Arcades Project excerpt_3

In his study "La Mante religieuse:Recherches sur la nature et la signification du mythe", Caillois refers to the striking automatism of reflexes in the praying mantis (there is hardly a vital function that it does not also perform decapitated).He links it, on account of its fateful significance, with the baneful automatons known to us from myths.Thus Pandora: "automaton fabricated by the blacksmith god for the ruin of humankind, for that 'which all shall/take to their hearts with delight, an evil to love and embrace' (Hesiod, Works and Days, line 58).We encounter something similar in the Indian Krtya-those dolls, animated by sorcerers, which bring about the death of men who embrace them.Our literature as well, in the motif of femmes fatales, possesses the concept of a woman-machine, artificial, mechanical, at variance with all living creatures, and above all murderous. No doubt psychoanalysis would not hesitate to explain this representation in its own terms by envisaging the relations between death and sexuality and, more precisely, by finding each ambiguously intimated in the other." Roger Caillois, Mesures, 3, no.2 (April 15, 1937) [Z2a,1]