Johanna Malt
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199253425
- eISBN:
- 9780191698132
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199253425.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
In a speech given in Prague in 1935, André Breton asked, ‘Is there, properly speaking, a left-wing art capable of defending itself?’. But despite his conviction that surrealism did indeed offer such ...
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In a speech given in Prague in 1935, André Breton asked, ‘Is there, properly speaking, a left-wing art capable of defending itself?’. But despite his conviction that surrealism did indeed offer such an art, Breton always struggled to make a theoretical connection between the surrealists' commitment to the cause of revolutionary socialism and the form that surrealist art and literature took. This book explores ways in which such a connection might be drawn, addressing the possibility of surrealist works as political in themselves and drawing on ways in which they have been considered as such by Marxists such as Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. Encompassing Breton's and Louis Aragon's textual accounts of the object, as well as paintings and the various kinds of objet surréaliste produced from the end of the 1920s, it mobilises the concept of the fetish in order to consider such works as meeting points of surrealism's psychoanalytic and revolutionary preoccupations. Reading surrealist works of art and literature as political is not the same as knowing the surrealist movement to have been politically motivated. The revolutionary character of surrealist work is not always evident; indeed, the works themselves often seem to express a rather different set of concerns. As well as offering a new perspective on familiar and relatively neglected works, this book recuperates the gap between theory and practice as a productive space in which it is possible to recontextualise surrealist practice as an engagement with political questions on its own terms.Less
In a speech given in Prague in 1935, André Breton asked, ‘Is there, properly speaking, a left-wing art capable of defending itself?’. But despite his conviction that surrealism did indeed offer such an art, Breton always struggled to make a theoretical connection between the surrealists' commitment to the cause of revolutionary socialism and the form that surrealist art and literature took. This book explores ways in which such a connection might be drawn, addressing the possibility of surrealist works as political in themselves and drawing on ways in which they have been considered as such by Marxists such as Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. Encompassing Breton's and Louis Aragon's textual accounts of the object, as well as paintings and the various kinds of objet surréaliste produced from the end of the 1920s, it mobilises the concept of the fetish in order to consider such works as meeting points of surrealism's psychoanalytic and revolutionary preoccupations. Reading surrealist works of art and literature as political is not the same as knowing the surrealist movement to have been politically motivated. The revolutionary character of surrealist work is not always evident; indeed, the works themselves often seem to express a rather different set of concerns. As well as offering a new perspective on familiar and relatively neglected works, this book recuperates the gap between theory and practice as a productive space in which it is possible to recontextualise surrealist practice as an engagement with political questions on its own terms.
Vincent L. Wimbush
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199873579
- eISBN:
- 9780199949595
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199873579.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
This book is a transdisciplinary analysis of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, first published in England in 1789. It was one of the earliest ...
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This book is a transdisciplinary analysis of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, first published in England in 1789. It was one of the earliest and remains to this day one of the best-known English language “slave” narratives. This now famous work was not really meant to be in any simple respects autobiographical; and it does not unproblematically register the several interests and motivations of a slave, spiritual, or travel narrative. Notwithstanding the inclusion of some formal elements of all these genres, it is best read as something else altogether—as a reflexive social-political commentary and criticism disclosed by a simple narratological framework. What Equiano wrote was not so much his life story as it was his creative effort to describe, critique, and reshape dominant society through his mimetics of what he, as strategically positioned “stranger,” understood to be—and named as—the “magic” that was the (British-inflected) practice of scripture reading, reflected within the structure of discourse and power relations that the author calls “scripturalization”. The book uses Equiano’s narrative to think with; it is a site for historical and contemporary social-critical excavation, using scriptures as social-cultural phenomenon and dynamics as analytical wedge. This scripturalizing mimetics open an analytical window onto the dynamics and structuring of British (and by extension Euro-American) civilization as a kind of ideological-discursive and social-psychological slavery, the representations of which are the deeper interest of this book. The form of enslavement identified as scripturalization in turn poignantly raises the possibility—with Equiano the ex-slave as model—of a particular type of negotiation or escape: ideological-psychological marronage, if not freedom in absolute terms. In Equiano’s reflexive thinking and discursive are the elements for the construction of “the African,” or “the Ethiopian,” the complex self within a reconceptualized modern, pluralistic society.Less
This book is a transdisciplinary analysis of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, first published in England in 1789. It was one of the earliest and remains to this day one of the best-known English language “slave” narratives. This now famous work was not really meant to be in any simple respects autobiographical; and it does not unproblematically register the several interests and motivations of a slave, spiritual, or travel narrative. Notwithstanding the inclusion of some formal elements of all these genres, it is best read as something else altogether—as a reflexive social-political commentary and criticism disclosed by a simple narratological framework. What Equiano wrote was not so much his life story as it was his creative effort to describe, critique, and reshape dominant society through his mimetics of what he, as strategically positioned “stranger,” understood to be—and named as—the “magic” that was the (British-inflected) practice of scripture reading, reflected within the structure of discourse and power relations that the author calls “scripturalization”. The book uses Equiano’s narrative to think with; it is a site for historical and contemporary social-critical excavation, using scriptures as social-cultural phenomenon and dynamics as analytical wedge. This scripturalizing mimetics open an analytical window onto the dynamics and structuring of British (and by extension Euro-American) civilization as a kind of ideological-discursive and social-psychological slavery, the representations of which are the deeper interest of this book. The form of enslavement identified as scripturalization in turn poignantly raises the possibility—with Equiano the ex-slave as model—of a particular type of negotiation or escape: ideological-psychological marronage, if not freedom in absolute terms. In Equiano’s reflexive thinking and discursive are the elements for the construction of “the African,” or “the Ethiopian,” the complex self within a reconceptualized modern, pluralistic society.
