on hotels

Location: The Sir Savigny, Berlin
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Hotels are about two things: sex and death. The two main vectors of escape. A haute bourgeois temporary autonomous zone, outside the space-time of everyday life, where for a moment the world might stop and something else happen.

Or nothing might happen: where nothingness is in fact the point. The cultural logic of hotel room sex is well enough known, but I would argue that libido is not the only drive present in this space. There is also the death drive: in Freud, the desire of all living things to return to the inorganic state from which they came; in Lacan, the desire to return to the pre-Oedipal fusion with the mother’s breast.

The hotel is both. Sleep. Lethe. And the uncommon luxury of being taken care of. Multi-thousand pound beds that one sinks into as if resting amid clouds. Strong whiskey-based drinks that appear magically on cue. The ability to hang a sign from the door and to be left perfectly alone. And it’s needless to say, but of course when the hotel room sex is any good it’s a loss of self of another kind, too.

I’ve been fantasising about hotels all year, fed by the precision-honed daydream fuel of the Mr & Mrs Smith newsletter and a considerable amount of travel necessitating bookings to be made. Business and pleasure. Sometimes it’s my money, sometimes not. Moments - Los Angeles and New York, London and Berlin - where you follow the guidance of the aforementioned Smiths and find something you didn’t know you needed quite that badly.

This is the Sir Savigny in Berlin and for 24 hours it delivered almost exactly everything I wanted.