Abstract
Sigmund Freud’s appropriation of fetishism was rooted in animism, but also an expression of the fetish’s conceptualization at the crossroads of modernity and colonialism. For Freud, it was the apparently worthless thing valued by the individual, sexualizing the fetish, that was also bound up with the sacred. Freud’s conceptualization of fetishism is the question of modernity put to religion. Following commentary on the Freudian corpus through Jacques Lacan, Jean-Joseph Goux, Slavoj Žižek, Mari Ruti, Paul Ricoeur, Michel de Certeau, and Edward Said, we explore his conceptualization of the “Thing” (das Ding), which promised to restore a seemingly primordial lack within the subject. In the end, the de-stabilization of identity itself is at stake through the de-constructive force of the fetishistic which perpetually unsettles any attempt to totalize the self.
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Notes
- 1.
See, among others, Lorraine Gamman and Merja Makinen, Female Fetishism: A New Look (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1994), pp. 14–46; and Steffen Böhm and Aanka Batta, “Just doing it: enjoying commodity fetishism with Lacan,” Organization 17:3 (2010): pp. 345–361.
- 2.
Lingis, Body Transformations, p. 117.
- 3.
Laura Mulvey, Fetishism and Curiosity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 14.
- 4.
Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper & Row, 1957). In Mulvey’s words, “One, the Marxist, is derived from a problem of inscription. How, that is, does the sign of value come to be marked onto a commodity? It is in and around the difficulty of establishing the exchange value of actual objects produced under capitalism that commodity fetishism flourishes, while the Freudian fetish, on the other hand, flourishes as phantasmatic inscription. It ascribes excessive value to objects considered to be valueless by the social consensus. How, that is, does an object acquire sexual value as the substitute for something else, the maternal penis that never existed in the first place, perceived as missing, an absence? In one case, the sign of value fails to inscribe itself on an actual object; in the other, value is over-inscribed onto a site of imagined lack, through a substitute object.” Mulvey, Fetishism and Curiosity, p. 2.
- 5.
Alfred Binet, “Le fetichisme dans l’amour,” Etudes de Psychologie Experimentale (Paris: Octave Doin, 1887). See also Logan, Victorian Fetishism, p. 117.
- 6.
Ian, Remembering the Phallic Mother, p. 53.
- 7.
The overlap between fetishism and the sacramental practices of the Christian traditions should no doubt be somewhat clear from the fact that both claim to locate materially embodied forms of the divine. I would only note, for example, the careful language which theological discourse often lends to its attempts to describe exactly how the divine can be said to reside within a material object, such as the Eucharistic host, or in particular events within one’s life. In describing the “making-present” of the divine within a sacrament, Herbert Vorgrimler, for one, describes the process as such: “This making-present thus does not happen without human beings, but neither does it happen simply through them (as happens from the point of view of religious studies or history of religions). Instead, it is the Spirit of God who takes the initiative and supports the whole event, causing the effects in the human persons; but instead of depriving those human persons of their own activity, the Spirit actually strengthens them for what they do.” Herbert Vorgrimler, Sacramental Theology, trans. Linda M. Maloney (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1992), p. 71.
- 8.
Sigmund Freud, “The Sexual Life of Human Beings,” Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 16, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1963), pp. 305–306; see also “Some Thoughts on Development and Regression—Aetiology,” vol. 16, p. 348.
- 9.
Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 21, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), p. 152.
- 10.
Ian, Remembering the Phallic Mother, p. 54.
- 11.
Freud, “Fetishism,” p. 155.
- 12.
Freud, “Fetishism,” p. 154.
- 13.
Kaplan, Cultures of Fetishism, pp. 22–24.
- 14.
Ian, Remembering the Phallic Mother, p. 93.
- 15.
Ian, Remembering the Phallic Mother, p. 88–89.
- 16.
Freud, “Fetishism,” p. 154.
- 17.
Ian, Remembering the Phallic Mother, pp. 54–55.
- 18.
Freud, “Fetishism,” p. 154.
- 19.
See the critical analysis of fetishism, in particular the myriad feminist responses to the male utilization of the fetish in Freud, provided in Kent L. Brintnall, Ecce Homo: The Male-Body-in-Pain as Redemptive Figure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), pp. 69–74.
- 20.
See, among others, Lynda Hart, Between the Body and the Flesh: Performing Sadomasochism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 55.
- 21.
Freud, “Fetishism,” p. 155.
- 22.