Tina Chanter
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199559213
- eISBN:
- 9780191594403
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199559213.003.0002
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
Heidegger and Lacan both emphasize the uncanny, monstrous aspects of Antigone, who must be expelled from the polis, and yet who plays a liminal role in which she is the excluded yet facilitating ...
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Heidegger and Lacan both emphasize the uncanny, monstrous aspects of Antigone, who must be expelled from the polis, and yet who plays a liminal role in which she is the excluded yet facilitating other. In Žižek's Lacanian reading, Antigone is regarded as ‘proto‐totalitarian’. By contrast, the tradition of political, dramatic appropriations of Antigone, including five Irish versions since the 1980s, among them Seamus Heaney's The Burial at Thebes—which is the focus here—establish Antigone as a freedom fighter. A critique of Lacan's reading of Antigone is provided which, the argument goes, fetishizes the character of Antigone. In contrast to the abstract gesture that is content to construe Antigone as a figure of excess, as if she merely marked the limits of the articulate, her continual renaissance is read as a genealogy of that which is figured as abject by dominant narratives by each new political staging of Antigone's rebirth.Less
Heidegger and Lacan both emphasize the uncanny, monstrous aspects of Antigone, who must be expelled from the polis, and yet who plays a liminal role in which she is the excluded yet facilitating other. In Žižek's Lacanian reading, Antigone is regarded as ‘proto‐totalitarian’. By contrast, the tradition of political, dramatic appropriations of Antigone, including five Irish versions since the 1980s, among them Seamus Heaney's The Burial at Thebes—which is the focus here—establish Antigone as a freedom fighter. A critique of Lacan's reading of Antigone is provided which, the argument goes, fetishizes the character of Antigone. In contrast to the abstract gesture that is content to construe Antigone as a figure of excess, as if she merely marked the limits of the articulate, her continual renaissance is read as a genealogy of that which is figured as abject by dominant narratives by each new political staging of Antigone's rebirth.
Johanna Malt
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199253425
- eISBN:
- 9780191698132
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199253425.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
The continual play of presence and absence in surrealist objects is a function of repetition and representation, and it is in their relationship to mimesis that the multiple disavowals of those ...
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The continual play of presence and absence in surrealist objects is a function of repetition and representation, and it is in their relationship to mimesis that the multiple disavowals of those objects unfold. The starting point in this chapter is one particular, uniquely fascinating surrealist object, namely Salvador Dalí's 1933 Buste de femme rétrospectif, a work to which this chapter often returns in its analysis. The chapter proposes the fetish as a more useful critical alternative, tracing some of the many domains in which it can signify. While it would be wrong to suggest that any one theoretical notion can account for all the many, heterogeneous manifestations of surrealist activity, an extended analysis of Dalí's rétrospectif demonstrates how very helpful concepts of fetishism can be as ways of approaching surrealist uses of the object.Less
The continual play of presence and absence in surrealist objects is a function of repetition and representation, and it is in their relationship to mimesis that the multiple disavowals of those objects unfold. The starting point in this chapter is one particular, uniquely fascinating surrealist object, namely Salvador Dalí's 1933 Buste de femme rétrospectif, a work to which this chapter often returns in its analysis. The chapter proposes the fetish as a more useful critical alternative, tracing some of the many domains in which it can signify. While it would be wrong to suggest that any one theoretical notion can account for all the many, heterogeneous manifestations of surrealist activity, an extended analysis of Dalí's rétrospectif demonstrates how very helpful concepts of fetishism can be as ways of approaching surrealist uses of the object.
Johanna Malt
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199253425
- eISBN:
- 9780191698132
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199253425.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter goes on to look at a rather different set of artistic works, namely the paintings of Salvador Dalí from the inter-war period, asking whether they enter into or stand outside the ...
