The Returns of Fetishism
The Returns of Fetishism

Author: Charles de Brosses

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2017-07-26

Total Pages: 442

ISBN-13: 022646489X

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For more than 250 years, Charles de Brosses’s term “fetishism” has exerted great influence over our most ambitious thinkers. Used as an alternative to “magic,” but nonetheless expressing the material force of magical thought, de Brosses’s term has proved indispensable to thinkers as diverse as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Lacan, Baudrillard, and Derrida. With this book, Daniel H. Leonard offers the first fully annotated English translation of the text that started it all, On the Worship of Fetish Gods, and Rosalind C. Morris offers incisive commentary that helps modern readers better understand it and its legacy. The product of de Brosses’s autodidactic curiosity and idiosyncratic theories of language, On the Worship of Fetish Gods is an enigmatic text that is often difficult for contemporary audiences to assess. In a thorough introduction to the text, Leonard situates de Brosses’s work within the cultural and intellectual milieu of its time. Then, Morris traces the concept of fetishism through its extraordinary permutations as it was picked up and transformed by the fields of philosophy, comparative religion, political economy, psychoanalysis, and anthropology. Ultimately, she breaks new ground, moving into and beyond recent studies by thinkers such as William Pietz, Hartmut Böhme, and Alfonso Iacono through illuminating new discussions on topics ranging from translation issues to Africanity and the new materialisms.

Cultures of Fetishism
Cultures of Fetishism

Author: L. Kaplan

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-03-01

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 0230601200

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In her latest book, Dr. Louise Kaplan, author of the groundbreaking Female Perversions , explores the fetishism strategy, a psychological defense that aims to tame, subdue, and if necessary, murder human vitalities. Through an exploration of such cultural phenomena as footbinding, reality television, and the construction of robots, Kaplan demonstrates how, in a technology-driven world, an understanding of the fetishism strategy can help to preserve the human dialogue that is the basis of all human relationships. Kaplan writes from the heart as well as from the intellect.

Fantasies of Fetishism
Fantasies of Fetishism

Author: Amanda Fernbach

Publisher:

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13:

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At the dawn of the new millennium, Western culture is marked by various fantasies that imagine our future selves and their forms of embodiment. These fantasies form part of a rapidly growing discourse about the future of the human form, the disappearing boundary between the human and the technological and the cultural consequences of greater human-technological integration. This book is about those cultural fantasies of fetishism, the different forms they take and the various ways in which the transformative processes they depict can reaffirm accepted definitions of identity or reconfigure them in an entirely new fashion.

Fetishism and Curiosity
Fetishism and Curiosity

Author: Laura Mulvey

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2019-07-25

Total Pages: 399

ISBN-13: 1838715681

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Writer and film-maker Laura Mulvey is widely regarded as one of the most challenging and incisive contemporary cultural theorists, credited for incorporating film theory, psychoanalysis and feminism. Part of the pathbeating 1970s generation of British film theorists and independent film-makers, she came to prominence with her classic essay on the pleasures – and displeasures – of narrative cinema, 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema'. She went on to make her own avant-garde films, co-directed with Peter Wollen, and to write further, greatly influential works – including this one. Fetishism and Curiosity contains writings which range from analyses of Xala, Citizen Kane and Blue Velvet, to an extended engagement with the creations of Native American artist Jimmie Durham and the feminist photographer Cindy Sherman. Essays explore the concept of fetishism as developed by Marx and Freud, and how it relates to the ways in which artistic texts work. Mulvey returns to some of the knottier issues in contemporary cultural theory, especially the links between looking, fantasy and theorisation on the one hand, and the processes of historical change on the other. What are the modes of address that characterise 'societies of the spectacle'? How might 'curiosity' be directed towards deciphering the politics of popular culture? These are just some of the questions raised in this brilliant and subtle collection. Published as part of the BFI Silver series, this new edition of Mulvey's classic work of feminist theory features a new, specially commissioned introduction and stills from the films discussed.

Fetishism, Psychoanalysis, and Philosophy
Fetishism, Psychoanalysis, and Philosophy

Author: Alan Bass

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-11-27

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1351368656

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Fetishism, Psychoanalysis, and Philosophy explores how and why Freud’s late work on fetishism led to the beginnings of a re-formulation of the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. Freud himself, however, was unaware of the long history of the concept of fetishism, a history crucial to understanding the concept. This book contains three main thrusts. One is historical, tracing the development of the concept of fetishism from the 16th century onwards. The focus here is on two important thinkers: Charles de Brosses from the 18th century, and Auguste Comte from the 19th. The second thrust is philosophical. Fetishism is always about the relation between the mind and things. Martin Heidegger, Jaques Derrida, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty have made essential contributions in this area, contributions which have important scientific relevance. The third thrust integrate the historical, philosophical, and psychoanalytic investigations of fetishism. It also looks at Wallace Stevens’ poetic meditation on mind and thing, which helps to illuminate everything that precedes. This comprehensive book features careful integration of the historical, philosophical, and psychoanalytic investigations of fetishism. It will contribute to opening new ways of thinking about the mind and how it is structured, so that fetishism is possible. Fetishism, Psychoanalysis, and Philosophy will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists as well as philosophy scholars.

The Fetish Revisited
The Fetish Revisited

Author: J. Lorand Matory

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2018-10-04

Total Pages: 404

ISBN-13: 1478002433

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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.

Fetishism
Fetishism

Author: Anthony Shelton

Publisher: Ben Uri Gallery & Museum

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 140

ISBN-13:

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Published to accompany the South Bank Centre National Touring Exhibition held in 1995.

Idols of the Marketplace
Idols of the Marketplace

Author: D. Hawkes

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2001-10-11

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 0312292694

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Postmodern society seems incapable of elaborating an ethical critique of the market economy. Early modern society showed no such reticence. Between 1580 and 1680, Aristotelian teleology was replaced as the dominant mode of philosophy in England by Baconian empiricism. This was a process with implications for every sphere of life: for politics and theology, economics and ethics, aesthetics and sexuality. Through nuanced and original readings of Shakespeare, Herbert, Donne, Milton, Traherne, and Bunyan, David Hawkes sheds light on the antitheatrical controversy, and early modern debates over idolatry and value and trade. Hawkes argues that the people of Renaissance England believed that the decline of telos resulted in a reified, fetishistic mode of consciousness which manifests itself in such phenomena as religious idolatry, commodity fetish, and carnal sensuality. He suggests that the resulting early modern critique of the market economy has much to offer postmodern society.

The Problem of the Fetish
The Problem of the Fetish

Author: William Pietz

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2022-11-18

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 0226821811

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"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"--