Erotically erotic, erotically heretical
The Aesthetics of Hans Bellmer’s Poupée
Abstract
“How is it possible that a clever boy like you fell in love with that waxen face, that wooden puppet over there?”. It is with these indignant words, uttered by Siegmund - a name that fortuitous chance has made incredibly prescient - to his friend Nathanael, the protagonist of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s 1815 short story Der Sandmann, that one of the most intolerable heresies of the human being is flagrantly investigated: to direct one’s erotic drive towards an inanimate object. Precisely to love, to desire a doll. The story of Nathanael and the Olympia doll, taken up by Freud - the other Sigmund, this time without ‘e’ - as the ultimate example of the uncanny does not only lead us into an obvious reconnaissance of eros that recognizes itself in what Benjamin would have called the sex appeal of the inorganic but into a broader analysis of the mimetic value of this object of desire, the doll. This is also the story of the obsession that Hans Bellmer has cultivated in his art since 1934, the conception of an artificial self, the Poupée.
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