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This chapter goes on to look at a rather different set of artistic works, namely the paintings of Salvador Dalí from the inter-war period, asking whether they enter into or stand outside the fetishistic processes they portray. The presentation of the surface of the painting as transparent, as a window through which one looks out on (or into) the landscape of the mind, distances the painting from its own status as a material object, complicating the way it participates in its own fetish dialectic. In order to sustain such an argument, it is essential to recognise surrealist works as always threatened by the fetishising forces they represent. Their status as critical responses to the capitalist commodity society is precarious, but at times also powerful. It is in their binding of sexual and commodity fetishism in a dialectial relation that they are able to illuminate both.Less
This chapter goes on to look at a rather different set of artistic works, namely the paintings of Salvador Dalí from the inter-war period, asking whether they enter into or stand outside the fetishistic processes they portray. The presentation of the surface of the painting as transparent, as a window through which one looks out on (or into) the landscape of the mind, distances the painting from its own status as a material object, complicating the way it participates in its own fetish dialectic. In order to sustain such an argument, it is essential to recognise surrealist works as always threatened by the fetishising forces they represent. Their status as critical responses to the capitalist commodity society is precarious, but at times also powerful. It is in their binding of sexual and commodity fetishism in a dialectial relation that they are able to illuminate both.
Anita Chari
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780231173896
- eISBN:
- 9780231540384
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231173896.003.0007
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Political Philosophy
This chapter examines artworks that make use of the strategy of the defetishizing fetish in ways that move the critique of reification from theory to praxis. The author discusses contemporary works ...
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This chapter examines artworks that make use of the strategy of the defetishizing fetish in ways that move the critique of reification from theory to praxis. The author discusses contemporary works by Oliver Ressler, Zanny Begg, Claire Fontaine Jason Lazarus, and Mika Rottenberg.Less
This chapter examines artworks that make use of the strategy of the defetishizing fetish in ways that move the critique of reification from theory to praxis. The author discusses contemporary works by Oliver Ressler, Zanny Begg, Claire Fontaine Jason Lazarus, and Mika Rottenberg.
Karen McCarthy Brown
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195167962
- eISBN:
- 9780199850150
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195167962.003.0011
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
The demonstration for Abner Louima in 1997 in New York City marked a new stage in the growing involvement of Haitians in local politics. Many protest signs blamed Mayor Rudolph Giuliani for what ...
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The demonstration for Abner Louima in 1997 in New York City marked a new stage in the growing involvement of Haitians in local politics. Many protest signs blamed Mayor Rudolph Giuliani for what happened to Louima, a victim of police brutality. Issues of secrecy, especially the malevolent kind, are overdetermined in relation to anything that has to do with Haiti, a country and culture that, in the eyes of white America, is virtually synonymous with black magic. The dense, racially charged images that public personalities and journalists called up so effortlessly in commentary on the cases of Louima and Amadou Diallo, who was shot and killed by New York City police, are representations constructed “in the shadow of the fetish”. Like the charms Haitian Vodou priestess and healer Mama Lola made to help Louima, they are wanga.Less
The demonstration for Abner Louima in 1997 in New York City marked a new stage in the growing involvement of Haitians in local politics. Many protest signs blamed Mayor Rudolph Giuliani for what happened to Louima, a victim of police brutality. Issues of secrecy, especially the malevolent kind, are overdetermined in relation to anything that has to do with Haiti, a country and culture that, in the eyes of white America, is virtually synonymous with black magic. The dense, racially charged images that public personalities and journalists called up so effortlessly in commentary on the cases of Louima and Amadou Diallo, who was shot and killed by New York City police, are representations constructed “in the shadow of the fetish”. Like the charms Haitian Vodou priestess and healer Mama Lola made to help Louima, they are wanga.
April R. Haynes
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780226284590
- eISBN:
- 9780226284767
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226284767.003.0007
- Subject:
- History, American History: 19th Century
The Epilogue summarizes key changes that resulted from women’s physiological discourse by 1860. First, the case of Theodore Grimké Weld illustrates how masturbation had become firmly associated with ...
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The Epilogue summarizes key changes that resulted from women’s physiological discourse by 1860. First, the case of Theodore Grimké Weld illustrates how masturbation had become firmly associated with mental illness in the minds of most Americans. Second, the diagnosis of spermatorrhea represented a gradual turn from moralism to medicalization. These processes reframed the solitary vice as inherently masculine and a foil for wholesome heterosexuality. Third, even liberal feminists conflated sexual virtue with feminine purity. Finally, African American sexual thinkers observed the racialized discourse on purity take root in the minds of their former allies. The hope for meaningful coalition between white and African American reform women ended, ushering in an era of segregated sexual politics. The book ends by chronicling the great reversal in white feminists’ discourse on masturbation. After Havelock Ellis debunked masturbatory insanity, early twentieth-century feminists popularized his sexology along with birth control and “the erotic rights of woman.” While female masturbation had been the enemy of antebellum women’s rights activists, women’s liberationists of the 1970s fetishized it. Feminist sex therapy taught women how to masturbate and coined new diagnoses associated with anorgasmia. Masturbation became the new normal, a sign of self-possession and sanity.Less
The Epilogue summarizes key changes that resulted from women’s physiological discourse by 1860. First, the case of Theodore Grimké Weld illustrates how masturbation had become firmly associated with mental illness in the minds of most Americans. Second, the diagnosis of spermatorrhea represented a gradual turn from moralism to medicalization. These processes reframed the solitary vice as inherently masculine and a foil for wholesome heterosexuality. Third, even liberal feminists conflated sexual virtue with feminine purity. Finally, African American sexual thinkers observed the racialized discourse on purity take root in the minds of their former allies. The hope for meaningful coalition between white and African American reform women ended, ushering in an era of segregated sexual politics. The book ends by chronicling the great reversal in white feminists’ discourse on masturbation. After Havelock Ellis debunked masturbatory insanity, early twentieth-century feminists popularized his sexology along with birth control and “the erotic rights of woman.” While female masturbation had been the enemy of antebellum women’s rights activists, women’s liberationists of the 1970s fetishized it. Feminist sex therapy taught women how to masturbate and coined new diagnoses associated with anorgasmia. Masturbation became the new normal, a sign of self-possession and sanity.
