, rather, if the soul wanes, but its defining quality,
animism, persists, what is it that animates things in modernity? If not driven
ED_int.indd 320 15/10/2013 5:06 PM

by religion, magic or aesthetic power per se, what power inheres in the thing
in modernity, which is also, incidentally, modernity’s thing?
In answering these questions, I propose that, despite Adorno and Hork-
heimer’s assertion in Dialectic of Enlightenment that the Enlightenment’s ‘dis-
enchantment of the world [by Enlightenment’s dispelling of myths in order to
“overthrow phantasy with knowledge”] means the extirpation of animism’, in
the absence of the ensouled, animism persists albeit by assuming a form that
is particular to modernity as itself a magical thinking. It is a melding of theo-
logical and supernatural beliefs with scientific, technological and philosophical
principles.10 It persists because of how, as I have argued, Enlightenment reason
invented the fetish, producing it as supernatural and as a component of natural
magic, despite the fetish’s etymological origins as artifice in making, manu-
facturing and falsification. Animism persists in modernity, then, by way of the
fetish emerging through the converging of the distinct yet inter-articulating
discourses of the anthropological, political economy and the psychiatric/psy-
choanalytic. As such its decidedly modern complexity is allied to decidedly
modern forms of sexuality, eroticism and desire. The fetish thus reawakens
and repurposes for modernity the discourse of animism. Further, the fetish
itself is given its force, power and energy, embodied in and articulated by the
material thing bearing its name, by modernity’s own thinking as magical, as a
historical condition fuelled by animism’s enchanting.
Intimate relations (as fetishistic) between men and things were the basis of
the invention in the nineteenth century of male heterosexuality, and of hetero-
sexual masculinity as narcissistic, perverse, singular, empathetic and alienat-
ing; also embattled, disdainful and full of contempt for both persons and
things. This includes male heterosexuality’s own recognising and figuring of
the individual as both a person and as a thing. It is these ‘qualities’ between
persons and things that gave birth to the distinctively modern desires that
pulse through and between them.
The very existence of such reciprocity between human and inanimate human
form arises because (via enchantment, economy, and erotics) both are matter
as form through which vital energies circulate. That is, they come to be com-
prised as living systems. The human is a motion machine operating through
the matter by which it is constituted, from the physiology of humours and
nerves and on to its functioning as a bio-medical and bio-technological system,
conclusion / 321
ED_int.indd 321 15/10/2013 5:06 PM

while the thing has an inhered power and affective force. Thus both the human
and inanimate human form as discrete systems produce and generate many
interconnecting and self-perpetuating systems, arrangements, interruptions,
assemblages which, desiring production, interconnect with (or plug into) other
(both human and non-human) assemblages.
With the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment’s challenge to the divine
nature of the creation of human beings, the earth and the celestial spheres,
and with its physics confirming all matter as animate, matter’s aliveness was
argued for by any number of transforming forces and pneumatics (mysterious,
inexplicable or otherwise). Matter is energy, movement. Its nature is perpetual
motion. Energised, matter transforms. Matter becomes form. For human and
inanimate human form, the material soul thus becomes material substance
as well as incorporeal. Matter flows and innervates both the animate and the
inanimate as animal spirit, effluvia, magnetism, élan, plunum, ether, the
nervous energies of the nervous system, electricity, vapours, sexual excita-
tions, libidinal energy, revolutionary energies, elective affinities, gas, water,
erotic liquid, love gasoline, the process of the elastic tensions of distorting and
the friction of anagrams forming, as well as gravity, concentricity, eccentricity
and so forth. Also, of course, human desire and the desire that desires desire.
Energised matter flows, interrupts, transforms. All is generative of an erotics
composed of the intangibles that fuel human and inanimate human form, as
discrete and interconnecting systems, and the desire that drives them; the
desires taking shape that challenge the very structure, process and itinerary
of human desire as such.
(In addition to such powers that inhere in the human and non-human as a
thing in modernity, one might flag up some of the energetic paradigms from
which they come, and others: Freud’s drive towards self-preservation, the
sexual drive, and that fusing of the inherent urge towards both life and death
that is tinged, as he writes, with eroticism. Marx’s concrete labour as human
expenditure (as skill, sinew and acts of repetition are worked into and produce
things and a thing-like nature). Bataille’s alchemical and materialist economy
of expenditure (la dépense) where virulent matter is energy, where matter is
energised, a heterogeneous force, where energy is human activity, a libidinous
energy that we labour to expend, a spending without accounting, accumulating
or return. The multiplicity of flows and interruptions of Deleuze and Guattari’s
ED_int.indd 322 15/10/2013 5:06 PM

desiring machines going back to Bergson and Liebnitz and forward to the New
Materialism. As well as Thing Theory’s ontology of things and its ontology in
things. All of which may (or may not) leave us somewhere unthinkable among
classical mechanics, Newton’s laws of motion, rheology, quantum physics and
chaos theory.11)
The nineteenth century’s convergence of the mechanical, technological and
magical nature of such (human and non-human) systems, which marks also
the invention of artificial life, produced a historically specific constellation of
conditions in modernity, in which the confusion of the distinction between
persons and things lead to a distinctive erotics of intimate relations between
heterosexual men and inanimate human form.
One compelling consequence of this is that while heterosexual masculinity
has been invented by capitalism as part of its industrious economy of efficiency,
accumulation and profit, as a hydraulic reproduction machine (a result of the
private ownership of the means of reproduction), it is also (perhaps because
of this) hysterical, neurotic and ridiculous. It became a stick with which to beat
post-Enlightenment modernity’s rationality about the fragility of the ideology
of the hetero-normative procreative impulse as it is pressured ever more by
perversities: by for instance the nature, practices, pleasures and satisfaction
of men’s erotic relations with inanimate human form. In fact, the nineteenth
century’s invention of heterosexuality as both the height of efficiency and as
perverse produced it as a productive yet non-procreative and non-reproductive
economy. It is the efficient motor at the heart of industrial capitalism and yet
the wasteful tool undermining that very capitalist mode of production. It is thus
a fly in the ointment of capitalism. The thing as fetish – by way of men’s erotic
relations to inanimate human form – speaks most actively of the dangers of
such active yet unproductive activities. That is to say, the doll eroticised, for
instance, marks the human as firstly a hydraulic reproduction machine but
also as, secondly, an autopoietic machine (a self-governing system which
produces, maintains and recreates itself) and ultimately as, thirdly, an allopoi-
etic machine that produces things other than itself, including complex assem-
blages of bodies and body parts, interconnecting (human and non-human)
systems as un-productive economies, and their activities (such as masturba-
tion) and the uneconomic produce of that activity.12 Bataille for one is stressing
masturbation as producing fluid that both drives this economy (of omnipo-
conclusion / 323
ED_int.indd 323 15/10/2013 5:06 PM

tence, progenitoring, creativity, narcissism and self-love) and reveals its futility,
when he describes a blob of ejaculate as ‘a fetid, sticky object without bounda-
ries, which teems with life and yet is the sign of death’.13
If not an outright renunciation of procreation, heterosexual masculinity
becomes a staging of the dramatic tension between a procreative impulse and
a desiring of and for non-productive forms of generation. Heterosexual mas-
culinity was always thus: a bachelor machine. As Rosalind Krauss puts it,
following on from French scholar Michel Carrouges’s Le Macchine Celibi (1952),
a book highly influential on Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring machines that open
their Anti-Oedipus (1972), the bachelor machines, obviously taken from
Duchamp, ‘involve a perpetual motion that takes them outside the field of
organic procreation. Beyond the cycle of fecundation/birth/life/death, they con-
stitute a dream of both infinite celibacy and total autoeroticism’.14
What does man want? If one were looking for answers to the mocking (and
largely rhetorical) question with which I began, this would be one: man dreams
of infinite celibacy and total autoeroticism. The doll – as inanimate or animate,
willing or unwilling, possessed or possessing, acted on or acting on, a thing
with an inexplicable vitality that seems to generate its own laws, demands and
desires and, in so doing shapes man’s understanding of his erotic attachment
to such form and to himself – is this dream incarnate.
As generative as the confusing of the distinctive relations between persons
and things is, it is, though, also damning for relations between persons and
things. The advent of heterosexual masculinity as intrinsically polymorphously
perverse confirms a need to attend to men’s obsessions with, devotion to and
desire for things, especially in the shape of inanimate human form. This is
because it is composed (banally as it is interestingly) of the fantasies, pleasures
and practices of a crowded catalogue of perversions such as erotomania, fet-
ishism, masturbation and so on, none of which comprise relations between
persons and persons. In men giving themselves up to things, heterosexual
masculinity comes to be constituted by a love of and for the artificial (which is
the non-reproductive absolutely), which is also a love of and lusting after the
inanimate, as well as of and for the self; which are in the end quite the same
point. As the basis of men’s singular erotic relations with inanimate human
form, it becomes apparent that the very idea of such relations in modernity
becoming reciprocal wilfully is only conceivable because of how modernity
ED_int.indd 324 15/10/2013 5:06 PM

formulates the thing-like nature of persons and the anthropomorphic nature
of things: that is, because persons are reified and things are personified. This
is humanity’s de-enchanting and fetishism’s re-enchanting. Here, men act on
things. Things act on men. In things giving themselves up, men act on them
and, in so doing, themselves become thing-like and alienated from themselves
and others. This is unavoidable for, as Adorno and Horkheimer put it,
‘[a]nimism had endowed things with souls; industrialism makes souls into
things’.15
This is a reason to be wary of Thing Theory, despite my making use of it: in
siding with things, we do so within capitalist modernity and at our own
expense.16 Our complicity with things is at a cost to ourselves. In this, Thing
Theory must be cautious not to resume 1980s and 90s consumer culture
studies that obscured the thing’s production and the concrete labour therein,
and instead rejoiced in lifestyle choices as affirmations of self as if each one
were an act affirming freedom of will. That is, Thing Theory has the (unac-
knowledged and surely unintentional) potential to be complicit with capital-
ism’s more wilful confusing of persons and things. It could promulgate a
neo-liberal and proto-capitalist fantasy of reciprocal relations between persons
and things, between animate and inanimate things, as if the mere fact of rela-
tionality were enough to rationalise the risks and actualities of reification and
alienation, especially as they are structured and articulated by, as has been
seen, behaviours, acts and practices between persons and things.
Having sounded such warnings, soon enough the fantasy of the promise of
reciprocal relations is shattered. There is no reciprocity, no possibility of
exchange. The doll is neither willing nor ungrateful, it is indifferent to love or
yearnings or happiness. Surely this gives the lie to some of Thing Theory’s
all-purpose argument for the ontology of things and the ontology in things in
general, whether ancient or modern, its personifying and subjectivising of
things, of things as interrogative. I simply do not believe that dolls, for
instance – or stones, amulets, totems, sculptural forms, mannequins or any
thing else, for that matter – are in general sentient, have a will, a will to be
brought to life, to possess the desire for life, that they have desire and the
desire to desire.
Such reservations notwithstanding, perhaps in light of them, Thing Theory
is what enables me to write a genealogy of the erotic doll, the doll eroticised
conclusion / 325
ED_int.indd 325 15/10/2013 5:06 PM

as a modern fetish, as a thing in modernity. Thinking fetishism through Thing
Theory is what allows me to identify the two arcs of the book as the two tra-
jectories of inanimate human form’s animism in modernity. The first is that
mimetic trajectory of dolls, mannequins and artificial body parts in art, visual
and material culture. Here the doll’s will-to-verisimilitude, its sculptural logic
and integrity, is closely tied to the contents and discontents of male hetero-
sexuality, hetero-normative perversity, the hetero-normative as perverse albeit
banally so. Second is that non- or anti-mimetic trajectory exemplified by
Duchamp and Bellmer. Here inanimate human form’s communicative potential
is in distorting and the anagrammatical as self-interrogating operations of and
on the notion of time and transformation itself which generate altogether dif-
ferent logics of desire and in which, by way of intimate and erotic encounters
between men and inanimate human form, unanticipated shifts in desire take
shape, as desire itself multiplies the things it loves. It is no accident that I end
this book with chapters on Duchamp’s mannequin and Bellmer’s poupées.
While still not wholly un-tetherable from psychoanalysis, they are the event
horizon for all previous and subsequent iterations of dolls, mannequins and
artificial body parts, and of how such inanimate human form animates differ-
ently questions of the relations of male heterosexuality to the erotic, desire and
animism itself. Nothing more contemporary comes close. In fact, they may act
as reminders that the precedent for such distorting and anagrammatical
assemblages was established in the founding moments of that mimetic trajec-
tory’s will-to-verisimilitude: Praxiteles’s Aphrodite modelled on three models
and Pygmalion’s jointed statue.
Thing Theory is animism for the twenty-first century.17 It is a twenty-first-
century atomism or molecular materiality of matter. It is a vibrating matter
energised. Thing Theory brings animism back. These things’ intrinsic force as
an activity motivates inanimate human forms, or it at least demands that we
attend, as Bill Brown writes, to ‘the ontology in things’, by which he means ‘the
historical ontology congealed within objects’. I am convinced by this appeal,
rather than by any call to the consciousness, presence or sentience of things.18
Thing Theory’s proffering of evocative objects, non-human actants, quasi-
objects, factishes as ‘slightly autonomous beings’ and the ‘vital materiality’ of
a thing’s ‘thing-power’ is provocative. It is productive for the ways in which I
approach dolls, mannequins and other modern fetishes. For through the
process of their constituting historically, materially, phenomenologically and
ED_int.indd 326 15/10/2013 5:06 PM

by extension erotically, they may well be driven by an animating force or an
‘inexplicable vitality or energy’, as Jane Bennett describes the independence
of inanimate things which somehow seem to generate their own laws, demands
and desires, and as such assert themselves as things.19 By way of Thing Theory,
then, the doll as modern fetish figured erotically emerges historically and
materially, as a thing that is deeply historical and has an irreducible material-
ity. It is this historical and material particularity – the starting point for thinking
with things – that permits me to attend to how the doll works and what it
does – what and how it demands – in relation to its intimate and erotic encoun-
ters. This particularity is why their intense and reciprocal relations are so
singular. That is why attending to dolls, and the fabric of their materials, the
processes and practices of their making, and the contingencies of that labour-
ing as they are crafted, worked, formed, is what marks the distinctive nature
of the intense, erotic and reciprocal relations between persons and things or,
rather, between a person and a thing. It is the foregrounding of the doll’s
capacities and functionings – as a fetish, a thing, a commodity, a possession,
an obsession, a magic acting on us, an object of and for worship, adoration
and devotion, love, desire, lust and sex – that tells much about our fixations
on inanimate human form. Such foregrounding exposes our erotic relations
with such things, our desire, what structures such desire, and how and why
desires, articulated by way of behaviours, acts and practices, are given form.
It discloses the distinctly modern patterning of these encounters as they are
given form and present on, across and between (human and non-human)
bodies as generative of desires, tenderness and despair in our own climate of
artificial life, bio-technology and self-organising and regenerative living
systems.
This is possible when you think with things, if not side with them. This is why
I started from what the doll as a thing is, how it works, and what it does – what
the doll does, the work that it performs – rather than what and how it means.
All things thing by doing rather than meaning. This is why I tell the story of the
erotic doll, the doll eroticised, from and through the doll itself. The doll is a
stimulator. An intensifier. It presents. The doll as modern fetish emerges by
way of the erotic relations engendered by such intimate encounters between
men and inanimate human form in modernity, as a thing of such historicising,
materialising and desiring activity. The doll is a thing, a thing that things. The
thing things. The doll things.
conclusion / 327
ED_int.indd 327 15/10/2013 5:06 PM

/ notes
introduction
1 A. M. Homes, ‘A Real Doll’, in The Safety of Objects, London: Granta Books, 1990, p. 171.
2 In shifting from meaning to doing, from what things mean to what things do, I take my lead from and
evoke José Esteban Muñoz’s invocation to attend to ‘what acts and objects do . . . rather tha[n] what they
might possibly mean’. See José Esteban Muñoz, ‘Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer
Acts’, Woman & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 8: 2, 1996, p. 12.
3 As Maurizio Bettini puts it, ‘the doll is virginity’. See Maurizio Bettini, The Portrait of the Lover, trans.
Laura Gibbs, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999, p. 226.
4 See ibid., pp. 217, 218, 225–6; Max von Boehn, Dolls and Puppets, trans. Josephine Nicoll, London: George
G. Harrap & Co. Ltd, 1932, pp. 108, 150, 202–3, 204; Leslie Daiken, Children’s Toys Through the Ages,
London: Spring Books, 1963, p. 102; K. M. Elderkin, ‘Jointed Dolls in Antiquity’, American Journal of
Archaeology, 34, 1930, pp. 455–79; Asko Kauppinen, ‘The Doll: The Figure of the Doll in Culture and
Theory’, PhD thesis, University of Sterling, 2000.
Bettini and Victor J. Stoichita write (albeit differently) of antique dolls made of ivory and wood but usually
terracotta found in the Roman burials of young girls. See Bettini, Portrait of the Lover, pp. 213–27 and
Victor J. Stoichita, The Pygmalion Effect: From Ovid to Hitchcock, trans. Alison Anderson, Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 2008, pp. 11–12.
5 This final question is a slight re-working of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s still pressing question: ‘If she
[the critic] confines herself to asking the question of woman (what is woman?) she might merely be
attempting to provide an answer to the honorable male question: what does woman want? . . . The gesture
that the “historical moment” requires might be to ask the “question of man” in that special way – what
is man that the itinerary of his desire creates such a text?’ See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Displacement
and the Discourse of Women’, Displacement, Derrida, and After, ed. Mark Krupnick, Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1983, pp. 185–6.
My introduction’s title, while echoing Spivak’s question, is obviously a nod and a wink to Sigmund Freud’s
statement: ‘The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to
answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is “What does a woman want?”‘ See
Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, 2, London: Hogarth Press, 1955, p. 468.
6 On genealogical thinking see Michel Foucault, passim, and esp. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An
Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith, London: Routledge, 1970 (1966); Michel
Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith, London: Routledge, 1972 (1969);
Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Prac-
tice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. D. F. Bouchard, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977, pp.
139–64.
7 Definitions of these terms vary and are often interchangeable, as I shall discuss in Ch. 1.
8 ’Heterosexuality’ entered the English language via C. G. Chaddock’s 1892 translation of Richard von Krafft-
Ebbing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1886). It entered the American language also in 1892 via Dr James G.
Kiernan, ‘Responsibility in Sexual Perversion’, Chicago Medical Recorder, 3, May 1892, pp. 185–210. On
Kiernan see Jonathan Ned Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality, New York: Plume Book/Penguin Books,
1995, pp. 19–21.
9 In certain ways this book’s conceptualisation is akin to Richard Dyer’s book White, in which he learns from
the lessons of post-colonial theory, its impact on film studies and on the increased focus in the 1980s on
questions of representations of race, blackness and so on, and turns that learning on that which rarely
seemed to be discussed in post-colonialism: whiteness itself. As with whiteness, there is something
intriguing about how male heterosexuality and its practices are, from their invention, intrinsically poly-
328 / notes
ED_int.indd 328 15/10/2013 5:06 PM

morphously perverse and yet have a similar invisibility and un-remarkability to them. See Richard Dyer,
White: Essays on Race and Culture, London: Routledge, 1997.
10 Donald Kuspit, ‘The Modern Fetish’, in Signs of Psyche in Modern and Postmodern Art, Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1993, pp. 149–62. I have never been clear what it is that makes Kuspit’s fetish specifically
modern but I think it concerns a distinction between or a coming together of a soft pre-psychoanalytic
psycho-sexual understanding of the fetish combined with, let’s call it, an anthropological one, and how
modern artists who are familiar with these mechanisms of fetishism can thus utilise them in their art
making.
11 See Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, Creativity and Perversion (1985), cited in Kuspit, Signs of Psyche, p. 154.
12 It is too restrictive to fall back onto knee-jerk psychoanalytic assumptions that the (doll as) fetish is simply,
or in any simple way, a surrogate, a security prop, a double, a phallic or penis substitute, a disavowal and
acknowledgement of sexual difference, that it is uncanny, Surreal, sentient, dead and so on. Throughout
this book, I shall be looking to circumvent/argue against the idea of the doll as symptom.
13 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Thing’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter, New York: Harper-
Collins, 2001 (1971), pp. 172, 175.
14 Since about 2001, ‘things’ have come to the fore in new ways. See e.g. Jane Bennett, ‘The Force of Things:
Steps Toward an Ecology of Matter’, Political Theory, 32, 2004, pp. 347–72; Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter:
A Political Ecology of Things, Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 2010; Bill Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, Critical
Inquiry, 28: 1, Autumn 2001, pp. 1–22; Bill Brown, ‘Reification, Reanimation, and the American Uncanny’,
Critical Inquiry, Winter 2006, pp. 175–207; Fiona Candlin and Raiford Guins, eds, The Object Reader,
London: Routledge, 2009; Steven Connor, ‘Thinking Things’, http://www.stevenconnor.com/thinkingthings/,
2009; Lorraine Daston, ed., Things That Talk: Object Lessons for Art and Science, New York: Zone Books,
2007; Miguel Tamen, Friends of Interpretable Objects, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004;
Sherry Turkle, ed., Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007. These
thinkers, and others including Peter Galison, Ian Hacking and Bruno Latour, use numerous terms to
articulate the animistic impulse at the heart of thing-ology: evocative objects (Turkle), non-human actants,
quasi-objects and quasi-subjects, ‘factishes’ as ‘slightly autonomous beings’ (Latour, On the Modern Cult
of the Factish Gods, Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 2010, p. 35), material agency (Bennett) and so
on. Such covert anthropomorphism (driven by a will, an energy, a vitality, a vital materiality) takes a beauti-
fully florid form in Bennett’s call for attention to what she calls ‘thing-power’. At the centre of her argument
is the affirmation that ‘so-called inanimate things have a life of their own, that deep within them is an
inexplicable vitality or energy, a moment of independence from and resistance to us and to other things.
A kind of thing-power’. See Bennett, ‘Force of Things’, p. 349; Jane Bennett, ‘THING POWER: Toward an
Ecological Materialism’, http://webdev.boras.se/download/jane_bennett.pdf, July 2002.
Much of this would not have been possible without Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things:
Commodities in Cultural Perspective, Cambridge University Press, 1988; Susan Stewart, On Longing:
Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Durham, N.C: Duke University Press,
1993; and W. J .T. Mitchell who uses Coleridge’s phrase ‘companionable forms’ to distinguish totems
(which can be conversed with) from idols and fetishes (which are to be worshipped). See W. J. T. Mitchell,
Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, University of Chicago Press, 1986, p. 114.
15 Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, p. 4.
16 Ibid., p. 3.
17 Ibid., p. 5.
18 Ibid., p. 4.
19 Ibid., p. 5.
20 Ibid., p. 7.
21 Ibid., p. 9.
22 Here Brown writes of the need to attend not to the ‘biography of things, but . . . the ontology in things, by
which I mean the historical ontology congealed within objects’ (emphasis in the original). See Brown,
‘Reification, Reanimation, and the American Uncanny’, p. 183.
23 Heidegger, ‘The Thing’, p. 169.
24 Ibid., p. 171.
25 Ibid., p. 175.
26 Bennett, Vibrant Matter.
27 Heidegger, ‘The Thing’, p. 179 (emphasis in the original).
notes / 329
ED_int.indd 329 21/10/2013 3:25 PM

28 See Lynda Nead, The Haunted Gallery, Painting, Photography, Film c. 1900, New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2007, p. 45.
29 The Greek kinema is also the root for that most moving (visually, emotionally) of modern technological
public spectacles, ‘cinema’. See Giuliana Bruno, ‘Cultural Cartography, Materiality and the Fashioning of
Emotion’, in Marquard Smith, Visual Culture Studies: Interviews with Key Thinkers, London: Sage, 2008,
pp. 149, 159–60. See also Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film, London:
Verso, 2002.
30 ’I know very well, but all the same . . .’ is a phrase taken from Octave Mannoni, ‘Je sais bien, mais quand
même . . .’, which exposes fetishism as a perpetual oscillation between two logically incompatible beliefs:
woman is and is not castrated. At this point, I am suggesting that, as with all beliefs, a similar structure
of recognition and disavowal lies at the heart of the myth of Pygmalion and his statue: ‘I know very well
that the statue is only a representation, that it doesn’t have a soul, that it isn’t sentient, that it doesn’t
come to life, that it can’t be brought to life, and that it doesn’t possess the desire for life, but all the
same . . .’ See Octave Mannoni, ‘Je sais bien, mais quand même’, in Clefs pour l’imaginaire ou l’autre
scène, Paris: Seuil, 1969, pp. 9–33; trans. as ‘I know very well, but all the same . . .’, trans. Wendy A.
Hester, Comparative Literature 225, Spring 2003, pp. 85–100. See also Naomi Shor, ‘Fetishism’, in Eliza-
beth Wright, ed., Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary, Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.:
Blackwell, 1992, p. 114.
31 See Michelle E. Bloom, Waxworks: A Cultural Obsession, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p.
42, and J. Hillis Miller, Versions of Pygmalion, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990, p. 5.
The difference between Pygmalion and Narcissus, for Bloom at least, is that while Narcissus ‘progresses
from unwitting desire for himself to the realization that he is “on fire with love for . . . [his] own self”’,
Pygmalion, on the other hand, ‘having sculpted the object of his desire from ivory, knows what it is, even
if he doesn’t necessary behave as if he does’. See Bloom, Waxworks, p. 41.
32 This connection between the story of Pygmalion and Pygmalionism has been made, albeit differently, by
Nead, Haunted Gallery, pp. 58–60, and Cynthia Ann Moya, ‘Artificial Vaginas and Sex Dolls: An Erotological
Investigation’, PhD thesis, Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, San Francisco, 2006, pp. 35–48.
33 Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1992, p. 229, and Thomas W. Laqueur, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation,
New York: Zone Books, 2003.
1/ visions of pygmalionism

1 Xenophon, The Memorabilia, Bk 3, Ch. 10, 97–9.

2 Johann Gottfried Herder, ‘Von der Bildhauerkunst fürs Gefühl (Gedanken aus dem Garten zu Versailles)’,
Sämmtliche Werke, 8: 88, in Sculpture: Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalion’s Creative
Dream (1778), ed. and trans. Jason Gaiger, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002, p. 25.
3 Maurizio Bettini, The Portrait of the Lover, trans. Laura Gibbs, Berkeley: University of California Press,
1999, p. 147.
4 Jacques Ferrand, ‘Traité de l’essence et guérson de l’amour ou mélancholie érotique’, 1610, in Bettini,
Portrait of the Lover, pp. 63–4.
5 Bettini, Portrait of the Lover, p. 2.
6 Denis Diderot is here writing on Étienne Maurice Falconet’s 1763 group sculpture Pygmalion et Galatée.
See Diderot on Art, trans. John Goodman, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995, vol. 1, pp.
245ff.
7 George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion (1916), Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1946, p. 157.
8 The reference is to Persius in Satires, 2. 69f, from Lactantius, Divinae institutiones, 2.4.12ff, quoted,
somewhat differently in both George L. Hersey, Falling in Love with Statues: Artificial Humans from
Pygmalion to the Present, University of Chicago Press, 2009, p. 138, and Bettini, Portrait of the Lover, p.
220.
9 Trismegistus: ‘The gods have souls and bodies; the souls are demons and the bodies are statues’. Quoted
by Augustine, City of God, 8. 26, cited in Hersey, Falling in Love with Statues, p. 112 and passim. See Plato,
Meno (380 bce), trans. Benjamin Jowett, for a conversation between Meno and Socrates on ‘images of
Daedalus’ which ‘require to be fastened in order to keep them, and if they are not fastened they will play
330 / notes
ED_int.indd 330 15/10/2013 5:06 PM

truant and run away’; Pindar, Seventh Olympiad; and Pliny’s discussion of Praxiteles’s sculpture of Aph-
rodite in his Natural History to which I shall return. See references also in Euripides (Alcestis, 348ff),
Homer (Iliad, 6.297ff), Pausanias (Description of Greece, 2.4.5), Strabo (Geography, 6.1.14), Hermes Tris-
megistus (Asclepius). See also Sarah P. Morris, Daidalos and the Origins of Greek Art, Princeton University
Press, 1992.
10 See Hersey, Falling in Love with Statues, p. 134. See also David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies
in the History and Theory of Response, University of Chicago Press, 1989, p. 293, and Bonnie Roos, ‘Refin-
ing the Artist into Existence: Pygmalion’s Statue, Stephen’s Villanelle and the Venus of Praxiteles’, Com-
parative Literature Studies, 38: 2, 2001, p. 95.
The automaton was not, then, the precursor to the robot, a word hailing from Karel Čapek’s 1920 play
R.U.R. which gives us the word ‘robot’ from Czech robata, meaning ‘forced labour’, from rab, slave. In
R.U.R., robots are biological entities rather than mechanical devices. On puppets and marionettes see
e.g. Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001, and
Harold B. Segel, Pinocchio’s Progeny: Puppets, Marionettes, Automatons, and Robots in Modernist and
Avant-Garde Drama, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.
11 Homer, Iliad (c. 8th century bce), The Iliad of Homer, Bks 10–24, trans. Alexander Pope (1715), ed. Maynard
Mack, London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1967, line 491, p. 345. While Aphrodite is given rather scant attention
here, she is key to the Pygmalion myth. The prevalence in classical antiquity of statues of Aphrodite, the
cult and worship of Aphrodite, is a context out of which come many of the origins of modern considerations
of love, sexuality, eroticism and procreation. See e.g. Hersey, Falling in Love with Statues, esp. pp. 22–35.
12 Iliad of Homer, trans. Alexander Pope, Bk 18, Edinburgh: printed for A. Kincaid and W. Creech, and J.
Balfour, 1773, lines 487–90, p. 32. Hephaestus also makes an ivory shoulder for Pelops to replace his
original one that had been eaten by Demeter at Tantalus’s banquet.
13 See W. J. Verdenius, Pindar’s Seventh Olympian Ode: A Commentary, Amsterdam and London: North-
Holland Publishing, 1972, p. 22. Another originary instance of the inanimate becoming animate is the
Talmud’s account (Tractate Sanhedrin 38b) of the creation of Adam, who is crafted from collecting dust,
which is then worked as mud or clay into a shapeless mass (Hebrew, ‘Golem’, ‘my unshaped form’; Yiddish,
‘goylem’), and who later has a soul infused into him. See also n. 40 below on Prometheus.
14 See Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe, New
York: Zone Books, 2011. As Walker Bynam writes (p. 125), in the late Middle Ages ‘[p]eople behaved as if
images were what they represented. To materialize was to animate.’
15 Torriano’s lute player is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
16 See Claudia Springer, Electronic Eros: Bodies and Desire in the Postindustrial Age, London: Athlone Press,
1996, pp. 28–9; Gaby Wood, Living Dolls: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life, London: Faber
and Faber, 2002, pp. 3–5.
17 On Jacques de Vaucanson see Jessica Riskin, ‘The Defecating Duck, or, The Ambiguous Origins of Artificial
Life’, Critical Inquiry, Summer 2003, 29: 4, pp. 599–633, and Jessica Riskin, ‘Eighteenth-Century Wetware’,
Representations, 83, Summer 2003, pp. 97–125.
18 Gaby Wood, Living Dolls, pp. xiv–xv, writes that many decades after Pierre and Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz’s
harpsichord player was crafted, Mary Shelley passed through the town in which their ‘Magical Lady’ was
shown, may well have seen it and, two years later, wrote Frankenstein.
19 This internal phonographic mechanism is an aural precursor to the rotating visual panorama that Hans
Bellmer had hoped to introduce into the belly of his first poupée in 1933.
20 Letter from A. B. Dick to Edison, cited in Wood, Living Dolls, p. 148. Thousands of dolls were manufactured
but few were sold. Their whereabouts remain a mystery, rumours suggesting that they were destroyed by
Edison himself or perhaps buried. See ibid., p. 154.
21 On Pygmalion see e.g. Bettini, Portrait of the Lover; Michelle E. Bloom, ‘Pygmalionesque Delusions and
Illusions of Movement: Animation from Hoffmann to Truffaut’, Comparative Literature, 52: 4, Fall 2000,
pp. 291–320; Michelle E. Bloom, Waxworks: A Cultural Obsession, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2003, pp. 37–111; John Elsner, ‘Visual Mimesis and the Myth of the Real: Ovid’s Pygmalion as
Viewer’, Ramus, 20: 2, 1991, pp. 154–68; Freedberg, Power of Images; Anne Geisler-Szmulewicz, Le Mythe
de Pygmalion au XIXe siècle: Pour une approche de la coalescence des mythes, Paris: Honoré Champion,
1999; Alan H. F. Griffin, ‘Ovid’s Metamorphoses’, Greece and Rome, April 1977, 24: 1, pp. 57–70; Kenneth
Gross, The Dream of the Moving Statue, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992; Francis Haskell and
Nicholas Penny, The Most Beautiful Statues: The Taste of the Antique, Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 1981;
notes / 331
ED_int.indd 331 15/10/2013 5:06 PM

