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Object fetishism is becoming a more and more pervasive phenomenon. Focusing on literature and the visual arts, including cinema, this book suggests a parallelism between fetishism and artistic creativity, based on a poetics of detail, which has been brilliantly exemplified by Flaubert's style. After exploring canonical accounts of fetishism (Marx, Freud, Benjamin), by combining a historicist approach with theoretical speculation, Massimo Fusillo identifies a few interpretive patterns of object fetishism, such as seduction (from Apollonius of Rhodes to Max Oph�ls), memory activation (from Goethe to Louise Bourgeois and Pamuk), and the topos of the animation of the inanimate. Whereas all these patterns are characterized by a projection of emotional values onto objects, modernism highlights a more latent component of object fetishism: the fascination with the alterity of matter, variously inflected by Proust, Woolf, Joyce, Barnes, and Mann. The last turning point in Fusillo's analysis is postmodernism and its obsession with mass media icons-from DeLillo's maximalist frescos and Zadie Smith's reflections on autographs to Palahniuk's porn objects; from pop art to commodity sculpture.
"The Problem of the Fetish gathers William Pietz's innovative writing on the fetish object and the history of the "fetish" as a concept. Engaging extensively with historical documents, Pietz traces the genealogy of fetishism from encounters between European colonizers and African communities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the emerging social sciences. Discussing the role of fetishism in anthropology, political economy, psychiatry, and law, he analyzes the relationship between the fetish and value, violence, sacrifice, and debt. To accompany Pietz's seven essays, this long-awaited volume includes a foreword by Francesco Pellizzi, editor of RES, the journal in which several of the essays originally appeared, and it also includes an introduction by Stefanos Geroulanos and Ben Kafka, who provide an invaluable guide to Pietz's thought. This book will speak to Pietz's multidisciplinary readership, continuing his legacy of engaging with questions of material culture, object agency, merchant capitalism, and spiritual power, and introducing the work of a powerful theorist to new generations of scholars and thinkers"--
By delving into the history of the fetish-object among both modern and contemporary commentators, this book highlights the fetish-object’s role as a philosophical and religious concept of the highest significance. Historically, fetishes are implicated in specific struggles for sovereign (political) and/or religious (hierarchical) power, with their interwoven symbols defined as the primary location for transcendence in our world. This book defines the political consequences of fetish-objects within a western cultural, and primarily theological context through a comparative approach of various literatures on fetish-objects—anthropological to the psychological, Marxist to the theological. It reconceives of fetishes as a form of resistance to oppressive structures, something which motivated Christians themselves historically, and shaped our western understanding of the sacraments far more than has been acknowledged. Taking up this conversation likewise holds forth the possibility of reconceptualizing how fetish-objects and sacramental presences both speak profoundly to our late-modern selves.
Freud’s 1927 essay on the acquisition of a screen memory, or fetish, allows the subject to come to terms with the traumatic truth that, for him, dominates the present moment (in Freud’s scenario, the truth of mother’s sexuality) by maintaining, alongside and not in place of it, a parallel story of the past (the myth of the phallic mother). In this book Freud’s theory of the fetish, and in particular this way of allowing two opposed and ostensibly mutually exclusive narratives to co-exist, is used to provide a number of Parisian crime texts with radical new solutions. The fetishistic world-view of Charles Baudelaire’s poetics will be shown to provide the template for all overvalued instances of women passing by; notably, it will be seen how the famous assault on one of Christian Dior’s models as she displayed the New Look for the first time in Montmartre in 1947 depends on a fetish erected in the poem “À une passante”. The same Paris streets allow red herrings to be raised to the status of truth in novels by Fred Vargas, Léo Malet and Frédéric Cathala. In these texts the discovery of a primal scene allows doubt to be cast over authorial solutions and new murderers or victims to be found. In the case of Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée, the fetishism at work is shown to have harboured a serial killer where no crime was previously considered to have taken place. In these analyses, fetishism is mapped onto prose poetics, intertextuality and deconstruction in order to challenge the way we read text. More importantly, rereading these texts allows us to see fetishism in a new light as a force for positive, creative acts of meaning-making. Alistair Rolls is Associate Professor of French Studies at the University of Newcastle, Australia. He is the author of The Flight of the Angels: Intertextuality in Four Novels by Boris Vian (Rodopi, 1999) and, with Deborah Walker, of French and American Noir: Dark Crossings (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