Jennifer Wenzel
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780823286782
- eISBN:
- 9780823288885
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823286782.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
This chapter considers the limits of disseminating knowledge about the harms of neoliberal globalization as a strategy for creating change. It examines three documentary films (Life and Debt, ...
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This chapter considers the limits of disseminating knowledge about the harms of neoliberal globalization as a strategy for creating change. It examines three documentary films (Life and Debt, Darwin’s Nightmare, and Black Gold) as commodity biographies. Offering an alternative to complicitous consumption (where one’s life is subsidized by others’ suffering), these films urge a shift from overconsumption to postconsumerism, which privileges products that dare to tell their own stories. Such value-adding narratives function less as defetishization than as new objects of consumerist desire. Nevertheless, moments of reflexivity, in which documentary subjects appear as consumers of commodities or film, disrupt too-easy binaries of First World consumption versus Third World production. The chapter situates these films about fair trade within longer histories of consumerism and its ethical conundrums, including the nexus of commodity knowledge and desire in Moby-Dick, and lessons in ethical consumption and viewership in Dziga Vertov’s experimental films.Less
This chapter considers the limits of disseminating knowledge about the harms of neoliberal globalization as a strategy for creating change. It examines three documentary films (Life and Debt, Darwin’s Nightmare, and Black Gold) as commodity biographies. Offering an alternative to complicitous consumption (where one’s life is subsidized by others’ suffering), these films urge a shift from overconsumption to postconsumerism, which privileges products that dare to tell their own stories. Such value-adding narratives function less as defetishization than as new objects of consumerist desire. Nevertheless, moments of reflexivity, in which documentary subjects appear as consumers of commodities or film, disrupt too-easy binaries of First World consumption versus Third World production. The chapter situates these films about fair trade within longer histories of consumerism and its ethical conundrums, including the nexus of commodity knowledge and desire in Moby-Dick, and lessons in ethical consumption and viewership in Dziga Vertov’s experimental films.
Angela Jones
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781479842964
- eISBN:
- 9781479829422
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479842964.003.0010
- Subject:
- Sociology, Law, Crime and Deviance
“Kink” is an umbrella term used to describe a range of non-normative sexual practices. Performing kink and catering to taboo sexual desires can be quite lucrative. In the camming industry, performers ...
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“Kink” is an umbrella term used to describe a range of non-normative sexual practices. Performing kink and catering to taboo sexual desires can be quite lucrative. In the camming industry, performers argue that in their kinky interactions with clients, they explore their sexual desires, better understand their sexual subjectivity, and, in the process, find empowerment and pleasure. Cam models who perform kink shows and do fetish work see their work as having positive effects on their lives and the lives of their clients. It is crucial that, in camming, customers can have pleasurable experiences exploring kink that they feel they cannot have offline. These kinky encounters online affect individuals’ lives offline, as well. Our offline and online experiences share a symbiotic relationship—our lives are diffuse. This chapter explores a range of kink work, which includes BDSM shows such as age play, incest play, foot fetish, blasphemy play, cuckolding, small penis humiliation, and race play. BDSM play on or offline can feel like an escape from the social systems that confine our desires and restrict our bodies, which does produce pleasure. However, various forms of BDSM play also reinforce existing systems of oppression such as White supremacy, patriarchy, cissexism, and transphobia.Less
“Kink” is an umbrella term used to describe a range of non-normative sexual practices. Performing kink and catering to taboo sexual desires can be quite lucrative. In the camming industry, performers argue that in their kinky interactions with clients, they explore their sexual desires, better understand their sexual subjectivity, and, in the process, find empowerment and pleasure. Cam models who perform kink shows and do fetish work see their work as having positive effects on their lives and the lives of their clients. It is crucial that, in camming, customers can have pleasurable experiences exploring kink that they feel they cannot have offline. These kinky encounters online affect individuals’ lives offline, as well. Our offline and online experiences share a symbiotic relationship—our lives are diffuse. This chapter explores a range of kink work, which includes BDSM shows such as age play, incest play, foot fetish, blasphemy play, cuckolding, small penis humiliation, and race play. BDSM play on or offline can feel like an escape from the social systems that confine our desires and restrict our bodies, which does produce pleasure. However, various forms of BDSM play also reinforce existing systems of oppression such as White supremacy, patriarchy, cissexism, and transphobia.