Hersey, Falling in Love with Statues; Barbara Johnson, Persons and Things, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2008; Essaka Joshua, Pygmalion and Galatea: The History of a Narrative in English
Literature, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001; J. Hillis Miller, Versions of Pygmalion, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1990; Elizabeth C. Mansfield, Too Beautiful to Picture: Zeuxis, Myth, and Mimesis, Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007; A. R. Sharrock, ‘The Love of Creation’, Ramus, 20: 2, 1991,
pp. 154–68; A. R. Sharrock, ‘Womanufacture’, The Journal of Roman Studies, 8, 1991, pp. 136–49. Nigel J.
Spivey, Understanding Greek Sculpture, London: Thames & Hudson, 1997; Deborah Tarn Steiner, Images
in Mind: Statues in Archaic and Classical Greek Literature and Thought, Princeton University Press, 2001,
pp. 185–250; Victor I. Stoichita, The Pygmalion Effect: From Ovid to Hitchcock, trans. Alison Anderson,
Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008; Jane Thomas, ‘“The Earthly Realization of this
Formless Desire”: Victorian Revisions of the Pygmalion Myth’, in Richard Pearson, ed., The Victorians and
the Ancient World: Archaeology and Classicism in Nineteenth Century Culture, Cambridge Scholars Press,
2006, pp. 162–75.
22 See references in n. 21 above. See also Jason Q. von Ehrenkrook, ‘Sculpting Idolatry in Flavian Rome: (An)
iconic Rhetoric in the Writings of Flavius Sosephus’, PhD, University of Michigan, 2009 (http://deepblue.
lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/63697/1/jvonehr_1.pdf; accessed 18 August 2010). See also Geoffrey
Miles, ed., Classical Mythology in English Literature: A Critical Anthology, London: Routledge, 1999, pp.
332–449.
23 I am using two translations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. A. D. Melville, Oxford
University Press, 1986, and Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. David Raeburn, London: Penguin, 2004. For line
numbers I shall refer to the former as ‘M’ and the latter as ‘R’.
24 ’[M]oulded by caresses’ is a phrase used by Auguste Rodin to describe somewhat erotically in his encoun-
ter with the ‘Venus dei Medici’ the levels of detail that account for its realism. It transpires that Rodin was
wrong to exalt it so: it was a copy. See Elsner, ‘Visual Mimesis and the Myth of the Real’, pp. 154–68.
25 This is no surprise since at this time vision’s power was governed by the ‘laws’ of extramission, where
rays of light were emitted by or emanated from the eyes; a perfect instance of sight as touch and a propo-
sition that was only finally overturned in the 11th century by the Arabian physicist Ibn al-Heytham’s proof
of intromission in his Book of Optics (1021). See David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-kindi to
Kepler, University of Chicago Press, 1976.
26 Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Treatise on the Sensations (1754), trans. Geraldine Carr, Manchester: Clina-
men Press, 2000; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘Pygmalion scène lyrique’, in Oeuvres complètes (1762/70),
ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1961, vol. 2, pp. 1224–31. See
also Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust, New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979, passim; S. M. Weber, ‘The Aesthetics of Rousseau’s Pyg-
malion’, MLN, 83: 6, 1968, pp. 900–18; Gross, Dream of the Moving Statue, pp. 119 n. 7, 227–9; Mary D.
Sheriff, ‘Passionate Spectators: On Enthusiasm, Nymphomania, and the Imagined Tableau’, Huntington
Library Quarterly, 60: 1/2, 1997, pp. 51–84; Mary D. Sheriff, Moved by Love: Inspired Artists and Deviant
Women in Eighteenth-Century France, University of Chicago Press, 2004, pp. 125–200, esp. 181. I am
borrowing heavily here from Sheriff.
27 Rousseau, ‘Pygmalion scène lyrique’, cited in Sheriff, Moved by Love, p. 182. On Ovid, tactility and the
ekphrastic nature of such touching, Hersey writes of ‘the palpability of living tissue transferred from stone
to human flesh’. See Hersey, Falling in Love with Statues, p. 96. On this see also Stoichita, Pygmalion
Effect, pp. 14–20.
28 Stoichita, Pygmalion Effect, p. 5.
29 Ovid’s text intimates that Pygmalion’s probable offering when he prays to Venus is one of the slain heifers
with gold in their horns and snowy white necks. Stoichita proposes that the thing that ‘passes into the
ivory statue in order to animate it’ is the heifer’s soul. This is one of many ways in which metamorphosis
as a process is a transformation and not a substitution. See ibid., p. 16.
It is Aphrodite, the goddess of love, not Pygmalion himself, that breathes life into the statue and thus,
as Michelle Bloom writes, ‘plays an instrumental role in the act of creation’. See Bloom, Waxworks, p. 37.
I suggest that there is available both a lesbian interpretation of this tale and an ‘inter-species’ (deity-thing,
bypassing the human altogether) ‘take’ on it too.
30 Bettini, Portrait of the Lover, p. 147.
31 The statue is anonymous. It was not until much later on that it acquired a name, ‘Galatea’, probably in
the late 18th century. See Helen H. Law, ‘The Name Galatea in the Pygmalion Myth’, The Classical Journal,
332 / notes
ED_int.indd 332 15/10/2013 5:06 PM

27, 1932, pp. 337–42; Meyer Reinhold, ‘The Naming of Pygmalion’s Animated Statue’, The Classical
Journal, 66: 4, 1971, pp. 316–19; Bloom, Waxworks, p. 39. A character called Galatea does appear in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses, in Bk 8, but she is a sea nymph.
32 This is a point also made by Hillis Miller, Versions of Pygmalion, p. 11.
33 There are of course earlier re-workings of the Pygmalion story, the best-known in the medieval period
coming in the poem La Roman de la Rose, written in two parts across the 13th century first by Guillaume
de Lorris (c. 1230) and later Jean de Meun (c. 1275). See Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The
Romance of the Rose, trans. Frances Horgan, Oxford University Press, 1994. Indeed, there is no iconog-
raphy of Pygmalion and his statue until the 13th century. See Stoichita, Pygmalion Effect, pp. 21–54.
Stoichita notes (p. 46), fascinatingly I think in the light of my efforts in this book to track how inanimate
form becomes the subject of/subject to energy, vitality, motion, that (although this is not quite accurate
chronologically) the period in which de Meun was writing was also the period in which both the mechanical
(but post-hydro-powered) clock and the perpetual motion machine are invented.
34 For more on the story of Pygmalion and his statue in the Middle Ages and on into the Enlightenment, see
Stoichita, Pygmalion Effect, passim, and Sheriff, Moved by Love, esp. pp. 125–200. For Stoichita (pp.
111–25), the 18th century’s ‘take’ on the story of Pygmalion and his statue is encapsulated in the moment
of the statue’s ‘step’ away from its plinth, as the moment that matter moves, and of the particular nature
of that movement.
35 Hersey, Falling in Love with Statues, pp. 99–106. Such discussions from the 18th century of dead matter
and the power of matter’s resurrection, of animate matter, of matter animating, persisted into the late
19th century, although they assumed a new magical mimetic form: as ectoplasm, the spiritual energy or
life force or soul of the medium. Thanks to Leigh Wilson for conversations on ectoplasm. See Leigh Wilson,
Modernism and Magic: Experiments with Spiritualism, Mysticism and the Occult, Edinburgh University
Press, 2012.
36 Denis Diderot, ‘Nerf’, in Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné, 10: 109, in Stoichita, Pygmalion Effect, p.
147. I have found similar sentiments in Diderot’s Encyclopédie but under the heading ‘Animal Soul’ (vol.
1, 1751, pp. 343–53).
38 Ibid., p. 153.
39 See Hersey, Falling in Love with Statues, pp. 99–106. On Pygmalion and electricity see this: ‘The miracle
is taking place, life has penetrated into the heart of the statue, and is spreading throughout her beautiful
body . . . The statue is coming to life, her cheeks are tinted with a faint red blush. Her heart is beating.
The electrical charge has been felt’. Anon., Notice sur la Galatée de M. Girodet-Trioson avec gravure au
trait, Paris: Pillet, 1819, pp. 4–5, cited in Wettlaufer, Pen vs. Paintbrush, pp. 126–7, quoted in Stoichita,
Pygmalion Effect, p. 154. As Dr Frankenstein says: ‘“I became myself capable of bestowing life upon life-
less matter”’. Shelley, Frankenstein, ch. 4. She refers to Frankenstein as her ‘hideous progeny’. Ibid.,
‘Introduction’ (2nd ed., 1831).
40 Shelley’s subtitle refers to another Western creation myth, that of Prometheus. While appearing first in
Hesiod (Theogony, lines 507–616, and Works and Days, lines 42–105) and then Aeschylus’s Prometheus
Bound, it is not until later Greek and Roman retellings (by Sappho, Plato, Aesop and Ovid) that Prometheus
is positioned as central to the creation of the human race by making or sculpting clay or silt statues that
came alive, thereby transforming base matter into living entities; and amplifying their wherewithal by
bringing them fire. In e.g. Ovid’s Metamorphosis Bk 1, Prometheus modelled the first man ‘in the image
of the gods, masters of the Universe’. In one version of the myth, it is because Prometheus is in love with
his statue of Pandora which the gods refuse to animate that he steals Cupid’s torch. See also Francis
Bacon, ‘Prometheus or the State of Man’, in The Wisdom of the Ancients (1619).
41 Champfleury, ‘L’Homme aux figures de cire’, in Les Excentriques, Paris: Michel Lévy, 1857,
pp. 3–20. Michelle Bloom has interesting things to say on both Champfleury’s novel and Flaubert’s
Madame Bovary, where in the former ‘“intercourse” [between Diart and Julie] is nothing more than a form
of masturbation’ and in the latter, where it is the lifelikeness of the hairdresser’s wax figure that stimulates
his desire. See Bloom, Waxworks, pp. 68, 70.
42 Charles Villiers de L’Isle Adam, The Eve of the Future, trans. Marilyn Gaddis Rose, Kansas: Coronada
Press, 1981. On The Eve of the Future see e.g. Charles Bernheimer, ‘Huysmans: Writing Against (Female)
Nature’, in Susan Rubin Suleiman, ed., The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives,
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986, pp. 373–86; Andreas Huyssen, ‘The Vamp and the
notes / 333
ED_int.indd 333 15/10/2013 5:06 PM

Machine: Technology and Sexuality in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis’, New German Critique, 24–5, 1981–2, pp.
221–37; Annette Michelson, ‘On the Eve of the Future: The Reasonable Facsimile and the Philosophical
Toy’, October, 29, 1984, pp. 3–20; Peter Wollen, ‘Cinema/Americanism/the Robot’, New Formations, 8,
Summer 1989, pp. 7–34; and Wood, Living Doll, pp. xvii, 125–54.
See also Oscar Wilde’s ode to a lover of a statue, ‘Charmides’ (1890); the poet John Davidson’s Earl
Lavender, illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley (1895); the Futurist founder Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s drama
‘La donna è mobile (Poupées électriques)’ (1909) with its puppet Maria who is pumped with electricity to
get her worked up; and Shaw’s Pygmalion (performed in 1913, published in 1916), originally performed
with marionettes, as well as tales of transformation by George Eliot, Walter Pater and Henry James. See
Richard Jenkyns, Dignity and Decadence, London: Fontana Press, 1992, pp. 128–42. Many thanks to Alex
Warwick for bringing this book to my attention.
During the final drafting of this book, a previously undiscovered series of lost short stories by Daphne
du Maurier were found. One is entitled ‘The Doll’, written around 1928. It is mentioned by du Maurier in
her autobiography ‘Myself When Young’ but was unknown and unread until recently. It was found in The
Editor Regrets, ed. George Joseph, London: Michael Joseph, 1937, a collection of stories by authors
popular by the 1930s who had been rejected earlier in their careers by editors and magazines. In ‘The
Doll’, a man discovers that the woman with whom he is in love is a mechanical sex doll. Not only that, it
is in fact a male mechanical sex doll. My book was too far gone to engage more fully with du Maurier’s
short story. See Daphne du Maurier, The Doll: Short Stories, London: Vintage, 2011, p. 127. As much as
the literary community would like to suggest otherwise, that a story such as this would be written in 1928
is no real surprise.
43 See also e.g. Emmanuel-Jean Népomucène de Ghendt’s illustrated series for Boureau-Deslandes’s mate-
rialist Pygmalion; ou, La statue animée (1741); Thomas Rowlandson’s series of pornographic prints (1800);
Honoré Daumier’s ‘Pygmalion’ from his Histoire ancienne series of lithographs (1842) where the sculpture
colours herself to life. See Alison Smith, The Victorian Nude: Sexuality, Morality and Art, Manchester
University Press, 1996, and Alison Smith, ed., Exposed: The Victorian Nude, London: Tate Publishing, 2001.
David Freedberg attributes the popularity of visual renderings of Pygmalion and his statue in part to its
literary rendering in Balzac’s Le chef-d’oeuvre inconnu (Frenhofer: ‘Cette femme n’est pas une créature,
c’est une création’) and Zola’s L’oeuvre. See Freedberg, Power of Images, pp. 341–2. See also Jenkyns,
Dignity and Decadence.
44 See Wood, Living Dolls, pp. 178–81.
45 Bloom, ‘Pygmalionesque Delusions and Illusion of Movement’, p. 306.
46 Nead, Haunted Gallery, p. 67. This is also the argument of Bloom, ‘Pygmalionesque Delusions and Illu-
sions of Movement’, pp. 291–320.
47 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin,
Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002 (Ger. ed. 1982), p. 559, S9a, 2.
48 Charles Bernheimer, ‘Fetishism and Decadence: Salome’s Severed Heads’, in Emily Apter and William
Pietz, eds, Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993, p. 63. As examples
of ‘the primacy of artifice over nature’ in decadent aesthetics, and I would say modernity more broadly,
Bernheimer quotes Baudelaire’s ‘Éloge du maquillage’ (1863): ‘Woman performs a kind of duty when she
endeavors to appear magical and supernatural: she should dazzle men and charm them, she is an idol
who should cover herself with gold so as to be adored’; he also writes that Baudelaire ‘praises makeup
because it permits woman to construct herself as a fetish, as a dazzling, shiny surface that covers over
and obscures the corrupt sexual nature beneath. “Woman is natural, that is abominable”, Baudelaire noted
in ‘Mon coeur mis à nu” ([Oeuvres complètes, Paris: Gallimard, 1961, 1272)’. For more on modernity’s
primacy of artifice over nature see Chs 2 and 4 below.
49 See e.g. Smith, Exposed, p. 42.
50 On the invention of ‘normalcy’ see Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the
Body, New York: Verso, 1995; Lennard J. Davis, ‘Constructing Normalcy: The Bell Curve, the Novel, and
the Invention of the Disabled Body in the Nineteenth Century’, in Lennard J. Davis, ed., The Disability
Studies Reader, London: Routledge, 1997, pp. 9–28, p. 10.
51 Iwan Bloch, The Sexual Life of Our Times: In Its Relations To Modern Civilization, trans. M. Eden Paul
(from the 6th Ger. ed.), London: Rebman Ltd, 1908, on fetishism and perversion esp. pp. 611–70; Iwan
Bloch, Anthropological and Ethnological Studies in the Strangest Sex Acts in Modes of Love of All Races
334 / notes
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Illustrated, New York: Falstaff Press, 1935, hereafter Strangest Sex Acts. Gaby Wood refers in passing to
Bloch on Pygmalionism; see Wood, Living Dolls, pp. 132–3.
52 Bloch, Sexual Life of Our Times, p. 648.
53 Ibid. On such animated statues, tableaux vivants and poses plastiques see Gail Marshall, Actresses on
the Victorian Stage: Feminine Performance and the Galatea Myth, Cambridge University Press, 1998; Barry
J. Faulk, Music Hall and Modernity: The Late-Victorian Discovery of Popular Culture, Athens: Ohio Uni-
versity Press, 2004; Margaret Mayhew, ‘Just Act Natural: Models, Mannequins and Muses’, part ii http://
sydney.edu.au/arts/publications/philament/issue9_pdfs/MAYHEW_JustActNatural2.pdf); Nead, Haunted
Gallery, esp. pp. 69–82; and Aura Satz, ‘Tableaux Vivants: Inside the Statue’, in Aura Satz and Jon Wood,
eds, Articulate Objects: Voice, Sculpture and Performance, Bern: Peter Lang, 2009, pp. 158–81.
55 Bloch, Strangest Sex Acts, p. 137.
56 Ibid., p. 136. Bloch refers to a conversation in which Arthur Schopenhauer speaks of individuals ‘“moved
to real erotic frenzy at the sight of some ancient statues of nudes”’. See Schopenhauer’s Gespräche und
Selbstgespräche, Berlin, 1902, in Bloch, Strangest Sex Acts, pp. 136–7.
57 Bloch, Sexual Life of Our Times, pp. 647–8. Bloch, Krafft-Ebing and Ellis all connected Pygmalionism and
necrophilia, men wanting to fuck statues and men wanting to fuck corpses. This analogy is based both
on the similarities of the status of the object itself (i.e. that they are cold, that they are ‘raped’ and that
they are completely ‘defenceless’ objects [Strangest Sexual Acts, p. 135]) and, as noted above, the disposi-
tion of the perpetrator: sadistic, masochistic, fetishistic.
59 Ibid. Bloch refers to Krafft-Ebing’s reporting of this instance from the newspaper L’Événement (4 March
1877). Through no fault of its own, the Venus de Milo was tried, convicted and condemned for nudity in
Mannheim, 1853. See Lennard J. Davis, ‘Nude Venuses, Medusa’s Body, and Phantom Limbs: Disability
and Visuality’, in D. T. Mitchell and S. L. Snyder, eds, The Body and Physical Difference, Ann Arbor: Uni-
versity of Michigan Press, 1997, pp. 51–70. Such condemnation is due not to its part in a sexual encounter
with a Pygmalionist but rather, one can guess, because of its potential to incite such lust.
60 Bloch, Strangest Sexual Acts, p. 140.
61 Ibid., p. 142.
62 Ibid. , p. 139.
63 Bloch, Sexual Life of Our Times, pp. 411–13.
65 Ibid.
67 Bloch goes on (ibid., p. 648): ‘The most astonishing thing in this department is an erotic romance (“La
Femme Endormie,” by Madame B.; Paris, 1899), the love heroine of which is such an artificial doll, which,
as the author in the introduction tells us, can be employed for all possible sexual artificialities, without,
like a living woman, resisting them in any way. The book is an incredibly intricate and detailed exposition
of this area.’ This erotic romance, certainly pornographic, includes the most elaborate account I have
come across of the interior workings of an inanimate human form as a bio-technological machinic system
with details of how it is fitted with basins, boxes, cylinders and ducts, to ‘permit the circulation of all sorts
of products’ that enable it better to simulate the real. The romance is translated and reproduced in Phyllis
Kronhausen and Eberhard Kronhausen, Erotic Fantasies: A Study of the Sexual Imagination, New York:
Grove Press, 1969, pp. 362–82, esp. 363–4.
68 Cynthia Ann Moya, ‘Artificial Vaginas and Sex Dolls: An Erotological Investigation’, PhD thesis, San Fran-
cisco: Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, 2006, p. 35.
69 Bloch, Sexual Life of Our Times, p. 411, and Moya, ‘Artificial Vaginas’, p. 38. Moya mentions Schidrowitz’s
The Custom-History of Vice, which, even more than Bloch, sub-divides Pygmalionism further, differentiat-
ing Puppenkult (doll cult or doll love) from statuenliebe (statue love). See Ergänzungswerk zur Sittenge-
schichte des Lasters, 1927, pp. 211–12, in Moya, ‘Artificial Vaginas’, p. 44.
70 Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, authorised English adaptation of the 12th Ger. ed. by F. J.
Rebman, New York: Rebman Company, 1906, esp. pp. 468–614 (http://archive.org/stream/psychopathiasex-
u00krafuoft/psychopathiasexu00krafuoft_djvu.txt) cites Paul Moreau’s Abérrations du sens génésique
(1880) as the source for numerous cases, ancient and modern, of what became known as Pygmalionism.
notes / 335
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71 The text continues: ‘At any rate, these cases stand in etiological relation with abnormally intense libido
and defective virility or courage, or lack of opportunity for normal sexual gratification.’ Ibid., p. 525.
72 Ibid., p. 221.
73 Ibid., pp. 17–18.
74 Ibid., p. 247.
75 Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. 5, 1927 (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13614
[n.p.]).
76 Ibid.
77 Ibid.
78 Ellis affirmed that Greek statues were tinted and thus more lifelike. (A popular contrary argument was
that Greek statues, because they are white, are ‘abstract’ and thus more in keeping with the Greek ideal.
Coloured statues are preferred, it was argued, by ‘uncivilised races’.) While there is almost a consensus
that Praxiteles and others (e.g. Phidias) polychromed their statues, compelling research by Christine
Mitchell Havelock does its best to establish that Praxiteles did not. See Christine Mitchell Havelock, The
Aphrodite of Knidos and Her Successors: A Historical Review of the Female Nude in Greek Art, Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2007 (1995), pp. 51–2.
79 Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Sexual Selection in Man (1927), Honolulu: University Press
of the Pacific, 2001, p. 188.
80 Those repeated ancient stories include two from Athanaeus, who recommends without irony that men
sleep with statues if their wives are frigid, and who describes the use by Cleisophus of Selymbria of raw
meat as a masturbatory aid to consummate his desire for a too-cold statue, already mentioned. See
Athanaeus, 13.605f, cited in Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex. See also Benjamin Tarnowsky,
The Sexual Instinct and its Morbid Manifestations from the Double Standpoint of Jurisprudence and
Psychiatry (1885), trans. W. C. Costello and Alfred Allinson, Paris: Charles Carrington, 1898, pp. 84–5, cited
in Nead, Haunted Gallery, p. 59.
There are more. Euripides in Alcestis (348–52) writes of Admetus who after his wife’s death commissions
a statue of her which he treats like a living being; he also mentions Laodamia who apparently does the
same after her husband’s demise. There is also reference to a pilgrimage to Delphi where a pilgrim
embraces a male statue in the Temple of Apollo, has a tryst and then leaves behind a garland as an offer-
ing. See Bettini, Portrait of the Lover, p. 62. Further references to statues inspiring passion can be found
in Pliny, Natural History, 36.12f (also 7.127), Valerius Maximus, Facta et dicta memorablia, 8.2 ext. 4;
Arnobius, Adversus nationes, 6.22; Lucian, Imagines, 4; Clement of Alexandria, Protrepticus, 4.57; and
Philostratus, Vita Apollonii, 6. 40.
82 Pliny, Natural History, 36.20–21. Also see Mitchell Havelock, Aphrodite of Knidos, p. 10.
83 Ibid., p. 48.
84 Ibid., p. 62.
85 While most commentators make much of the ‘in the round-ness’ of Praxiteles’s Knidian Aphrodite, Antonio
Corso writes that ‘from a formal point of view . . . [it] is conceived for viewing from the front and back, but
not from the side’. See Antonio Corso, The Art of Praxiteles II: The Mature Years, Roma: L’Erma di Bretsch-
neider, 2007, p. 16.
86 Since bodies exist in time and space, embodying and articulating this capturing of the sudden motion
pinpoints what the philosopher Lessing called the ‘pregnant moment’, a portraying of the moment that
frees the imagination; note the simultaneity of the addition of imagination and that the work triggers the
imagination that brings it to life. See Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon, trans. Rt. Hon. Sir Robert
Philimore, London: Routledge & Sons, 1776. See also W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘The Politics of Genre: Space and
Time in Lessing’s Laocoön’, Representations, 6, Spring 1984, pp. 98–115, and Alex Potts, Flesh and the
Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994.
87 See Plato, The Republic, trans. Benjamin Jowett. See also Elsner, ‘Visual Mimesis and the Myth of the
Real’, esp. pp. 162–3. Elsner writes of the importance of Ovid’s deciding that Pygmalion’s statue is made
of ivory because of its associations in Greek and Roman literary traditions with deception. These associa-
tions go back to Homer’s Odyssey (19.562–5) where he puns, Elsner proposes, on the Greek for ‘ivory’
(elephas) and ‘to deceive’ (elephairomai). Interesting then that ivory is a wholly natural material and figured
as deception. See also Kelly Dennis, ‘Playing with Herself: Female Sexuality and Aesthetic Indifference’,
in Paula Bennett and Vernon A. Rosario ii, eds, Solitary Pleasures: The Historical, Literary, and Artistic
336 / notes
ED_int.indd 336 15/10/2013 5:06 PM

