Fetishism is a term widely disseminated in literary and cultural studies. It carries a variety of generic meanings. Most of these derive to some degree from Marxist and psychoanalytic discourses, where the term fetishism has technical significance.
Karl Marx (1818–1883) explains his concept of fetishism in Capital I, where he argues that when it comes to the exchange of commodities in capitalism, a social relation between people assumes the form of a relation between things. Material objects circulated as commodities, in other words, seem to embody inherently certain characteristics that, in fact, derive from social relations. He argu…
According to William Pietz, who provides a historical study of the concept of the fetish that situates its use in Marx and Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), both the term and the idea of the fetish achieve new meaning and define a new problem in the cross-cultural spaces of the West African coast in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He argues that the fetish comes into being at the moment o…
As the modern European sexual perversion best known perhaps from the writings of Freud, fetishism makes its appearance in continental fin-de-siècle literary texts and in medical and psychiatric discourses of the 1880s and 1890s known as sexology. Freud's most extended treatment of the topic is in a relatively late essay entitled "Fetishism" (1927). Here Freud describes fe…
According to Freud, and for obvious reasons, fetishism is a perversion restricted to men alone; however, feminist psychoanalytic and cultural theorists have also theorized the concept's broader applicability. Naomi Schor coins the term for feminism in her studies of textual instances of fetishism in the writing of Georges Sand. For Emily Apter, the combined commodity and sexual fetishism of…
Combining Marx and Freudian notions of fetishism via Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Zizek has argued that ideological fantasies function according to the logic of disavowal. His studies focus on capitalism and thus on metropolitan political economies, the United States in particular. His insight is to point out that the misrecognition involved in commodity fetishism is not on the level of knowledge—…
Following on the work of the Martinican psychoanalyst and revolutionary theorist Frantz Fanon (1925–1961), whose work sought to understand the fantasies that produce racist colonial stereotypes, postcolonial and critical race theorists use the ambivalent oscillation of fetishistic disavowal to describe how racial difference works fetishistically in colonial encounters. For Homi Bhabha, the …
Apter, Emily. Feminizing the Fetish: Psychoanalysis and Narrative Obsession in Turn-of-the-Century France. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991. Apter, Emily, and William Pietz, eds. Fetishism as Cultural Discourse. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of …
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