Louise J. Kaplan is one of the most influential and heterodox living psychoanalysts. She’s from New York, carrying in the Big Apple her business of psychotherapist, and deals especially issues related to feminism. In Italy have been translated her Female Perversions:The Tempations of Emma Bovary, 1991 – from which Susan Streitfeld made in 1996 a movie – and No Voice is Ever Wholly Lost, 1995, both published by Raffaello Cortina.
Erickson, in Trento, has just published the Italian translation of her latest work, Culture of Fetishism, 2006, where the scholar uses as a key concepts those she calls “culture of fetishism” and “fetishist strategy”, applying their five principles to the use of the female body in the movies, to the practices of body-manipulation – starting from piercings, to the tattoos, until scarification and self-mutilation – the new high tecnogized goods, to thinking about the direction that the postmodern society has embarked, in terms of control on personal energy and desire. We think that these definitions give a good name – nowadays – to the trends analyzed and reported in the last two decades by scholars who have tried to define the arrival and deployment of the effects of post-industrial society. Here’s what Louise J. Kaplan thinks about this vast network of topics.

Remaining focused for now on the classic definition of fetishism as a phenomenon that affects the strict sense of sexuality, some passages of your book have reminded us what Mario Perniola, an Italian philosopher, wrote years ago in his Il sex appeal dell’inorganico1. Perniola claimed then that we have to provide for a shift to a neutral sexuality, artificial – inorganic, precisely that is very similar to the fetishism. From your point of view, are there similarities with the definition of “fetishist strategy” as – if we understand well – a strategy of control on post-modernity?
Perniola’s proposal that we must begin to provide for a shift to a neutral, artificial, inorganic sexuality as a remedy for fetishism is, to my way of thinking, another example of the fetishism strategy and not a solution to the conflicts inherent in fetishism. His suggestion, in fact, is more a reflection of the first and primary principle of the fetishism strategy which I describe on page 12 of Culture of Fetishism, fetishism is a mental strategy or defense… that enables a human being to transform something or someone with its own enigmatic energy and immaterial essence into something or someone that is material and tangibly real, a form of being that makes the something or someone controllable.

About the forms of “writing” on the body which you discuss at length, and which are also, now, part of phenomena that go beyond individual practice since they took a social dimension, it could be possible – not forgetting the tradition of keeping diaries – thinking that maybe blogs, chat rooms and other phenomena related to the web imply a writing on a now virtual body, shared, located on the web?
Yes, that is an interesting idea about the social dimension given to the fetishism strategy by blogs, chat rooms and other phenomena related to the web. I disagree only insofar as I would not consider these writings as taking place on a “virtual, shared body,” since the web is exactly a non-alive thing without its own unpredictable vitalities - which, of course, is its attraction. Thus these writings, by virtue of avoiding the perils of direct human interaction, seem to embody the fourth principle of the fetishism strategy as I describe on page 14 of Culture of Fetishism, “… the more dangerous and unpredictable the threat of desire the more deadened or distanced from human experience the fetish object must be… when the full identity of the sexual object is alive, with all manner of threatening, dangerously unpredictable vitalities, the desire he or she arouses must be invested in an object that is knowable and predictable.”