Discourses of Autoeroticism, New York: Routledge, 1995, p. 51; Kelly Dennis, ‘Art Made Flesh: Pygmalion
and the Rhetoric of the Flesh’, in Art/Porn: A History of Seeing and Touching, Oxford: Berg, 2009, pp.
37–53; and Mitchell Havelock, Aphrodite of Knidos, who draws from J. J. Pollitt, The Art of Ancient Greece:
Sources and Documents, Cambridge, 1990, pp. 84, 86.
88 Pliny claims that her derrière bore the cum stains of her male audience’s lust. See Pliny, Natural History,
ibid., 36.5, 20–21.
89 This is recorded in Pliny (ibid., 36.4. 22f), Lucian (Imagines, 4.263) and Arnobius (Adversus nationes, 6.22).
See Bettini, Portrait of the Lover, p. 61.
90 Griffin, ‘Ovid’s Metamorphoses’, p. 65.
91 Clement of Alexandria, Protrepticus. See Bloom, Waxworks, p. 41.
92 Arnobius, The Case Against the Pagans, trans. George E. McCracken, Westminster, Md: Newman Press,
1949, 2.6, p. 475, cited in Stoichita, Pygmalion Effect, p. 8.
93 Firmicus Maternus cited in Hersey, Falling in Love with Statues, pp. 113–14.
94 Clement of Alexandria, Protrepticus, 4.575. This statement can be found in a chapter on the reasons not
to fall in love with statues and the madness of such acts; that this subject would even warrant a chapter
is telling.
95 This is all the more problematic since the statue he makes is of Aphrodite and it is she who brings it to
life, thereby creating her double in mortal form. Hence her punishment, perhaps (she falls in love with
Adonis and then suffers when he dies), as well as Pygmalion’s deferred punishment, his great-grand-
daugher Myrrha being turned into a tree for committing incest.
96 Hillis Miller, Versions of Pygmalion, p. 9.
97 Kenneth Gross wrote of the ‘self-referentiality of statues’, how they turn on themselves to comment on
their own inanimacy and failure to move. I am after something similar, although with a less ontological
bent. See Gross, Dream of the Moving Statue, pp. 170, 167.
98 Lucian, Erotes, 17. See Corso, Art of Praxiteles II, pp. 18–20.
100 Hillis Miller, Versions of Pygmalion, p. 10.
101 Pygmalion’s punishment came later, and only indirectly, in Ovid’s Metamorphosis, Bk 10, in the story of
Myrrha.
102 Wisdom of Solomon, 14:12; see also 14:27. See Ehrenkrook, ‘Sculpting Idolatry in Flavian Rome’, p. 81.
Porneia means prostitution, fornication, licentiousness; an apostasiac disaffiliation from or unfaithfulness
to God; in later Judaism it came to include incest, sodomy, unlawful marriage and sexual intercourse in
general. In the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs it is also the first of seven evil spirits, to which both
men and women are subject. See Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich, eds, Theological Dictionary of the
New Testament, Grand Rapids, Mich: William B. Erdmans Publishing, 2003 (1985), pp. 918–20.
2/ the doll as fetish
1 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ (1919), in Sigmund Freud, Art and Literature, Pelican Freud Library, vol.
14, trans. James Strachey, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985, p. 354.
2 J.-A. Dulaure, Histoire abrégée de differens cultes, 2nd ed., 2 vols, Paris: Guillaume, 1825, vol. 1, pp. 33–4.
3 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, working note to Le Visible et l’invisible (1964), in William Pietz, ‘The Problem of
the Fetish, I’, Res 9, Spring 1985, p. 5.
4 See Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image, trans. J. Fort, New York: Fordham University Press, 2005;
Ian Balfour, ‘Nancy on Film: Regarding Kiarostami: Re-Thinking Representation (with a Coda on Claire
Denis)’, Journal of Visual Culture, 9: 1, April 2010, pp. 29–43.
5 Later I shall draw out significant distinctions, etymological, historical and material, between the icon and
the fetish.
6 Xavier Bray, ‘The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting and Sculpture 1600–1700’, in The Sacred Made
Real: Spanish Painting and Sculpture 1600–1700, ed. Xavier Bray with Alfonso Rodríguez G. de Cebellos,
Daphne Barbour and Hudy Ozone, London: National Gallery Press, 2010, pp. 15–43. The National Gallery’s
eponymous exhibition coincided with another in the Gallery’s Sunley Room, of Ed and Nancy Reddin
Kienholz’s The Hoerengracht (1983–8). This made for interesting comparisons, especially around ques-
tions of sculpture’s realism. ‘The Hoerengracht’, a spectacle of voyeurism, like its older sibling, Ed
notes / 337
ED_int.indd 337 15/10/2013 5:06 PM

Kienholz’s Roxys (1961–2), is the Kienholzes’ installation/tableau of Amsterdam’s red-light district set in
the late 1970s/early 1980s. With relations to Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés, as I shall suggest in Ch. 7,
in The Hoerengracht the mannequins’ bodies are cast from living women while the heads are taken from
shop-window dummies. See Colin Wiggins and Annemarie de Wilde, The Hoerengracht: Kienholz at the
National Gallery London, London: National Gallery Company, 2009.
7 The persistence of incarnation (to be sure, different ways of such ‘making flesh’) will be detailed through-
out this book.
8 Bray, ‘Sacred Made Real’, p. 38.
9 Such a claim, citing Pliny (Natural History, 35.133), was made by e.g. Aileen Ajootian, ‘Praxiteles’, in Olga
Palagia and J. J. Pollitt, eds, Personal Styles in Greek Sculpture, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp.
98–129. In contrast, Mitchell Havelock suggests that Nikias did not paint any of Praxiteles’s sculptures,
including his Knidian Aphrodite and that Praxiteles did not polychrome any of his statues. See Christine
Mitchell Havelock, The Aphrodite of Knidos and Her Successors: A Historical Review of the Female Nude
in Greek Art, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007 (1995), pp. 51–2.
10 Bray, ‘Sacred Made Real’, p. 40. There is some irony here since, as the art historian Alfonso Rodríguez G.
de Ceballos writes, ‘[t]he decree of the Council of Trent on sacred images, dating from 1563, specifically
stipulated a number of obligatory prerequisites for images that were the subject of veneration. They should
depict true, not false or apocryphal stories; they should be decorous in nature; they should be lifelike; and
their emotional and expressive qualities should inspire not only devotion but also the emulation of the
sacred figured depicted’. See Alfonso Rodríguez G. de Ceballos, ‘The Art of Devotion: Seventeenth-century
Spanish Painting and Sculpture in its Religious Context’, in Bray, Sacred Made Real, p. 49.
11 On wax see Roberta Panzanelli, ed., Ephemeral Bodies: Wax Sculpture and the Human Figure, Los
Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008, passim; Georges Didi-Huberman, ‘Wax Flesh, Vicious Circles’,
trans. Brian Holmes, in Monika von Düring, Georges Didi-Huberman and Marta Poggesi, Encyclopaedia
Anatomica: A Complete Collection of Anatomical Waxes, Cologne: Taschen, 1999, pp. 64–74; Michelle E.
Bloom, Waxworks: A Cultural Obsession, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003; Mark B.
Sandberg, Living Pictures Missing Persons: Mannequins, Museums, and Modernity, Princeton University
Press, 2003; and Marian Warner, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenti-
eth-first Century, Oxford University Press, 2006, pp. 22–57.
12 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Aufsätze, Fragmente, Studien zur Morphologie, ed. Dorothea Kuhn, Weimar:
Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1964, 366–7, cited in Joan B. Landes, ‘Wax Fibres, Wax Bodies, and Moving
Figures’, in Panzanelli, Ephemeral Bodies, p. 52.
13 On the desacralisation of the anatomical cadaver see Katharine Park, Secrets of Women: Gender, Genera-
tion, and the Origins of Human Dissection, New York, Zone Books, 2010, p. 231.
14 On the Musée Dupuytren, see Bloom, Waxworks, pp. 4–6.
15 These three categories are identified and outlined in more detail in Landes, ‘Wax Fibres’, p. 45.
16 Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (1963), trans. A. M. Sheridan
Smith, New York: Vintage Books, 1975, p. 126.
17 Bloom uses the gender specific term ‘gynomorphic’ rather than ‘anthropomorphic’ for wax women. See
Bloom, Waxworks, p. xv.
18 On anatomy in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance see e.g. Andrea Carlino, Books of the Body: Anatomi-
cal Ritual and Renaissance Learning, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedeschi, University of Chicago
Press, 1999; Park, Secrets of Women; Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human
Body in Renaissance Culture, London: Routledge, 1996.
19 See Landes, ‘Wax Fibres’, p. 45. See also Ludmilla Jordanova, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science
and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1989. The partial nature of the woman’s reproductive-driven bodily configurations is brought into starker
(quantitive) relief when put next to e.g. Fontana’s Wooden Man (1799), a human anatomical model that is
made up of 3000 parts that are there to be disassembled and reassembled but which, unlike its female
counterparts, maintains its ‘integrity’.
20 Such anatomical models only fell out of favour in the late 19th century, for two reasons: the invention of
medical X-ray technology and the more widespread commercial use of refrigeration. The latter makes for
an all the more disturbing image.
21 Giorgio Vasari cited in Roberta Panzanelli, ‘Compelling Presence: Wax Effigies in Renaissance Florence’,
in Panzanelli, Ephemeral Bodies, p. 30.
338 / notes
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22 On verisimilitude see David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of
Response, University of Chicago Press, 1989, p. 201.
23 Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori et architettori, ed. Gaetano Milanesi (Florence, G. C.
Sansoni, 1906), 3, p. 374, cited in Panzanelli, ‘Compelling Presence’, p. 17.
24 Georges Didi-Huberman, ‘Viscosities and Survivals: Art History Put to the Test by the Material’, in Pan-
zanelli, Ephemeral Bodies, p. 155 (emphasis in the original).
25 Didi-Huberman, ‘Wax Flesh, Vicious Circles’, in von Düring et al., Encyclopaedia Anatomica, p. 64.
26 Georges Didi-Huberman, ‘Heuristik der Ähnlichkeit: Der Fall der Votivbilder’, in Jan Gershow, ed., Eben-
bilder: Kopien von Körpern – Modelle des Menschen, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002, p. 67.
27 Roberta Panzanelli, ‘Introduction’, in Panzanelli, Ephemeral Bodies, pp. 4–5.
28 Jean-Paul Sartre, L’être et le néant: Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique, Paris: Gallimard, 1943, pp.
698–703, unpublished trans. Jane Marie Todd, in Didi-Huberman, ‘Viscosities and Survivals’, p. 154
(emphasis in the original).
29 Didi-Huberman, ‘Viscosities and Survivals’, p. 155 (emphasis in the original).
30 See Bloom, Waxworks, p. 8.
31 ’Plastic’ as a term, as in the ‘plastic arts’, of course anticipated etymologically the synthetic polymer
material ‘plastic’ that is used for manufacturing industrial products. Vulcanite rubber, a natural rubber
derived from latex that when heated becomes more elastic and durable, was ‘invented’ in 1839 by the
American Charles Goodyear (of the tyres) and, like the English inventor Thomas Hancock, he exhibited at
the 1851 Great Exhibition in London. Another Englishman, Alexander Parkes, invented Parkesine, the first
wholly manufactured plastic, which was unveiled at the 1862 Great International Fair in London.
32 Strangely, given its ubiquity, there are few significant and successful critical considerations of the uncanny.
Successes include Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-century Culture and the Invention
of the Uncanny, Oxford University Press, 1995; Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1993; Sarah Kaufman, Freud and Fiction, trans. Sarah Weekes, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991, esp.
pp. 121–62; Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny, Manchester University Press, 2003; Anthony Vidler, The Archi-
tectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992. See also the exh.
cat. by Mike Kelley, The Uncanny, Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2004.
33 E. T. A. Hoffmann, ‘The Sandman’, in Tales of Hoffmann, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1982, pp. 85–125. For the extensive critical literature on Hoffmann’s story, see Royle, The Uncanny, pp.
47–8 n. 2. Ernst Jentsch, ‘On the Psychology of the Uncanny’, trans. Roy Sellars, Angelaki, 2: 1, 1995, ed.
Sarah Wood, pp. 7–16.
34 In Offenbach’s opera Tales of Hoffmann, Olympia is the coloratura with an affirmative ‘oui’ at the heart of
her restricted vocabulary. Max Reinhardt’s production of Offenbach’s opera was attended by Hans Bellmer
in 1932, a production in which the role of Olympia was take on by three: one singing, one dancing and a
doll. The opera is one of the unoriginary origins of his poupée, as I note in Ch. 8.
35 As in Ch. 1 above, see the fragment from Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project: ‘[t]he extreme point in
the technological organisation of the world is the liquidation of fertility. The frigid woman embodies the
ideal of beauty in Jugendstil. (Jugendstil sees in every woman not Helena but Olympia.)’ See Walter
Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002 (Ger. ed. 1982), p. 559, S9a, 2. See also
Anthony Vidler, ‘Fantasy, the Uncanny and Surrealist Theories of Architecture’, Papers of Surrealism, issue
1, winter 2003 http://www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/papersofsurrealism/journal1/acrobat_files/Vidler.pdf
(accessed 2 December 2011) and Vidler, Architectural Uncanny, p. 157.
36 Hoffmann, ‘Sandman’, p. 116.
37 Freud, ‘Uncanny’, p. 340. To this end Freud turns to Daniel Sanders’s Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache
(1860, I, 729), pp. 342–5. Further page references will appear in brackets in the text.
38 We might say that this is the culmination of a genealogy of, or certainly connected to, a Cartesian and
post- and then anti-Cartesian trajectory of thought concerning the idea of man-as-machine that includes
Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s ‘Machine Man’ (1748), Heinrich von Kleist’s ‘On the Marionette Theatre’ (1810)
and Henri Bergson’s Le Rire: Essai sur la signification du comique (1900) where what is at the heart of
all laughable objects, including human beings, is ‘something mechanical in something living’. As Bergson
wrote: ‘The comic is that side of a person which reveals his likeness to a thing, that aspect of human
events which, through its peculiar inelasticity, conveys the impression of pure mechanism, of automatism,
of movement without life. Consequently it expresses an individual or collective imperfection which calls
notes / 339
ED_int.indd 339 15/10/2013 5:06 PM

for an immediate corrective. This corrective is laughter, a social gesture that singles out and represses a
special kind of absentmindedness in men and in events.’ See Henry Bergson, ‘Laughter’, in Comedy, ed.
Wylie Sypher, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991 (1956), p. 117. For Kleist in ‘On the Mari-
onette Theatre’, it is the puppet, an extension of its operator who ‘transpose[s] himself into the centre of
the gravity of the marionette’ (p. 3), that is ‘more graceful than a living human body’ (p. 7). The dancer is
limited by the force of gravity, the inertia of matter and, most importantly, by self-consciousness.
‘. . . “Grace appears’, Kleist concludes, ‘most purely in the human form which either has no consciousness
or an infinite consciousness. That is, in the puppet or the god”‘ (p. 12). This genealogy traces another of
modernity’s victories of artifice over nature. Freud, ‘Uncanny’, p. 348.
39 Jane Marie Todd, ‘The Veiled Woman in Freud’s “Das Unheimliche”’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture
and Society, 2: 3, 1986, pp. 519–28.
40 Cixous wrote that what Freud’s discussion of the uncanny is trying (but failing) to repress is actually ‘homo-
sexuality, along with the uncanny nature of animism (a living doll) affirmed by Jentsch’. See Hélène Cixous,
‘Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s Das Unheimliche (The “Uncanny”)’, trans. Robert Dennomé,
New Literary History, 7: 3, 1976, pp. 525–48. She also wrote (p. 542), drawing attention to the workings of
the mechanisms of the interior, that the ‘unconscious psychic activity appears to be derived from primitive
animism. Associated with narcissism, animism reintroduces the double’. See also Royle, Uncanny, p. 42.
41 Cixous, ‘Fiction and Its Phantoms’, p. 538.
42 Ibid.
43 Mladen Dolar, ‘“I Shall Be with You on Your Wedding-Night”: Lacan and the Uncanny’, October, 58, Autumn
1991, p. 9.
44 On fetishism in Freud see Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), in Sigmund
Freud, On Sexuality, trans. James Strachey, London: Penguin, 1977, pp. 45–169; and ‘Fetishism’ (1927),
ibid., pp. 351–65. Freud returned to fetishism in ‘Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence’ (1938), as
well as in ‘Gradiva’, the Rat Man case study, ‘Leonardo’ and his ‘Negation’ essay. On fetishism in Marx
see Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I (1867), trans. Ben Fowkes, London:
Penguin, 1976, esp. pp. 125–78. For some of the best writings on fetishism after Freud and Marx see Emily
Apter and William Pietz, eds, Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993; Jean
Baudrillard, ‘Fetishism and Ideology: The Semiological Reduction’, in For a Critique of the Political
Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin, St Louis: Telos Press, 1981, pp. 88–101; Charles Bernheimer,
‘Castration as Fetish’, Paragraph 14, 1991, pp. 1–9; Homi Bhabha, ‘The Other Question . . . The Stereotype
and Colonial Discourse’, Screen, 24: 6, 1983, pp. 18–36; Amanda Fernbach, Fantasies of Fetishism: From
Decadence to the Post-Human, New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002; Luce Irigaray,
‘Women on the Market’, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke, Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1985, pp. 170–91; Bruno Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, Durham,
N.C: Duke University Press, 2010; Jacques Lacan and Wladimir Granoff, ‘Fetishism: The Symbolic, the
Imaginary, and the Real’, in Sandor Lorand, ed., Perversions, Psychodynamics and Therapy, London:
Tavistock, 1956, pp. 265–76; Michel Leiris, ‘Alberto Giacometti’, Documents, 4, 1929, p. 209, trans. James
Clifford, Sulfur, 15, [1986], pp. 38–41; Laura Mulvey, Fetishism and Curiosity, London: BFI Publishing, 1996;
Jean-Baptiste Pontalis, ed., Revue de psychanalyse, 2, Autumn 1970; Pietz, ‘Problem of the Fetish, I’;
William Pietz, ‘The Problem of the Fetish, II’, Res, 13, 1987, pp. 23–45; William Pietz, ‘The Problem of the
Fetish, III’, Res, 16, 1988, pp. 105–23; William Pietz, ‘Fetishism and Materialism: The Limits of Theory in
Marx’, in Apter and Pietz, Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, pp. 119–51; Jacques Rancière, ‘The Concept
of “Critique” and the “Critique of Political Economy” (from the 1844 Manuscript to Capital)’, trans. Ben
Brewster, in Economy and Society, 5, 1976, pp. 352–76; Naomi Schor, ‘Female Fetishism: The Case of
George Sand’, in Susan Rubin Suleiman, ed., The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Per-
spectives, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986, pp. 363–72; David Simpson, Fetishism and
Imagination: Dickens, Melville, Conrad, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982; and Patricia
Spyer, ed., Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces, London: Routledge, 1998.
45 Pietz, ‘Problem of the Fetish, II’, pp. 24–5.
46 Pietz’s paradigm-shifting essays form the basis of the etymological and historical material here.
47 Pietz, ‘Problem of the Fetish, I’, pp. 6–7.
48 There is a further irony at work here: traders carried trinkets that they considered to be viable objects of
exchange with ‘primitives’, although they themselves considered them ‘useless’ because they were largely
340 / notes
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‘ornamental’, when the ‘primitives’ had already become tired of such things and when useless ornamenta-
tion, albeit of a different kind, was at the same time being ‘theorised in the vocabulary of paganism and
primitivism’ as part of a critique of the obsession in 18th-century Europe with surplus luxury. See Simpson,
Fetishism and Imagination, p. 29.
49 Peter Pels, ‘The Spirit of Matter: On Fetishism, Rarity, Fact, and Fancy’, in Spyer, Border Fetishisms, p.
93–4.
50 Charles de Brosses, Du culte des dieux fétiches, 1760. See Pietz, ‘Fetishism and Materialism’,
p. 131. For an odd combination of texts on the fetish in Anthropology see e.g. Georges Bataille, Eroticism
(1957), trans. Mary Dalwood, New York: Marion Boyars, 1987; Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A
Study in Magic and Religion (1922), London: Wordsworth Editions, 1993; Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms
and Functions of Exchange in Ancient Societies (1925), trans. Ian Cunnison, New York: W. W. Norton, 1967;
Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert, A General Theory of Magic (1902), trans. R. Brain, New York: W. W. Norton,
1972; Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1980.
51 As Pietz wrote, ‘[t]he terms feitiço, feiticeiro, and feitiçaria . . . referred, respectively, to the objects,
persons, and practice proper to witchcraft’. See Pietz, ‘Problem of the Fetish, II’, p. 24.
52 It seems, though, that such forgetting is endemic not to the ‘primitive’ but to modernity’s magical thinking.
Latour e.g. writes that ‘the Moderns do have a fetish . . . they deny to the objects they fabricate the
autonomy they have given them’. See Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, p. 61. Decades ago,
Mitchell had written that [t]he deepest magic of the commodity fetish is its denial that there is anything
magical about it’. See Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, University of Chicago Press, 1986, p. 193.
53 See W. Taylor, review of D. Heynig, Sämmthchen Religions arten, in Monthly Magazine, or British Register,
11, 1801, p. 646, in Pietz, ‘Fetishism and Materialism’, p. 131 n. 35.
54 Thanks to Nigel Mapp for conversations on the apotropaic.
55 Pietz, ‘Fetishism and Materialism’, p. 138.
56 Pels, ‘Spirit of Matter’, p. 91.
57 Taussig, Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, p. 25. Latour writes of the fetish as a ‘talk
maker’. See Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, p. 4. Statements such as these by Pels,
Taussig, Latour and others are right, historically and conceptually, but also wilfully inflammatory, playing
as they do on the intrinsic, implicit, structural, institutional racism of the discourse of colonisation. To get
from one to the other is to crisscross 100 years of Anthropology, from a 19th-century Anthropology which
needed the fetish to be ‘primitive’ and ‘irrational’ so it could manage the inexplicability of such things, to
a 20th-century Anthropology that gradually became critical of such essentialising, to more recent critical
anthropologising (Pels, Pietz, Taussig, etc.), which has returned to the provocative and challenging poten-
tial of the fetish’s animating and ‘magical’ possibilities but without the earlier essentialising impulse. As
an antecedent, this most recent strain of Anthropology anticipates thereby contributing actively to the
emergence of Thing Theory, as discussed in my Introduction.
58 Pietz, ‘Problem of the Fetish, I’, p. 15.
59 Ibid., p. 7.
60 Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (1620), in Francis Bacon, The Works of Francis Bacon, Vol. XIV, ed. Basil
Montagu, London: William Pickering, 1831, p. 36.
61 John Locke, Essays on the Laws of Nature and Associated Writings (1676), ed. W. von Leyde, Oxford
University Press, 2002 (1954), p. 261. See also Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone
(1793), trans. Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson, New York: Harper & Row, 1960 (1934).
62 This sounds suspiciously like fetishism, which is why fetishism as a worshipping of things in and for
themselves is considered prior historically to idolatry; that idolatry marks a shift from (what we might call
natural or even abstract) things to figurative forms is a moot point.
63 The idol is born of similarity, of a non-sensuous similarity, of the mimetic faculty. See e.g. Walter Benjamin,
‘On the Mimetic Faculty’ (1933), in Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical
Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, New York: Schocken Books, 1978, pp. 333–6, and Michael Taussig, Mimesis
and Alterity, London: Routledge, 1993. Thanks to Leigh Wilson for conversations.
64 Genesis [1:26–7] tells us that we are created, made in the ‘image’ and ‘likeness’ of our creator.
65 Pietz, ‘Problem of the Fetish, II’, p. 24. See also Voltaire’s The Philosophical Dictionary, ‘Atheism’, London:
Jaques and Co, 1802, pp. 17–28, where he warms against discussing ancient religions as idolatrous.
notes / 341
ED_int.indd 341 15/10/2013 5:06 PM

66 Mitchell, Iconology, p. 197. Given my discussion later in this chapter on the dangers that onanism, impo-
tence and exhaustion posed in the later 19th century for a hydraulic economy of heterosexual coitus, note
that idolatry was, also in that century, a marker of feminisation, emasculation and impotence. See Mitchell,
Iconology, pp. 194, 195, and Simpson, Fetishism and Imagination, p. 75.
67 Karl Marx, ‘The Leading Article in No. 179 of the Kölnische Zeitung’, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels,
Collected Works, vol. 1, New York: International, 1975, p. 189, cited in Pietz, ‘Fetishism and Materialism’,
p. 133 (emphasis in the original). See also Mitchell, Iconology, p. 186, and Lawrence Krader, ed., The
Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx, Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1972, pp. 89, 396. Marx would
already have been familiar with the idea of fetishism, and Brosses’s conceptualisation of it, from Hegel’s
posthumously published (1837) Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. See Peter Osborne, How to
Read Marx, London: Granta Books, 2005, p. 17. Osborne writes (p. 17) that Marx’s ‘first appeal to fetishism
as a critical term’ was in his article ‘Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood’, published in the Rhenish
Times, also in 1842. Osborne points out (pp. 16–17) that Marx presents ‘capitalism as secretly possessed
by . . . pre-modern forms’, but that these forms are not ‘repressed beneath the surface of modernity’, they
are, in fact, effects of capitalism. Osborne’s book has greatly helped throughout this section.
68 E. B. Tylor, ‘The Religion of Savages’, Fortnightly Review, 6, 1866, pp. 71–86, in Pietz, ‘Fetishism and
Materialism’, p. 133.
69 Karl Marx, Capital; A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 (1867), trans. Ben Fowkes, London: Penguin/
New Left Review, 1976, p. 125.
70 Ibid., p. 164.
71 Ibid., p. 165.
72 Ibid.
73 Ibid., pp. 163–4.
74 Ibid., p. 165. See also Peter Stallybrass, ‘Marx’s Coat’, in Spyer, Border Fetishisms, p. 184.
75 Marx, Capital, Volume 1, p. 165.
76 Stallybrass, ‘Marx’s Coat’, p. 184. Stallybrass adds (ibid.): ‘To fetishize commodities is, in one of Marx’s
least-understood jokes, to reverse the whole history of fetishism. For it is to fetishise the invisible, the
immaterial, the supra-sensible. This fetishism of the commodity inscribes immateriality as the defining
feature of capitalism’.
77 Marx, Capital, Volume 1, p. 178. Thanks to Alex Warwick for drawing my attention to this key statement
in Marx, and to her and David Cunningham for extensive discussions on the first and second chapters of
Marx’s Capital.
78 For the history of the history of fetishism as it emerges from the history and science of religion, see
footnotes in Pietz, ‘Fetishism and Materialism’, pp. 119–51, esp. pp. 131–3. For the arrival of fetishism
into the discourses of medicine and psychiatry, see e.g. Robert A. Nye, ‘The Medical Origins of Sexual
Fetishism’, in Apter and Pietz, Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, pp. 13–30.
79 See Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity, Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1992, p. 38, and Carolyn Thomas de la Peña, The Body Electric: How Strange
Machines Built the Modern American, New York University Press, 2003.
80 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume I, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, London: Penguin,
1990 (1976), p. 36.
81 Jan Goldstein, Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century, Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1987, esp. p. 162; on Esquirol and monomania, see pp. 154–96.
82 Etienne Esquirol, ‘Monomania’, Dictionnaire des sciences médicales, 1819, vol. 34, p. 115, cited in Gold-
stein, Console and Classify, p. 157.
83 E. Esquirol, ‘Erotic Monomania’, in Mental Maladies: Treatise on Insanity (1838), trans. E. K. Hunt, Phila-
delphia, Pa.: Lea and Blanchard, 1845, p. 335.
84 Ibid., p. 336.
85 Ibid., p. 341.
86 Albert Binet, ‘Le fétichisme dans l’amour: Étude de psychologie morbide’, Revue philosophique 24, 1887,
pp. 143–67, 252–74.
87 Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, p. 154.
88 Foucault, History of Sexuality, Volume 1, pp. 154, 37.
89 Ibid., p. 37.
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91 Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, cited in Robert A. Nye, ‘The Medical Origins of Sexual
Fetishism’, in Apter and Pietz, Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, p. 29.
92 See Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Lesbian Fetishism?’, in Apter and Pietz, Fetishism as Cultural Discourse,
p. 103. See also Sigmund Freud, ‘Contributions to the Psychology of Love’ (1911), Standard Edition, vol.
11, pp. 165–75.
94 Ibid., pp. 65–6.
95 Note also that even metonymy is itself fabricated by way of such intricate tenuity, and is no less discredit-
able than these other more apparently random tropes, since it too is no more related directly to the thing
to which it refers.
96 Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, pp. 66–7 (emphasis in the original).
97 As early as 1908, Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambeault, under whom Lacan studied, wrote of female fetishists
but he figured them as failures because, rather than turning the fetish into a substitute for a love object,
since they lacked imagination they simply used the fetish, silk e.g., for instrumental purposes, as a ‘vehicle
for orgasm’. See Jann Matlock, ‘Masquerading Women, Pathologized Men: Cross-Dressing, Fetishism,
and the Theory of Perversion, 1882–1935’, in Apter and Pietz, Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, pp. 31–2,
58–60. Failure or otherwise, I am evidently arguing something similar for the male fetishist.
98 Here Marx’s invocation of the image of the dancing table resonates, so, given the ambivalence of his
wonderment, I sound a cautionary note: while it is the form that abstracts or substitutes one thing for
another to which it has absolutely no connection (as Marx writes), more critically it is what it abstracts or
substitutes that is knotty: labour as a social form for the commodity form. This is perhaps close to the
process that Kant names ‘subreption’, the ‘substitution of a respect for the object in place of one for the
idea of humanity in our own self – the subject’. See Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement (1790),
trans. James Creed Meredith, Oxford University Press, 1952, SS 27.
99 See Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, and Freud, ‘Fetishism’, and for a wonderfully succinct
definition of fetishism, see Schor, ‘Fetishism’, p. 114.
100 Sigmund Freud, ‘Medusa’s Head’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18,
London: Hogarth Press, 1975, pp. 273–4. There are ties that bind such things, fetishism and the castration
complex with narcissism: the ‘I’ of ‘I know very well, but all the same . . .’ is never innocent, and its making
is also a making love, a reciprocating with itself.
101 Freud, ‘Fetishism’, p. 353.
102 For Freud, following James Frazer, ‘[a]s distinguished from a fetish, a totem is never an isolated individual,
but always a class of objects, generally a species of animals or of plants, more rarely a class of inanimate
natural objects, very rarely a class of artificial objects’. See James Frazer, Totemism and Exogamy, 4 vols,
1910, cited in Sigmund Freud, ‘Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thoughts’, in Totem and Taboo
(1913), Pelican Freud Library, vol. 13, trans. James Strachey, London: Penguin, 1985, p. 162. See also
James Frazer, Totemism, Edinburgh: Adam & Charles Black, 1887.
103 Jacques Lacan, ‘The Signification of the Phallus’, in Écris: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York:
W.W. Norton, 1977, pp. 281–91.
104 Freud, ‘Fetishism’, pp. 351–2.
105 Schor, ‘Fetishism’, p. 114.
106 Emily Apter, ‘Perversion’, in Elizabeth Wright, ed., Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary,
Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1992, p. 312.
107 Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, p. 150. On the place of fore-pleasure as a particular kind
of perversion that foregrounds touch, see Marquard Smith, ‘Wound Envy: Touching Cronenberg’s Crash’,
Screen, 40: 2, Summer 1999, pp. 193–202.
108 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Sexual Life of Human Beings’, in Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1916),
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972, p. 317.
109 See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (1967), trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1976; David Wills, Prosthesis, Stanford University Press, 1995; Marquard Smith
and Joanne Morra, eds, The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future,
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006, pp. 1–14. Perhaps it is a coincidence that Rousseau’s Emile was
published in the same year that the philosopher began his lyric drama ‘Pygmalion scène lyrique’, in which,
as has been seen, by way of touch Pygmalion’s statue becomes self-aware, comes into self-awareness
and begins such reciprocal relations. Touching herself she utters her first word: ‘Moi’.
notes / 343
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3/ touching
1 Oskar Kokoschka recalled Mahler’s abortion in his autobiography, My Life, trans. David Britt, London:
Thames and Hudson, 1974, p. 77.
2 See Oskar Kokoschka: Letters 1905–1976, selected by Olda Kokoschka and Alfred Marnau, forward E. H.
Gombrich, London: Thames and Hudson, 1992. This collection of Kokoschka’s correspondence shows that
the artist was still writing to Mahler during and after the time of the doll, albeit as Alma Mahler-Groupius.
There is no reference in this volume to the correspondence between Kokoschka and Moos, perhaps
because the letters were selected by Olda Kokoschka (née Pavlovská), Kokoschka’s widow.
3 Edith Hoffmann, Kokoschka: Life and Work, London: Faber & Faber Ltd, 1947. Hoffmann was the daughter
of Camill Hoffmann, who had written an essay on Kokoschka’s work entitled ‘Kokoschka’s Bildrisse und
Phantasien’ as early as 1917. See also Suzanne Keegan, The Eye of God: A Life of Oskar Kokoschka,
London: Bloomsbury, 1999, and the unnecessarily salacious Tobias G. Natter and Max Mollein, eds, The
Naked Truth: Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka and Other Scandals, New York: Prestel, 2005, esp. p. 149. See
also Alfred Weidinger, Kokoschka and Alma Mahler: Testimony to a Passionate Relationship, Munich and
New York: Prestel, 1996.
4 Kokoschka, My Life, cited in Hoffmann, Kokoschka, p. 144.
5 Kokoschka, My Life, p. 74.
6 Hoffmann, Kokoschka, p. 144.
7 Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, (1905), in Sigmund Freud, On Sexuality, trans.
James Strachey, London: Penguin, 1977, p. 65.
8 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (1925), trans. Ian Cun-
ninson, New York: W. W. Norton, 1967, p. 55. See also Peter Stallybrass, ‘Marx’s Coat’, in Patricia Spyer,
ed., Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces, London: Routledge, 1998, pp. 183–207.
9 Keegan, Eye of God, p. 106. Hoffmann, Kokoschka, p. 144, says that the correspondence between Koko-
schka and Moos on the doll, what Hoffmann calls ‘this child of his desire’, has been preserved by Paul
Westheim who published it as ‘Der Fetisch’, in the Künstlerbekenntnisse (‘Confessions of Artists’) series,
Berlin: Ullstein, n.d. Kokoschka did not keep Moos’s replies, so the ‘exchange’ is one-sided. See Oskar
Kokoschka, ‘Der Fetisch’, Oskar Kokoschka: Die frühen Jahre: Aquarelle und Zeichnungen (1906–1924),
Hanover: Kestner-Gesellschaft, 1983.
10 Hoffmann, Kokoschka, p. 145. Keegan, Eye of God, pp. 105–6, dates this letter to 22 July 1918. She also
reproduces (p. 106) a following line in the same letter: ‘I rather think a whole series of figures become
necessary, which you shall have to create to keep my heroine company’. Her source for the letters is ‘The
Fetish’, typescript letters to Hermione Moos, Kokoschka Archive, Villeneuve. See also Paul Westheim,
Oskar Kokoschka, Potsdam-Berlin: Gustav Kiepenhauer Verlag, 1918, and Paul Westheim, Das Werk
Kokoschkas, Berlin: Paul Cassirer Verlag, 1925.
11 This is not strictly true, since there is one scholarly reference to Kokoschka sending photographs to Moos:
‘When Kokoschka was questioned on the matter of his fetish in 1931/32, he came straight to the point: “I
wanted to own a life-size replica of Alma! I sought out the best female artisan I could find. I saw to it that
she was provided with all Alma’s photographs and measurements so that she could create the doll I had
in mind.”‘ See Weidinger, Kokoschka and Alma Mahler, p. 91. However, I am wary of this reference because
it is said to have been recalled by Kokoschka more than ten years after the event; in all the literature on
the topic it is the only mention of photographs going from Kokoschka to Moos; it is not noted by Kokoschka
in his autobiography; and there are other contradictions in Weidinger’s argument, as will be seen, that
make me somewhat cautious of his claim, even if it is a direct quotation from the artist himself. Overall,
Weidinger shows himself to be an unreliable chronicler.
13 Keagan, Eye of God, p. 106.
15 Keegan, Eye of God, pp. 106–7.
16 Hoffmann, Kokoschka, pp. 145–6.
17 See René Descartes, ‘La Dioptrique’ (1637), an appendix to Discours de la méthode pour bien conduire
sa raison et chercher la vérité dans les sciences; Denis Diderot, ‘Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those
Who See’ (1749), in Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature and Other Philosophical Works, ed. David
Adams, Manchester: Clinaman Press, 2000, pp. 149–200; William Molyneux, 1912/1693, ‘Letter to John
344 / notes
ED_int.indd 344 15/10/2013 5:06 PM