Antonio Eduardo Alonso
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- January 2022
- ISBN:
- 9780823294121
- eISBN:
- 9780823297405
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823294121.003.0005
- Subject:
- Religion, Theology
Informed by the work of Michel de Certeau and Walter Benjamin, this chapter develops a foundation from which to think theologically about consumer culture. An emphasis on cultural resistance in ...
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Informed by the work of Michel de Certeau and Walter Benjamin, this chapter develops a foundation from which to think theologically about consumer culture. An emphasis on cultural resistance in current theological literature on consumer culture uses Certeau’s notion of tactics to describe a mode of Christian resistance that can persist even without overthrowing the strategic grid of consumer culture. By situating tactics within the wider body of his work, this chapter argues that for Certeau tactics were not primarily signs of resistance but signs of absence: living realities that pulse within and against systems of strategies that can never quite contain them. Reading tactics through a hermeneutic of absence opens a space for a theological account of consumer culture that takes seriously the irreducibility of our experiences, even those on the contemporary marketplace. To extend Certeau’s insights into a consumer culture, this chapter further explores the commodity fetish, as Karl Marx first articulated it and as Walter Benjamin distinctively expanded it, to ground a theological account of consumer culture that recognizes not only its deceptions but also the traces of truth in its broken promises and fallen hopes.Less
Informed by the work of Michel de Certeau and Walter Benjamin, this chapter develops a foundation from which to think theologically about consumer culture. An emphasis on cultural resistance in current theological literature on consumer culture uses Certeau’s notion of tactics to describe a mode of Christian resistance that can persist even without overthrowing the strategic grid of consumer culture. By situating tactics within the wider body of his work, this chapter argues that for Certeau tactics were not primarily signs of resistance but signs of absence: living realities that pulse within and against systems of strategies that can never quite contain them. Reading tactics through a hermeneutic of absence opens a space for a theological account of consumer culture that takes seriously the irreducibility of our experiences, even those on the contemporary marketplace. To extend Certeau’s insights into a consumer culture, this chapter further explores the commodity fetish, as Karl Marx first articulated it and as Walter Benjamin distinctively expanded it, to ground a theological account of consumer culture that recognizes not only its deceptions but also the traces of truth in its broken promises and fallen hopes.
Elayne Oliphant
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- January 2022
- ISBN:
- 9780226731124
- eISBN:
- 9780226731438
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226731438.003.0006
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Anthropology, Religion
The third installation at the Collège des Bernardins encouraged viewers to inhabit the varied history of the Collège: as a monastery, a prison, a warehouse, and in its present state. The chapter ...
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The third installation at the Collège des Bernardins encouraged viewers to inhabit the varied history of the Collège: as a monastery, a prison, a warehouse, and in its present state. The chapter describes how, by highlighting the contingency of the Collège, the installation denied visitors access to the visceral and immediate encounter with the medieval past that they desired. The artists’ efforts revealed the possibility that the Collège had become a fetish object; from the perspective of many visitors, it was modern and contemporary artists who were responsible for the continued appearance of fetish objects in the present. A small minority of visitors responded to the apparent posted by the installation committing vandalism against it. These violent reactions are yet another expression of the privilege of the banality of Catholic materiality in France. Such banality in no way excludes powerful affects and emotions; instead, it makes space for them while denying the legitimacy of such attachments to the material forms of other religions. The chapter argues that Catholic materiality has long constrained visions of equality in France, serving to aestheticize inequalities that did not disappear with the Revolution.Less
The third installation at the Collège des Bernardins encouraged viewers to inhabit the varied history of the Collège: as a monastery, a prison, a warehouse, and in its present state. The chapter describes how, by highlighting the contingency of the Collège, the installation denied visitors access to the visceral and immediate encounter with the medieval past that they desired. The artists’ efforts revealed the possibility that the Collège had become a fetish object; from the perspective of many visitors, it was modern and contemporary artists who were responsible for the continued appearance of fetish objects in the present. A small minority of visitors responded to the apparent posted by the installation committing vandalism against it. These violent reactions are yet another expression of the privilege of the banality of Catholic materiality in France. Such banality in no way excludes powerful affects and emotions; instead, it makes space for them while denying the legitimacy of such attachments to the material forms of other religions. The chapter argues that Catholic materiality has long constrained visions of equality in France, serving to aestheticize inequalities that did not disappear with the Revolution.
