FRE-DESIR DHUMAIN

There is a love doll industry in Japan producing life-size dolls to serve as "substitute partners."Curiously, these high-end sex products are made in the phantasmic form of young girls with vacant eyes and incomplete bodies. Is it even possible to "use" them? These moulded ersatzes confronting humans with the issue of solitude provide a representative model of what is deemed to be exciting and attractive in today's society.Companies competing in this market advertise them not as "products to sell," but as "girls to marry." When the client cannot, or does not, want to keep his doll, the latter is given a Buddhist funeral. Usually these “love dolls” look so real that they could fool anyone.Currently, the Japanese are investing millions in robotic research and are focusing particularly on ways to simulate human consciousness. These dolls constitute a genuine laboratory for artificial life research. They serve as models for android prototypes and influence cutting-edge research in the field of anthropomorphism. This book's approach to the subject thus ventures well beyond the anecdotal.This survey goes to the very heart of a system that is delivering new forms of psychic life. Japanese look-alikes are expected to invade the world and to do so all the more quickly because these objects offer something more than a realistic appearance.Agnès Giard is a journalist at Libération and an anthropologist. She has published seven books on sexuality and love, three of which were translated in Japan. In 2000, she became a correspondent with the Japanese magazine SM & Sniper and has been contributing to that publication for over ten years.