Locke’ (1693), in John Locke, Essays Concerning Human Understanding. Books II and IV (with omissions),
ed. Mary Whiton Catkins, Chicago: Open Court, 1912, pp. 67–9. See also e.g. Fiona Candlin, ‘The Dubious
Inheritance of Touch: Art History and Museum Access’, Journal of Visual Culture, 5: 2, August 2006, pp.
137–54; Etienne Bonnet, Abbé de Condillac, Philosophical Writings, trans. Franklin Philip, London: Law-
rence Erlbaum Associates, 1982; Steven Connor, The Book of Skin, London: Reaktion Books, 2003;
Jacques Derrida, On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry, Stanford University Press, 2005;
Georgina Kleege, Sight Unseen, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999; Georgina Kleege,
‘Blindness and Visual Culture: An Eyewitness Account’, Journal of Visual Culture, 4: 2, August 2005, pp.
179–90; Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses,
Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 2000; Tobin Siebers, ‘The Blindspot in Descartes’ La Dioptrique’,
MLN, 94: 4, French Issue: Perspectives in Mimesis, May 1979, pp. 836–43; and Bernadette Wegenstein,
Getting Under the Skin: Body and Media Theory, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006.
18 The film historian and theorist Laura Mulvey pointed out in 1975 that scopophilia transforms the object
‘into something satisfying in itself’. See Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen,
16: 3, 1975, pp. 6–18.
20 See http://www.alma-mahler.at/engl/almas_life/puppet2.html (accessed 14 June 2007). A different version
of this sentence appears in Keegan, Eye of God, p. 105.
21 Hoffmann, Kokoschka, pp. 146–7. Keegan also reproduces this section from the letter: ‘Please give some
more detail to the bust! The nipples are not to be raised, but should rather be a bit uneven, prominent
only on account of the swell itself. The ideal model would be Helene Fourment in that little Rubens book.’
See Keegan, Eye of God, pp. 111–12.
22 Karl Marx, Capital; A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 (1867), trans. Ben Fowkes, London: Penguin/
New Left Review, 1976, p. 167.
23 No one affirms or confirms whether these photographs that Kokoschka mentions, which Moos has sent
him, are the same ones reproduced here. Perhaps it goes without saying or perhaps he never even saw
these. Given the timing of his letter, Moos’s presence in one of the images and one of his sketches in the
other, I assume that they were taken at her place during the process of the making of the doll. Identifying
the whereabouts of the rug or wall-hanging or wallpaper behind the doll is the only way to be sure.
24 See e.g. Jan Bondeson, A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities, London: I. B. Tauris, 1997; Rosemarie Garland
Thomson, Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, New York University Press, 1996; and
David Hevey, The Creatures Time Forgot: Photography and Disability Imagery, London: Routledge, 1992.
For a case study of hypertrichosis universalis in the Renaissance see Merry Wiesner-Hanks, The Marve-
lous Hairy Girls: The Gonzales Sisters and Their Worlds, New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
2009, who also discusses stories that go back to the 10th century of hairy female saints, beginning with
Mary Magdalene.
Such nasty spectacularisation of modern bodily wonders persists and in 2011 the Guinness World
Records, that book of quantitative record, of banal frivolity and freakery, named an 11-year-old Thai,
Supatra Sasuphan, the world’s hairiest girl.
25 Weidinger, Kokoschka and Alma Mahler, p. 91.
26 See Bonnie Roos, ‘Oskar Kokoschka’s Sex Toy: The Women and the Doll Who Conceived the Artist’, MOD-
ERNISM/Modernity, 12: 2, 2005, p. 304.
27 The one author who does is Bonnie Roos. See ibid., p. 303.
28 Roos writes (ibid., p. 299) that Moos used swanskin, although she does not give her source for this. She
also does not distinguish between the two definitions of swanskin, the first being the actual skin of a swan
with feathers still attached, the second being any one of a number of flannel or cotton fabrics with a soft
or fuzzy surface. I assume that Moos used the latter.
29 I admit that he does not mention in his letters at any point that he wants this.
30 Hoffmann, Kokoschka, p. 147. Even by his letter of 10 December 1918, as Keegan shows in an excerpt
from that letter left out by Hoffmann, he was speaking of his commitment to the look, in fact the real feel,
of the doll’s hair: ‘The hairy portions should not be embroidered, but set with real hair, otherwise any
nude for which I use her for a model will seem contrived rather than alive. Please!’ See Keegan, Eye of
God, pp. 111–12. Recall that Freud in his earliest comments on fetishism says that ‘no doubt the part
played by fur as a fetish owes its origin to an association with the hair of the mons Veneris’. See Sigmund
Freud, On Sexuality, trans. James Strachey, London: Penguin, 1977, pp. 67–8.
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31 Hoffmann, Kokoschka, p. 148. Keegan quotes part of a letter in which Kokoschka speaks of not just the
doll’s importance to him but also that no one else know about it: ‘And does anyone else know about all
this, except for your sister? I would die from jealousy if some man should come into contact . . . with this
artificial woman, nude and unclothed as she is’. See Keegan, Eye of God, p. 114.
32 Keegan (ibid., p. 114) at least says that the doll is finished in April 1919.
33 Hoffmann, Kokoschka, pp. 148–9.
34 Ibid., p. 149.
35 Weidinger, Kokoschka and Alma Mahler, pp. 90–91.
37 Weidinger, Kokoschka and Alma Mahler, p. 92.
38 Ibid.
40 See http://www.alma-mahler.at/engl/almas_life/puppet.html (accessed 18 June 2007).
42 Keegan, Eye of God, p. 121.
43 In his biography, Kokoschka claims that his maid, Hulda/Reserl, spread these rumours at his request.
See Kokoschka, My Life, p. 118. There are also eyewitness accounts of the doll’s presence in Kokoschka’s
studio, including one from the late 1950s by Kurt Pinthus, a documenter of Expressionism, who recalled
a visit to Kokoschka’s studio in Dresden: ‘On the sofa in Kokoschka’s living room, between the side wall
and the long wall, behind the round table, there is sat – a life-size, shimmering white, crowned with
chestnut brown hair, a blue jacket round its shoulders: the doll, the fetish, the artificial woman, the ideal
lover, the ideal Model.’ See hhtp://www.alma-mahler.at/engl/almas-life/puppet3.html (accessed 18 June
2007).
44 Kokoschka, quoted in Keegan, Eye of God, pp. 114–15 (my emphases).
45 Kokoschka, My Life, quoted in Weidinger, Kokoschka and Alma Mahler, p. 92.
47 See Luce Irigaray, ‘This Sex Which Is Not One’, in The Sex Which Is Not One (1977), trans. Catherine Porter
with Carolyn Burke, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985, p. 24. See also Kelly Dennis, ‘Playing with
Herself: Feminine Sexuality and Aesthetic Indifference’, in Paula Bennett and Vernon A. Rosario ii, eds,
Solitary Pleasures: The Historical, Literary, and Artistic Discourses of Autoeroticism, New York: Routledge,
1995, p. 65. As Irigaray makes clear, woman’s masturbation needs no mediation.
48 Guys’n’Dolls: Art, Science, Fashion & Relationships, ed. Suzie Plumb and Jackie Lewis, Brighton Royal
Pavilion, Libraries and Museum, 2005.
49 Paulus Manker, ‘1919: Unpacking of the Doll’, transcript of performance, kindly supplied by Suzie Plumb.
50 Sequences of the film can be found at http://www.alma-mahler.at/ (accessed 21 November 2005). From
the information available on the website, the film could have been made in 1996, 1997 or 1999. It was
produced by Nanookfilm.
51 The gentleman who lent the photographs by Bellmer says that he spoke with Bellmer himself, who con-
firmed his willingness that they be lent to this exhibition.
4/ modernity’s outmodedness
1 André Breton, ‘Interview de Professeur Freud à Vienne’, Littérature, 1, 1 March 1922, p. 19. See also Eliza-
beth M. Legge, Max Ernst: The Psychoanalytic Sources, Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989, pp. 17–29.
2 Xavière Gauthier, Surréalisme et sexualité, Paris: Gallimard, 1971, pp. 190, 269 and passim.
3 André Vigneau, cited in Nicole Parrot, Mannequins, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982, p. 74.
4 Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1942), trans. Haakon M. Chevalier, New York: Dial Press,
1961, p. 372.
5 Such accusations of childishness are themselves perhaps childish but I have no time for Surrealism’s
humour, its games, its play. I might make an exception for André Masson’s automatic drawing or, I think,
Max Ernst’s frottages. Frottage is a funny word and just sounds rude. Here, I am not going to argue that
the Surrealists are either misogynist or proto-feminist, as some have argued, nor am I denying that the
Surrealists were political, nor that their art might have a political impulse; merely that they do not interest
me. (To be clear, for me neither Bellmer nor Duchamp are Surrealists.)
346 / notes
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6 Georges Gatian de Clérambault, cited in Robert Belton, The Beribboned Bomb: The Image of Woman in
Male Surrealist Art, University of Calgary Press, 1995, p. 65. In 1932, Freud himself admitted to Breton in
a letter that he was ‘not able to clarify for himself what surrealism is and what it wants’. See Sigmund
Freud to André Breton, 26 December 1932, in André Breton, Les Vases communicants, Paris: Gallimard,
p. 176. Freud later mellowed somewhat and, in a letter to Stefan Zweig dated 20 July 1938, reflecting on
his meeting in that year with Dalí in London, after Dalí showed him his Metamorfosis de Narciso (1937),
he wrote: ‘Up to now I have been inclined to consider surrealists, who seem to have chosen me as their
patron saint, as incurable nutcases. The young Spaniard, however, with his candid, fanatical eyes and
unquestionable technical skill has made me reconsider my opinion. In fact, it would be very interesting to
investigate the way in which such a painting has been composed.’ See Nicolas Caparrós, Correspondencia
de Sigmund Freud, Madrid: Quipú, 2002, vol. 5, Imago, p. 3.
7 On the more recent crop of new media artists with an interest in dolls and mannequins, see Sigrid Schade,
‘The Media/Games of the Doll: From Model to Cyborg. Contemporary Artists’ Interest in Surrealism’, at
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/cyborg_bodies/doll_bodies/print/ (accessed 15 July 2005). For
Schade, and others, the doll in Surrealism is a symptomatology, a marker of a return of the repressed, a
compulsive repetition performed to deal with the horrors of war and war neuroses. Many of these more
recent artists are, it is argued, preoccupied similarly by concerns believed to be pressing in contemporary
culture such as body image, advertising, cosmetic surgery and gene technology. In such cases, both
historical and contemporary, the doll and the mannequin come to embody an uncanny return of the
repressed, becoming, as Schade argues, ‘a function of the castration anxiety associated with an all-
powerful father’; ‘the threat of castration is always a threat of death’. I am uncomfortable with how well
these kinds of analyses work, historically and theoretically, and I hope that I have been convincing, espe-
cially in Ch. 2 and indeed throughout, in arguing against the idea of the doll as symptom.
8 For the most relevant scholarship on this topic see Elena Filipovic, ‘Abwesende Kunstobjekte: Mannequins
und die Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme von 1938’, in Pia Müller-Tamm and Katharina Sykora,
eds, Puppen. Körper. Automaten: Phantasmen der Moderne, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen and
Düsseldorf: Oktagon, 1999, pp. 200–18; Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1993; Lewis Kachur, ‘Surrealism and the Cyborg: Mannequins and Body Doubles’, at http://www.artlab23.
net/issue1/LewisKachur.html (accessed 21 November 2005); Lewis Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous:
Marchel Duchamp, Salvador Dalí, and Surrealist Exhibition Installations, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
2001; Rosalind Krauss, ‘Corpus Delecti’, in Rosalind Krauss, Jane Livingston and Dawn Ades, L’Amour
fou: Photography and Surrealism, Washington, D.C.: Corcoran Gallery of Art, and New York: Abbeville
Press, 1985, pp. 55–112; Alyce Mahon, Surrealism and the Politics of Eros 1938–1968, London: Thames &
Hudson, 2005, pp. 23–64; Joanna Malt, Obscure Objects of Desire: Surrealism, Fetishism, and Politics,
Oxford University Press, 2004; and Dickran Tashjian, A Boatload of Madmen: Surrealism and the American
Avant-Garde 1920–1950, New York: Thames & Hudson, 1995. On Surrealism and sexuality in general see
e.g. Belton, Beribboned Bomb; Mary Ann Caws, Rudolf E. Kuenzli and Gwen Raaberg, eds, Surrealism
and Women, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991; Whitney Chadwick, Women Artists and the Surrealist
Movement, London: Thames and Hudson and Boston: Little Brown, 1985; Katharine Conley, Automatic
Woman: The Representations of Woman in Surrealism, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996; Susan
Rubin Suleiman, Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1990; and Xavière, Surréalisme et sexualité.
9 André Breton, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’ (1924), in André Breton, Manifestos of Surrealism, trans. Richard
Seaver and Helen R. Land, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969, p. 16 (emphasis in the original).
Mannequins with powers of the supernatural appear in Louis Aragon’s Anicet ou le Panorama, roman
(1921), p. 28, and Breton and Philippe Soupault’s Les Champs magnétique (1921), p. 80. In anticipation of
any confusion, let me say that when I refer to the ‘modern mannequin’ (emphasis in the original), it is to
Breton’s manifestation of the marvellous; when I refer to mannequins modernes or the modern manne-
quin, it is to the overly stylised mannequins of the 1920s, exemplified by V. N. Siégel’s mannequins on
display at the 1925 Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels in Paris; and when I refer to mannequins
otherwise, it is to capitalist modernity’s commercial bespoke or mass-manufactured mannequins that, as
things, are both the bearers of commodities and the commodities themselves.
10 Directly or indirectly such a scene was recreated by the Surrealists and captured in photographs by Man
Ray (1924) in the Centrale Surréaliste (Bureau of Surrealist Research) where a headless and armless
mannequin likewise hangs from the ceiling.
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11 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, cited in Donald Kuspit, ‘The Modern Fetish’, in Signs of Psyche in Modern
and Postmodern Art, Cambridge University Press, 1993.
12 See Anne d’Harnoncourt and Walter Hopps, ‘Étant Donnés: 1 degree la chute d’eau, 2 degrees le gaz
d’éclairage: Reflections on a New Work by Marcel Duchamp’, Philadelphia Museum of Art Bulletin, 64:
299/300, April 1969, pp. 31–4; Arturo Schwarz, ed, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, New York:
Delano Greenidge Editions, 3rd rev. 1995; David Hopkins, Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst: The Bride
Shared, Oxford University Press, 1998. Originally due to be installed in the window at Brentano’s Bookstore,
because of complaints from the League of Women (denouncing that part of the installation by Mattà), Lazy
Hardware was moved to the Gotham Book Mart. See e.g. Michael R. Taylor, Marcel Duchamp: Étant
donnés, Philadelphia and New Haven and London: Philadelphia Museum of Art and Yale University Press,
2009, p. 59. Tashjian writes that Lazy Hardware did take place at Brentano’s. See Tashjian, Boatload of
Madmen, 153 and 66–90.
For a sustained engagement with Dalí’s ‘Dream of Venus’ pavilion see Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous,
pp. 129–51.
13 Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous, esp. pp. 43–67. In the paragraphs that follow I draw heavily on Kachur’s
excellent historical account, as well as from additional sources in n. 8. The exhibition’s invitation included
a photograph from 1905 of Enigmarelle, billed as a ‘descendant authentique de Frankenstein’. Enigmarelle
was a hoax.
14 George Orwell referred to Rainy Taxi as ‘Mannequin rotting in a taxicab’ and wrote that ‘such pic-
tures . . . are diseased and disgusting’. It is odd that he called it a picture and also ‘some kind of faked
photography’. Coupled with his reference to the ‘already somewhat bloated face and breast of the appar-
ently dead girl’, one has to assume that Orwell did not know it was an installation. See George Orwell,
‘Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dalí’, in George Orwell, Dickens, Dalí and Others (1944), New
York: Hadcourt, Brace and World, Inc, 1946, pp. 170–84, p. 184, p. 175.
15 M. Petitjean, ‘À propos de l’exposition surréaliste’, Nouvealle revue française, 26, 1 March 1938, p. 515.
See Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous, p. 40.
16 As is well known, Surrealism was taken by the language, the automatism, the seductions and the subver-
sions of hysteria, and in 1928 celebrated the 50th anniversary of the ‘birth date’ of hysteria and the golden
age of Charcot’s studies of hysteria’s ecstasies, real, imagined or simulated. See Louis Aragon and André
Breton, ‘La Cinquantenaire de l’hystérie 1878–1928’, La Révolution surréaliste, no. 11, 15 March 1928. See
also David Lomas, The Haunted Self: Surrealism, Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity, New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 2000, pp. 53–93; Mahon, Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, pp. 52–4; and Marquard
Smith, ‘The Passion That Hath No Name: Critical Theories of Laughter and the Hysterical Male Body’,
PhD, University of Leeds, 1999.
17 Georges Hugnet, ‘L’exposition internationale du surréaliste en 1938’, Preuves, no. 91 (September 1958),
repr. in Hugnet, Pleines et déliés, La-Chapelle-sur Loire: Guy Authier, 1972, p. 329, cited in Kachur,
Displaying the Marvelous, pp. 38–40. Surrealists regularly produced images of Pygmalion and Galatea to
explore the imaginative, creative and procreative spirit of the story, including Delvaux’s Pygmalion (1939),
in which it is the woman that embraces the male statue (with no limbs) in the hope that he will come to
life, and Masson’s Pygmalion (1938), a prelude to his Gradiva (1939).
Gradiva is a figure perhaps even more representative for the Surrealists of the myths of animation, a
favourite because it offered a ‘cure through love’, and here they were influenced by Freud’s essay on
Wilhelm Jensen’s novel Gradiva (1903), entitled ‘Delusion and Dream in W. Jensen’s “Gradiva” ’, which,
while published in 1907, was translated into French only in 1931. In the novel, as Freud recounts, the
archaeologist Norbert Hanold buys a plaster cast with a bas-relief of a figure that he calls ‘Gradiva’ (from
the Latin, ‘she who walks’). In the story, Gradiva is variously a marble figure, an imaginary one and a living
person. In his quest for ‘the “reality” of her gait’, Hanold falls in love with her, ostensibly because she
reminds him of his childhood sweetheart/playmate Zoe Bertgang (zoe is ‘life’ in Greek; Bertgang is
‘someone who steps along brilliantly or splendidly’). Breton’s gallery at 31, rue de Seine, opened in 1937,
was also named ‘Gradiva’; its entranceway, designed by Duchamp, forced the visitor to walk through a
glass door via a silhouetted outline of two bodies, echoing the negative space left by Gradiva’s ashen
corpse at Pompeii.
The link between Pygmalion and mannequins is made explicitly by Robert Desnos, ‘Pygmalion et le
Sphinx’, Documents, 2: 1, 1930, pp. 33–8, trans. Simon Barker, ‘Papers of Surrealism’, Issue 7, 2007, on
‘The Use-Value of Documents’: http://www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/papersofsurrealism/journal7/
348 / notes
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acrobat%20files/articles/bakerpdf.pdf). Desnos writes: ‘What can be said about shop-window manne-
quins? These anonymous statues don’t always look at us kindly. There is enchantment beneath their
sweating brows and porcelain eyes’ (p. 3) and ‘Pygmalion was probably just a clumsy magician who,
wanting to bring himself love, fell in love with his own copy. . . .We would not want statues to be anything
other than supplements’ (p. 6).
18 Man Ray, ‘Résurrection des mannequins’ (1966), typewritten statement, Man Ray Archives, Centre Georges
Pompidou, Paris, cited in Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous, p. 41 n. 41. See Sara K. Schneider, Vital
Mummies: Performance Art and the Store-Window Mannequin, New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 1995, p. 62, quoting from Parrot, Mannequins, p. 153.
19 Man Ray, ‘Résurrection des mannequins’, in Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous, pp. 61–2.
20 See Belton, Beribboned Bomb, p. 19. This line on masturbation as universal and non-gender-specific,
delivered by a Surrealist who is a woman, may well be referring to Dalí’s painting The Great Masturbator
of the same year.
21 This is noted by Kachur also, pp. 43–67.
22 André Breton, Arcane 17, 1945, p. 11. Kachur makes this suggestion in passing; see Displaying the Mar-
velous, p. 48. Bellmer’s first doll was meant to have an electrically charged torch-bulb lighting up the
compartments in the rotating panorama in its belly, activated by pressing on its left nipple. Built in 1933,
it was well known to the Surrealists, since 18 photographs of it appeared in Minotaure, 6, December, under
the title ‘Poupée: Variations sur le montage d’une mineure articulée’ (‘Doll: Variations on the assembling
of an articulated female minor’). There is some debate over the date of this spread. While the majority of
commentators claim that it was 1934, Malcolm Green writes, quoting Bellmer from his 1962/3 German
edition of Die Puppe, that the piece in Minotaure appeared in 1935. See Malcolm Green, The Doll, London:
Atlas Press, 2005, p. 10.
23 Even, perhaps especially, with Duchamp it is hard to avoid the masturbatory: ‘It [the turning and grinding
of the gears of the chocolate-grinding machine] is a kind of onanism. The machine goes round, and by
some miraculous process I have always found fascinating, produces chocolate’. See Dawn Ades, Neil Cox
and David Hopkins, Marcel Duchamp, London: Thames and Hudson, 1999, p. 75.
24 D’Harnoncourt and Hopps, ‘Étant Donnés’, pp. 16, 20.
25 Breton, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’ (1924), p. 16.
26 According to Hugnet, ‘the Surrealists were most particular about the mannequins they used: they rejected
the first lot that were delivered to them and chose a different model which they felt better embodied the
“Eternal Feminine”’. See Mahon, Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, p. 44 and Hugnet, Pleins et déliés,
p. 329.
27 Man Ray, ‘Introduction’ to Les mannequins (Paris, 1966), English-language MS., Man Ray Archives, Centre
Georges Pompidou, cited in Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous, p. 41.
28 Kachur (ibid., pp. 44, 64) points out that to the left of Jean Arp’s mannequin is a plastic sign reading
‘Mannequins PLEM’, an advertisement requested for inclusion by the manufacturer supplying them and
to whom, he suggests, they were probably returned after the exhibition.
29 On Surrealism and fashion see ibid., pp. 4–67; Richard Martin, Fashion and Surrealism, New York: Rizzoli;
Tashjian, Boatload of Madmen, esp. pp. 66–90. Note also the many exhibitions on this topic, including
Fashion and Surrealism at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York (1987), and Surreal Things: Surreal-
ism and Design at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2007).
30 Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous, p. 41.
31 Ibid., p. 8.
32 Paris Magazine, 80, April 1938, in Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous, p. 37 n. 34.
33 See Kachur, ibid., p. 18.
34 See ibid., p. 41.
35 Ibid., p. 42.
36 Ibid.
37 See Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity, London: Verso, 1983.
The street, with its jostling crowd, is also a breeding ground for fear, criminality, revulsion and revolution.
It is in the crowd of the street and even more of the department store that is found one of modernity’s
unsung protagonists of modern life: the frotteur, a monomaniacal ‘type’ who, invented by the new proximi-
ties of consumer capitalism, mingles in the throng, jostling and being jostled, rubbing up against stran-
gers’ bodies in a way that might permit talk of the greedy and sexual touch of modernity where human
notes / 349
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contact, rather than sight and seeing, as a coming-to-know is at the heart of the experience of consumer
capitalist modernity. Perhaps the frotteur is less profound than the flâneur, like touching as coming-to-
know might be less profound than seeing-to-know, but the type is no less indispensable. See Pierre Giffard,
Paris sous la troisième république: les grands bazaars, Paris: Victor Havard, 1882, pp. 105, 116, 288–90,
cited in Michael B. Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869–1920,
Princeton University Press, 1981, p. 193.
38 In this context, the ‘mass-produced mannequin-woman’ is discussed by Esther Leslie as a product of the
ways in which in capitalist modernity the female body, ‘no longer nature, but historical because commodi-
fied . . . has abandoned auratic femininity’. See Esther Leslie, ‘Ruin and Rubble in the Arcades’, in Beatrice
Hanssen, ed., Walter Benjamin and ‘The Arcades Project’, London: Continuum, 2006, p. 103.
39 Charles Baudelaire, ‘Éloge du maquillage’ (1863; ‘In Praise of Cosmetics’), in The Painter of Modern Life
and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne, London: Phaidon Press, 1995, pp. 31–4.
40 Similarly, modernity’s invention of [male] heterosexuality as perverse – the figures of the fetishist, the
loiterer and the frotteur come to mind – with its non-reproductive imperative, like the prostitute and the
mannequin, is itself produced by, complicit with and a critique of commodity culture.
41 There are overlaps between Benjamin’s discussions of the outmoded and of Jetztzeit (‘now-time’) as they
are laid out in his two essays ‘Surrealism, the Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’ (1929) and
‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1940) respectively, in so far as both concern a specifically modern
relation of present to past. Here I draw on the latter to inform and energise the former, at the same time
recognising that Jetztzeit, shot through with the splinters of Messianic time (where, as he puts it, the
historical materialist ‘grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one’),
is different from the outmoded as it relates to the aging of 19th-century modernity and the more recent
past. See Walter Benjamin, ‘Surrealism, the Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’, in Walter
Benjamin: Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. and
intro. Peter Demetz, New York: Schocken Books, 1978, pp. 177–92; and Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the
Philosophy of History’, in Walter Benjamin: Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn, ed.
and intro. Hannah Arendt, New York: Schocken Books, 1968, p. 263.
On modernity’s temporalities see Benjamin passim; Charles Baudelaire, ‘Salon of 1846’, in Baudelaire:
Selected Writings on Art and Artists, trans. P. E. Charvet, Cambridge University Press, 1972, pp. 47–107;
Baudelaire, ‘Painter of Modern Life’; Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde,
Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism, Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 1987; David Cunningham, ‘A
Question of Tomorrow: Blanchot, Surrealism and the Time of the Fragment’, Papers of Surrealism, 1,
Winter 2003, pp. 1–17; Jürgen Habermas, ‘Modernity’s Consciousness of Time and Its Need for Self-
Reassurance’, in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence, Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1987; Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts,
trans. Todd Samuel Presner et al., Stanford University Press, 2002; Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On
the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985; Sami Ktatib, ‘The
Time of Capital and the Messianicity of Time: Marx with Benjamin’ (http://anthropologicalmaterialism.
hypotheses.org/844#_ftn11, accessed 20 June 2011); Peter Osborne, ‘Modernity is a Qualitative, not a
Chronological Category: Notes on the Dialectics of Differential Historical Time’, in Francis Baker, Peter
Hulme and Margaret Iversen, eds, Postmodernism and the Re-reading of Modernity, Manchester Univer-
sity Press, 1992, pp. 23–45; Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde, London:
Verso, 1995.
42 On modernity, the city and spectacle see e.g. Walter Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, in Ben-
jamin: Illuminations, pp. 155–200; Walter Benjamin, ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, in Benja-
min: Reflections, pp. 146–52; Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin
McLaughlin, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 2002 (Ger.
ed. 1982); Berman, All That Is Solid; and Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin
and the Arcades Project, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991.
43 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’, in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings,
Volume 4, 1938–1940, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Others, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings,
Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003, pp. 3–92, p. 19.
44 On modernity, the fashion industry and mannequins see e.g. Dominique Autié, ‘Les Corps artificiels’, in
Mannequins, Paris: Éditions Marc Walter/Colona, 1981; Dominique Autié, ‘Artificial Bodies or the Naturist’s
Chamber’, in Nicole Parrot, ed, ‘Introduction’, Mannequins, pp. 9–32; Caroline Evans, ‘Living Dolls: Man-
350 / notes
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nequins, Models and Modernity’, in Julian Stair, ed., The Body Politic: The Role of the Body and Contem-
porary Craft, London: Crafts Council, 2000, pp. 103–16; Caroline Evans, Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle,
Modernity and Deathliness, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003, esp. pp. 142–5 and
163–89; Tag Gronberg, ‘Beware Beautiful Women: The 1920s Shop Window Mannequin and a Physiognomy
of Effacement’, Art History, 20: 3, 1997, pp. 375–96; Tag Gronberg, Designs on Modernity: Exhibiting the
City in 1920s Paris, Manchester University Press, 1998, pp. 80–113; William Leach, Land of Desire: Mer-
chants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture, New York: Pantheon Books, 1993; Ulrich
Lehmann, Tigersprung: Fashion in Modernity, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000; Leonard S. Marcus,
The American Store Window, New York: Whitney Library of Design and Watson-Guptill Publications, 1978;
Miller, Bon Marché; Sara K Schneider, Vital Mannequins; Émile Zola, The Ladies’ Paradise (1883), trans.
Brian Nelson, Oxford University Press, 1995. For an archive of images of restored vintage mannequins see
Helga Heubel (http://www.vintage-mannequins-photos.com/cms/) and three books Lost Beauties I, II and
III (accessed 29 June 2011).
45 ‘Frenzy of the material’ alludes to Jean-Louis Comolli’s memorable characterisation of the rapidly chang-
ing perceptual world of the second half of the 19th century as a ‘frenzy of the visible’. See Jean-Louis
Comolli, ‘Machines of the Visible’, in Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath, eds, Cinematic Apparatus,
New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980, p. 122.
46 On modernity’s gaze as ‘covetous and erotic’ see Griselda Pollock, ‘Modernity and the Spaces of Feminin-
ity’, in Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art, London:
Routledge, 1988, p. 67.
47 Such window licking must resonate with e.g. Duchamp’s various voyeuristic dispotif, the looking at, into
and through-ness of The Large Glass and the anti-retinal viewing machine Étant donnés, as well as the
1945 window display of a headless mannequin where, by way of the transparent and reflective glass, a
viewer’s head is both superimposed and reflected back, attached now to that very inanimate commodity
form. On the erotics of looking, desiring and purchasing, Duchamp wrote of ‘the coition through the glass
pane’. See Marcel Duchamp, note (Neuilly, 1913) from À l’infinitif (‘The White Box’), New York: Cordier &
Ekstrom, 1967.
48 See Gronberg, Designs on Modernity, p. 82.
49 Ibid.
50 Visual merchandising only really became professionalised in the 1910s. L. Frank Baum, the author of The
Wonderful Wizard of Oz, was the founding editor of the first display-trade magazine, The Shop Window,
and went on in 1898 to set up the industry’s first organisation, the National Association of Window Trim-
mers of America. In the 1900s, live models were often used as part of shop-window displays, a practice
that must resonate with Iwan Bloch’s accounts of Pygmalionism or, more modestly, with the popularity
of tableaux vivants and poses plastiques in the Victorian period.
On the opening night of the exhibition Eros, at Galerie Daniel Cordier in Paris, 1959, Meret Oppenheim’s
‘Cannibal Feast’ installation included a gold-painted live model, stretched out amid food and champagne.
She was surrounded by five diners (three men, two women) and on subsequent nights was replaced by a
mannequin, the diners being replaced by two mannequins in tuxedos. See Mahon, Surrealism and the
Politics of Eros, p. 167. Intentionally or otherwise, this installation replicated the Japanese ritual of nyo-
taimoréi (serving food on a woman’s body).
51 On European fashion dolls see Karl Gröber, Children’s Toys of Bygone Days: A History of Playthings of all
Peoples from Prehistoric Times to the XIXth Century, English version by Philip Hereford, London: B. T.
Batsford Ltd, 1932, pp. 28–9. Gröber’s thoughts on tailors’ dummies, from the original German publication
of 1927, appear as a fragment in Benjamin’s Arcades Project, p. 693 (Z1,1). See also Juliette Peers, The
Fashion Doll: From Bébé Jumeau to Barbie, Oxford: Berg, 2004.
52 Guillaume Janneau, ‘Le Visage de la rue moderne’, Bulletin de la vie artistique, 15: 22, November 1924, p.
498, cited in Gronberg, Designs on Modernity, p. 86. See also Guillaume Janneau, ‘Le Visage de la rue
moderne’, Bulletin de la vie artistique, 15, November 1924, no. 22, p. 498 and ‘Mannequins modernes’, Bul-
letin de la vie artistique, 1925, no. 25, pp. 6–11, repr. in G. Janneau, ‘VI. – Un métier d’art: LES MANNEQUINS
MODERNES’, L’Art décorative moderne: formes nouvelles et programmes nouveaux, Paris: Les Enquêtes
du Bulletin de la Vie Artistique, 1925, pp. 112–15. V. N. Siégel thought something similar, writing that ‘the
old wax mannequins were too realistic to respond to the abstract form assumed by architecture and decora-
tion’. See V. N. Siégel, cited in Marcus, American Store Window, p. 28. That said, around the same time, the
trade journal Display World described Siégel’s Deco mannequins as ‘grotesque’. See also Marcus, ibid.
notes / 351
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53 See ‘Life Goes to a Party with a New York Café Socialite named Cynthia’, Life Magazine, 13 December
1937, pp. 84–7. See also Richard Rosenthal and Jack Sokel, ‘Models of Your Mind’, The New Yorker, 26
May 1969, pp. 37–9, which notes anecdotal evidence of the defilement of mannequins in store basements
and in lingerie departments. A photograph of Gaba’s favorite mannequin ‘Cynthia’ was exhibited in the
artist Mike Kelley’s The Uncanny exhibition, Tate Liverpool, 2004.
54 Schneider writes that ‘Cynthia met her end in a Long Island garage, where her creator was trying to resur-
rect her as an animated figure. Her motor overheated, and she blew up’. Schneider, Vital Mummies, p.
96.
55 Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, pp. 261, 255.
56 Beatrice Hansen, ‘Introduction: Physiognomy of a Flâneur: Walter Benjamin’s Peregrinations Through
Paris in Search of a New Imaginary’, in Beatrice Hanssen, ed., Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project,
London: Continuum Books, 2006, p. 6.
57 See Benjamin, Arcades Project, pp. 693–7.
58 J.-K. Huysmans, Croquis parisiens, Paris, 1886, pp. 129, 131–2 (‘L’Etiage’, ‘Ebb Tide’), in Benjamin, Arcades
Project, pp. 694–5 (Z1a,1).
59 Dalí, Secret Life of Salvador Dali, p. 372.
60 On Eugène Atget see e.g. Annette Michelson, ‘Dr. Crase and Mr. Clair’, October, 11, Winter 1979, pp. 30–53;
Molly Nesbit, Atget’s Seven Albums, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992; and Ian Walker,
City Gorged with Dreams: Surrealism and Documentary Photography in Interwar Paris, Manchester
University Press, 2002. Atget became an ‘unintentional surrealist’ by way of the Victorian and Albert
Museum’s 2007 exhibition Eugène Atget: Unintentional Surrealist? (http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/t/
eugene-atget/).
61 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1968 trans.), in Benjamin:
Illuminations, p. 226. Adrian Rifkin turns things on their head, as he often does, pointing out that ‘a crime
begins to look like the scene of an Atget’. See Adrian Rifkin, Street Noises: Parisian Pleasure 1900–40,
Manchester University Press, 1993, p. 124.
62 Benjamin, ‘Surrealism, the Last Snapshot’, in Benjamin: Reflections, p. 181. On Benjamin and Surrealism
see also Margaret Cohen, Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of the Surrealist Revolu-
tion, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993.
63 Benjamin, ‘Surrealism, the Last Snapshot’, p. 181.
64 Ibid., p. 189.
65 This important distinction is made by Pierre Missac. See Pierre Missac, Walter Benjamin’s Passages,
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995, p. 111.
66 Malt, Obscure Objects of Desire, p. 5.
67 Ibid., p. 103.
68 Ibid., p. 104.
69 Ibid., p. 112.
70 Leslie, ‘Ruin and Rubble in the Arcades’, p. 93.
71 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘A Portrait of Walter Benjamin’, in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber, London:
Neville Speerman Ltd., 1969, p. 239.
5/ the modern sex doll
1 Paolo Mantegazza, Igiene dell’ amore (‘the hygiene of love’; 1877), cited in Paul Tabori, The Humor and
Technology of Sex, New York: Julian Press, 1969, p. 367.
2 A. M. Homes, ‘A Real Doll’, in The Safety of Objects, London: Granta Books, 1990, p. 156.
3 I take the term ‘penetrable sexual devices’ from Cynthia Ann Moya, ‘Artificial Vaginas and Sex Dolls: An
Erotological Investigation’, PhD thesis, San Francisco, Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality,
2006. To my knowledge, Moya’s is the only full-length academic study on this topic, to which I am indebted
for much of the information in the next few pages; I shall cite it carefully.
Penetrable sexual devices, and other sex aids, were available commercially at least 100 years before
the late 19th century, for purchase at private shops and brothels in London and Paris. A Mrs Phillips and
her shop near London’s Leicester Square are mentioned in Andrea de Nerciat’s erotic fiction Le Diable
au corps (1789) and in Johann Wilhelm von Archenholtz’s travel book England (vol. 1, c. 1787, p. 125); and
352 / notes
ED_int.indd 352 15/10/2013 5:06 PM

