The problem of the fetish, II: The origin of the fetish
W Pietz - RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 1987 - journals.uchicago.edu
W Pietz
RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 1987•journals.uchicago.eduIn the first part of this essay (Res 9) I argued that the terms" fetish" and" fetishism" have
marked a specific problem-idea for modern social theory as it has developed since the
Enlightenment. Despite the use of this terminology in a variety of disciplines that claim no
common theoretical ground? ethnography and the history of religion, Marxism and positivist
sociology, psychoanalysis and the clinical psychiatry of sexual deviance, modernist
aesthetics and Continental philosophy? there is a common configuration of themes among …
marked a specific problem-idea for modern social theory as it has developed since the
Enlightenment. Despite the use of this terminology in a variety of disciplines that claim no
common theoretical ground? ethnography and the history of religion, Marxism and positivist
sociology, psychoanalysis and the clinical psychiatry of sexual deviance, modernist
aesthetics and Continental philosophy? there is a common configuration of themes among …
In the first part of this essay (Res 9) I argued that the terms" fetish" and" fetishism" have marked a specific problem-idea for modern social theory as it has developed since the Enlightenment. Despite the use of this terminology in a variety of disciplines that claim no common theoretical ground? ethnography and the history of religion, Marxism and positivist sociology, psychoanalysis and the clinical psychiatry of sexual deviance, modernist aesthetics and Continental philosophy? there is a common configuration of themes among the various discourses about fetishism. Four themes consistently inform the idea of the fetish:(1) the untranscended materiality of the fetish:" matter," or the material object, is viewed as the locus of religious activity or psychic investment;(2) the radical historicality of the fetish's origin: arising in a singular event fixing together otherwise heterogenous elements, the identity and power of the fetish consists in its enduring capacity to repeat this singular process of fixation, along with the resultant effect;(3) the dependence of the fetish for its meaning and value on a particular order of social relations, which it in turn reenforces; and (4) the active relation of the fetish object to the living body of an individual: a kind of external controlling organ directed by powers outside the affected person's will, the fetish represents a subversion of the ideal of the autonomously determined self.(" Fetishism" treats the self as necessarily and in essence embodied.)
If the history of the idea of fetishism that I am attempting to write has any interest, it is due to the appropriation of this word as a theoretical term by many of the major social thinkers of the nineteenth century (a" long" nineteenth century extending from Kant to Freud, that is, from Enlightenment to Modernism). The human sciences that constituted themselves in this period (sociology, anthropology, psychology) did so in part by taking a position in the ongoing debate over the explanation of the history and nature of religion proposed by the theory of fetishism. This theory was fully established in European intellectual discourse by 1800, having been formulated during the period of the Encyclopedists (the 1750s and 1760s). I believe that a study of the theoretical use of
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