For Jane

They trot, just like marionettes,

They trail along as do wounded animals

Where they dance, without wanting to dance,

Poor bells on which tugs a pitiless Demon, completely cracked.

(Charles Baudelaire, “Les petites vieilles”)

Although subject to interminable comment, it is not often noted that the cave at the core of Plato's allegory of the acquisition of true knowledge through education is modeled on a puppet theatre. In the Sheehan translation it reads,

Between the fires and those who are shackled [i.e., behind their backs] there runs a walkway at a certain height. Imagine that a low wall has been built the length of the walkway, like the low curtain that puppeteers put up, over which they show their puppets [μαριονέτϵς].

Recourse to puppetry is made to exemplify the conditions under which perception can be deluded, but more than that (see Figure 9.1). What is likewise exemplified is the inadequate character of visual and aural perception. Both falsely attribute reality to falsities. Both, in a space of confinement and the absence of freedom, confuse the animate and the inanimate. This confusion is what true education must overcome. “Confusion” is here thought through the space of the puppet show, though it will later be thought through the space of the movie theatre. Somewhere in between, through the device of an automaton named Olympia, this confusion is psychoanalytically reconfigured as uncanny. The difference between truth and falsity is thus superseded by undecidability, and confinement gives way to possession, perhaps even love. Although Freud's concentration falls on the motif of visual perception, and specifically perception haunted by an unstable signifier/patronym (Coppola/ Coppelius), the problem of the puppet, the automaton taken for a “living doll,” repeats. Over and over.