a Parisian brothel-keeper, Mme Gourdan, appears to have also supplied dildos and condoms in the late
18th century (Correspondence de Madame Gourdan dite la Comtesse, 1784, London, British Museum,
Private Case, P.C.30.c22). See Evelyn Rainbird, The Illustrated Manual of Sex Aids, New York: Minotaur
Press, 1973, pp. 24, 27. The earliest reference I have found to the commercial supply of a penetrable sexual
device is in de Nerciat’s Diable au corps. Here, the character Marquise is visited by a travelling salesman,
Monsieur Bricon (his name is a sexual pun: ‘cunt-breaker’), and there ensues a long dialogue on sex aids.
Marquise points to something she does not recognise in his box of wares but he tells her that these are
‘[m]en’s items . . . [s]eamless apparel, Madame, to be used for . . . (He takes one out and blows it up, thus
making it immediately recognizable to the Marquise)’. See Rainbird, ibid., pp. 23–6. Gut told me that
Rainbird was a nom de plume and, given the book’s inconsistent writing style, tone and moral stance, it
seemed possible that it had more than one author. In fact, Evelyn Rainbird was the name of a publishing
company, ‘harassed into bankruptcy by the Justice Department’. See Joseph W. Slade, Pornography and
Sexual Representation: A Reference Guide, Volume 1, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001, p. 127. A
newspaper article in Washington’s The Spokesman-Review (Sunday, 18 April 1982, p. A17) on Robert
Cuccione lists Evelyn Rainbird Ltd as a mail-order company selling sex aids, one of his companies along
with magazines such as Penthouse and Forum.
The earliest reference I have seen to a Western ‘simulated vagina in a dummy female’, and also the
first known ‘automaton in sexual aids’, is in Michel Millot and Jean L’Ange’s L’Escole des filles (1655),
published in English as The School of Venus, trans. Donald Thomas, London, Panther Books, 1972.
4 Moya points out that due to the 1873 Comstock Act, even the relative privacy and anonymity of mail order
did not make it easy during most of the 20th century in the USA to purchase devices for sexual pleasuring.
As she writes: ‘In America, most three dimensional, mechanical devices intended for use during sexual
activities were illegal during the time between the 1873 Comstock law prohibiting the mailing of obscene
materials, and the changing of American laws around 1968 that opened mail order to sex devices.’ See
Moya, ‘Artificial Vaginas’, p. 26.
5 This advertisement, reportedly from a French magazine in the 1890s, can be found translated in Phyllis
Kronhausen and Eberhard Kronhausen, Erotic Fantasies: A Study of the Sexual Imagination, New York:
Grove Press, 1969, p. 387. (Rainbird claimed that this advertisement was from a 40-page illustrated cata-
logue of c. 1902 from Paris and referred also to a catalogue from c. 1900, produced by a seller of erotic
books based on the Strand in London, which offered ‘artificial cunts’ for sale. See Rainbird, Illustrated
Manual of Sex Aids, p. 51.) The section of Erotic Fantasies entitled ‘La Femme Endormie’ (pp. 362–87) also
retells a story and a poem –  La Femme Endormie (‘The Benumbed Woman’) by ‘Madame B___, Advocat’
(Paris [?]: J. Renold, 1899) and ‘Adollizing, or a lively picture of a Doll-Worship’ from the mid-18th
century – of men having fashioned or fashioning themselves lifelike female dolls.
This same advertisement was translated, somewhat differently, in Henry Nathaniel Cary, Erotic Contriv-
ances: Appliances Attached to, or Used in Place of, the Sexual Organs, Chicago, Il: privately printed, 1922;
see Moya, ‘Artificial Vaginas’, p. 63. Cary’s book is as close as I have found to a contemporary account of
and engagement with late 19th and early 20th-century advertising for sex dolls and other sexual devices.
6 Dildos or objects and artefacts used as dildos go back much further. In ancient Greece such devices
(olisbos in Greek, deriving from Lesbos, its etymological root at least suggesting that they were born to
satisfy women rather than reaffirm a phallo-centric culture, albeit as part of a phallo-centric economy)
were emblazoned on artefacts such as bowls and vases. Such artificial phalluses were also tied closely
to practices of anal masturbation, sodomy and heterosexual acts. In a comedy by Cratinus, the Greek
dramatist spoke of the ‘olisboi of Narcissus’, alluding to both their use for anal masturbation and, as I
have been discussing, the narcissistic nature of masturbation in general. Usually made of leather but also
sometimes of wood, clay and even glass, olisboi were known by Aristophanes as ‘leather comforters’. See
Tabori, Humor and Technology of Sex, pp. 277, 278.
While it was often interchangeable with the phallus, sometimes considered literal, sometimes meta-
phorical, sometimes gargantuan in size, now for us, not wholly dissimilarly, the dildo is, as Page DuBois
writes rather wryly, a ‘literalization of the Freudian fetish, a figuring of the phallus, that nonexistent thing
that conceals or protects the viewer from the castration of the mother which Freud describes as “fact” in
his 1927 essay “Fetishism”’. See Page DuBois, ‘Dildos’, in Slaves and Other Objects, University of Chicago
Press, 2003, p. 100. DuBois continues (ibid.): ‘[t]he dildo, a representation, a simulacrum of a human body
part, is for the Greeks not a fetish, a veil for the castration of the female, nor a toy. Rather, it is an inanimate
imitation of a part of an animate human body’. (In my book, I every now and then think I am trying to do
notes / 353
ED_int.indd 353 15/10/2013 5:06 PM

something similar: to think in the mindset of the rhetoric of the post-sexological/psychoanalytic eroticisa-
tion of/desire for the doll, artificial body part, mannequin and sculpture, but to conceive of them as
artefacts, objects and devices in pre-sexological/psychoanalytic ways; if it were possible to do such a thing.)
For further scholarship on dildos see e.g. Heather Butler, ‘What Do You Call a Lesbian with Long Fingers?
The Development of Lesbian and Dyke Pornography’, in Linda Williams, ed., Porn Studies, Durham, N.C:
Duke University Press, 2004, pp. 167–97, on the dildo/phallus debate in psychoanalysis and feminist theory;
and Rachel P. Maines, The Technology of Orgasm: ‘Hysteria’, the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfac-
tion, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999, for an insightful and often hilarious discussion,
across the history of science, medicine and material culture, on technologies of vibrational massage as
a curative therapeutic. See also Tabori, Humor and Technology of Sex, pp. 271–529.
The most recent iteration of the history of the dildo, its most macho, loutish and penetro-centric incar-
nation, is the arrival of motorised dildos. Built by amateur inventors, and sold via the internet, ‘sex
machines’ are manufactured for customers that are straight or queer, single or coupled. They have names
like Fuckzilla, The Satisfyher and The Octopussy. See Timothy Archibald, Sex Machines: Photographs and
Interviews, Carrboro and Los Angeles: Daniel 13 and Process, 2005. This micro-culture has become more
visible since 2000, with the establishing of the internet company fuckingmachines.com. These ‘sex
machines’ form the latest in a genealogy of vibrating technologies that go back via highly ornate early
20th-century hand-operated vibrators to apocryphal stories of Cleopatra’s vibrator, a calabash filled with
bumble-bees. See also the Sex Machines Museum in Prague (http://www.sexmachinesmuseum.com,
accessed 15 September 2009).
With reference to the artificial vagina’s lubricating mechanism, note that dildos with similar squirting
devices (filled with warm water and a prepared whitish solution which when ejaculated ‘gave the illusion
of male sperm’) were described in erotic fiction of the late 18th century. See Rainbird, Illustrated Manual
of Sex Aids, pp. 27–8.
7 Iwan Bloch, The Sexual Life of Our Time: In its Relations to Modern Civilization, New York: Allied Book
Company, 1907, p. 411. See also Moya, ‘Artificial Vaginas’, p. 38.
8 Moya writes (ibid., pp. 38, 671) that Ellis asserted in Studies on the Psychology of Sex that condoms and
other rubber goods were already being sold via the establishments (brothels) of Mrs Phillips in London
and Madame Gourdan in France. See also n. 3 above. Godemiché comes from the Latin gaude mihi, ‘give
me joy’. Sometimes made of glass (16th century) sometimes of velvet (17th century), in the 17th and
especially 18th centuries godemichés often came with added ‘artificial testicles’ (scrotum artificiale) filled
with hot milk that when compressed were believed to stimulate ejaculation. See Tabori, Humor and
Technology of Sex, p. 356.
9 See Richard Francis Burton, ‘Terminal Essay’, from The Arabian Nights (1885; available unpaginated at
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/pwh/burton-te.html, accessed 4 September 2009.) See also Moya, ‘Artifi-
cial Vaginas’, p. 31.
10 This is the ‘magical, religious and spiritual’ mana, power or quality, of Mauss’s ‘Gifts and the Obligation
to Return Gifts’, not the manna or sustenance provided the Israelites in Exodus 16. See Marcel Mauss,
‘Gifts and the Obligation to Return Gifts’ (1922), in The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic
Society, trans. Ian Cunnison (1954), London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974, pp. 6–16. Rainbird offered
a basic overview of anthropological accounts of non-Western inventions, modifications and uses of dildos,
penis enhancements and clitoral stimulators, including those from the Balinese Wakamba, the ‘Batta
people’ of Sumatra, the Dyak of Borneo, the Patagonian Indians and inhabitants of Burma, the North
Celebes and the Philippines. See Rainbird, Illustrated Manual of Sex Aids, pp. 18–23. See also Tabori,
Humor and Technology of Sex, pp. 292–6.
11 All these images are taken from Moya, ‘Artificial Vaginas’, pp. 32, 77, 114, 124, 128 and 145.
12 See ibid., p. 204.
13 See Meghan Laslocky, ‘Deconstructing RealDoll’, On the Page Magazine, 11, Summer 2004, n.p. (http://
www.onthepage.org/work/deconstructing_realdoll.htm, accessed 9 July 2009). Laslosky’s data is from
Moya, ‘Artificial Vaginas’.
14 Howard Stern, live radio show, July 1997 (http://www.marksfriggin.com/news96_97/nov-97.htm).
15 Photographic, sculptural and installation art works employing sex dolls, many of which use RealDolls,
include the Chapman Brothers’ Death (2003), a sculpture of two sex dolls cast in bronze and painted to
give the impression of vinyl; Elaine Dorfman’s photography series ‘Still Lovers’ (2005); Alex Sandwell
Kliszynski’s series of human-Barbie doll portraits ‘My Luxuria’ (2008); the images and objects displayed
354 / notes
ED_int.indd 354 15/10/2013 5:06 PM

in Lynn Hershman Leeson’s exhibition entitled Found Objects (2008); Hannah Plumb’s sex-doll lightboxes
and her Reclining Miss World cast in marble from an inflatable sex doll (2003); Laurie Simmons’s project
The Love Doll: Days 1–30 (2009–10); and Amber Hawk Swanson’s Las Vegas Wedding Ceremony from her
‘Amber Doll Project’ (2007). See http://www.bitforms.com/lynn-hershman-leeson-gallery.html (acccesed
4 June 2009). Also interesting are Hershman Leeson’s films, Conceiving Ada (1997), Teknolust (2002) and
Strange Culture (2007), which I discuss in Bio Art: The Future of Life (Reaktion Books, forthcoming).
Helmet Newton completed a number of fashion photo-shoots with dolls and mannequins and was
rumoured to have produced an unpublished RealDoll shoot for Playboy. This rumour, allegedly Newton’s
own, is not mentioned in his autobiography, the supposed source for the rumour. On Newton’s use of dolls
and mannequins, see Helmut Newton: Autobiography, New York and London: Doubleday, 2002, esp. pp.
222, 246. Dolls exhibited for educational and museological purposes include those that would have been
on display in China’s first sex theme-park in Chongqing called ‘Love Land’, due to have opened in 2009
but abandoned after public uproar, and in New York’s Museum of Sex. Erotic encounters between humans
and dolls in commercial and art cinema include Air Doll (2009, dir. Hirokazu Koreeda), Lars and the Real
Girl (2007, dir. Craig Gillespie), Love Object (2003, dir. Robert Parigi), Monique (2002, dir. Valérie Guigna-
bodet) and, most interesting, Gaspar Noé’s ‘We Fuck Alone’, his contribution to the art-porn project
Destricted (2006). Animation made doll-on-doll action possible in Team America: World Police (2004, dir.
Trey Parker). Television offers a rich resource of doll-related erotic encounters, with inanimate human
form appearing in episodes of Pushing Daisies (‘Bitter Sweets’, 2007), Boston Legal (‘Can’t We All Get A
Lung?’, 2006) Nip/Tuck (‘Kimber Henry’, 2004), Family Guy (‘The Perfect Castaway’, Season Four, 2005)
and Ally McBeal (passim). The cover art of the dvd boxset for Nip/Tuck’s 4th season could not be a more
unmistakable homage to the story of Pygmalion and the Venus de Milo (without reference to its besmirch-
ing) in an age of popular aesthetic surgery.
16 ‘Sex in a can’ is a still more recent modification of such social camouflaging products.
17 See United States Patent 5,807,360 submitted to the United States Patent and Trademark Office by a Steven
A. Shubin from Austin, Texas, on 15 September 1998. It is the invention patented in 1998 that formed the
prototype for what became known as the Fleshlight. Yet, until more recently the majority of patents sub-
mitted to the US Patent and Trademark Office for sexual devices were for anti-masturbation con-
trivances.
18 The patent for the ‘female functioning mannequin’ claims that it is geared for sales to men such as this.
The website advertisement for the Fleshlight, the product brought into the world from the later patent,
the invention of a ‘device for discreet sperm collection’, includes video footage of female porn actors using
the product on male porn actors as an integrated and thus integratable part of heterosexual intercourse.
This pleasure-fest of a demonstration is a long way from the truth of the matter: most of the devices are
bought by individuals, for individual use, alone.
19 Thanks to Raiford Guins for this observation, made also by Laslocky, ‘Deconstructing RealDoll’, n.p.
20 In the context of the rabidly banal homogeneity of Western capitalist consumer culture, the sheer force
of the naïveté of Scovil and Gaba’s mimetic impulse almost looks like a case of the outmoded short-cir-
cuiting the depthless veneer of contemporary celebrity culture.
21 See http://www.theasiannews.co.uk/news/s/510/510932_sex_doll_renamed_after_protest.html (accessed
10 July 2009).
22 On Barbie see e.g. Stefanie Deutsch, Barbie: The First 30 Years 1959–1989 and Beyond, Identification and
Value Guide, Paducah, Ken: Collector Books and Schroeder Publishing, 1995; M. G. Lord, Forever Barbie:
The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll, New York: Avon Books, 1994; Marly Pearson and Paul R.
Mullins, ‘Domesticating Barbie: An Archaeology of Barbie Material Culture and Domestic Ideology’, Inter-
national Journal of Historical Archaeology, 3: 4, 1999, pp. 225–59; and Erica Rand, Barbie’s Queer Acces-
sories, Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 1995.
23 I can find no mention of this sex doll initiative in books on sexuality, medicine and science in Hitler’s Third
Reich such as Hans Peter Bleuel, Strength Through Joy: Sex and Society in Nazi Germany, trans. J.
Maxwell Brownjohn, London: Secker & Warburg, 1973; William R. Lafleur, Gernot Böhme and Susumu
Shimazono, eds, Dark Medicine: Rationalizing Unethical Medical Research, Bloomington: Indiana Univer-
sity Press, 2007; Betsy L. Nies, Eugenic Fantasies: Racial Ideology in the Literature and Popular Culture
of the 1920’s, London: Routledge, 2002; Vivien Spitz, Doctors from Hell: The Horrific Account of Nazi
Experiments on Humans, Boulder, Colo: Sentient Publications, 2005.
24 Chuck Palahniuk, Snuff, London: Jonathan Cape, 2008.
notes / 355
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25 Ibid., p. 49.
26 See http://www.corriere.it/Primo_Piano/Cronache/2005/06_Giugno/26/hitler_bambola.shtml and YNet-
News.com, 13 August 2007 (both accessed 22 December 2008).
27 In Japan, ‘comfort stations’, a licensed brothel system sanctioned by the military (like ‘disinfection-trailers’
but with prostitutes rather than dolls), had been used from shortly after the first Sino-Japanese war and
the idea was well established by the 1930s. See Sabine Frühstück, Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social
Control in Modern Japan, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, pp. 37–8.
28 It is reported, ibid., that sex dolls were available to Japan’s submarine personnel for similar reasons during
the Second World War.
29 For this source see http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3104790,00.html (accessed 22 December
2008), which also repeats and confirms this quotation.
30 Ibid. Given all this encouraging of sexual relations with dolls, it is ironic that, as Tabori wrote, pre-Hitler
Germany criminalised sex with statues, in so doing affirming the existence of such a practice. See Tabori,
Humor and Technology of Sex, p. 383.
31 Mike Kelly, http://coverdoll.ca/drupal/?q=node/74 (accessed 22 December 2008) writes: ‘The Borghild
project was considered more secret than top secret [Geheime Reichssache] at the time. Himmler put his
commander-in-chief of the SS – Dr. Joachim Mrurgowsky in charge of the project the highest ranking
officer of Berlin’s notorious SS. All members of the team – also Tschakert – were sworn to complete
secrecy. In July 1941, when Hitler’s army attacked Russia, an unknown but ambitious SS-Doctor Named
[sic] Olen Hannussen took over control of the project from Mrurgowsky’. The correct spelling for ‘Mrur-
gowsky’ is Mrugowsky and he was Senior Colonel in the Waffen S.S., the Chief of the Hygiene Institute of
the Waffen S.S., and Senior Hygienist at the Reich. He was prosecuted at the Nuremberg Medical Trial for
conducting medical experiments on prisoners in the concentration camps, condemned to death in 1947
and executed in 1948. See http://nuremberg.law.harvard.edu/php/search.php?DI=1&FieldFlag=3&Defend
ants=14 (accessed 23 December 2008). The information in my text here is not strictly historically accurate,
since the anecdote is not strictly true. Tschakert had in fact been working for the museum since 1913 and
from 1925 was the chief of its Cellon section. His ‘Transparent Man’ was made of this new translucent
synthetic plastic, a celluloid-like substance derived from acetycellulose made by Röhm & Haas A. G.,
Darmstadt, that could be heated and then shaped using a steam line as part of the moulding process.
Tschakert found a skeleton, made it self-supporting with wires and then moulded the arms, legs and parts
of the torso from Cellon. Also, the Hygiene Museum’s opening was graced by the Transparent Man, not
the Transparent Woman. It was not until a few years later that a Transparent Woman was manufactured;
it may well have first appeared at a touring exhibition proposed by the American Public Health Organization
and curated by the German Hygiene Museum, entitled ‘Eugenics in the New Germany’. The Transparent
Woman, it is reported, went to more than 100 cities and towns in the USA as part of American social and
hygiene education. See Klaus Vogel, ‘The Transparent Man: Some Comments on the History of a Symbol’,
in Robert Budd, Bernard Finn and Helmuth Trischler, eds, Manifesting Medicine: Bodies and Machines,
Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1999, pp. 31–61. Between 1945 and 1997, 114 statues of the
Transparent Man and the Transparent Woman (47 of the former, 67 of the latter) were manufactured and
sold round the world for the purpose of exhibition, education and public spectacle.
32 See e.g. http://www.borghild.de/indexe.htm (accessed 22 December 2008).
33 Vogel confirms that Tschakert’s first Transparent Man, shown at the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden
from 1930 onwards, was destroyed in 1945 by the bombing. He also points out that by this point there
were already numerous other Transparent Men and Transparent Women circulating in Germany, the USA,
Japan and elsewhere. See Vogel, ‘Transparent Man’, pp. 48–9.
34 On Japanese popular (and sexual) culture see e.g. Timothy J. Craig, Japan Pop!: Inside the World of Japa-
nese Popular Culture, Armonk, N.Y., and London: M. E. Sharpe, 2000; Sharon Kinsella, ‘What’s Behind the
Fetishism of Japanese School Uniforms?’, Fashion Theory, 6: 2, 2002, pp. 215–37; Fran Lloyd, ed., Consum-
ing Bodies: Sex and Contemporary Japanese Art, London: Reaktion Books, 2002; Dolores Martinez, ed.,
The Worlds of Japanese Popular Culture: Gender, Shifting Boundaries and Global Cultures, Cambridge
University Press, 2008; Laura Miller, Beauty Up: Exploring Contemporary Japanese Body Aesthetics,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006; G. M. Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire: Male–Male Sexu-
ality in Japanese Discourse, 1600–1950, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1999; Miriam Silverberg,
Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times, Berkeley: University of Cali-
356 / notes
ED_int.indd 356 15/10/2013 5:06 PM

