Lacan’s insight that phallic desire is masturbatory predates pop culture’s artificial-partner stories
Evidence
Roxy’s “In Every Dreamhome a Heartache” is about an attempt, simultaneously disenchanted-cynical and desire-delirious, to resolve this deadlock. It is as if Ferry has recognised, with Lacan, that phallic desire is fundamentally masturbatory. Since, that is to say, a fantasmatic screen prevents any sexual relation so that his desire is always for an “inhuman partner”, Ferry might as well have a partner that is literally inhuman: a blow-up doll. This scenario has many precursors: most famously perhaps Hoffman’s short story “The Sandman” (one of the main preoccupations of Freud’s essay on “The Uncanny” of course), but also Villier de L’isle Adam’s lesser known but actually more chilling masterpiece of decadent SF, The Future Eve and its descendant, Ira Levin’s Stepford Wives. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1035
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to Freud’s ‘The Uncanny’ reading of Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’ and the automaton theme — the artificial beloved recurs across the uncanny-literature tradition. — connects to: Roxy Music dramatized phallic desire as fundamentally masturbatory — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1035; The eroticized harem fantasy predates Montesquieu — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 1180; Human sexuality depends on fantasy, not biological excitation — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 168
- ADDENDUM: The blow-up doll as the literalizing of desire aimed at an ‘inhuman partner’ parallels the eroticized artifice threads from architecture and physical-ideal material in earlier curated work.
Broader Connections
- Roxy Music dramatized phallic desire as fundamentally masturbatory
#exemplifies(0.80) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1035 - Human sexuality depends on fantasy, not biological excitation
#expands(0.80) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 168 - The eroticized harem fantasy predates Montesquieu
#exemplifies(0.72) — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 1180