Since the early-modern encounter between African and European merchants on the Guinea Coast, European social critics have invoked African gods as metaphors for misplaced value and agency, using the term “fetishism” chiefly to assert the irrationality of their fellow Europeans. Yet, as J. Lorand Matory demonstrates in The Fetish Revisited, Afro-Atlantic gods have a materially embodied social logic of their own, which is no less rational than the social theories of Marx and Freud. Drawing on thirty-six years of fieldwork in Africa, Europe, and the Americas, Matory casts an Afro-Atlantic eye on European theory to show how Marx’s and Freud’s conceptions of the fetish both illuminate and misrepresent Africa’s human-made gods. Through this analysis, the priests, practices, and spirited things of four major Afro-Atlantic religions simultaneously call attention to the culture-specific, materially conditioned, physically embodied, and indeed fetishistic nature of Marx’s and Freud’s theories themselves. Challenging long-held assumptions about the nature of gods and theories, Matory offers a novel perspective on the social roots of these tandem African and European understandings of collective action, while illuminating the relationship of European social theory to the racism suffered by Africans and assimilated Jews alike.
Emily Apter offers a fresh account of the complex relationship between representation and sexual obsession in turn-of-the-century French culture, and in particular the theme of "female fetishism" in the context of the feminine culture of mourning, collecting, and dressing.
Lesbianism in literature has been dealt with rather indirectly in the past. Editors have led readers to the "artistry" of a work containing lesbianism, emphasizing instead the literary history and historical context of the work rather than the representations of lesbianism. The editor for Colette's The Pure and the Impure, for instance, affirms that Colette has a knowledge of a "strange sisterhood," but assures readers she has never strayed from the "normal." In the groundbreaking A Lure of Knowledge, Judith Roof demonstrates that representations of lesbian sexuality occupy specific locations or positions in the arguments, subject matter, and rhetoric of Western European and American literary criticism. She examines the political context of representations: how lesbian sexuality is used as a signifier an why it appears when and where it does. Roof argues that attempts to depict or explain lesbian sexuality spur anxieties about knowledge and identity. In reaction to and denial of these anxieties, lesbian sexuality is represented in film, literature, theory, and criticism as foreplay, as simulated heterosexuality, as erotic excess, as joking inauthenticity, as artful compromise, or as masculine mask in a specific repertoire of neutralization and evasion. Challenging the heterosexism of film theory and feminist theory, this book analyzes the rhetorical use of lesbian sexuality. Roof explores a range of discourses, from the woks of such authors as Anais Nin, Olga Broumas, Julia Kristeva, Jane Rule, Luce Iriguray, and Sigmund Freud, to films such as Emmanuelle, Desert Hearts, Entre Nous, and I've Heard the Mermaids Singing, to professional tennis.
The concept of fetishism has long been a window through which philosophers, psychoanalysts and cultural anthropologists have looked in order to critically examine the nature of beliefs, sexual interests and material values, and it remains today a vital interpretive paradigm. The enduring interest in fetishism gives testimony to the fact that its status and significance have yet to be fully resolved. In the attempt to further clarify this ambiguous and often mystifying phenomenon, the contributors to Everyday Extraordinary: Encountering Fetishism with Marx, Freud and Lacan have taken a fresh look at the fundamental dynamic of fetishism through the lenses of its most influential interpreters?not only Marx, Freud and Lacan, but also Derrida, Mannoni and Pietz.In this collection of essays, the philosophical approach joins forces with the psychoanalytic, and the psychoanalytic with the aesthetic and mythological, often with striking results. Emerging from the essays contained in this volume is a notion of fetishism as a response to a crisis of meaning: personal, social or religious. The fetish mediates the crisis that arises when a system of meaning and identity is confronted with something that threatens it with dissolution, whether this threat arises from an excessive and traumatic figure of alterity, or from the loss of the ground on which ones certainty had been staked. And the stakes of this confrontation are indeed high, as the fetish is here seen as an object having a profound influence on the life of desire, now leading to a symbolic blossoming of the mundane, now into perverse repetition and the refusal of change.