fornia Press, 2006; Douglas Slaymaker, ed., A Century of Popular Culture in Japan, Lewiston, N.Y., and
Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2000.
35 Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense. This is also the period, the 1910s–30s, that Sexology in Japan was
at its height. Seiyokugaku, Japan’s equivalent of Germany’s sexualwissenschaft, propagated the science
of sex as sex education through popular sexological journals but its influence disintegrated in the face of
the rise in the 1930s of discourses of eugenics, ‘racial hygiene’, ‘pronatalist’ ideology and of the introduc-
tion of legislation to preserve ‘public morals’, whose censoring equated it with pornography. See Früh-
stück, Colonizing Sex, p. 152.
36 See Miller, Beauty Up.
37 Japan has had a modern beauty industry for some time. It has a long history of breast implantation e.g.
that is documented by medical practitioners from as early as 1898 and became much more widespread
in post-war occupied Japan because of American Occupation servicemen’s predilection for larger breasts.
At this time, silicone was injected directly into the breasts of Japanese streetwalkers, to an extent antici-
pating, all too literally, the beginnings of the modern syntheticisation of woman. The sex doll becomes an
all-inclusive version of this process, although in reverse (a reverse Pygmalion myth) since here the animate
woman becomes the inanimate thing. See Miller, Beauty Up, p. 82.
38 Japan has traditions of figurine and doll-making thousands of years old, always with a ritual purpose.
Small humanoid figures (dogū, literally ‘pottery doll’) – perhaps goddesses or fertility symbols or pregnant
themselves – were crafted in the late Jōmon period (12,000–250 bce). terracotta clay funerary figures
(haniwa) were crafted in the Kofun period (c. 300–600 ce); the public display of dolls (ningyō ) likewise goes
back thousands of years and has spawned an annual Doll Festival (hina-matsuri). In addition to featuring
in fertility rituals and funeral rites, ningyō also play a part in health and purification rituals (oharai), as
protective talismans that ward off disease and misfortune. Given their human form, dolls figure as sub-
stitutes, as stand-ins, for evil, as scapegoats – placating the spirits, absorbing evil, diverting illness,
purifying the individual. As things of and to worship, dolls in such ancient customs indicate that the Japa-
nese believed that they had animistic qualities and that, as (representations or the embodiment of) spirits,
they could relieve them of their troubles. Since animation, as noted earlier, derives from the Latin root
animare, from anima, ‘life, soul, breath, spirit’, it necessarily raises questions intrinsic to that form. There
is an interesting conceptual link here, I think, from ukiyo-e (Edo-period woodcuts, woodblock prints or
‘pictures of the floating world’), to the dominance in Japan of the two dimensions of manga and anime
culture, to ningyō culture that has, according to Alan Scott Pate, ‘frequently been called three-dimensional
ukiyo-e’. See Alan Scott Pate, Ningyō: The Art of the Japanese Doll, North Clarendon, Vt: Tuttle Publishing,
2005, p. 188.
I dare speculate, irresponsibly perhaps, that the dogū figures with eyes that resemble snow-goggles
(Shakōkidogū ) are the origins of the outsized doe-eyes that are central to Japanese cute (kawaii) culture,
and that by way of kawaii there is a direct link among dogū , animism (which is at the heart of many
religions including Shinto) and Japan’s adoption of proto-Pygmalion myths that permeate its popular
culture and often accompany discussions on and testimonies from users of sex dolls.
39 On cuteness, see e.g. Sharon Kinsella, ‘Cuties in Japan’, in Lise Skov and Brian Moeran, eds, Woman,
Media and Consumption in Japan, Honolulu, University of Hawai’i Press, 1995, pp. 220–54, (http://www.
kinsellaresearch.com/Cuties.html; n.p., accessed 24 August 2009) and passim in the books cited in n. 34
above.
40 See e.g. Mizuki Takahashi, ‘Opening the Closed World of Shōjo Manga’, and Deborah Shamoon, ‘Situating
the Shōjo in ShōjoManga’, in Mark W. MacWilliams, ed., Japanese Visual Culture: Explorations in the World
of Manga and Anime, Armonk, N.Y., and London: M. E. Sharpe, 2008, pp. 114–36 and 137–76
respectively.
41 See e.g. Romain Slocombe, City of the Broken Dolls: A Medical Art Diary, Tokyo 1993–96, London: Creation
Books, 1997.
42 Chizuko Naitō, ‘Reorganization of Gender and Nationalism: Gender Bashing and Lolicanized Japanese
Society’, in Frenchy Lunning, ed., Mechademia 5: Fanthropologies, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2010, pp. 325–33.
43 For (often erotic) dolls, androids and gynoids in Japanese manga and anime see e.g. Leiji Matsumoto’s
sci-fi Sexaroid (1968); Tezuka Osamu’s Yakeppachi no Maria (1970) in which a blow-up doll is ‘occupied’
by the ectoplasm to which the main character has given birth; Ishinomori Shotaro’s manga Sexadoll (1971);
notes / 357
ED_int.indd 357 15/10/2013 5:07 PM

Neon Genesis Avangelion’s character Ayanami Rei; the artist Peach-Pit’s manga series Rozen Maiden in
which the main character Jun Sakurada becomes a doll’s human host or ‘medium’ fuelled by his ‘life
energy’; and Innocence: Ghost in the Shell 2 (2004, dir. Oshii Mamoru) which includes dolls modelled on
Bellmer’s poupée. On the last see Steven T. Brown, ‘Machinic Desires: Hans Bellmer’s Dolls and the
Technological Uncanny in Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence’, in Frenchy Lunning, ed., Mechademia, 3, Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008, pp. 222–53; Livia Monnet, ‘Anatomy of Permutational Desire:
Perversion in Hans Bellmer and Oshii Mamoru’, in Lunning, ed., Mechademia, 5, pp. 285–310; Livia
Monnet, ‘Anatomy of Permutational Desire, Part II: Bellmer’s Dolls and Oshii’s Gynoids’, in Frenchy
Lunning, ed., Mechademia, 6: User Enhanced, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011, pp.
153–69. See also Margherita Long, ‘Malice@Doll: Konaka, Specularization, and the Virtual Feminine’, in
Frenchy Lunning, ed., Mechademia, 2: Networks of Desire, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2007, pp. 157–73. Miyako Maki, a manga artist, was also the creator in 1967 of Licca-Chan, ‘Japan’s Barbie’.
(Maki’s partner is Leiji Matsumoto.)
Dolls were integral to Japanese avant-garde visual arts practice. Yotsuya Simon led the way, following
an article he had read on Bellmer written in 1965 by the novelist and critic Tatsuhiko Shibusawa, a transla-
tor of de Sade, which was published in the magazine Shinfujin. Simon was later (1984) introduced in the
French doll magazine Polichinelle as a ‘Japanese Pygmalion’ and in 1985 a book of his works was pub-
lished entitled Yotsuya Simon: Pygmalionisme (Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppan-sha, Showa 60). More recent
adopters of dolls in their visual arts practice include Mahoko Akiyama, Katan Amano, Horoko Igeta,
Kiotsykehime, Etsuko Miura and Ryo Yoshida. Work by some of these artists and Simon appeared, along-
side work by Bellmer, in an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, entitled Dolls of Inno-
cence (2004). Other exhibitions in this context include Doll Art from the Early Showa Era and Other Periods,
Crafts Gallery, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (1986) and Contemporary Dolls: Formative Art of
Human Sentiment, National Museum of Art, Tokyo (2003). On Akiyama’s work see Hiroshi Fujita and Mahoko
Akiyama, Psychoanalysis of Doll Love (details unknown). On Miura’s work see Etsuko Miura: Doll Bride of
Frankenstein, Toyko: Editions Treville, 2006.
44 Moya refers to the sex stores and rubber-goods stores in the Ginza district of Tokyo frequented by North
American soldiers on leave that openly sold sexual devices. She also mentions that in the mid-1930s sex
stores published a catalogue called The Key to the Sex Question, which included details of penetrable
sexual devices made of soft hollow rubber, shaped like hot-water bottles, one that used hot water and
another that used air to create realistic sensations. See Moya, ‘Artificial Vaginas’, pp. 75–8, 92. The cata-
logue can be found in full at http://poetry.rotten.com/sexcat/ (accessed 22 August 2009). Rainbird also
identifies such a device first appearing in 1929, naming it the saku and referring to it as the ‘most portable
Japanese device’ for lonely men. See Rainbird, Illustrated Manual of Sex Aids, p. 49.
45 See http://www.demonbaby.com/blog/2005/08/curiosities-from-japans-porno-shops.html (accessed 22
August 2009).
46 On the hentai doll market see http://www.hongfire.com/forum/archive/index.php?t-33599.html (accessed
22 August 2009). For resources on the Japanese sex industry and ‘curiosities from Japanese porn shops’
see http://www.wordpress.tokyotimes.org/, http://www.demonbaby.com/blog/2005/08/curiosities-from-japans-
porno-shops.html, http://www.demonbaby.com/blog/2007/06/more-curiosities-from-japans-porno.html
(accessed 22 August 2009) and http://www.otaku2.com/articleView.php?item=15 (accessed 17 September
2009).
47 See http://www.coremagazine.co.jp/idoloid/index2.html (accessed 22 August 2009).
48 When it comes to the market in toys, the free-standing penetrable sexual device or disembodied artificial
body parts, much like the Fleshlight, Japan has its own ‘vagina-in-a-can’ (or Vagican or Cangina) products.
Going one better than the Fleshlight, perhaps taking its lead from the vibrating devices of the 1960s and
70s such as the Orgo-Aid, they have manufactured a Vagican Vibrator so the consumer can insert the
Vagican into the machine, switch it on and it vibrates for them, so they do not have to. The consumer can
even purchase and bolt on a rubber hand, creating an electronic vibrating hand-job machine (in transla-
tion, the ‘Electric Man’). For the ladies, there are also novelty products; the epitome is a mould of vibrating
fingers, cast from the hands of a famous Japanese actor, thus acknowledging an ideological and rhetorical
shift, as well as a shift in operationality, of sexual devices for women from penetrating (vagino-centric?)
to vibrating, massaging and circulatory (clitero-centric?) devices.
49 Tabori, Humor and Technology of Sex, p. 373.
358 / notes
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50 For the websites of this and other Japanese companies that produce sex dolls see e.g. http://aidoll.4woods.
jp/, http://www.orient-doll.com/ and http://www.honeydolls.jp/.
51 Honey Dolls e.g., a ‘leading company of Resinic Technology’ as their website proclaims, have, pushing the
hyper-realism of RealDoll a step further, ‘voice response’ pressure sensors attached in the breasts which
trigger lifelike orgasmic sounds that play from a device in the doll’s head. (Their dolls come with four
customised voices but the customer can also store voices obtained from elsewhere.) Moya reports that
dolls (both male and female) were being fitted with phonographic attachments early in the 20th century,
echoing closely Edison’s almost contemporary manufacturing of some 500 ‘talking dolls’. See Moya,
‘Artificial Vaginas’, p. 64. On Edison’s doll see Wood, Living Dolls, pp. 117–54.
52 See http://www.honeydolls.jp/ (accessed 10 February 2009).
53 Japanese doll-making itself was born of fire, it is said, the first time when a doll was substituted for
humans: ‘The first doll in Japanese history was made, according to legend, by Nomi-no-Sukune about
two thousand years ago, i.e. in the 8th year of the reign of the Emperor Suinin. In the 35th year of that
reign, when the Imperial Consort died, the custom of zyunsi (permitting self-immolation of retainers at
the death of their master in order to follow him in death) was prohibited at the suggestion of Nomi-no-
Sukune; and the practice of substituting clay figures of men and animals then began.’ See Tekiho Nisizawa,
Japanese Folk-Toys, trans. S. Sakabe, Tokyo: Board of Tourist Industry/Japanese Government Railways,
1939, p. 17.
54 For a company that sells sex products, Pururu is representative in its range of products, how they are
designed and how their packaging is designed and marketed, etc. http://www.pururu.co.jp/ (accessed 22
August 2009).
55 One example will suffice. On 23 August 2006, USA Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were
executing a search warrant on a Long Island home while investigating incidences of online trafficking of
child pornography. During the search they discovered ‘inflated, anatomically-correct child sexual dolls,
which were dressed as children’. A copy of the arrest warrant can be found at http://www.thesmokinggun.
com/archive/0921062doll1.html (accessed 10 August 2009). If a reader is looking for a direct connection
between pre-teen and adolescent sex dolls, and child pornography and the sexual abuse of children, this
is it.
56 On Fujiwara, see Nicholas Bornoff, ‘Sex and Consumerism: The Japanese State of the Arts’, in Lloyd,
Consuming Bodies, pp. 41–68, esp. 56–7; and Fran Lloyd, ‘Strategic Interventions in Contemporary Japa-
nese Art’, in ibid., pp. 69–108, esp. 95–101. It is Bornoff who writes (p. 56) that Fujiwara’s work For
Pleasure! Dogs! (1995), with its kitsch plastic dog-shaped sculptural form, with ‘built-in orifices at the
head and front . . . manages to suggest a “Dutch Wife”, without actually looking like one’.
57 On Miwa Yanagi see Yuko Hasegawa, ‘Post-identity Kawaii: Commerce, Gender and Contemporary Japa-
nese Art’, in Lloyd, Consuming Bodies, pp. 127–41, esp. 130–32.
58 Many thanks to Akira Lippit for this insight, in conversation. On sexless love, see http://www.guardian.
co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/27/japan-men-sexless-love (accessed 27 December 2011).
59 Dave Hickey, writing for Artforum, 37: 4, December 1998, pp. 93–95. My Lonesome Cowboy sold at
Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening in May 2008 for $13,500,000.
60 On sexuality, sodomy and the sea, see e.g. B. B. Burg, Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition: English Sea Rovers
in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean, New York University Press, 1995 (1984), and Hans Turley, Rum,
Sodomy, and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality, and Masculine Identity, New York University Press, 1999. On the
idea of ‘impermeable institutions’ see Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental
Patients and Other Inmates, New York: Anchor Books, 1961.
61 ‘Sex-surrogacy masturbation’ is a phrase I take from Burg who uses it to refer to same-sex activities between
convicts, and transposes the model to buccaneers. See Burg, Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition, p. 108.
62 In the contemporary Netherlands, in common parlance the Dutch Wife refers directly and generically to
a piece of wood with a hole in it that is used for masturbatory purposes. The Dutch Wife is also defined
variously as a long pillow; a hot-water bottle; a pillow used by sailors to box them into their sleeping
quarters during stormy weather; and a rattan or bamboo pillow-like structure or bolster that in hot cli-
mates is used at night in bed to suspend the limbs above the sheets.
63 Not long after the arrival of the Dutch, such erotic ningyō featured in the writings of Ihara Saikaku
(1642–93) ‘as incarnations of vengeful spirits, expensive gifts demanded by ladies of the pleasure quarters,
as well as the source of libidinous fantasies’. See Scott Pate, Ningyō, p. 274.
notes / 359
ED_int.indd 359 15/10/2013 5:07 PM

64 See Moya, ‘Artificial Vaginas’, pp. 78–88. See also Tabori, Humor and Technology of Sex, esp. ‘The Toys of
Love’, pp. 269–529, and Rainbird, Illustrated Manual of Sex Aids, p. 49. From the 17th to the 19th century
dildos were available from the Komamonoya, fancy-goods stores that were forerunners of the sex shop.
Unlike their European cousins that were often made from wax, porcelain wood and ivory, glass from
Murano, and later so-called India rubber, in Japan dildos could be made from carrots, papier-mâché,
leather, horn and pewter, or tortoiseshell. See Rainbird, Illustrated Manual of Sex Aids, pp. 39–50. See
also Tabori, Humor and Technology of Sex, pp. 269–529, esp. 322–44. Tabori wrote (p. 326) that the best-
known factories (for manufacturing harikatas) ‘were the Yotsume-ya of Jeddo and Osaka . . . They were
both manufacturers and wholesalers, modestly calling themselves pharmacists. Yotsume became a
generic popular name for all technical aids of sex life: aphrodisiacs, potions, artificial penises, etc.’ Leather
azumagata were called kawagata (the leather form) or kawa-no-sugata (the leather image). Ibid., p. 336.
65 Rainbird, Illustrated Manual of Sex Aids, p. 49, citing the Jiro Haya Shinan. Tabori spelt it Jiiro Haya Shinan
and referred to it as ‘The Art of Quickly Seducing a Novice’. See Tabori, Humor and Technology of Sex, p.
337. Scott Pate writes of shutsuro bijin (‘traveling beauties’) or kōshoku onna (‘play women’). Scott Pate,
Ningyō, p. 274.
66 Scott Pate, Ningyō, p. 275.
67 While the Japanese adapted the penetrable sexual device from the Dutch in the middle of the 17th century,
they had for centuries before been crafting or improvising penetrating sex devices or artificial penises
(harikata), out of papier-mâché and, later, horn, tortoiseshell, wood, metal and glass for auto-erotic and
shared satisfactions. They had been doing so long before sexologists (who in their writings on ‘onanistic
stimulatory apparatus[es]’, prioritised penetrating sexual devices over penetrable sexual devices as part
of their larger debate on the ‘auto-erotic instrumentarium’ in order to pathologise female eroticism and
sodomitic practices) and also long before the olisbos devices of ancient Greece.
In Japan, penetrating sexual devices were so popular, wrote Tabori, that they needed more than one
name and were known variously as to-kei (‘the likeness’), maragata (‘shape of penis’), ohase-gata (‘the
form or image of maleness’), ohashi (‘the centre of the male’) and warai-dogu (‘the laughable (or ridicu-
lous) thing’). These terms all fall nicely into my argument in this section for the erotic doll’s will-to-veri-
similitude, in which regard I like the last term best. There was also a tradition of preparing ‘homemade
dildos’ from agricultural produce (known generically as sokuza-harikata, ‘improvised, self-made instru-
ment’) such as carrots. In an ancient collection of writings during the Jingo-Keiun (767–70), Empress
Shōtoku used as a harikata (an artificial penis) a yam, which broke and eventually killed her. See Tabori,
Humor and Technology of Sex, pp. 328, 330–31, 326. Let this be a warning to us all, lest we lose all sense
of personal dignity.
6/ realdoll
1 Howard Stern on his radio show while on air having sex with his RealDoll Celine, July 1997 (http://www.
marksfriggin.com/news96_97/nov-97.htm).
2 Robert J. Stoller, Perversion: The Erotic Form of Hatred, New York: Pantheon, and London: Karnac, 1975,
p. 6.
3 Meghan Laslocky points out that, strictly speaking, doll love is known as ‘pediophilia’, which does not
include sculpture love. To avoid any confusion between ‘pediophilia’ and ‘paedophilia’, Laslocky sticks with
agalmatophilia as a more all-embracing paraphilia that includes love of/for sculptures, dolls and man-
nequins. I shall do the same. See Meghan Laslocky, ‘Real Dolls: Love in the Age of Silicone’, p. 4 (see
http://www.saltmag.net/images/pdfs/RealDollsPDF.pdf, accessed 20 December 2008). Originally titled
‘Just Like a Woman’ and published by Salon.com on 11 October 2005, this article was, when I began the
research for this book and still is to my knowledge, the first and only lengthy academic-type engagement
with the owners of RealDolls; it interviews many of the same RealDoll owners that appear in Elena Dorf-
man’s book Still Lovers and Nick Holt’s television documentary Guys and Dolls (see nn. 4 and 9 below).
During the final drafting of this book I came across additional writings attending to RealDolls although
none of them affect the content or argument of this book. See Anthony Ferguson, The Sex Doll: A History,
Jefferson, N.C., and London: McFarland & Company, 2010; Allison de Fren, ‘The Exquisite Corpse: Dis-
articulations of the Artificial Female’, PhD, University of Southern California, 2008 (http://digitallibrary.
360 / notes
ED_int.indd 360 15/10/2013 5:07 PM

usc.edu/assetserver/controller/item/etd-Fren-2417.pdf, accessed 10 October 2011); Fren is also the direc-
tor of the documentary a.s.f.r. (alt.sex.fetish.robots) (2001), on robot sex fetishists, which includes material
on the RealDoll; and David Levy, Love & Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human–Robot Relationships,
London: Duckworth Overlook, 2008.
4 Elena Dorfman, Still Lovers, New York: Channel Photographics, 2005. For an early consideration of Dorf-
man’s photographs, a review of an exhibition entitled ‘Valley of the Dolls: Hans Bellmer, Elena Dorfman,
David Levinthal: Photographs’, Modernism Gallery, San Francisco, see Kenneth Baker, ‘Getting intimate
with guys and “Dolls”’, San Francisco Chronicle, Saturday 19 July 2003 (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/
article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/07/19/DD304668.DTL; accessed 04 June 2009).
5 Elizabeth Alexandre, ‘Still Lovers’, in Dorfman, Still Lovers, pp. 11–12.
6 Dorfman, Still Lovers, ‘Preface’, p. 4.
7 Ibid. (emphasis in the original).
8 Ibid., dust jacket.
9 Nick Holt, Guys and Dolls, shown on UK terrestrial television station Channel 5 at 10 pm, 18 September
2006.
10 This quotation comes from Laslocky, ‘Real Dolls’, p. 12.
11 Ibid., p. 7.
12 See Diane Fuss, The Sense of an Interior: Four Writers and the Rooms that Shaped Them, London: Rout-
ledge, 2004, esp. ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–21, for a framework for this chapter’s opening gambit on the role
of the domestic in articulating differently the erotic dynamics between men and dolls. See also Giuliana
Bruno, ‘Havana: Memoirs of Material Culture’, Journal of Visual Culture, 2: 3, December 2003, pp. 303–24,
and Penny Sparke et al., Designing the Modern Interior: From the Victorians to Today, Oxford: Berg, 2009.
13 There is a hint every now and then that iDollators take video footage too, although it is never said if these
are home movies, if they are even watched and, if they are, whether that footage is put to any use, nefari-
ous or otherwise.
14 See Joshua Simon, ‘Neo-Materialism, Part Three: The Language of Commodities’, e-flux (http://www.e-
flux.com/journal/view/182, n.p; accessed 12 October 2011), and Jane Bennett, ‘Powers of the Hoard: Notes
on Material Agency’, a lecture at ici Berlin (http://www.ici-berlin.org/docu/bennett/2/ accessed 12 October
2011).
15 See Roland Barthes, ‘Toys’ (1957), in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers, New York: Hill and Wang, 1972,
pp. 53–5.
16 See Jean Baudrillard, ‘Subjective Discourse or The Non-Functional System of Objects’ (1968), in Revenge
of the Crystal: Selected Writings on the Modern Object and its Destiny, 1968–1983, ed. and trans. Paul
Foss and Julian Pefanis, London: Pluto Press, 1990, p. 45. Baudrillard continues (p. 46) that in opposition
to this, ‘in the field of human relations, which are unique and conflictual, this fusion of absolute singularity
and an indefinite series is not permitted, which is why they are a source of continual anguish’.
17 On toys and the miniature see e.g. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic,
the Souvenir, the Collection, Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 1993.
18 See Baudrillard, ‘Subjective Discourse’, p. 45.
19 I cannot find any evidence that silicone turns to dust; quite the contrary, it does not rot. Cremation as
consecration, as I shall touch on later, shows itself to be a better option.
20 Alexandre, ‘Still Lovers’, p. 14.
21 In continuing this theme, the cover of Roxy Music’s later Manifesto album (1979) features a variety of
mannequins dancing at a disco; the picture disc features the same scene although all the mannequins
are unclothed. The singles from the album (‘Trash’, ‘Dance Away’ and ‘Angel Eyes’) also feature manne-
quins on their covers.
22 For a more detailed article solely on Fiero see ‘The Love Doctor’ (http://men.style.com/details/features/
full?id=content_7878; accessed 07 June 2009).
23 See http://www.realdoll.com/ (accessed 08 July 2009). All quotations and many of the facts in the next few
pages are taken from the official RealDoll website.
24 Customers are warned that their RealDoll can lose its shape memory through the use of tight clothes or
boned bras which can leave impressions; customers are encouraged to avoid creasing the silicone when
storing by re-positioning it every now and then, so that it does not take on flat spots on the buttocks, legs
or breasts that will become permanent.
notes / 361
ED_int.indd 361 15/10/2013 5:07 PM

25 Highly detailed advice on how to get the best out of a RealDoll can be found on the numerous iDollator
internet clubs and bulletin boards. On this matter of body heat, one board offers advice on ‘how to rig up
an aquarium heater and a dimmer switch to heat your doll’s vagina if you don’t have time to warm up her
whole body with an electric blanket’. (http://www.realdoll.com/; accessed 10 July 2009).
26 Matt McCullen quoted in Laslocky, ‘Real Dolls’, pp. 20–21.
27 Slade Fiero cited in ibid., p. 18.
28 Ibid., p. 19.
29 Ibid., and Alexandre, ‘Still Lovers’, p. 13.
30 Stoller, Perversion, p. 4, p. 120. Sigmund Freud, ‘Fetishism’ (1927), in Sigmund Freud, On Sexuality, trans.
James Strachey, London: Penguin, 1977, p. 353.
31 On pornotopia see Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-
Nineteenth Century England (1964), New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2009, ‘Conclusion:
Pornotopia’.
32 Mike Kelly quoted in Laslocky, ‘Real Dolls’, p. 11.
33 Instrumentality, fungibility and violability are for Martha Naussbaum three of the seven objectifying notions
in our treatment of things. See Martha Naussbaum, ‘Objectification’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 24: 4,
1995, pp. 249–91.
34 On how bodies and bodily practices are regulated, enforced and articulated, both as lived bodies and forms
of representation, see e.g. Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body,
London: Verso, 1995; Sander Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and
Madness, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985; and Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment
and Moving Image Culture, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
35 Matt McCullen, quoted in Holt, ‘Guys and Dolls’ documentary.
36 McCullen cited in Laslocky, ‘Real Dolls’, p. 20.
37 Stoller, Perversion, p. 212.
7/ duchamp’s étant donnés
1 See Julian Levy, Memoir of an Art Gallery, New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1977, p. 20. Michael R. Taylor, a
former curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, quotes the same passage, although slightly differently.
See Michael R. Taylor, ‘Body Matters: Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés Revisited’, in Marc Décimo, ed.,
Marcel Duchamp and Eroticism, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007, p. 37. Thanks to Gavin
Parkinson for bringing to my attention this article, which I shall utilise at length later in this chapter. Taylor
completed a book-length study of Étant donnés to coincide with the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s exhibi-
tion in 2009 celebrating the 40th anniversary of its installation. See Michael R. Taylor, Marcel Duchamp:
Étant donnés, Philadelphia Museum of Art and New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009.
Thanks to Michael Taylor for correspondence.
2 Much of the information here on Étant donnés is taken from Marcel Duchamp, Manual of Instructions for
Étant Donnés: 1 la chute d’eau, 2 le gaz d’éclairage, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1987; Anne d’Harnoncourt
and Walter Hopps, ‘Étant Donnés: 1 degree la chute d’eau, 2 degrees le gaz d’éclairage: Reflections on a
New Work by Marcel Duchamp’, Philadelphia Museum of Art Bulletin, 64: 299/300, April 1969, pp. 1–58;
David Hopkins, Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst: The Bride Shared, Oxford University Press, 1998; Arturo
Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, New York: Delano Greenridge Editions, 3rd rev. 1995;
Taylor, ‘Body Matters’; Taylor, Marcel Duchamp; and Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography, New York:
Little Owl, 1998. See also Stefan Banz, ed., Marcel Duchamp and the Forestay Waterfall, Zurich: JRP
Ringier, 2010; Rachel Blau-DuPlessis, ‘Marcel Duchamp and the Female Spectator’, in The Pink Guitar:
Writing as Feminist Practice, New York: Routledge, 1990, pp. 68–82; Thierry de Duve, ed., The Definitely
Unfinished Marcel Duchamp, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991; Julian Jason Haladyn, Marcel Duchamp:
Étant donnés, London: Afterall Books, 2010; David Hopkins, Dada’s Boys, New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2008; Dalia Judovitz, Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transition, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1995; Amelia Jones, Postmodernism and the En-Gendering of Marcel Duchamp, Cam-
bridge University Press, 1995; Rosalind Krauss, ‘Where’s Poppa?’, in de Duve, Definitively Unfinished
Marcel Duchamp, pp. 432–62; Francis M. Naumann and Hector Obalk, eds, Affectionately, Marcel: The
Selected Correspondence of Marcel Duchamp, trans. Jill Taylor, Ghent and Amsterdam: Ludion Press,
362 / notes
ED_int.indd 362 15/10/2013 5:07 PM