Elena Gorfinkel
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- January 2022
- ISBN:
- 9781474482349
- eISBN:
- 9781399501606
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474482349.003.0002
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
The chapter considers Wishman’s Chesty Morgan films, Deadly Weapons and Double Agent 73, in relation to feminist psychoanalytic theory by analyzing how the female body acts as both a prop and a ...
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The chapter considers Wishman’s Chesty Morgan films, Deadly Weapons and Double Agent 73, in relation to feminist psychoanalytic theory by analyzing how the female body acts as both a prop and a technology within the films’ modes of address. Discussing the film in context of exploitation as filmic category defined by its mode of production and marketing, the author contends that Morgan’s body is the films’ primary prop and exploitation “gimmick.” However, the implantation of a camera into Morgan’s breasts complicate the actress’s as simply an object of the gaze; she becomes both a screen and a memory technology, assaulting the male characters and arguably the viewer in the process.Less
The chapter considers Wishman’s Chesty Morgan films, Deadly Weapons and Double Agent 73, in relation to feminist psychoanalytic theory by analyzing how the female body acts as both a prop and a technology within the films’ modes of address. Discussing the film in context of exploitation as filmic category defined by its mode of production and marketing, the author contends that Morgan’s body is the films’ primary prop and exploitation “gimmick.” However, the implantation of a camera into Morgan’s breasts complicate the actress’s as simply an object of the gaze; she becomes both a screen and a memory technology, assaulting the male characters and arguably the viewer in the process.
Jay Geller
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780823233618
- eISBN:
- 9780823241781
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823233618.003.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Judaism
This chapter introduces terminology and methods that will be used throughout this study. It offers working definitions of Judentum, antisemitism, Jewish-identified individuals, fetish, modernity, and ...
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This chapter introduces terminology and methods that will be used throughout this study. It offers working definitions of Judentum, antisemitism, Jewish-identified individuals, fetish, modernity, and the morphemic/orthographic/semantic/phonemic field. It also describes a physiognomic epidemiological method, a technique for mapping the emergence and distribution of as well as the interrelationships among particular Jewish-associated morphemes and images in German-language verbal and visual texts. The chapter depicts a European modernity characterized by the emergence of medical/biological and national/evolutionary/colonial narratives and accompanying authorizing discourses by which truth was identified and rendered visible on the body—specifically, the body of “the Jew” and the techniques practiced upon it (e.g., circumcision). It situates the socio-politico Jewish Question in Germanophone lands within the unresolved crisis over whether or not Jewish-identified individuals should or could be integrated into the dominant society.Less
This chapter introduces terminology and methods that will be used throughout this study. It offers working definitions of Judentum, antisemitism, Jewish-identified individuals, fetish, modernity, and the morphemic/orthographic/semantic/phonemic field. It also describes a physiognomic epidemiological method, a technique for mapping the emergence and distribution of as well as the interrelationships among particular Jewish-associated morphemes and images in German-language verbal and visual texts. The chapter depicts a European modernity characterized by the emergence of medical/biological and national/evolutionary/colonial narratives and accompanying authorizing discourses by which truth was identified and rendered visible on the body—specifically, the body of “the Jew” and the techniques practiced upon it (e.g., circumcision). It situates the socio-politico Jewish Question in Germanophone lands within the unresolved crisis over whether or not Jewish-identified individuals should or could be integrated into the dominant society.
Jay Geller
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780823233618
- eISBN:
- 9780823241781
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823233618.003.0003
- Subject:
- Religion, Judaism
This chapter maps how European discourses have fetishized body parts of and techniques practiced upon members of cultures whose origins antedate Europe's and whose persistence therefore questions ...
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This chapter maps how European discourses have fetishized body parts of and techniques practiced upon members of cultures whose origins antedate Europe's and whose persistence therefore questions European claims for autonomy and universality. It first traces the weave of gendered and ethno-racial stereotypes of circumcised Jews and pigtailed Chinese as mediated among Germanophones by the morphemic field of Zopf- (braid): Chinesenzopf (the queue), and Judenzopf (a scalp disease). The chapter then focuses on how the tail (Schwanz), as figural displacement of both penis and queue, was used to ascribe gendered ethno-racial difference. It also describes the ways in which hair on the face and head—the beard and the braid—functioned as diacritical marks between (uncircumcised) German and (circumcised) Jew. The writings of Heinrich Heine as well as J. C. Lichtenberg among others are analyzed.Less
This chapter maps how European discourses have fetishized body parts of and techniques practiced upon members of cultures whose origins antedate Europe's and whose persistence therefore questions European claims for autonomy and universality. It first traces the weave of gendered and ethno-racial stereotypes of circumcised Jews and pigtailed Chinese as mediated among Germanophones by the morphemic field of Zopf- (braid): Chinesenzopf (the queue), and Judenzopf (a scalp disease). The chapter then focuses on how the tail (Schwanz), as figural displacement of both penis and queue, was used to ascribe gendered ethno-racial difference. It also describes the ways in which hair on the face and head—the beard and the braid—functioned as diacritical marks between (uncircumcised) German and (circumcised) Jew. The writings of Heinrich Heine as well as J. C. Lichtenberg among others are analyzed.
