Pleasure and Political Subjectivity: Fetishism from Freud to Agamben

Freud's interest in sexual fetishism – an interest that spanned his entire career – lay in the way that fetishistic pleasure does not result from repressing a forbidden desire, but rather in displacing desire from a forbidden object onto an object available for use. In this way, fetishism recognizes the 'law of the father' but manages to evade an effect of its force. Our argument here is that the fetishistic relationship to law that Freud described can be used to understand aspects of Giorgio Agamben's influential approach to contemporary debates concerning law and sovereignty that have confused critics, specifically, the call to sever the nexus of violence and law as the only true political action. Said slightly differently, Agamben's invocation of 'whatever being' and a form of life after the state of exception, represents the limit threshold of law, but it is a limit that becomes evident only at the level of private enjoyment. The implication of our argument is that Agamben's utopian pronouncements are not best understood as theories of political action at all, but rather as fantasies of life untouchable by the violence that sovereign law requires.