2000; Molly Nesbit, ‘Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés’, ArtForum, 32: 1, September 1993, pp. 158–9; Gavin
Parkinson, The Duchamp Book, London: Tate Publishing, 2008; and Juan Antonio Ramírez, Duchamp:
Love and Death, Even, trans. Alexander R. Tulloch, London: Reaktion Books, 1998.
3 The information in Duchamp’s Manual became available to a wider public only after its publication by the
Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1987. Out of print for many years, it was re-published in 2009 for the
Museum’s 40th anniversary exhibition of Étant donnés.
4 Taylor, Marcel Duchamp, p. 139.
5 See Chris Horrocks, ‘You want to see? Well, take a look at this! Ethical Vision, Disembodiment and Light
in Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés’, in Fran Lloyd and Catherine O’Brien, eds, Secret Spaces, Forbidden
Places, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2000, p. 205.
6 This point is made by a number of authors: Arturo Schwartz, Man Ray: The Rigour of the Imagination,
New York: Rizzoli, 1977; Hopkins, Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst, p. 17; Hellmut Wohl, ‘Beyond the Large
Glass: Notes on a Landscape Drawing by Marcel Duchamp’, The Burlington Magazine, 119: 896, November
1977, p. 771.
7 D’Harnoncourt and Hopps, ‘Étant Donnés’, p. 50, and Hopkins, Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst, p. 20.
8 Étant donnés is characterised as an ‘obscene diorama’ by Martin Jay, following Roger Shattuck, in Martin
Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1993, p. 169. Lewis C. Kachur speaks of Étant donnés’s ‘regimented viewing’, its
peephole as ‘a delayed realization of [Julian] Levy’s concept of a Surrealist nickelodeon, crossed with a
pornographic peep show’. See Lewis Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous: Marchel Duchamp, Salvador Dalí,
and Surrealist Exhibition Installations, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001, p. 204. On the ‘rape aesthetic’
of Étant donnés see e.g. Laura E. Tanner, ‘Reading Rape: Sanctuary and The Women of Brewster Place’,
American Literature, 62: 4, December 1990, pp. 559–82. Ramírez suggests that the scene is ‘the prelude
to the act of lovemaking’ and calls the mannequin a ‘sacrificial dummy’ and a ‘mutilated woman’. Ramírez,
Duchamp, pp. 214 and 234.
9 See e.g. Hopkins, Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst, p. 47.
10 Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography, p. 454. Tomkins, one of the commentators on Étant donnés who sees
the recumbent mannequin as a figure of/in post-coital bliss, continues his interpretation: ‘Your eye keeps
going back to the articulate cunt and to the phallic lamp held aloft and to the distant waterfall: water and
gas combine in the mind of the beholder as the bride, stripped bare at last, completes (by herself, appar-
ently) the process that was so endlessly and hilariously delayed in The Large Glass.’ Here Tomkins pin-
points something germane to my earlier discussions of auto-affection: he suggests that the mannequin
‘completes (by herself, apparently)’ the deferred sexual gratification so denied her (denied by her?) in
Duchamp’s Large Glass (1915–23). On sexuality, eroticism and deferred gratification in the Large Glass
see e.g. Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art,
Princeton University Press, 1983, and Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Duchamp in Context: Science and
Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works, Princeton University Press, 1998; Hopkins, Marcel
Duchamp and Max Ernst; Rosalind Krauss, Bachelors, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999.
11 See Jones, Postmodernism and the En-Gendering of Marcel Duchamp, pp. 196, 194, 193–4, 196.
12 Virginie Monnier, ‘Catalogue of Works’, in Jean Clair, ed., Balthus, Milan: Bompiani, 2001, p. 388. On the
important historical and structural links between Duchamp’s Étant donnés and Courbet’s Origin, see Linda
Nochlin, ‘Courbet’s L’origine du monde: The Origin without an Original’, October, 37, 1986, pp. 76–86;
Jones, Postmodernism and the En-Gendering Marcel Duchamp, pp. 202 and 303 n. 33.
13 See Schwarz, Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, p. 561. See also Horrocks, ‘You want to see?’, p. 214,
and Jean-François Lyotard, Duchamp’s TRANS/formers, trans. Ian McLeod, Venice, Cal.: Lapis Press, 1993
(1977).
14 See Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography, p. 278. See also Ernestine Daubner, ‘Allegories of Nature, Culture,
Gender: Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés’, PhD thesis, Concordia University, 2000, pp.
155–60.
15 See François Rouan, ‘Circling around a Void’, trans. Rosalind Krauss, October, 65, Summer 1993, p. 86.
16 Jean Clair, ‘Medusa’, in Jean-Michjel Rabaté, Given 1° Art 2° Crime: Modernity, Murder and Mass Culture,
Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2007, p. 35.
17 Ramírez, Marcel Duchamp: Love and Death, Even, pp. 200 and 240–45. Here Ramírez writes about Dalí’s
The Hair in Soft Structures (1936). He also mentions Baroness Else von Freytag-Loringhoven who appears
in a film by Duchamp and Man Ray having her pubic area shaven by a barber. For more on this see David
notes / 363
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Hopkins, ‘Men Before the Mirror: Duchamp, Man Ray and Masculinity’, Art History, 21, September 1998,
p. 317, and Paul B. Franklin, ‘Object Choice: Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain and the Art of Queer Art History’,
Oxford Art Journal, 23: 1, 2000, pp. 23–50.
18 Ramírez, Marcel Duchamp: Love and Death, Even, p. 240.
19 Jones, Postmodernism and the En-Gendering of Marcel Duchamp, p. 201.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid., p. 202 (emphasis in the original).
22 Ibid. Tanner also speaks about ‘the hairless vagina that is cut into the woman like a wound’ and that ‘the
woman lies as if abandoned after an act of violation’. Tanner, ‘Reading Rape’, p. 559. In his discussion of
the tableau in Jeff Wall and Marcel Duchamp, Michael Newman speaks of Wall’s The Destroyed Room
(1978) with its ‘mattress slashed from corner to corner in a way that resembles a vagina, and also sug-
gests that a rape has taken place’. See Michael Newman, ‘Towards the Reinvigoration of the “Western
Tableau”: Some Notes on Jeff Wall and Duchamp’, Oxford Art Journal, 30:1, 2007, p. 90. Newman also
writes (p. 91): ‘Duchamp’s naked manikin has been substituted in Wall’s The Destroyed Room the bed with
the vagina massively enlarged as the cut through which spill the innards of the mattress’.
23 See Lyotard, Duchamp’s TRANS/formers, and Hopkins, Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst, p. 123 n. 62. See
also Dalia Judovitz, ‘Rendezvous with Marcel Duchamp: Given’, in Rudolf Kuenzli and Francis M. Naumann,
eds, Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989, pp. 184–202.
24 See Lyotard, Duchamp’s TRANS/formers, p. 9–10.
25 This phrase comes from Hal Foster’s discussion of Robert Gober. See Hal Foster, ‘An Art of Missing Parts’,
October, 92, Spring 2000, pp. 128–56. Foster and Krauss’s writings on Gober, Cindy Sherman and Louise
Bourgeois have been of great help here. As I worked carefully with and against them, they were more
visible in an earlier version of this chapter that included a section on these post-Surrealist artists who
utilise assemblages of objects, figures and environments.
26 E.g., as Olga M. Viso wrote on the occasion of Gober’s installation for the United States Pavilion at the
49th Venice Biennale in 2001, ‘in their perplexing distortions and anthropomorphic associations, Gober’s
sinks went beyond formalist exercise to become haunting surrogates for the human body’. Olga M. Viso,
‘Life’s Small Epiphanies’, in Robert Gober, The United States Pavilion, 49th Venice Biennale, Chicago and
Washington, D.C.: Art Institute of Chicago and Hirshhorn Museum, Smithsonian Institution, 2001, p. 20.
27 Foster, ‘Art of Missing Parts’, p. 138.
28 Ibid.
29 Lynne Cooke has written of Gober’s ‘parodying heterosexual masculinity’. Lynne Cooke, in Judith Nesbitt,
ed., Robert Gober, London: Serpentine Gallery, 1993, p. 24.
30 See Foster, ‘Art of Missing Parts’, p. 152.
31 Henri-Pierre Roché, ‘Souvenirs of Marcel Duchamp’, in Robert Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, New York: Para-
graphic Books, 1967 (1959), p. 87.
32 Taylor, Marcel Duchamp, Étant donnés, p. 99.
33 Ibid., p. 114. Taylor continues (p. 114) that the motor was a Prevel Worm Motor, Standard Series W, pur-
chased in 1963, and is ‘slightly slower today, turning at a speed closer to 21/2 rpm than the 3 rpm specified
by Duchamp [in his Manual]’. On the lighting in Étant donnés see also Horrocks, ‘You want to see?’, p.
207 and passim.
34 In a passage in the notes for the Large Glass, Duchamp wrote of ‘slightly distending the laws of physics
and chemistry’ and it seems to me that, in the Preface of The Green Box that gives Étant donnés its title,
the distending of these laws are the conditions of possibility for the currents of water, gas and electricity.
See d’Harnoncourt and Hopps, ‘Étant Donnés’, pp. 17 and 18–20.
35 Bernard Marcadé, ‘Water Leaking on All Floors’, in Banz, Marcel Duchamp and the Forestay Waterfall, p.
98.
36 Taylor, Marcel Duchamp, Étant donnés, p. 68. This economy of fluxes and fluids, of waste and non-pro-
ductive general economy is what ties Duchamp and Gober together: Duchamp’s gas lamp is Gober’s
candles, his waterfall Gober’s drains, his peculiar mannequin Gober’s male/hermaphroditic torsos.
Gober’s things, the body parts themselves, but also the (unplumbed, unconnected or, as they are often
characterised, ‘useless’) sinks, urinals and drains are all queerings of Duchamp’s urinal. (Duchamp had
his own drain, of course, his Bouche évier (Sink Stopper, 1964) which, with its little circle of bulges, is an
inverted echo of the little holes in the bath or urinal’s waste drain, making him if not queer enough already,
then certainly an invert, or at least a wit.)
364 / notes
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37 Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography, p. 462.
38 See d’Harnoncourt and Hopps, ‘Étant Donnés’, pp. 16 and 20.
39 Molly Nesbit, ‘Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés’, Art Forum, 32: 1, September 1993, pp. 158–9.
40 Jacques Lacan, ‘Anamorphosis’, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1973), trans. Alan
Sheridan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, London: Penguin, 1977, pp. 79–90.
41 Taylor, ‘Body Matters’, 2007, pp. 36–7.
42 In his recent book, Marcel Duchamp, Étant donnés, p. 244, Taylor is even more precise, writing that the
life-sized figure was made in plastilene in 1949.
43 Taylor has affirmed, contrary to Tomkins and other scholars, that the skin of the mannequin is in fact
made of vellum or calfskin, not pigskin as has often been claimed – although vellum can be made of
pigskin. Taylor, ‘Body Matters’, pp. 36–7. Subsequently, following Melissa Meighan, Taylor has argued that
it is ‘parchment – animal skin that is mechanically and chemically processed but not tanned’. Taylor,
Marcel Duchamp, Étant donnés, pp. 75–6, and Melissa S. Meighan, ‘A Technical Discussion of the Figure
of Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés’, in Taylor, ibid., pp. 240–61.
44 Taylor, ‘Body Matters’, p. 39.
45 Ibid., p. 39.
46 Ibid., p. 40.
47 As a brood that breeds it own, Taylor points out that there are three additional erotic objects, deriving
‘from the mold of the 1949 lost plaster sculpture and consist[ing] of a flat object shaped like a lady’s boot
. . . which appears to be a fragment of the mold of the left thigh; a loopy, U-shaped object taken from the
curve beneath and surrounding the right breast . . . and an object shaped similarly to Not a Shoe that
appears to come from the right armpit of the mannequin’s body’. These, Taylor writes, bear an ‘indexical
trace’ to the ‘genitals, perineum, anus, breasts, thigh and armpit’ of Maria Martins, the Brazilian sculptor
with whom he was having an affair. Taylor mentions two further erotic objects that appeared in 1959,
bringing the total to nine. See Taylor, Marcel Duchamp, Étant donnés, p. 81.
48 This had already been noted by d’Harnoncourt and Hopps in 1969; ‘Étant Donnés’, p. 35.
49 Taylor, ‘Body Matters’, ibid., p. 40. On Duchamp’s erotic objects as part objects see Helen Molesworth,
‘Duchamp: By Hand, Even’, in Helen Molesworth, ed., Part Object, Part Sculpture, Columbus, Oh.: Wexner
Center for the Arts/Ohio State University, and University Park, Pa.: Penn State University Press, 2005, p.
197. See also Taylor, ‘Body Matters’, p. 46. As Taylor has put it more recently, Female Fig Leaf e.g. ‘fits
snugly into the genital region of the plaster torso fragment . . . support[ing] the idea that most of the erotic
objects were made from molds of the 1949 plaster sculpture’. Taylor, Marcel Duchamp, Étant donnés, p.
80.
50 Taylor, ‘Body Matters’, p. 40.
51 Ibid., p. 42.
52 On this, see Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge,
MIT Press, 1985, Krauss, Bachelors, and Linda Nochlin, The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor
of Modernity, London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 2001. Duchamp was one of a number of artists
in the 1950s and 60s using body casts and cast body parts in their work, including Jasper Johns in Large
Target Construction (1955) with its plaster cast of rows of body parts and According to What (1962) which
includes a cast of a human leg; George Segal in his Couple on a Bed (1965), Paul Thek’s Tomb (1967) and
Edward Kienholz’s ‘Concept Tableaux’, esp. The State Hospital (1964–6). (Kienholz’s Roxy’s and Hoeren-
gracht [see Ch. 2 above] in their requirement to include the spectator in the spectacle are perhaps dia-
metrically opposed to Duchamp’s Étant donnés.)
53 Krauss, Bachelors, pp. 54 and 60.
54 David Joselit, ‘Molds and Swarms’, in Molesworth, Part Object, Part Sculpture, 2005 p. 160.
55 Ibid., p. 164.
56 D’Harnoncourt and Hopps make two points of importance here. First, Networks uses as its basis
Duchamp’s unfinished painting Spring (1911) that includes two human figures. One of them is ‘my’ ghost.
Second, Duchamp’s drawing Cols alités (1959) adds a background to the Large Glass, and in it an electronic
pole perhaps connects the scene to one of the blades of the Scissors on top of the Chocolate Grinder that
may well spark the Bachelors into life, albeit onanistically. See d’Harnoncourt and Hopps, ‘Étant Donnés’,
pp. 27–30.
57 Taylor believes that most of these were made earlier than dated, probably in 1946. Taylor, Marcel Duchamp,
Étant donnés, p. 68.
notes / 365
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58 Ibid., p. 78. See also Meigham, ‘Technical Discussion of the Figure’, pp. 240–61, esp. 241.
59 I am thinking here of the cover of the first edition of Le Surréalisme, même (Winter 1956) where Female
Fig Leaf is turned inside out (that is, it was rotated, reversed and re-touched before being photographed).
60 Rhonda Roland Shearer, cited in ‘“A Very Normal Guy”, Robert Barnes on Marcel Duchamp and Étant
donnés’, an interview by Thomas Girst, in tout-fait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal, 2: 4
(http://www.toutfait.com/online_journal_details.php?postid=1193), accessed 12 May 2008, n.p.
61 See Dalrymple Henderson, Duchamp in Context.
62 Marcel Duchamp (1961), cited in Alain Jouffroy, Marcel Duchamp, rencontre, Paris: Centre Georges Pom-
pidou, 1997.
64 See Jonathan Wallis, ‘Case Open and/or Unsolved: Étant donnés, the Black Dahlia Murder, and Marcel
Duchamp’s Life of Crime’, first published as ‘Case Open and/or Unsolved: Marcel Duchamp and the Black
Dahlia Murder’, The Rutgers Art Review, 20, 2003, pp. 7–23 (available at tout-fait, website, accessed 12
May 2008), and Jean-Michel Rabaté, Given: 1° Art 2° Crime. Rabaté makes it clear (p. 206 n.) that he made
the connection between Elizabeth Short and Duchamp’s Étant donnés long before Wallis published his
article in 2003. At the same time (n. 10), Rabaté also extends his ‘[t]hanks to Patricia Gherovici who pointed
out to me the similarity between the picture of Short’s corpse as published for the first time since the
press releases of the time in Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon II . . . and Duchamp’s female figure in
the PMA [Philadelphia Museum of Art] installation’.
See also Mark Nelson and Sarah Hudson Bayliss, Exquisite Corpse: Surrealism and the Black Dahlia
Murder, New York: Bulfinch Press, 2006; Mark Nelson, ‘Surrealism and the Black Dahlia Murder’, in Banz,
Marcel Duchamp and the Forestay Waterfall, pp. 190–207, and, as a rejoinder, Michael R. Taylor, ‘Marcel
Duchamp: Étant donnés’, in Banz, ibid., pp. 112–31.
65 On the life and esp. death of Elizabeth Short see James Ellroy, The Black Dahlia, New York: Mysterious
Press, 1987, and John Gilmore, Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia Murder (1994), Los Angeles:
Amok Books, 2006.
66 Ellroy, Black Dahlia, p. 77.
67 Gilmore, Severed, p. 5.
68 See www.stevehodel (accessed 12 May 2008); Wallis, ‘Case Open and/or Unsolved’, n.p., and Gilmore,
Severed, p. 124.
69 Ramírez, Duchamp: Love and Death, Even, p. 208.
70 Nesbit, ‘Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés’, p. 159.
8/ bellmer’s poupées
1 Hans Bellmer, ‘A Brief Anatomy of the Physical Unconscious or The Anatomy of the Image’ (1957), in Hans
Bellmer, The Doll, ed. and trans. Malcolm Green, London: Atlas Press, 2005, p. 133. Bellmer and Bataille
met in Paris in May 1946. Bellmer was commissioned to illustrate the new edition (1946) of Bataille’s
Histoire de l’oeil. De Sade’s Justine ou les infortunes de la vertu de Sage was published by Zerbib in 1950,
Preface by Bataille, frontispiece by Bellmer. Bellmer also contributed 12 engravings to a new edition of
Bataille’s Madame Edwarda (1955/6) and gave Bataille a copy of ‘A Brief Anatomy’ in 1957.
2 Hans Bellmer, quoted in Malcolm Green, ‘Introduction’, in Bellmer, The Doll, p. 16.
3 Georges Bataille, La Littérature et le mal, Paris: Gallimard, 1957, cited in Peter Webb with Robert Short,
Death, Desire, and the Doll: The Life and Art of Hans Bellmer, Washington, D.C.: Solar Books, 2006 (1985).
4 On Bellmer’s poupées see e.g. Bellmer, The Doll; Steven T. Brown, ‘Machinic Desires: Hans Bellmer’s
Dolls and the Technological Uncanny in Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence’, in Frenchy Lunning, ed.,
Mechademia, 3: Limits of the Human, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008, pp. 222–53; Hal
Foster, Compulsive Beauty, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993; Rosalind Krauss, Jane Livingston and
Dawn Ades, L’Amour fou: Photography and Surrealism, Washington, D.C., London and New York: Corcoran
Gallery of Art, Arts Council and Abbeville Press, 1985; Therese Lichtenstein, Behind Closed Doors: The
Anatomy of Hans Bellmer, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001; Michael Semff and Anthony Spira,
eds, Hans Bellmer, Paris, London and Ostfildern: Centre Georges Pompidou, Whitechapel Art Gallery and
366 / notes
ED_int.indd 366 15/10/2013 5:07 PM

Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2006; Marquard Smith, ‘What is it that makes today’s Hans Bellmer so different, so
appealing?’, Art History, 26: 1, December 2003, pp. 100–05; Sue Taylor, ‘Hans Bellmer in The Art Institute
of Chicago: The Wandering Libido and the Hysterical Body’, 2001, http://www.artic.edu/reynolds/essays/
taylor.php, n.p; Sue Taylor, Hans Bellmer: The Art of Anxiety, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000; and
Webb with Short, Death, Desire, and the Doll.
5 Bellmer’s doll has been held up as a Surrealist Object par excellence from as early as Marcel Jean’s 1936
essay ‘Arrivée de la belle époque’ in the special edition of Cahiers d’Art on the first Exhibition of Surrealist
Objects, May 1936, Paris; repr. in Marcel Jean, ed., The Autobiography of Surrealism, New York: Viking
Press, 1980, pp. 303 ff. See also Green, ‘Introduction’, The Doll, p. 14.
6 Webb and Short mention a fourth poupée (the third chronologically) that Bellmer was ‘invited to contribute
to the Exhibition of Surrealist Objects at Charles Ratton’s Gallery in Paris, and he sent an eighteen-inch-
high composition of doll parts entitled Jointure de Boules, la Poupée (Articulation of Globes, the Doll)’.
Webb with Short, Death, Desire, and the Doll, p. 57.
7 Taylor notes that Bellmer produced a life-size study for the doll, now lost, from papier-mâché. Taylor,
Hans Bellmer, pp. 28–9. The details of the dolls are culled from a variety of sources including Green,
Lichtenstein, Taylor, Semff and Spira, and Webb with Short.
8 Riese Hubert wrote that there are only 11 photographs. Renée Riese Hubert, Surrealism and the Book,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988, p. 139. Green writes that the article in Minotaure appeared
in 1935. Green, ‘Introduction’, The Doll, p. 10.
9 See Hans Bellmer, ‘Memories of the Doll Theme’, in Bellmer, The Doll, pp. 35–42.
10 For Bellmer’s own full description of the panorama see ibid., p. 42.
11 Alain Sayag, ‘Hans Bellmer: Why Photography?’, in Semff and Spira, Hans Bellmer, p. 28.
12 Sayag (ibid.) offers this explanation of the panorama’s mechanism. While the mechanism was never
integrated, photographs show both the open wound/space where it would have been located, and how it
would have looked, and does look, with its sealed stomach/torso area, once covered.
13 Green uses the phrase ‘abdominal sphere’, taking it from ‘Data of this Book’, Bellmer’s postface to the
1962 edition of The Doll. Green, ‘Introduction’, The Doll, p. 10.
14 ‘Each “pelvis” was itself reversible and could represent breasts and shoulders or thighs and buttocks.
Thus the head could be placed at one end and legs at the other’. See Webb with Short, Death, Desire, and
the Doll, p. 48.
15 Green, ‘Introduction’, The Doll, p. 17.
16 Hans Bellmer, ‘Jointure de boules’, Minotaure, 8, 1936, p. 9; Hans Bellmer, ‘Poupée’, Cahiers d’art, 11,
1936, p. 54.
17 Agnès de la Beaumille, ‘The Stakes at Play in Drawing Les Jeux de la poupée’, in Semff and Spira, Hans
Bellmer, p. 35.
18 Semff and Spira, Hans Bellmer, p. 237.
19 Like previous publications, Les Jeux de la poupée appeared in a small format, as a limited edition, record-
ing and narrativising the doll’s trials and tribulations, not unlike the archives of RealDoll photographs.
20 Sue Taylor, referring to Webb with Short, confirms this burial arrangement. Taylor, Hans Bellmer, p. 68.
21 Webb with Short, Death, Desire, and the Doll, p. 59.
22 William Rubin, Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1968.
23 De la Beaumille, ‘Stakes at Play’, pp. 33–4.
24 Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Puppen: Puppen von Lotte Pritzel’, Die weissen Blätter, 1913/14. I utilise the transla-
tion appearing in Essays on Dolls, trans. Idris Parry and Paul Keegan, London: Syrens, 1994, pp. 26–39.
Of her dolls, Pritzel said: ‘they are creations of myself’, verifying that the narcissism of Pygmalionist
fantasies is not the sole preserve of men. See Ruth Hemus, Dada’s Women, New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2009, p. 51. Webb with Short write that Bellmer read with great interest the letters
exchanged between Kokoschka and ‘Liebes Fraülein M’, published in 1925 as ‘Der Fetish’, and that this
is confirmed by ‘Bellmer’s friend Christian d’Orgeix [who] recalls the artist discussing these letters written
by Kokoschka’. Webb with Short, Death, Desire, and the Doll, p. 16 n. ix. Taylor also notes that Bellmer
confirmed this himself in a letter of 1 November 1964 to ‘Polly’, Obliques, p. 118. Taylor, Hans Bellmer,
p. 238 n. 10.
The fourth of Rilke’s Duino Elegies (1915) refers to Kleist’s ‘On the Puppet Theatre’ and, as late as 1969,
Bellmer, in collaboration with the etcher Cécile Reims, contributed 11 etchings to an illustrated edition of
notes / 367
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Kleist’s On the Marionette Theatre. See Heinrich von Kleist, Les Marionnettes, Paris: Georges Visat, 1969.
25 See Alain Jouffroy, cited in Ronald Alley, Catalogue of the Tate Gallery’s Collection of Modern Art other
than Works by British Artists, London: Tate Gallery and Sotheby Parke-Bernet, 1981, pp. 45-46.
26 For more on Hennings, Taeuber and Höch see Hemus, Dada’s Women, esp. pp. 49–51, 57–63, 121–3.
27 On Bellmer’s art of the early/mid-1930s in this regard see Therese Lichtenstein, ‘The Psychological and
Political Implications of Hans Bellmer’s Dolls and the Cultural and Social Context of Germany and France
in the 1930s’, PhD diss., City University of New York, 1991, p. v; and Lichtenstein, Behind Closed Doors.
See also Hal Foster, ‘Fatal Attraction’, in Compulsive Beauty, pp. 100–22. Discussing Bellmer’s dolls and
Nazism, Foster (p. 115) quotes Adorno and Horkheimer from Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944): the Nazis
‘“see the body as a moving mechanism, with joints as its components and flesh to custom the skeleton.
They use the body and its parts as though they were already separated from it”.’ Foster argues (ibid.) that
Bellmer’s poupée as sadistic – sadism, as Foster writes quoting Walter Benjamin, is an ‘[e]xposure of the
mechanistic aspects of the organism [which] is a persistent tendency of the sadist[.]’ – exposes this very
mechanism of sadism at the heart of the fascist imaginary.
28 Bellmer, The Doll, pp. 37, 39, 38, 37.
29 Ibid., pp. 39 and 40.
30 Ibid., p. 40.
31 Ibid. The doll’s childlikeness chimes with my earlier discussion of the Japanese sex doll market. Bellmer
was invited to contribute to the International Exposition of Surrealism in Tokyo organised in June 1937 by
the magazine/journal Mizue and photographs of his second doll were reproduced in its pages.
32 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Corpus Delicti’, in Krauss, Livingston and Ades, L’Amour fou, p. 86; Hal Foster, ‘Armor
Fou’, October, 56, Spring 1991, pp. 64–97; and Foster, Compulsive Beauty, p. 103.
33 Such historicising, as well as psycho-biographising, fits well with arguments about Bellmer and his work
as fodder for psychoanalytic thinking, as well as discourses of feminism: either that Bellmer’s doll and
the accompanying photographs are proto-feminist because of their critique of gender stereotypes, of how
they deconstruct femininity (Foster, Krauss, Lichtenstein) or that the doll and photographs of it are so
locked in a logic of the objectification and fetishisation of the female body that they cannot help but end
up affirming patriarchal ways of looking (Taylor, Lora Rempel).
34 Taylor makes some of these claims in Hans Bellmer, pp. 57 and 21 respectively.
36 See Wieland Schmied, ‘The Engineer of Eros’, in Semff and Spira, Hans Bellmer, p. 15. The quotation
continues: ‘He saw it [the doll] as an ideal partner, not as an image of himself but as a being that reflected
parts of himself.’
37 See Sayag, ‘Hans Bellmer: Why Photography?’, p. 28.
38 See Schmied, ‘Engineer of Eros’, p. 19.
39 See Taylor, Hans Bellmer, p. 33 n. 33.
40 Ibid., p. 32.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid., pp. 27–8. Foster has written that ‘Bellmer manipulates the dolls as if to ascertain the signs of dif-
ference and the mechanics of birth’. Foster, Compulsive Beauty, p. 106.
43 For Freud, the navel is understood as ‘a tangle of dream-thoughts’. His earliest reference to the ‘navel’
comes in The Interpretation of Dreams, where in retelling the content of ‘the dream of Irma’s injection’
he speaks of it as the umplumbable, the point of contact with the unknown. On navels, see also Mieke
Bal, Reading ‘Rembrandt’: Beyond the Word–Image Opposition, Cambridge University Press, 1991; Fred
Botting, Sex, Machines and Navels: Fiction, Fantasy and History in the Future Present, Manchester Uni-
versity Press, 1999; Elizabeth Bronfen, ‘Death: The Navel of the Image’, in Mieke Bal and Inge Boer, eds,
The Point of Theory, Amsterdam University Press, 1994, pp. 79–90; Elizabeth Bronfen, The Knotted Subject:
Hysteria and its Discontents, Princeton University Press, 1998, esp. pp. 3–98; and Shoshana Felman,
‘Postal Survival, or the Question of the Navel’, Yale French Studies, 69, 1985, pp. 49–72.
45 Ibid., p. 366.
46 Ibid., p. 369.
368 / notes
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47 Bellmer, The Doll, p. 37.
48 Hans Bellmer, ‘The Ball-Joint’, in ibid., pp. 57–70. ‘Notes on the Subject of the Ball Joint’ was published
by Editions Premières, Paris, as part of Les Jeux de la poupée. Taylor ‘reads’ Bellmer’s essay psychoana-
lytically as ‘an allegory of castration anxiety and dread of female sexuality . . . his . . . struggle with the fear
of lack, with the fact of sexual difference’. Taylor, Hans Bellmer, pp. 99–129, esp. 119–26 and 112. See
also Tamara Trodd, review of Hans Bellmer, Pierre Klossowski and the Vicious Circle, Whitechapel Art
Gallery, London, 20 September–23 November 2006, and Semff and Spira, Hans Bellmer, in Papers of
Surrealism, 5, Spring 2007 (http://www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/papersofsurrealism/journal5/acrobat%20
files/exhibition%20reviews/troddpdf.pdf).
49 Bellmer, The Doll, pp. 59 and 60 (further references noted in text).
50 Hans Bellmer, The Doll, p. 59
51 It is this sustained fixation on rotation/motion that culminated in a preposterous bronze cast, the inverted
pyramid of multi-breasted, rotating La Toupie (The Spinning Top, 1938/68), painted (ivory) flesh colour with
pink nipples; like Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs but twisted through the same ridiculous kitsch sculptural prism
that, with its oscillating, vacillating, asymmetrical swelling and detumescence, gave birth to Alan Jones’s
furniture and Jeff Koons’s inflatables. If there is a fourth poupée for psychoanalytic theorists, with its
mechanical forces, its multiplication of parts of bodies, transitional objects, part objects, a fetish to end
all fetishes, that pushes the erotic forever into the realm of kitsch, this is it. As with La Toupie, from the
mid-1960s onwards, Bellmer was encouraged (largely by the gallerist André François Petit) to produce
and sign off on numerous multiples, including aluminium casts of the original doll-stomach ball joint with
added pelvises, many of which were painted (see e.g. The Doll. Sculpture in painted aluminium, 1965) and
his final sculpture, La Demie Poupée, which for Webb and Short ‘represents a travesty of original inspira-
tion which descends to the level of Kitsch’. See Webb with Short, Death, Desire, and the Doll, p. 182.
52 Hans Bellmer, The Doll, ibid., p. 66.
55 Hans Bellmer, The Doll, ibid., pp. 68-9.
57 Bellmer, ‘Brief Anatomy’, pp. 105–58. Some of the following argument is taken from Webb with Short,
Death, Desire, and the Doll.
58 Bellmer, The Doll p. 105.
61 Hans Bellmer, The Doll, ibid., p. 112. Sue Taylor, ‘Hans Bellmer in The Art Institute of Chicago’, n.p.
63 Hans Bellmer, The Doll, ibid., p. 116, p. 117.
66 Hans Bellmer, The Doll, ibid., pp. 121-2.
68 Krauss, Bachelors, p. 156.
69 See Green, ‘Introduction’, The Doll, p. 28.
71 Bellmer, The Doll, p. 130.
conclusion
1 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed.
Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, Stanford University Press, 2002, p. 21. My conclusion’s title is an honouring of
Jane Bennet’s Vibrant Matter.
2 Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Philosophy of Toys’, in Heinrich von Kleist, Charles Baudelaire and Rainer Maria
notes / 369
ED_int.indd 369 15/10/2013 5:07 PM