Ian, Remembering the Phallic Mother, p. 60. See also the way in which Marjorie Garber takes up such a “cross-cultural” practice as embodied in the transvestic fetishism of “cross-dressing”. Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (London: Routledge, 1992). What the case of the transvestite adds to the conversation may in fact be a recognition that fetishism, from a psychoanalytic point of view, tends to embody “important conflicts” within a broader matrix of social relations that situate us all: “The fact that we all have our bits of perversity makes these conditions approachable not as foreign territory, but with an understanding and empathy reserved for native soil”. Jon Meyer, “The Development and Organizing Function of Perversion: The Example of Transvestism,” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 92 (2011): pp. 311–332, p. 329.
- 23.
Richard Boothby, Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 95.
- 24.
Boothby, Freud as Philosopher, p. 209.
- 25.
Boothby, Freud as Philosopher, p. 210.
- 26.
Boothby, Freud as Philosopher, pp. 210–211.
- 27.
Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 7, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), pp. 153–155.
- 28.
See the commentary offered in Brian Robertson, Lacanian Antiphilosophy and the Problem of Anxiety: An Uncanny Little Object (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 43.
- 29.
See Mari Ruti’s development of the Lacanian paradigm in her The Call of Character: Living a Life Worth Living (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), p. 53.
- 30.
Charles Shepherdson, Lacan and the Limits of Language (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), p. 2.
- 31.
Jacques Lacan and Wladimir Granoff, “Fetishism: The Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real” in Perversions: Psychodynamics and Therapy, ed. Sandor Lorand and Michael Balint (New York: Random House, 1956), p. 273.
- 32.
Ian, Remembering the Phallic Mother, p. 90.
- 33.
Ian, Remembering the Phallic Mother, 177. Cf. Donovan Miyasaki, “The Evasion of Gender in Freudian Fetishism,” Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 8:2 (2003): pp. 289–298.
- 34.
Boothby, Freud as Philosopher, p. 211.
- 35.
Boothby, Freud as Philosopher, p. 215.
- 36.
Gamman and Makinen, Female Fetishism, p. 42.
- 37.
Boothby, Freud as Philosopher, p. 292.
- 38.
See Gamman and Makinen. This is further developed in Angela Moorjani, Beyond Fetishism and Other Excursions in Psychopragmatics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), pp. 46–48, specifically in relation to the work of Sylvia Payne and her early article “Some Observations on the Ego Development of the Fetishist,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 20 (1939): pp. 161–170.
- 39.
Kaplan, Cultures of Fetishism, p. 29. See also Logan, Victorian Fetishism, p. 132.
- 40.
E. L. McCallum, Object Lessons: How to Do Things with Fetishism (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1998), p. 3. See a similar conclusion developed in Moorjani, Beyond Fetishism and Other Excursions in Psychopragmatics, p. 131.
- 41.
Ian, Remembering the Phallic Mother, p. 200. Ian herself cites, in this context, Andrew Parker, “Mom,” Oxford Literary Review 8:1–2 (1986): pp. 96–104, p. 98.
- 42.
Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 161. See the comments on this in Carol-Anne Tyler, Female Impersonation (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 219.
- 43.
Ian, Remembering the Phallic Mother, p. 90.
- 44.
Ian, Remembering the Phallic Mother, p. 165.
- 45.
Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, in The Standard Edition, vol. 21, p. 18.
- 46.
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, in The Standard Edition, vol. 21, p. 81.
- 47.
Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, pp. 126–127.
- 48.
Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, p. 145.
- 49.
See, among others, René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977).
- 50.
Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, p. 145.
- 51.
Freud, Totem and Taboo, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 13, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), p. 144.
- 52.
Freud, Totem and Taboo, p. 148.
- 53.
Gamman and Makinen, Female Fetishism, p. 44; Kaplan, Cultures of Fetishism, p. 27.
- 54.
Freud, Totem and Taboo, p. 150–152.
- 55.
Quoted in Freud, Totem and Taboo, p. 155.
- 56.
Jean-Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 152.
- 57.
Goux, Symbolic Economies, pp. 153–154.
- 58.
“Behind fetishism lies the question of how subjects alienate their social relation in the form of objects, that is, how the symbolic relation, in establishing a third order, a universal intermediary, results in the dependence of subjects. Along the lines of fetishism as reverse domination—the domination of subjects by universal symbolic products (which, however, are only the effects of relations, of exchange)—what we encounter is less the sexual fetish (as a substitute in extremis, for what the mother lacks) than the question of the third entity and the law.” Goux, Symbolic Economies, p. 157, emphasis in the original.
- 59.
Jacques Lacan, Transference: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (Cambridge: Polity, 2015), pp. 139–143.
- 60.
See Roberto Esposito, Persons and Things: From the Body’s Point of View, trans. Zakiya Hanafi (Cambridge: Polity, 2015), pp. 94–95.
- 61.
Goux, Symbolic Economies, p. 155.
- 62.
Goux, Symbolic Economies, p. 157.
- 63.
Goux, Symbolic Economies, p. 158.
- 64.
Goux, Symbolic Economies, p. 156.
- 65.
Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), p. 203.
- 66.
Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 206.
- 67.
Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, pp. 206–207.
- 68.
Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 207.
- 69.
Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 208.
- 70.
Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 208.
- 71.
Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 2009), pp. 103–106.
- 72.
Adrian Johnston, “The Cynic’s Fetish: Slavoj Žižek and the Dynamics of Belief,” Psychoanalysis , Culture & Society 9 (2004) 259–283, p. 266.
- 73.
Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 228.
- 74.
Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 228. In other words, “[…] the subject overcomes the Otherness, the strangeness, of the Jewish God not by immediately proclaiming him their own creature but by presupposing in God himself the point of ‘incarnation’, the point at which God becomes man” (pp. 229–230).
- 75.
Goux, Symbolic Economies, p. 156.
- 76.
Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press, 2006).
- 77.
Goux, Symbolic Economies, p. 158.
- 78.
“Sacrifice is the inexpungeable debt to a superior source that has the force of law.” Goux, Symbolic Economies, p. 158.
- 79.
Goux, Symbolic Economies, p. 160, de-emphasized from the original. Goux goes on to draw a distinction between Judaism and Christianity as well: “Christianity, in its dogma of ‘God become man,’ reduces the scission, closes the gap to some degree, and restores a field of imaginary, symbolic projections. Now, Marx, starting from Feuerbach’s challenge of Christianity, ends up combining Judaic iconoclastic critique (of the projection crystallized into an idol) with the critique of schism itself, of alterity, of alienation. The absence of the fetish no longer has as its corollary the subject’s separation from an unrepresentable absolute Other; it is attended by the human subject’s total repossession of its imaginary projection and even of its symbolic reifications. This subjective reappropriation, completing predicates transferred onto the divine, is the beginning of atheism itself […].” Goux, Symbolic Economies, p. 162.
- 80.
See Jan Assmann, Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006).
- 81.
Goux, Symbolic Economies, p. 166.
- 82.
Ruti, The Call of Character, p. 71.
- 83.
Ruti, The Call of Character, p. 166.
- 84.
The point I am trying to make here concerning the socially revolutionary power of fetish-objects, and which resonates deeply with indigenous reactions to colonial impositions of power, can be found in David Graeber, “Fetishism as Social Creativity: Or, Fetishes Are Gods in the Process of Construction,” Anthropological Theory 5:4 (2005): pp. 407–438.
- 85.
Ruti, The Call of Character, p. 48.
- 86.
Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 530.
- 87.
See, among others, his early political-theology as espoused in Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 6th ed., trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968). See also George Hunsinger, Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002).
- 88.
Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, pp. 530–531.
- 89.
Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, p. 531.
- 90.
This was a task that would receive fuller recognition only much later when Ricoeur took up his considerations on the power of the “rule of metaphor” in onto-theological terms See Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny, with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello (London: Routledge, 2003). The nature of metaphor, of course, is another fascinating way to study the ways in which the human being, immersed in the ambiguities of language, often has to resort to a “fetishistic” manner of communication when utilizing metaphor, that highly unstable and ambiguous bridge between two worlds that do not meet up without remainder in our understanding. See, on this, Lisa Freinkel, “The Use of the Fetish,” Shakespeare Studies 33 (2005): pp. 115–122.
- 91.
Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, p. 531.
- 92.
Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, p. 543.
- 93.
Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, p. 534.
- 94.
Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, p. 540.
- 95.
Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
- 96.
See Logan, Victorian Fetishism, p. 140. It seems as if it should almost go without saying that the Freudian legacy, in terms of its strength for cultural critique, has spawned a good portion of the academic field of cultural studies which itself has blossomed under this psychoanalytic horizon, as the work of cultural theorists such as Slavoj Žižek, Terry Eagleton, Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Homi K. Bhabha, among others, adequately demonstrates. See Chris Barker’s in-depth study of this merger of the psychoanalytic into a Marxist founded cultural studies entitled Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice, 3rd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2008).
