Fetishism and Culture (eBook)

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Hartmut Böhme, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany.

Translator’s Note 9
Introduction 11
1 The horseshoe 11
2 Corrupt fetishism: a nineteenth-century invention 14
3 How to philosophise with a hammer 17
4 The contradictions of modernity 18
5 Historical development 21
6 The status of theory 24
7 Fetishism, ethnology, cultural studies 26
8 A book is never alone 29
9 Acknowledgements 30
I Now That’s Some Thing – An Introduction to the World of Things 31
1 The Bartelby effect 31
2 “The rebellion of things” 35
3 “The Cares of a Family Man” 39
4 “Where a thing ends and where it begins” 43
5 Phenomenology of things 47
5.1 Edmund Husserl 47
5.2 Martin Heidegger 52
6 Humans – things – collectives 59
6.1 Bruno Latour’s approach 59
6.2 Who acts? 62
6.3 Articulated things 69
6.4 Fetish – factum – factish 74
7 Lifeworld and material culture 78
7.1 “That the things have us, and that it is not we who have the things” 78
7.2 The evolution of functional objects? 83
8 The order of things 88
8.1 Function 88
8.2 Meaning 90
8.3 Aesthetics 91
8.4 Abundance 94
8.5 Dedifferentiation 100
8.5.1 Last things 101
8.5.2 Melancholy and asceticism 104
8.5.3 Chaos – chora – rubbish 106
9 On the disappearance of things 115
9.1 “Pseudoreality Prevails” 115
9.2 Everything disappears 116
9.3 Around 1900: fragmentation and electricity 119
9.4 Speed 122
9.5 “Super-American city” 124
9.6 Digital networks 127
II Fetishism in Religion and Ethnography 131
1 Forbidden images and anti-idolatry 131
1.1 Biblical traditions 131
1.2 The Church Fathers 137
1.3 Thomas Aquinas and Nicholas of Cusa 140
2 Relics and statues: magical Christian images 143
2.1 The relic’s spell 143
2.2 The cult of images and effigies 147
3 The ethnographic prehistory of fetishism 150
4 The magical thingly quality of fetishes 156
5 Concepts of fetishism in the Enlightenment and the early nineteenth century 166
5.1 Charles de Brosses: writing-desk inventions 166
5.2 Hermann Andreas Pistorius: Protestant reactions 169
5.3 Philipp Christian Reinhard: embodiment and representation 171
5.4 Christoph Meiners: disorder and classification 172
5.5 Overview of the philosophers 174
5.6 Auguste Comte: the primal positivity of fetishism 177
6 On the path to ethnology 180
6.1 Max Müller: the condemnation of fetishism 180
6.2 Theodor Waitz: the confused worship of images 183
6.3 Edward B. Tylor: animism and fetishism 184
6.4 Adolf Bastian: colonialism and self-reflection 186
6.5 Fritz Schultze: trifles of the primitive mind 188
7 Magic and modernity 192
7.1 Marcel Mauss: the theory of magic 192
7.2 Aby Warburg: a theory of modernity in memory of its collapse 197
8 Nail fetish pilgrimage: magic and politics 206
9 Political idolatry 210
9.1 Fetishes, idols, power 210
9.2 The cult of Stalin und Stalinist architecture 213
9.3 Stalin the idol 218
9.4 Charismatic leadership 222
9.5 The Palace of the Soviets 226
III Commodity Fetishism 233
1 Introduction 233
2 The exchange of gifts and sacred things (Marcel Mauss, Maurice Godelier) 236
3 Inalienable things 243
4 The discovery of commodity fetishism in Karl Marx 251
4.1 Mystifications of criticism? 251
4.2 The slow discovery of fetishism in Marx 254
4.3 From Marx’s early writings to Capital 258
4.4 The fetishism of the commodity and its secret 261
4.5 The fetishisation of fetishism in Marx 266
4.6 Beyond Marx 270
5 Reification and the culture industry 272
6 Consumer culture and fetishism 280
6 Inalienable things: collections, museums, memory 289
IV Fetishism, Sexuality and Psychoanalysis 306
1 Sexology and its mythical fathers 306
2 Alfred Binet: the discovery 312
3 Richard Krafft-Ebing: collections of fetishists 316
4 Excursus on the rhetorical form of fetishism 319
5 Sigmund Freud: winding paths to fetishism 323
6 Fetishism as metapsychological concept 332
7 Wilhelm Stekel: theatricality and religion 336
8 After Freud: the differentiation of fetishism 343
8.1 Melanie Klein: presymbolic origins 344
8.2 Jacques Lacan and the phallus – with an excursus on primordial murder 346
8.3 Joan Riviere: womanliness as masquerade 356
8.4 Donald W. Winnicott and his followers 358
8.5 M. Masud R. Khan: alienation as perversion 364
8.6 Psychoanalysis of fetishism – fetishes of psychoanalysis 366
9 Cultural developments and feminist discoveries 374
9.1 The failures of psychoanalysis 374
9.2 She has, she bears, she is the fetish – but whose? – Marcia Ian 376
9.3 Intellectual fetishes – fetishes of intellectualism 378
9.4 Feminism and the criticism of fetishism 380
9.5 Food fetishism 383
9.6 Fashion and fetishism 385
9.7 Film and fetishism 390
Conclusion 396
Bibliography 400
Index 434