Rilke, Essays on Dolls, trans. Idris Parry and Paul Keegan, London and New York: Syrens, 1994, p. 15.
3 Ibid., p. 24 (emphasis in the original).
4 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (1878), trans. Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann, 71,
London: Penguin, 1994, p. 58.
5 Michel Foucault, ‘The Masked Philosopher’ (1980), in Foucault Live (Interviews, 1961–1984), trans. Lysa
Hochroth and John Johnston, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, New York: Semiotext(e), 1996, p. 305.
6 On curiosity see Sina Najafi, ‘Cut the Bean: Curiosity and Research in the Pages of Cabinet Magazine’, in
Michael Ann Holly and Marquard Smith, eds, What is Research in the Visual Arts? Obsession, Archive,
Encounter, Williamstown, Mass., and New Haven and London: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute
and Yale University Press, 2008, pp. 138–57; Cabinet magazine, passim; and Laura Mulvey, Fetishism and
Curiosity, London: BFI Publishing, 1996.
7 Baudelaire, ‘Philosophy of Toys’, p. 20.
8 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I (1867), trans. Ben Fowkes, London: Penguin,
1976, p. 178.
9 See Aristotle, Nicomachaean Ethics, 1139a1, quoted in Thomas Aquinas, ‘Commentary on Aristotle’s “De
Anima”’, in Martin Cyril D’Arcy, ed., Aquinas: Selected Writings, London: Dent, 1939 (1900), p. 60. On exactly
this, see also Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-first
Century, Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 47.
10 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 2.
11 See Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933), trans. James Strachey, London,
1964; Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis (1938), trans. James Strachey, New York, 1949;
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (1930), trans. James Strachey, New York, 1961. As Elisa-
beth Bronfen has put it: ‘The challenge posed by Freud’s formulation of a death drive resides in the fact
that he ultimately binds all desire, whether sexual, aggressive or melancholic, to a desire for death’.
Elisabeth Bronfen, ‘The Death Drive (Freud)’, in Elizabeth Wright, ed., Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A
Critical Dictionary, Oxford: Blackwell, 1992, p. 56; Bill Brown, ‘Reification, Reanimation, and the American
Uncanny’, Critical Inquiry, Winter 2006, p. 183; Georges Bataille, ‘Celestial Bodies’, trans. Annette Michel-
son, October, 36, Spring 1986, pp. 75–8; Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939,
ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993; see also Allan Stoekl,
Bataille’s Peak: Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007;
Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related
Works, Princeton University Press, 1998; Gavin Parkinson, Surrealism, Art and Modern Science: Relativity,
Quantum Mechanics, Epistemology, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008.
12 See Anselm Franke, ed., Animism, Volume I, Bern: Kunsthalle and Sternberg Press, 2010, p. 99.
13 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, Volumes II and III, trans. Robert Hurley, New York: Zone Books,
1991, p. 95.
14 Rosalind Krauss, Bachelors, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999, p. 64. See also e.g. Gilles Deleuze and
Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972), trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and
Helen R. Lane, London: Athlone Press, 1984.
15 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 21
16 This accusation and those that follow are directed at some of the work across the Arts, Humanities and
Social Sciences that has taken up Thing Theory in the last decade or so and is not aimed at what might
be called that first wave of self-declared theorists of Thing Theory footnoted in my Introduction.
17 Animism in the 21st-century art world can be found in e.g. Franke, Animism.
18 Brown writes of the need to attend not to the ‘biography of things, but . . . the ontology in things, by which
I mean the historical ontology congealed within objects’. Brown, ‘Reification, Reanimation, and the Ameri-
can Uncanny’, p. 183.
19 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham and London: Duke University Press,
p. 18. See also above, Intro. n. 14.
370 / notes
ED_int.indd 370 15/10/2013 5:07 PM

/ acknowledgements
This book has been a long time coming.

I am incredibly grateful to good friends and colleagues for their generosity: for chatting,
drinking, advising, inviting, challenging, supporting, laughing and nourishing.
For insightful conversations along the way, I thank Nick Addison, AK, Caroline Ascott,
Stacy Baldrick, James Barrett, David Bate, Elisabeth Bronfen, Fiona Candlin, Tom Corby,
David Cottington, Jacqui Curran, Marie Fitzsimmons, George Gessert, Harry Gilonis, Ray
Guins, David Hopkins, Katherine Johnson, David Joselit, Juliette Kristensen, Esther Leslie,
Akira Lippitt, David Lomas, Nigel Mapp, Marta and the staff at Caffè Nero in West Hamp-
stead, Noriko Murai, Michael Nath, Simon Ofield, Gavin Parkinson, Iain Pate, Suzie Plumb,
Helen Potkin, Claire Potter, Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Peg Rawes, Vivian Sky
Rehberg, Agata Rosochacka, Aura Satz, Anthony Spira, Barbara Strauman, Nick Tromans,
Aaron Williamson, Helen Weston, David Wills, Leigh Wilson, Anne Witchard and Jon Wood.
For crucial interventions, for reading parts of this book when it was in various states of
disrepair and, in some cases, reading pre-proposal versions of it, I thank enormously Simon
Avery, Andrea Belloli, Emma Brasó, Lisa Cartwright, Stuart Daniel, Lennard J. Davis,
Amelia Jones, Mark Little, Sally O’Reilly, Adrian Rifkin, David Serlin, Vivian Sobchack, Alex
Warwick and also David Cunningham for thinking me a ‘vulgar materialist’ which I take as
a compliment. You have all done much to make this book better than it was and saved me
on numerous occasions from making even more of a fool of myself than I have.
Thanks are due to the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture at Kingston University
where I began writing this book and the School of Humanities, Social Sciences and Lan-
guages at the University of Westminster, where I finished it.
Thanks also to Yale University Press for their unwavering commitment and patience: to
Gillian Malpass, Emily Angus, Charlotte Grievson, Hannah Jenner, Katharine Ridler, the
design and marketing team and the anonymous readers for their valuable remarks.
I would like to thank warmly my mum and dad. Words do not even begin to come close
to expressing the appreciation I have for them. Finally, I thank absolutely and unreservedly
Joanne Morra. This book is dedicated to her. It is a strange book to dedicate to a partner,
but there it is.
acknowledgements / 371
ED_int.indd 371 15/10/2013 5:07 PM

/ illustration credits
Illustrations have been supplied with permission by the owners or custodians of the works, unless otherwise credited below.
Photo: Deutsches Museum: 1; Courtesy of Scientific American: 2; © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/
Scala, Florence: 3; The Bridgeman Art Library: 5, 11, 84; © Bibliothèque centrale du MNHN, Paris 2013: 9; © MNHN -
Bernard Faye: 10; © Fondation Oskar Kokoschka, Vevey / 2013, ProLitteris: 17; Photo Joerg P. Anders © 2013. Photo Scala,
Florence/BDK, Bildagentur für Kunst, Kultur und Gershichte, Berlin: 21; © www.alma-mahler.com: 22; Courtesy of The
Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton and Hove: 23; Courtesy of Timothy Baum, New York: 25; Image Courtesy of Bitforms
Gallery, New York: 33, 44; Photo: Stephen White: 39; Photography: Alberta Mayo: 42; Photo: Russell Kaye: 45; Photo: Attilio
Maranzano: 46; Photography Shvarts Llya: 48; Photo by Warner Bros./Getty Images: 56; Photo by Ali Goldstein/NBC/
NBCU. NBC via Gerry Images: 61; © 2013. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence: 86, 90,
103; Photo: Moderna Museet-Stockholm/Prallan Allsten: 91; © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais /
Georges Meguerditchian: 98; National Galleries Scotland: 104.
372 / illustration credits
ED_int.indd 372 15/10/2013 5:07 PM

/ index
Note: Principal discussions are indicated in bold; Bloch, Iwan 46–51, 186

pages with illustrations are indicated in italics. Bloom, Michelle E. 42, 59, 78
Blowupdol 101, 196
Abbott, Bernice 159
Bosman, Willem 87
Abyss Creation 198, 213, 226, 236
Boureau-Deslandes, André François 41
Adorno, Theodor 321, 325
Bourgeois, Louise 180
agalmatophiles 225–31, 243–5, 249–51
Bousquet, Joë 314
see also iDollaters; Pygmalianism
Bouvier, Monseigneur 50
Alexandre, Elizabeth 227–36
Bray, Xavier 69, 71
‘Alma’ 132–5
Breker. Arno 303
anagram 292, 308–9, 315–6
Breton, André 139, 140–41, 168, 299
anamorphism 269–70
and Mannequin Street (1938) 146–7
Andersen, Hans Christian 83
on the marvellous 147
animation 31–2
Brosses, Charles de 88, 91, 98
animism 60–61, 321, 325
Brown, Bill 16, 326
Thing Theory and 326
Bubble Baba Challenge 183, 196
Apter, Emily 102
buggery 221–4
Aquinas, Thomas 320
Burchard, Otto 140
Araki, Nobuyoshi 206
Burne-Jones, Edward 41
Aristotle 320
Burton, Richard Francis 186–7
Arnobius of Sicca 58–9
Atget, Eugene 159–60, 161 Cahiers d’art 298
Athenaeus 49 Cardano, Gerolamo 309–10
Carrouges, Michel 324
Bacon, Francis 90
castration
Barbie 201
in Bellmer 298, 303–5
‘Bareback Mount Him’ 197, 197, 220
decadents and 101
Barthes, Roland 233
in Étant donnés 263–4, 274–6, 278
Bartlett, Morton 135
fetish and 101–2, 243
Bataille, Georges 261, 322, 323–4
Freud and 82–4, 243
Baudelaire, Charles 150–51, 317
Champfleury (Jules-François-Félix Husson) 41
Baudrillard, Jean 233–4
Chaplin, Charlie 42
Beaumille, Agnés de 298, 301–2
Chapman, Jake and Dinos 176
Bellmer, Hans 93, 135, 140, 142, 289–316, 288, 293, 296,
Charcot, Jean-Martin 97
297 300, 326
Chargeheimer, Rudolf 202, 203
‘The Ball-Joint’ 308–11
Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine 14
‘A Brief Anatomy’ 312–14
Citroën, Paul 302
castration and 298, 303–5
Cixous, Hélène 83
Duchamp and 295, 311
Clair, Jean 262
Mannequin Street and 299
Clement of Alexandria 58–9
psychoanalysis and 303
Clérambault, Georges Gatian de 138
RealDolls and 306
Collidi, Carlo 41
Bellon, Denise 142, 148, 290
commodity
Benjamin, Walter 157, 168
Benjamin on 150–51
on Atget 160
dolls and 233–4, 305, 307
on commodity 150–51
emergence of 87
on Hoffman’s Olympia 44
as fetish 9, 15, 17, 23, 89, 92–3, 156–7, 167–8
on Surrealism 160–62
mannequin and 139, 149–55, 162–5
Passagen-Werk (Arcades Project) 157–9, 166
Marx on 91–3, 151, 251, 319
Bennett, Jane 17, 168, 327
Comte, Auguste 91
Berggruen, Heinz 299
Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de 37, 41
Bernheimer, Charles 44, 101
Courbet, Gustave 261, 270
Bettini, Maurizio 38
curiosity 318–19
Bild Lilli 201
Curtius, Phillippe 78
Binet, Albert 97
index / 373
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Dada 139–40 Marx on 118–19
Dali, Salvador 148, 158–9 sexual 94–105
Mannequin Street (1938) contribution 146 see also dolls
Däubler, Theodor 302 Fiero, Slade 231, 235–6, 246
Dejima 223 Firmicus Maternus 58–9
Deleuze, Gilles 283, 314, 322–3, 324 Fleshlight 194
Delibes, Léo 41 Foster, Hal 80, 263, 304–5
Dennis, Kelly 131 Foucault, Michel 72–3, 95, 319
Deren, Maya 136 Freud, Sigmund 303, 307, 322
Derrida, Jacques 104 on castration 82–4, 243
Descartes, René 33, 115 on dolls 80–85
Deuteronomy 90–91 on fetishism 97, 98–101
d’Harnoncourt, Anne 146, 256, 269 on perversion 103–4
dialectics 313 on touching 22–3
Diderot, Denis 40, 115 on uncanny 41, 67, 79–85, 284, 306–7
Didi-Huberman, Georges 76, 77 Fujiwara, Takahiro 213
dissection 72
Gaba, Lester 135, 154–5
Dolar, Mladen 84
Gérome, Jean-Léon 41, 43
dolls 327
Giacommetti, Alberto 290
as anagram 292, 298
Gober, Robert 179
dismissed by Freud 80–85
Goethe, Johan Wolfgang von 72, 168
etymology 9
Goffman, Erving 221
Kokoschka’s Alma Mahler doll 108–35
Goldstein, Jan 95
fornificatory 51
Green, Malcolm 295–6, 306, 311
see also agalmatophiles; fetish; iDollators;
Gronberg, Tag 152
Pygmalianism; RealDolls; sex dolls
Gropius, Walter 109
domesticity 232–4, 243–4
Grosholtz, Marie 78
Dominguez, Oscar 168
Grosz, Georg 301
Mannequin Street (1938) contribution 146
Guattari, Félix 322–3, 324
Dorfman, Elena 135, 227–36
Guys and Dolls (television documentary, 2006) 230–32
Duchamp, Alexina [‘Teeny’] [née Sattler] 256, 271, 280
Guys’n’Dolls: Art, Science, Fashion and Relationships
Duchamp, Marcel 93, 140–41, 324, 326
(exh., Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, 2005)
Bellmer and 295, 311
132, 134, 135, 227
Coin de chastelé 272–3, 274
Étant donnés 254, 255–87, 289, 290 Handler, Ruth 201
Feuille de vigne femelle 272–3, 274 Hannussen, Olen 202–4, 203
Mannequin Street (1938) contribution 144, 145–6 Hanssen, Beatrice 157
Network of Stoppages 278, 279–80 Harper’s Bazaar 148
Objet-dard 272–3, 274 Heartfield, John 302
Plaster study for the figure in Étant donnés 275 Heidegger, Martin 16
Rotoreliefs 311 Hennings, Emmy 302
Study for Étant donnés 279 Hephaestus 32, 318
Dürer, Albrecht 302 Hersey, George L. 40
‘Dutch Wife’ 221–4 Hershman, Lynn 172
heterosexuality (male) 7, 55, 321, 323, 326
Eckstein, Thomas 294
as emergent (c.1875) 10–15, 321–6
Edison, Thomas 33
in Japan 204, 215
Ellis, Havelock 48, 53–5, 186
Lacan on 101
Ellroy, James 285–6
as perverse 19, 27, 44, 64, 95, 97–8, 104, 143, 164,
Éluard, Paul 299
234, 245–9
Enlightenment 321–2
as repressed 263–4
Entartete Kunst (1937) 148
Hickey, Dave 220
Ernst, Max 290, 291
Hitler, Adolf 201–4
Mannequin Street (1938) contribution 146
Hoch, Hannah 139, 302
erotomania 95–7
Hoffmann, E. T. A. 41, 44, 80–81, 124–9
Espinoza, Augustin 146
Hoffmann, Edith 109–10
Esquirol, Étienne 95–6
Holt, Nick 230–31
Exodus 90
Homes, A. M. 7
Ferrini, Giuseppe 66 Hopkins, David 260
fetish 8–10, 85–105, 320–21 Hopps, Walter 146, 269
castration and 101–2, 243 Horkheimer, Max 321, 325
commodities and 9, 15, 17, 23, 89, 92–3, 156–7, 167–8 Horrocks, Chris 259
Freud on 97 Hugnet, Georges 143, 147, 148
Krafft-Ebing on 52–3 Huysmans, J.-K. 158, 302
374 / index
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iconoclasm 91 as unproductive expenditure 104–5, 223
idol worship 65, 89 see also touching
iDollators 231–5 matelotage 222
see also agalmatophiles; Pygmalionism; RealDolls Matisse, Paul 256
IG Farben 204 Mauss, Marcel 110
Irigaray, Luce 131 May, Karl 310–11
McCullen, Matt 231, 236, 246
Jackson, Richard 178
Mena, Pedro de 71
Janneau, Guilluame 152
merkin 186–7, 222
Jeftichew, Fedor 119
Mesa, Jean de 69
Jentsch, Ernst 80–84
Miller, J. Hillis 60, 63
Jones, Allen 168, 170–71
Minotaure 294, 298
Jones, Amelia 261–3
Miró, Joan 300
Joselit, David 277
Mitchell, W. J. T. 91
Kachur, Lewis 148–9 Molesworth, Helen 274
kawaii (cuteness) 206–7 Molyneux, William 115
Keegan, Suzanne 126 monomania 95–6
Klein, Melanie 291 Montañés, Juan Martinez 70
Kleist, Heinrich 41 Moos, Hermione 108, 109–35, 302
Kliszynski, Alex Sandwell 174 Mora, José de 71
Kokoschka, Oscar 93, 108, 112–13, 120–121, 109–35, Moses 91
302 Moya, Cynthia Ann 51, 186
Krafft-Ebing, Richard von 51–3 Murakami, Takashi 218–20, 219
Krauss, Rosalind 137, 259, 304, 316, 324, Muybridge, Eadweard J. 41, 42
Kuriyama, Chiaki 206 Méliès, Georges 42
Kuspit, Donald 14–15, 140
Naguschewski, Ursula 303, 305
L’Isle-Adam, Villiers de 41 Narihira, Ko shokken Ariwara no 223–4
La Mettrie, Juien Offray de 41 Nazis 148, 303
La Révolution surréaliste 159 Nead, Lynda 42
Lacan, Jacques 101, 261, 270, 291 necrophilia 55, 75
Lacan, Sylvia [née Makles] 261 Nesbit, Molly 269, 287
Lake, Mayumi 214 Nietzsche, Friedrich 318
Lang, Fritz 42 ningyo 223–4
Laqueur, Thomas 24, 232 Nordau, Max 46
Lebel, Robert 269
Ofer, Dana 133
Leeson, Lynn Hershman 179
Oppenheim, Meret 122
Lekay, John 177
Orient Industry 209–12
Leslie, Esther 166
Osborne, Peter 92
Levy, Julian 255
Otaku 218–20
Locke, John 90, 115
Ovid 36–9, 45, 60
Lombroso, Cesare 46
London Bulletin 148 Pacheco, Francisco 69
Lucas, Sarah 181 paedophilia 303–4
Lucian 62 ‘Lolita Complex’ 211–13
Lyotard, Jean-François 263 Pagel, Gerhart 302
Palahniuk, Chuck 201
Magritte, René 290
Panzanelli, Roberta 76–7
Mahler, Alma 109–35
Pastrana, Julia 119, 120
Mahler, Gustav 109
Pate, Alan Scott 224
Malt, Joanna 164
Pels, Peter 87–9
Manker, Paulus 133–5
perversion 103–4
Mannequin Street (1938) 142–4, 163, 166, 256, 299
see also heterosexuality
mannequins 138–69, 222
phallus 101
Marcadé, Bernard 268
Philo of Byzantium 310
Marey, Étienne-Jules 41, 42
Philostephanos of Styrene 35, 57–8
Martins, Maria 280
Picabia, Francis 290
Marx, Karl 91–2, 118, 319–20, 322
Picasso, Pablo 300–01
Masson, André 146
Pietz, William 86–8, 89, 90
masturbation 131–2, 145, 186, 221–4
Pinel, Philippe 95
Bataille on 323–4
Pinson, André Pierre 73
Bloch on 50
Pipedream Productions 197
Derrida on 104
Plato 57
mutual 221–3
pleasure 104–5
Surrealists on 145
index / 375
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Pliny 56–7, 86 Siégel, V.N. 152
Plumb, Hannah 177 Simmons, Laurie i173
Plumb, Suzie 132–5 Skira, Albert 140, 294
polychromy 69–71 Slocombe, Romain 206
Praxiteles 56–8, 62, 69, 96 Sobol, Joshua (Yehoshua) 133, 134
Prinzhorn, Hans 302 Söderbaum, Kristina 204
Pritzel, Lotte 301–2 Solomon 65, 310
Pururu 212 Stallybrass, Peter 93
Pygmalion 35–45 Stehli, Jemima 171
Pygmalianism 11, 45–55, 62–5, 77 Stern, Howard 191–2
Bloch on 47–52 Stoichita, Victor I. 38
Krafft-Ebing on 51–2 Stoller, Robert J. 243, 251
in Ovid 36–9 Surrealism 137–69
see also agalmatophiles; heterosexuality; iDollatry; Benjamin on 160–62
perversion; RealDolls; sex dolls; Venus statuaria on masturbation 145
see also Mannequin Street (1938)
Rabaté, Jean-Michel 262
Susini, Clemente 66, 75
Ramírez, Juan Antonio 262, 287
Swanson, Amber Hawk 172
Raoux, Jean 41
swarm 277–8, 281
Ratton, Charles 298
Ray, Charles 175, 176 Taeuber-Arp, Sophie 139, 302
Ray, Man 140, 143–4, 148, 159, 290 Tanguy, Yves 145–6
RealDolls 192–4, 213, 226, 228–9, 238–40, 227–51 Tarantino, Quentin 206
Bellmer and 306 Taussig, Michael 89
‘Guys and Dolls’ and 230–32 Taylor, Michael R. 257–8, 266–7, 270–72, 274, 313
Dorfman and 227–30 Taylor, Sam 306
Reinhardt, Max 303 Teddy Babes 198
Reynolds, Mary 257 Thing Theory 16–17, 283, 325–6
Rhode, Werner 302 30 Rock 199, 200
Rilke, Rainer Maria 302 Tomkins, Calvin 260, 262, 269
Rodin, Auguste 41 Torriano of Cremona, Gianello 33
Rouan, François 262 touching 76
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 37, 41, 104 Bloch on 50
Roxy Music 235 Condillac on 37
rubber 131 Freud on 22–3
Rubin, William 301 Kokoschka and 115–19, 127, 130–32, 135
Pygmalianism and 64–5
Sade, marquis de 47
self-touching 37, 63, 250 see also masturbation
sailors 221–4
Tschakert, Franz 203–4
Saliger, Ivo 303
Tussaud, Madame see Grosholtz, Marie
Sarazin-Lavassor, Lydie 262
Tylor, E. B. 91
Sartre, Jean-Paul 77
Sayag, Alain 306 Ubac, Raoul 142, 144
Schawinsky, Xanti 302 Umbro 302
Schiaparelli, Elsa 148 uncanny 79–85
Schilder, Paul 302
Valançay, Robert 294
Schlichter, Rudolf 302
Vanet, Hélène 142–3, 145
Schmied, Wieland 306
Vasari, Giorgio 75–6
Schor, Naomi 102, 130
Vaucanson, Jacques de 33
Scovil, Cora 154–5
Venus statuaria 48–50
Seligmann, Kurt 168
Vesalius, Andreas 73
sex devices
Viagra 218
‘marital aids’ 189–90
Vogue 148
penetrable/penetrating 185–6
von Bremen, Wilhelmina 204
sex toys 189
see also fetish; merkin; RealDolls; sex dolls
Wacker, Rudolf 302
sex dolls 183–204
Walter, Annette 204
‘Dutch Wife’ 220–24
Warburg, Aby 168
Hitler and 201–4
Warhol, Andy 219
in Japan 204–24
wax 71–8, 80, 81
Sexology [Sexualwissenschaft] 46, 47, 51, 186
Webb, Peter 301, 306, 316
Shelley, Mary 41
Weidinger, Afred 124, 125, 127, 128
Sherman, Cindy 75, 178
Shinto 211
Yanagi, Miwa 214, 216–18
Short, Elizabeth 285–6, 306, 316
Short, Robert 301
376 / index
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MARQUADT The Erotic Doll A Modern Fetish Yale Uni

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MARQUADT The Erotic Doll A Modern Fetish Yale Uni

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Marquard Smith is Director of Research and Doctoral Studies / the erotic doll: a modern fetish

marquard smith • the erotic doll: a modern fetish

Since the nineteenth century, dolls have served as commodities

Jacket design by +SUBTRACT

Jacket illustration: Raoul Ubac, Mannequin de Masson (detail), 1938.

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yale university press new haven and london

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All works by Marcel Duchamp © Succession Marcel

All works by Oskar Kokoschka © Fondation Oskar Kokoschka / DACS 2013.

All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

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introduction: what does man want? 007

2 the doll as fetish: perverse practices with fetishistic things 067

ii the integrity of the doll 107

3 touching: oskar kokoschka’s alma mahler 109

4 modernity’s outmodedness: surrealism’s mannequins

5 the modern sex doll: participatory sexual devices 183

6 realdoll: intimacy, domesticity and brutality 225

iii given, the anagrammatical doll 253

7 marcel duchamp’s étant donnés: a distorting 255

8 hans bellmer’s poupées: anagrammatical desire 289

conclusion: vibrating matter energised: animism and thing theory 317

illustration credits 372

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The thing things.

We need a concrete, materialist focus on the things closest

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I ran my tongue back and forth over the . . . ‘copyright

What is the nature of man’s – or rather men’s – intimate and erotic relations

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8 / the erotic doll

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To begin unpicking these questions it is useful to detail the changes I made to

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Puppets, mannequins, waxworks, automatons, dolls, painted scenery, plaster

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18 / the erotic doll

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20 / the erotic doll

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22 / the erotic doll

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24 / the erotic doll

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What is the nature of man’s – or rather men’s – intimate and erotic relations

There are numerous precedents in philosophy, aesthetics and literature – as

of being pathological – like the story of a young man (related by Lucianus