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.covered with diamonds or sequins which is the very end ofstriptease.This ultimate triangle, by its pure and geometrical And yet, at the Moulin Rouge, we see hints of another kind ofshape, by its hard and shiny material, bars the way to the sexual exorcism, probably typically French, and one which in actual factparts like a sword of purity, and definitively drives the woman tends less to nullify eroticism than to tame it: the compere tries toback into a mineral world, the (precious) stone being here the give striptease a reassuring pent-bourgeois status.To start with,irrefutable symbol of the absolute object, that which serves no striptease is a sport: there is a Striptease Club, which organizespurpose.healthy contests whose winners come out crowned and rewardedwith edifying prizes (a subscription to physical training lessons), aContrary to the common prejudice, the dance which accompanies novel (which can only be Robbe-Grillet's Voyeur), or useful prizesthe striptease from beginning to end is in no way an erotic element.(a pair of nylons, five thousand francs).Then, striptease isIt is probably quite the reverse: the faintly rhythmical undulation in identified with a career (beginners, semi-professionals,this case exorcizes the fear of immobility.Not only does it give to professionals), that is, to the honourable practice of a specializationthe show the alibi of Art (the dances in strip-shows are always (strippers are skilled workers).One can even give them the'artistic'), but above all it constitutes the last barrier, and the most magical alibi of work: vocation; one girl is, say, 'doing well' orefficient of all: the dance, consisting of ritual gestures which have 'well on the may to fuelling her promise', or on the contrary 'takingbeen seen a thousand times, acts on movements as a cosmetic, it her first steps' on the arduous path of striptease.Finally and above85 86all, the competitors are socially situated: one is a salesgirl, anothera secretary (there are many secretaries in the Striptease Club).The New CitroënStriptease here is made to rejoin the world of the public, is madefamiliar and bourgeois, as if the French, unlike the Americanpublic (at least according to what one hears), following anirresistible tendency of their social status, could not conceiveI think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the greateroticism except as a household property, sanctioned by the alibi ofGothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era,weekly sport much more than by that of a magical spectacle: andconceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed inthis is how, in France, striptease is nationalized.image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriatesthem as a purely magical object.* See below, p.121.It is obvious that the new Citroën has fallen from the sky inasmuchas it appears at first sight as a superlative object.We must notforget that an object is the best messenger of a world above that ofnature: one can easily see in an object at once a perfection and anabsence of origin, a closure and a brilliance, a transformation oflife into matter (matter is much more magical than life), and in aword a silence which belongs to the realm of fairy-tales.The D.S.-the 'Goddess' - has all the features (or at least the public isunanimous in attributing them to it at first sight) of one of thoseobjects from another universe which have supplied fuel for theneomania of the eighteenth century and that of our own science-fiction: the Déesse is first and foremost a new Nautilus.This is why it excites interest less by its substance than by thejunction of its components.It is well known that smoothness isalways an attribute of perfection because its opposite reveals atechnical and typically human operation of assembling: Christ'srobe was seamless, just as the airships of science-fiction are madeof unbroken metal.The D.S.19 has no pretensions about being assmooth as cake-icing, although its general shape is very rounded;yet it is the dove-tailing of its sections which interest the publicmost: one keenly fingers the edges of the windows, one feels alongthe wide rubber grooves which link the back window to its metalsurround.There are in the D.S.the beginnings of a newphenomenology of assembling, as if one progressed from a worldwhere elements are welded to a world where they are juxtaposedand hold together by sole virtue of their wondrous shape, which of87 88course is meant to prepare one for the idea of a more benign neologism (a whole publicity campaign had kept it on the alert forNature [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]