In his chapter on fetishism and ideology in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, Jean Baudrillard characterized the term fetishism as almost having “a life of its own.” “Instead of functioning as a metalanguage for the magical thinking of others,” he argued, “it turns against those who use it, and surreptitiously exposes their own magical thinking.”³ Baudrillard here identifies the uncanny retroactivity of fetishism as a theory, noting its strange ability to hex the user through the haunting inevitability of a “deconstructive turn.”

Neither Marx nor Freud managed to escape the return of the repressed fetish. Freud endowed the fetish of the (castrated) maternal phallus with an animus when he wrote: “It seems rather that when the fetish comes to life, so to speak, some process has been suddenly interrupted—it reminds one of the abrupt halt made by memory in traumatic amnesias.”⁴ Marx, endeavoring in Capital to define the commodity fetish, lures the reader into a labyrinth of discomfiting allusions. “A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood,” he began, only to retract: “Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” (C 81). The same paragraph ends on an even more “fantastic” note, when an ordinary table, transformed into a commodity, “evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than ‘tableturning’” (C 82). If here the metaphor is table-turning, later the mysterious value of the fetish commodity floats before the eye like an apparition. After constructing an optical analogy for the relation between man and commodity, Marx advises “recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world” (C 83). Alternately confusing and conflating appearance and reality, Eidos and materialism; alienation and belief, Marx, according to W. J. T. Mitchell, “disabled” his discourse through the very master tropes that gave his arguments the power to imprint themselves on the political unconscious.⁵ The camera obscura was his preferred figure for ideology, and fetishism his preferred figure for commodities, but the two terms were frequently “crossed,” for as Mitchell points out, both signify false images, with the former connoting an “idol of the mind” and the latter, in Francis Bacon’s wording, an “idol of the marketplace.” At some level, these idols become indistinguishable, rendering commodities dangerously interchangeable with the “true” currency of ideas. Mirroring each other as “icons” of illusion, both tropes, according to Mitchell, ultimately subvert their author’s attempt at demystification. “Ideology and fetishism,” he ascertains, “have taken a sort of revenge on Marxist criticism, insofar as it has made a fetish out of the concept of fetishism, and treated ‘ideology’ as an occasion for the elaboration of a new idealism.”⁶

Now even if we disagree with Mitchell’s conclusion that Marxist criticism has reified the elements of its own theory or allowed fetishism to masquerade as demystification, it does seem true that within contemporary discourse a kind of fetishism of fetishism is in the air. And this hypertrophic character is hardly confined to Marxist usage; it seems, as Baudrillard suggests, endemic to fetishism’s history as a metaphysical construct.

In what follows, I want to examine briefly the history of fetishism as a theory, emphasizing (1) its simultaneous critique of and implication in the very sociosymbolic phenomena that it seeks to unveil (from commodification to castration anxiety), (2) its importance as a specular meeting point for psychoanalytic and materialist discourses, and (3) its implications for a radical theoretical praxis in the domain of contemporary aesthetic production.

In the course of its etymological life from its Chaucerian prehistory to its post-Enlightenment usage in the twentieth century, the word fetisso and its phonological cognates have provoked a chain of divergent interpretations, all generated according to the codes of a romance linguistics forced to accept the untranslatable Other into its thoroughly Western genealogy. Used in the eighteenth century by Charles de Brosses (dubbed “the little fetish” for his pains by Voltaire) to describe the idolatrous worship of material objects in “primitive” societies, the term was traced to fatum, signifying both fate and charm. A century later the British ethnologist Edward Tylor derived the term from a different though related root (factitius), comprising both the “magic arts” and the “work of art.”⁷ The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, following Marx (fetishism of commodities as false consciousness) and Freud (the fetish as spurious, surrogate object of desire), deduced from the Latin facere neither charm nor beauty but rather the degraded simulacrum or false representation of things sacred, beautiful, or enchanting.⁸

