name: serena / age: 28 / profession: painter / location: milan / weekday: Saturday
fetish
a bit of a laden, perhaps over-determined term and therefore a bit of a hobbyhorse of critical theorists, who could sometimes be more careful to specify what kind of fetish they are talking about exactly. derived from the portuguese feitiço, a term originally used by anthropologists to designate (human-made) objects believed to possess some form of magical or supernatural power over human beings, it was then imported by marx to designate the generalized enchantment of the commodity over nineteenth-century western europe. for marx, the commodity is at first sight a self-evident thing, a material object with an evident use-value, though the analysis of the commodity under the capitalist mode of production “brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties”. common usage of the term fetish is however closest to freud’s use of it: for him the fetish is an object (usually a non-sexualized body part) that comes to act as a substitute for another desired but unattainable object, and that therefore becomes an object of (perverse) sexual fixation. the classic examples include shoes/feet, tissues, fabrics, and so forth. in ordinary parlance, we borrow a bit from both marx and freud when we say someone has a fetish for sneakers, gadgets, gizmos, and so forth…