Ilan Kapoor
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- May 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781501751721
- eISBN:
- 9781501751738
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9781501751721.003.0006
- Subject:
- Psychology, Social Psychology
This chapter discusses fetishism. As a substitute for fundamental trauma, the fetish is a site of disavowal, allowing the subject to better master their world by ridding it of difference. ...
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This chapter discusses fetishism. As a substitute for fundamental trauma, the fetish is a site of disavowal, allowing the subject to better master their world by ridding it of difference. Additionally, by behaving single-mindedly toward the fetish object as if it possesses a sublime quality, the fetishist forecloses other possible worthy objects or sociopolitical goals. Mastery, disavowal, and foreclosure thus become the hallmarks of fetishism. The chapter applies these psychoanalytic insights to international development — particularly its dominant modernization variant — by focusing on two of the latter's top fetishes: growth and technology. It examines how to each fetish is ascribed extraordinary powers, with several important socioenvironmental implications: the domination of the Other; the disavowal of social inequalities and environmental degradation; and the foreclosure of politics.Less
This chapter discusses fetishism. As a substitute for fundamental trauma, the fetish is a site of disavowal, allowing the subject to better master their world by ridding it of difference. Additionally, by behaving single-mindedly toward the fetish object as if it possesses a sublime quality, the fetishist forecloses other possible worthy objects or sociopolitical goals. Mastery, disavowal, and foreclosure thus become the hallmarks of fetishism. The chapter applies these psychoanalytic insights to international development — particularly its dominant modernization variant — by focusing on two of the latter's top fetishes: growth and technology. It examines how to each fetish is ascribed extraordinary powers, with several important socioenvironmental implications: the domination of the Other; the disavowal of social inequalities and environmental degradation; and the foreclosure of politics.
Mladen Dolar
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780226656397
- eISBN:
- 9780226656427
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226656427.003.0018
- Subject:
- Music, Performing Practice/Studies
This chapter reflects on some problems raised in Mladen Dolar’s A Voice and Nothing More (2006) from the author’s position of hindsight, concentrating on three issues. First, the aesthetics of the ...
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This chapter reflects on some problems raised in Mladen Dolar’s A Voice and Nothing More (2006) from the author’s position of hindsight, concentrating on three issues. First, the aesthetics of the voice: whereas focusing on voice as an aesthetic object risks turning voice into a fetish, obfuscating its psychoanalytic value as an “object a,” the chapter argues that voice never allows for a simple alternative between fetish or “object,” but rather that the proper object of aesthetics is actually the split between the two. Second, the intersection at which voice exists: the paradoxical object voice can be placed at the intersection of body and language, the somatic and the signifier, but the intersecting areas have no ontological priority or independence; instead voice functions as the agent of their split, blurring their seemingly self-evident dichotomy. Third, the echo: voice always entails an echo, even if inaudible, which testifies to the split nature of the object voice itself, entangling it in a web of repetitions, where it doesn’t coincide with either the original or the echo. Written as an afterword, the chapter also reflects on contributions to the volume.Less
This chapter reflects on some problems raised in Mladen Dolar’s A Voice and Nothing More (2006) from the author’s position of hindsight, concentrating on three issues. First, the aesthetics of the voice: whereas focusing on voice as an aesthetic object risks turning voice into a fetish, obfuscating its psychoanalytic value as an “object a,” the chapter argues that voice never allows for a simple alternative between fetish or “object,” but rather that the proper object of aesthetics is actually the split between the two. Second, the intersection at which voice exists: the paradoxical object voice can be placed at the intersection of body and language, the somatic and the signifier, but the intersecting areas have no ontological priority or independence; instead voice functions as the agent of their split, blurring their seemingly self-evident dichotomy. Third, the echo: voice always entails an echo, even if inaudible, which testifies to the split nature of the object voice itself, entangling it in a web of repetitions, where it doesn’t coincide with either the original or the echo. Written as an afterword, the chapter also reflects on contributions to the volume.
Julie Park
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804756969
- eISBN:
- 9780804773348
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804756969.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 18th-century Literature
Objects we traditionally regard as “mere” imitations of the human—dolls, automata, puppets—proliferated in eighteenth-century England's rapidly expanding market culture. During the same period, there ...