Though a semantic disjunction clearly emerges each time the word fetishism is displaced from language to language, discipline to discipline, and culture to culture, it is precisely this process of creative mistranslation that endows the term with its value as currency of literary exchange, as verbal token. Thus the word charme, a favored key word of Mallarmé and Valery commonly used to denote the incantatory power of music (carmen: psalm, oracle, sacred song), was seen as the carrier of an authenticated neoprimitivism, a sign linking symbolism to an exotic repertory of votive objects including the gri-gri, the juju or the phiphob. Like a good-luck charm or native artifact offered to the European traveler, the verbal fetish, surrounded by an aura of otherness, was aestheticized by the French poets of the turn of the century from Stéphane Mallarmé to Victor Segalen and Guillaume Apollinaire. As fetys, “well-made, beautiful,” the fetish emerged as a catalyst of symbolist artifice; as fatum, or fateful chance, it recalled the master narratives of shipwreck, solitude, and confrontation between civilized and “savage mind” from Robinson Crusoe to “Un coup de dés”; and as “Christs of another form, another belief, inferior Christs of obscure wishes” in Apollinaire’s poem “Zone” (1912), it became a protosurrealist icon, mediating between urban anomie and a “phantom Africa.”⁹

The literary history of fetishism may reveal a discursive pattern of difference, but its philosophical history deconstructs in the form of a rhetorical chiasmus. William Pietz has given us the most historically nuanced account of the philosophical fetish, which, he argues, points to the “emerging articulation of a theoretical materialism quite incompatible and in conflict with the philosophical tradition.”¹⁰ Following his scheme, one sees that from Kant (fetishism as a degraded sublime, a “trifle”) and Hegel (fetishism as a “factitious universal,” an unmediated particular) to Whitehead (“a fallacy of misplaced concreteness”) and Heidegger (an Ereigenes, an Appropriation), fetishism has been portrayed as theoretically worthless.¹¹ As a word, it was not even admitted into the French language by the Académie Française until 1835. But it is just this quantity of negative value that ultimately enables fetishism to undermine monolithic belief structures from Christianity and Enlightenment philosophy to the “rational” laws of capitalist exchange. For example, the Portuguese trading word fetisso stood not just for the native idol but also for the “small wares” or trinkets that European merchants used for barter or upon which they would swear an oath to honor a commercial transaction. According to William Pietz, these trading rituals inevitably led to “a perversion of the natural processes of economic negotiation and legal contact. Desiring a clean economic interaction, seventeenth-century merchants unhappily found themselves entering into social relations and quasi-religious ceremonies that should have been irrelevant to the conduct of trade.”¹² Pietz implies that Africa perverted Western capitalism (forcing it to adopt the superstitious worship of material objects) just as European capitalists perverted indigenous economics through exploitation. One may further deduce from this historico-philosophical chiasmus two central consequences: first, that the “civilized” mimesis of “primitive” object worship was only the explicit acting out of Europe’s own (masked) commodity fetishism; and second, that almost as a result of Europe’s initial contempt for “tribal” artifacts, the exotic fetish “returned” to Continental shores, where it was henceforth recommodified as art. Developing these points, and insisting on the irrecuperably “savage” nature of the African feitiço, V. Y. Mudimbe has seen the history of the aestheticization of the fetish from its “culturally neutral” origins as a curio collected by the trader-observer in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, to its gradual mystification as “strange and ugly artifact,” as an unregenerate example of Europe’s notion of African art.¹³

Pierre Loti’s Le Roman d’un spahi (The novel of a colonial conscript; 1881) provides an exemplary illustration of Mudimbe’s argument in its coded framing of Europe’s racist, exoticist construction of the African fetish. The novel recounts the story of a French soldier posted in Senegal who, having “gone native” (donning the Muslim fez, living with a black concubine), is rudely recalled to his European origins when his mistress secretly sells his watch in exchange for “worthless” pacotille (shoddy goods). Described as a crude silver watch to which he was as attached as Fatou was to her amulets, the spahi’s paternal heirloom is guarded in a “boîte aux fétiches” (fetish box), thus emphasizing the cross-cultural transference of fetishisms that has occurred. But the lesson of this episode rides on its revelation that such transferences are nothing other than a concession to barbarism. Black fetishes, in a picturesque market scene, are presented as profanations of Western sacred objects: