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‘Round About Fetishism With Louise J. Kaplan by Adolfo Fattori

In your question, you have suggested that some of my thoughts on the various expressions of the fetishism strategy in psychoanalytic training resemble what has happened to the vitalities that originally inspired Post-Modernism. I am not familiar with Jameson’s Postmodernism, but I would imagine from your remarks on his writings that he is observing how the current day pedantic, literal minded, constricted postmodernist reflections on Post-modernism are killing the essential spirit and aliveness of Postmodernism.

The theme of a death of someone beloved, that you deal in No Voice is Ever Wholly Lost and inability for our culture to manage the “death idea” is also one of the cornerstones of contemporary sociology, as in Zygmunt Bauman, Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies17. What can you say to this?
(In fact in Culture of Fetishism)… I then go on to show how the erotic masquerade of sexual fetishism that heads up the lists of perversions goes on finally to the last perversion in the lists - necrophilia - the death instinct that has tinted itself in erotic colour. We should, therefore, suspect an erotic theme taking up the foreground of an analysis and look for the death theme being pushed into the background. I am here also addressing the question about the inability for our culture to manage the “death idea” and how this inability has become a cornerstone of contemporary sociology as in the work of Zygmunt Bauman, Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies. And, of course, I am also speaking here about the avoidance of death that is so prevalent in the previously mentioned fantasies of substituting robotic parts for decaying human parts.

Your comments on “As-if” and about the reality shows refer to the sociological debate on mass media, their effects, on the infantilisation of contemporary identities. Are the positions of contemporary sociologist and philosophers as Pascal Bruckner18, for example, compatible with psychoanalytic?
More, the most sophisticated marketing strategies try to provide an identity to the brand and establish relationships with the consumers called brand experience and shopping experience. Is maybe here that the “virus” which originates all the fetishistic dynamics arises from? Or, at least, is this the fetishistic dimension of the material civilization?
And now, finally, to your last two questions - which in Culture of Fetishism, are dealt with as different aspects of the same trends in contemporary society - which you refer to as the “fetishistic dimension of material civilization.”
I do not know about Pascal Bruckner, who has a mixed reputation in the United States as being a fascist in the garb of a multiculturalist. But I do know that you have hit the nail on the head when you call attention to the infantilization of contemporary identities in the “as-if” personalities forced upon viewers in reality TV programs. In the conclusions of my chapter based on Marx’s commodity fetishism “The Fetishism of Commodities,” or as in Culture of Fetishism chapter 8. I speak particularly about the reality TV show, The Real World, which captures a special dimension of the fetishism strategy: there is a possibility that it even predicts the robotization of the human being; and if so, it materializes Marx’s predictions about human beings becoming unreal and imaginary while, at the same time, imaginary things become real and tangible. I then repeat the quotation that started this chapter on Marx’s commodity fetishism, all our inventions and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life and stultifying human life with a material force. I use this motto of Marx frequently during the course of the book and refer back to it especially in my chapter on robots and humans. Of course, Marx was speaking specifically of the commodification of human beings. It is the cornerstone of his theories on the social relations embedded in the production of commodities.

The “secret” of commodity fetishism arises out of the twisted relationship between the worker whose labour produces the commodity and the capitalist who feeds on that labour to maximize his profit from the sale of the commodity. In my introduction to that chapter, I say that the first principle of the fetishism strategy is given consummate expression in Marx’s concept of surplus labor. When the surplus labor of a worker is transformed into the profits of the capitalist, the worker is transformed into a commodity, --- a non-living thing like a shoe or a table. Thus someone with his own enigmatic energy and immaterial essence is transformed into someone or something that is material and real.
In the last chapter entitled, Culture of Fetishism, I go back to the chapter 5, and a review of a film about skin-cutting, In My Skin19. The reviewer emphasizes that skin-cutting, the compulsion to cut into one’s own flesh, is a desperate attempt to re-establish a connection with a body that has been lost. And he also identifies the culture that breeds and nurtures this disconnection with the human body. “In a sterile corporate culture where human appetites are quantified, tamed and manipulated by market research and where people have been rewarded for functioning like automatons, uncontrollable tics are really the anxious protesting twitches of an oppressed animal spirit.”
And I follow this up by saying that “Many of us, who on the surface seems to be happily and unquestioningly adapting to the technologies that are offered to us, are responding, unconsciously, with the tremblings of an animal possessed by a torment it does not comprehend.”
“The sterile corporate culture” which manipulates human desires and appetites through its duplicitous marketing practices, is a variation of the commodity fetishism that alienates human beings from other human beings and from themselves. Corporate culture, these days personified by the presence of Donald Trump and his reality TV show The Apprentice, is a powerful force, not only on reality TV but in everyday life.
And I ask, “Why are human beings so accepting of dehumanization, alienation, commodification? Have we become more comfortable in a monologue with a machine that simply mirrors whatever we need and desire, than in a relationship that requires uncertain and ambiguous give and take of human dialogue?
And here I sometimes answer with an evocation of Engels, “Just as people appear to be engaged in a revolutionary transformation of themselves and their material surroundings, as Engels said, ‘they anxiously summon up the spirits of the past to their aid, borrowing from the names, rallying cries, costumes, in order to stage the new world historical dream in a time-honoured disguise and borrowed speech’.”
As the fetishism strategy tells us, it is safer to stick with what is known and certain, even if it means to suffer and re-suffer the traumas of the past, rather than attempt to create something new and uncertain, with all its tempting ambiguities and challenging possibilities. Creativity is a danger. Where there is a spark there may develop a fire. Extinguish it before it is too late.
I hope this answers most of your questions. In each instance, I have tried to go back to the words I wrote in Culture of Fetishism. And, as I was happy to discover, most of the time the answers were there.


Translation from italian by Antonella Capasso. Our sincere thanks to Riccardo Mazzeo and Sara Modena (Edizioni Erickson) for their essential collaboration		[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] (6)

16. Author’s italic.		17. Zygmunt Bauman, Mortality, Immortality, and Other Life Strategies, Stanford, University Press, Usa, 1992.		18. Pascal Bruckner, La tentation de l'innocence, Editions Grasset & Fasquelle, France, 1995		19. Marina De Van, Dans ma peau, France, 2002.