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Objects we traditionally regard as “mere” imitations of the human—dolls, automata, puppets—proliferated in eighteenth-century England's rapidly expanding market culture. During the same period, there arose a literary genre called “the novel” that turned the experience of life into a narrated object of psychological plausibility. The author of this book makes an intervention in histories of the rise of the novel by arguing that the material objects abounding in eighteenth-century England's consumer markets worked in conjunction with the novel, itself a commodity fetish, as vital tools for fashioning the modern self. As it constructs a history for the psychology of objects, the book revises a story that others have viewed as originating later: in an age of Enlightenment, things have the power to move, affect people's lives, and most of all, enable a fictional genre of selfhood. It demonstrates just how much the modern psyche—and its thrilling projections of “artificial life”—derive from the formation of the early novel, and the reciprocal activity between made things and invented identities that underlie it.Less
Objects we traditionally regard as “mere” imitations of the human—dolls, automata, puppets—proliferated in eighteenth-century England's rapidly expanding market culture. During the same period, there arose a literary genre called “the novel” that turned the experience of life into a narrated object of psychological plausibility. The author of this book makes an intervention in histories of the rise of the novel by arguing that the material objects abounding in eighteenth-century England's consumer markets worked in conjunction with the novel, itself a commodity fetish, as vital tools for fashioning the modern self. As it constructs a history for the psychology of objects, the book revises a story that others have viewed as originating later: in an age of Enlightenment, things have the power to move, affect people's lives, and most of all, enable a fictional genre of selfhood. It demonstrates just how much the modern psyche—and its thrilling projections of “artificial life”—derive from the formation of the early novel, and the reciprocal activity between made things and invented identities that underlie it.
Melissa Dickson
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474443647
- eISBN:
- 9781474477055
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474443647.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Chapter 4 turns to the accumulation of goods at the Great Exhibition of 1851, which was frequently understood as another theatrical manifestation of the Arabian Nights, within the ‘fairy-tale’ ...
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Chapter 4 turns to the accumulation of goods at the Great Exhibition of 1851, which was frequently understood as another theatrical manifestation of the Arabian Nights, within the ‘fairy-tale’ Crystal Palace in the heart of Britain. A new and innovative architectural form, the palace and its contents challenged the viewer’s vision, judgement, and sense of scale to such an extent that recourse was made to the language of magic in an effort to represent its unfamiliar effects. The palace and the objects it contained had apparently materialised like the stuff of dreams. Within this transformative space, the magnificence of Britain’s industrial resources became truly apparent only by way of comparison, by the jostling together of old and new, of fictional and material, and of machinery and magic. Here, an anxious meta-narrative emerged about the nature of modern production and consumption. Casting those products originating from India, China and elsewhere within a framework of magic and the Arabian Nights was, this chapter argues, a part of the rhetoric of British modernity, which made the comparison between nations and their wares more palatable by insisting that supposedly ‘inferior’ nations had employed the agency of magic. Such a narrative generated wonder both for the beautiful, often hand-crafted productions that had supposedly been wrought by magic, and of the advancements of British civilisation, which had apparently gained, through science, all the powers of Aladdin’s lamp.Less
Chapter 4 turns to the accumulation of goods at the Great Exhibition of 1851, which was frequently understood as another theatrical manifestation of the Arabian Nights, within the ‘fairy-tale’ Crystal Palace in the heart of Britain. A new and innovative architectural form, the palace and its contents challenged the viewer’s vision, judgement, and sense of scale to such an extent that recourse was made to the language of magic in an effort to represent its unfamiliar effects. The palace and the objects it contained had apparently materialised like the stuff of dreams. Within this transformative space, the magnificence of Britain’s industrial resources became truly apparent only by way of comparison, by the jostling together of old and new, of fictional and material, and of machinery and magic. Here, an anxious meta-narrative emerged about the nature of modern production and consumption. Casting those products originating from India, China and elsewhere within a framework of magic and the Arabian Nights was, this chapter argues, a part of the rhetoric of British modernity, which made the comparison between nations and their wares more palatable by insisting that supposedly ‘inferior’ nations had employed the agency of magic. Such a narrative generated wonder both for the beautiful, often hand-crafted productions that had supposedly been wrought by magic, and of the advancements of British civilisation, which had apparently gained, through science, all the powers of Aladdin’s lamp.
Laurie Essig
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780520295018
- eISBN:
- 9780520967922
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520295018.003.0004
- Subject:
- Sociology, Gender and Sexuality
Getting engaged now requires more emotional and financial resources than ever before. Here Essig traces the history of engagements from the birth of companionate marriages in the nineteenth century ...
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Getting engaged now requires more emotional and financial resources than ever before. Here Essig traces the history of engagements from the birth of companionate marriages in the nineteenth century to the invention of rituals like the bended knee and fetish items like the diamond ring in the early twentieth century. But the real change happened at the beginning of the twenty-first century, as engagements became “spectacular,” requiring not just highly staged events but also highly produced videos and images that could then be disseminated to the larger world.Less
Getting engaged now requires more emotional and financial resources than ever before. Here Essig traces the history of engagements from the birth of companionate marriages in the nineteenth century to the invention of rituals like the bended knee and fetish items like the diamond ring in the early twentieth century. But the real change happened at the beginning of the twenty-first century, as engagements became “spectacular,” requiring not just highly staged events but also highly produced videos and images that could then be disseminated to the larger world.
