Book date: 11 November 2019

Abstract

Function

But could we believe that fetishism may be exactly the really other? The intent behind this paper would be to explore the possibility for this at very first sight counterintuitive idea. It locates the issue of fetishism in the crux associated with the dilemma of disavowal and contends any particular one has to differentiate between a disavowal – marked by cynical knowledge – and disavowal that is fetishistic and this can be grasped as being a subcategory of the identical belief framework of ideology.

Design/methodology/approach

This conceptual paper is predicated on literary works review and uses examples through the author’s ethnographic fieldworks in Asia (2008-2013) and central European countries (2015-2019).

Findings

The paper provides a unique insight into the dwelling of fetishism, depending on the psychoanalytic framework of disavowal, where all disavowal is ideological, yet not all disavowal is fetishistic, therefore positing an important, usually unacknowledged difference. Where disavowal follows the dwelling I don’t only discover how things are, but additionally the way they may actually me personally, and nonetheless …. “ I understand quite nicely how things are, but nevertheless …, ” fetishistic disavowal follows the formula: “”

Originality/value

The paper develops an authentic conceptualization of fetishism by identifying ideological disavowal from fetishistic disavowal.

Keywords

• Ideology
• Disavowal
• Fetishistic disavowal

Citation

Publisher

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2019, Tereza Kuldova.

Permit

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A estimate from Mitchell’s article “What do photos Want? ” may serve us as a point that is starting our considering fetishism and its particular reference to disavowal.

With its basic part, Mitchell supplies the statement that is following your reader being a protection against a possible accusation against him fetishizing pictures:

To truly save time, i wish to start with the presumption that individuals are designed for suspending our disbelief into the extremely premises associated with relevant question, ‘ What do images desire? ’ I’m well mindful that this is certainly a strange, possibly question that is even objectionable. I am mindful it involves a subjectivizing of images, a questionable personification of inanimate items, so it flirts having a regressive, superstitious mindset toward pictures, the one that if taken really would get back us to techniques like totemism, fetishism, idolatry, and animism. They are methods that a lot of modern, enlightened people respect with suspicion as ancient or childish inside their old-fashioned types (the worship of material things; the … treating of inanimate items like dolls as when they had been alive) so when pathological signs within their contemporary manifestations (fetishism, either of commodities or of neurotic perversion) … nonetheless, i wish to continue just as if issue had been well worth asking …. (Mitchell, 1996, p. 71).

Two things that are remarkable in this paragraph. First, we are able to sense the requirement associated with writer to protect himself against a cost perhaps maybe not yet levied against him,

A protection against an individual who might not also occur, but whom might have thought that the writer himself is a fetishist, and therefore the psychoanalytic formula of disavowal, “I know quite nicely, but still” (the real question is well well well worth asking) (Mannoni, 2003), structures his introductory paragraphs. 2nd, we are able to sense that fetishism, posited alongside other “primitive” takes regarding the world, needs to be one thing terribly undesirable owned by traditional communities – even in the event, later on when you look at the article that is same we learn that many of us continue to be fetishists in this feeling, personifying things and so forth. Us first consider several points, without aiming at an exhaustive literature review, in regard to how fetishism and fetishists have been constructed in opposition to the civilized before we move to the problem of disavowal, let.

Contemporary communities have actually usually thought as civilized and modern that it was precisely their lack of fetishistic thinking that distinguished them. Their members perceived on their own as superior logical beings straight in opposition to those they saw as substandard, ancient, superstitious, delusional, perverse and irrational thinkers that are magical. The fetishist, a character positioned on the phase of concept in 1760 by Charles de Brosses (Leonard, 2016; de Brosses, 1760), had been said to have confidence in the inscrutable energy of random product items and their agency; the fetishist ended up being the ancient par excellence, somebody maybe maybe perhaps not yet with the capacity of sublimation. James G. Frazer’s classic, The Golden Bough, could be regarded as a paradigmatic exemplory instance of this type of thought (Frazer, 1894). To Frazer, fetish had not been significantly more than a bit of superstitious miracle of the crudest savages, whom knew neither faith nor technology. If not, the savages had been thought to redtube perhaps not understand better. This anthropological idea of fetishism had been linked to an evolutionary idea of phases of social and religious development that placed fetishism in the middle atheism and totemism, due to the fact origin of spiritual idea (Lubbock, 1870; Comte, 1858).