- 97.
Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 23, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1964). Assmann explores the “obsessive” nature of Freud’s Moses in his introduction to Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), an obsession that Assmann claims to have shared in the composition of his own study.
- 98.
Almost all of the scholarship on Freud’s Moses today reflects the enormity of these criticisms against Freud’s historical “evidence” and so a detailed sketch of the most devastating of these is here neither desirable nor merited. See Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991); Richard J. Bernstein, Freud and the Legacy of Moses, Cambridge Studies in Religion and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); James J. DiCensio, The Other Freud: Religion, Culture and Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1999); Assmann, Moses the Egyptian. Subsequent comments upon Freud’s attempt to unearth an historical thesis of murder behind the death of Moses have run aground on numerous inaccuracies in his research as we have said. Perhaps two of the most acute charges against Freud’s method are levied by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi who questions (1) why the Jews would have repressed the record of this evil deed when the Jewish people’s evil deeds are stridently recorded in such detail elsewhere, and (2) the lasting invalidity of developing such a thesis based on an analogy between individual psychological traits and a collective society’s. Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses, pp. 84–87. It is in regard to the latter claim that Freud’s view of religion could be said to be “reductionistic”, reducing religion to a merely individual phenomenon writ large. See Tinneke Beeckman’s essay “Enlightenment and Reductionism: Freud’s Exemplary Theory of Religion” in Faith in the Enlightenment? The Critique of the Enlightenment Revisited, ed. Lieven Boeve et al. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006).
- 99.
On this correlation, there has been a renewed interest in Freud’s methodology in Moses and Monotheism, an interest that has far outweighed the criticism and given new life to cultural analysis in general. This is so much the case that the institutionalization of a Freudian hermeneutics has taken place despite such criticisms against his historical inaccuracies. This point is developed as a central research question in Sarah Winter’s Freud and the Institution of Psychoanalytic Knowledge (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). In commenting upon the radicality of Freud’s thesis in Moses and Monotheism, Jacob Taubes has leave to remark that “What is here developed as a conceptual network in the way of historical truth, of tradition and memory, of distortion—against this, all the so-called exegeses that come from here are simply trivial”. Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, trans. Dana Hollander (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 95. Perhaps this is why the re-visiting of Freud’s Moses is now expanding and proving to be a central site for a renewed hermeneutical vision of culture and religion in general.
- 100.
Freud, Moses and Monotheism, p. 94.
- 101.
Freud, Moses and Monotheism, pp. 66ff, 80. This cycle is unfolded in a more detailed manner in Bernstein, Freud and the Legacy of Moses, pp. 36ff.
- 102.
This impression of the traumatic undergoing a latency phase until it can be experienced at “another time” and in “another place” as the “return of the repressed” still dominates the scholarship on the experience of trauma today. See Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).
- 103.
Freud, Moses and Monotheism, p. 86.
- 104.
Bernstein, Freud and the Legacy of Moses , p. 73.
- 105.
Freud, Moses and Monotheism, pp. 134ff.
- 106.
It is in this exact sense that Jewish historian Yerushalmi once declared how history, and not the scriptural text (as the domain of the unconscious in Freud’s understanding), justifies Jewish faith. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), p. 86. History, in this sense, becomes defined by the constant unfolding of the canonical work throughout time, in its repetition and (re)formulation of subjects and in its development of an unconscious dimension which forever juxtaposes a canonical “History” (with an unconscious dimension) over against other “histories” (as repressed elements within the larger History).
- 107.
Freud, Moses and Monotheism, p. 90.
- 108.
Freud, Moses and Monotheism, p. 43.
- 109.
This train of thought is picked up by Paul Ricoeur in his study on Freud where he details the path from concepts of meaning to concepts of force which travels through the relation of the archaic to the oneiric (the dream-world) and is one which must focus upon “the abolished, the forbidden, the repressed” in order to elucidate the latent, or hidden meaning behind an event, albeit an event of the psyche, the text, history, or culture. Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, p. 91. This becomes the basis as well for Ricoeur’s use of Freudian theory in order to construct a cultural hermeneutics. See his essay in The Conflict of Interpretations entitled “Psychoanalysis and the Movement of Contemporary Culture,” ed. Don Ihde (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974).
- 110.
