Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Déesse

Déesse
“The D.S. - the ‘Goddess’ - has all the features (or at least the public is unanimous in attributing them to it at first sight) of one of those objects from another universe which have supplied fuel for the neomania of the eighteenth century and that of our own science-fiction: the Deesse is first and foremost a new Nautilus […] There are in the D.S. the beginnings of a new phenomenology of assembling, as if one progressed from a world where elements are welded to a world where they are juxtaposed and hold together by sole virtue of their wondrous shape, which of course is meant to prepare one for the idea of a more benign Nature.”

From “Citroën D.S.”, an essay in Roland Barthes’ 1957 collection Mythologies.