The commentary upon Freud’s Moses runs along several different axes, all of which are interrelated and interreferential, in some sense. One strand would run from Yerushalmi’s Freud’s Moses to Derrida’s Archive Fever to Assmann’s Moses the Egyptian to Bernstein’s Freud and the Legacy of Moses, returning in the end to Assmann’s Religion and Cultural Memory. This strand of commentary, which progressively takes account of itself and its predecessors, isolates the earlier work of both de Certeau and Ricoeur, both of whom play central roles in the reception of Freud’s Moses, but whose central theses lie unexamined directly by this later strand of critical inquiry.
- 111.
See Ben Highmore, Michel de Certeau: Analysing Culture (London: Continuum, 2006).
- 112.
Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), pp. 298–299.
- 113.
de Certeau, The Writing of History, p. 299.
- 114.
de Certeau, The Writing of History, p. 314.
- 115.
de Certeau, The Writing of History, p. 333.
- 116.
Exemplary here are two representative samples of direct encounters with Freud’s basic hypothesis, first, regarding his linking of Judaic faith and a hyper-masculine identity in the writing of Daniel Boyarin, “‘An Imaginary and Desirable Converse’: Moses and Monotheism as Family Romance” in Reading Bibles, Writing Bodies: Identity and The Book, ed. Timothy K. Beal and David M. Gunn (London: Routledge, 1996); and, second, from a postcolonial, feminist perspective in the work of Ranjana Khanna, Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
- 117.
de Certeau, The Writing of History, p. 315.
- 118.
de Certeau, The Writing of History, p. 316. Cf. Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
- 119.
de Certeau, The Writing of History, p. 318.
- 120.
de Certeau, The Writing of History, pp. 319–320.
- 121.
de Certeau, The Writing of History, p. 320.
- 122.
de Certeau, The Writing of History, p. 324.
- 123.
See Richard Burt, “(Un)Censoring in Detail: The Fetish of Censorship in the Early Modern Past and the Postmodern Present” in Censorship and Silencing: Practices of Cultural Regulation, ed. Robert C. Post (Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, 1998), pp. 17–41.
- 124.
de Certeau, The Writing of History, p. 345.
- 125.
de Certeau, The Writing of History, p. 346.
- 126.
Judith Butler envisions this “impossible mastery” as a failure of the self to give an account of itself precisely because of the unsettling nature of the Other, in a Levinasian sense, at the heart of our own pre-ontological grounding of identity. If the canonical, then, maintains the “radical otherness” of the divine, we are able to see how the re-writing of the self into the biblical narrative develops an ultimately impossible narrative of the subject which the subject seeks to always embody, but is never able to fully do so. See her Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), pp. 65. This also reveals a process which not only examines how “all writing is re-writing” (of an always re-determined and re-determining canonical form), but that which unveils the process of subject recognition which joins life with narrative. Just as canonical narratives often repeat and re-inscribe their own narratives, so canonical subjects outside the text come to re-write themselves into the canonical narratives, entering another time wholly apart from their own. There is no doubt a great liturgical reading of such a re-writing of canonical narratives in light of subject formation, as well as the literary re-writings alongside them. This last insight is taken from the work of Piero Boitani, The Bible and its Rewritings, trans. Anita Weston (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 55–56.
- 127.
Edward W. Said, Freud and the Non-European (London: Freud Museum, 2003), p. 14. In a related manner, though from an altogether different point of view than Freud offers us, there is also what could be termed a fetishism of the “Western” viewpoint within postcolonial literature. See Neil Lazarus, “The Fetish of ‘the West’ in Postcolonial Theory” in, Modernity, and Postcolonial Studies, ed. Crystal Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 43–64.
- 128.
Said, Freud and the Non-European, p. 26. The above quotation was actually made in the context of a series of remarks on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, but the methodology he is discussing is also applied by Said to Freud.
- 129.
See my “What Christians need no longer defend: The political stakes of considering antinomianism as central to the practice and history of theology”, Crisis and Critique 2:1 (2015): pp. 115–149.
- 130.
Said, Freud and the Non-European, p. 27.
- 131.
Said, Freud and the Non-European, p. 28.
- 132.
Said, Freud and the Non-European, p. 32.
- 133.
Said, Freud and the Non-European, p. 44.
- 134.
Said, Freud and the Non-European, p. 53.
- 135.
Said, Freud and the Non-European, p. 53.
- 136.
Said, Freud and the Non-European, p. 54.
- 137.
Said, Freud and the Non-European, p. 54.
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Dickinson, C. (2020). Fetishism as Psychological Compensation for a Lack. In: The Fetish of Theology. Radical Theologies and Philosophies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40775-9_4
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