Also in this regards, how are the place, in your analysis, of the experiments of avant-garde performers like Stelarc or Orlan?
Your question about Stelarc and Orlan, two different varieties of performance artist is also relevant to the first and fourth principles of the fetishism strategy.
I begin with Orlan as her form of writing on the body is also a good example of the failure of the strategy - which is, in part, to enlist an erotic act to contain and regulate aggression and death. As I explain in my discussion of the film The Pillow Book2, “Only when the fetishism strategy can no longer sufficiently disguise or regulate the underlying shameful, frightening, forbidden and dangerously unpredictable impulses, fantasies and wishes does out right madness, rampage, violence, rape, body mutilation, incest and murder result.” Or, as translated on page 97 of Culture of Fetishism, “Quando la strategia feticista fallisce, queste pulsioni esplodono portando follia, violenza, stupro, mutilazioni, incesto e morte3.” Orlan’s writing on her own skin, ostensibly in the name of self perfection and ideal beauty is actually obviously, all too obviously, a direct expression of the violence of body mutilation. 
In this regard it is also a failure of principle five of the fetishism strategy. On page 15, “… the death drive tints itself in erotic color.”  As Derrida has said, “… this impression of erogenous colour draws a mask right on the skin4.”         
That audiences enjoy watching a woman have surgeons mutilate her face and body and that surgeons who are supposed to protect the vitalities of the human body, collaborate with these acts of body mutilation are other indications of the failure of the fetishistic strategy.
Stelarc has another method of trying engaging the fetishism strategy, a method which resembles some of my discussions in the chapter 9 (in Italian: pp.145-160), I analyze the various processes of transforming of the carbon based body of living beings into the silicon based matter typical of robots and other non-living things. In that connection, I describe “Kismet,” a robot that has been designed to respond to human beings “as if” it were a human child. Then, I describe “Asimo” and its several prototypes, all of which have interactive capacities. But the major point of this chapter is not about the robots that are constructed to behave “as if” they were human. Ultimately, I am more concerned about the humans who want to transform human bodies into mechanical robot-like beings. Here I discuss such people as Natasha Vita More, founder of the Entropy Institute. Vita More (an invented name for sure) proposes that the human body be fused with machines by incorporating the metal-and silicon-based components that have been developed in the robotic and electronic technologies. (p.156)
What I am proposing is to design a full body prototype that functions like a human body but is not 100 percent biological. Rather it is a whole body prosthetic that acts either as a spare body or an alternative body. This body “Primo” would house the brain and whatever organs and essential parts (that) would not be replaced. The other parts would be prosthetic, synthetic models working together; forming a system that acts to transport us just like our human body does today5.
As I comment on Primo, (p. 157) i say that, the necrophilic principle of the fetishism strategy is evoked by the fantasy that living, animate beings are potentially dangerous. Therefore, animate flesh-and-blood creatures should be controlled (p.158) introducing silicon-based life as a substitute for human experience is dangerous not only to individual human beings but to the entire human species. 
Stelarc very often behaves as if he is attempting to transform himself into a Primo. He proposes that we humans should be able to take out decaying natural organs and install improved artificial ones. He reasons “The only way I see is that the body is mass produced but at the moment it doesn’t have any replaceable parts. What we really need is a design approach. We should start to re-engineer the body.” At the Blue Skies conference on art and technology he presented his various plans to hollow out the body and fill in up with high test machinery in preparation for a life in space.  In his varied performances involving sensory deprivation, wiring his body for sound, filming his insides and hooking himself up to a robotic third hand, he presents a multiplicity of methods of mixing up the natural and the automated. At Blue Skies he proclaimed, “The important thing isn’t freedom of information, but freedom of form, freedom to mutate and modify our body.” 
One way that Stelarc attempted to illustrate this freedom was to have hooks implanted into various parts of his body so that his body could be suspended over different landscapes and cities. Photographs of Stelarc’s self-imposed ritual of pain and endurance make his so-called scientific explorations of the body in space, appear to be more akin Orlan’s body mutilation scenarios. However, Stelarc does not violate the boundaries of the human body to anywhere near the extent that Orlan does. His philosophy, though very often enacted on the surface and insides of his body, is more contained in the realm of ideas. Admittedly, however, his mix-up between the natural and the artificial comes very close to being symptomatic of a failure of the fetishism strategy --- a symptom not too different from Orlan’s body mutilations.
One need not be a performance artist to consider transforming one’s body into a cyber body. In the last chapter of Culture of Fetishism, I present the example Prof. of Cybernetics, Kevin Warwick (p. 163) who, in his book, I, Cyborg6, described how he had his nervous system linked to a computer. The computer and he sent thought signals back and forth. He could switch on lights. he could manipulate a robotic hand directly from the neural signals he emitted, and even feel how much force the arm was using. using his neural signals, Warwick could control technology on the other side of the world. 
Similarly, when a New York City, reporter interviewed ordinary citizens who were plugged into their I Pods, cell phones, laptops, and other gadgets which they had to lug around on a daily basis, he found people who fantasized about having their nervous system hooked up to their machines. One of these, a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, wished that someone would invent a brain implant that, “would be an ultimate interface between your nervous system and the larger accretive nervous system that you could switch on or off in different ways that would be constantly reconfigurable so that you wouldn’t have to upgrade it by buying a new one every six months.” (Cultures of Fetishism, p.176: Described briefly on p. 162, Falsi Idoli).

Connections between organic and artificial in the body have long been the focus of the debate on post-human. You mention the “three laws of robotics” by Isaac Asimov and show the reflections and predictions of cybernetics and scientists. But maybe the place where this theme reaches its focal point is the Blade Runner7 movie by Ridley Scott. What do you think about the way the problem is faced in the movie?
Yes, I agree with you that these questions about the relations between humans and robots reached a focal point in this fantastic film by Ridley Scott. Adapted from the Philip K. Dick novel, Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep?8 the film encourages viewers to sympathize with the artificial beings, the androids. This sympathy is evoked particularly by the plight of the replicant, Pris who is destroyed by the human, Deckard, the replicant hunter who acts under the belief that she like the other replicants has turned evil and dangerous.  Nevertheless, he falls in love with another replicant, Rachael. The visions of good and evil in this film follow the novel in that the androids are represented as more sensitive in their feelings and thoughts than the humans who despise, fear and hunt them. While Blade Runner does not illustrate any one principle of the fetishism strategy, the film demonstrates how the erotic and the violent aggressive trends in human beings are sometimes confounded in the name of law and order. In the novel and the film, the law of the land encourages the violence and anger of humans, who have lost their essential humanity by having to live in an empty world that has been deprived of moral conviction. It also illustrates that humans can be more violent and less humane than the androids that they create. In Blade Runner, the organic tends toward inhumanity and cruelty, while the artificial, the androids, can be more compassionate and humane. Blade Runner set a new perspective on the relations between humans and androids, a perspective that was followed by other films where the android is a sensitive and loving helper to humans - like Artificial Intelligence9. On the other hand, more typical films like Terminator10 and Alien11, emphasize the cruelty and aggression of the androids and the need for humans to destroy them.

You devote an entire chapter of your book to the fetishist strategies found within the same American psychoanalytical establishment – an issue debated, although perhaps not in those terms, even in Italy. There’s a sort of self-reference in all of this, it seems a perverse version of the Mœbius’ ring that you mention about the relationship between internal and external body. A similar reasoning, in a more general way, is carried on by Fredric Jameson in his Postmodernism12, about the fact that the reflection regarding the post-modernity is itself a postmodern phenomenon. Do you feel a relationship between the two phenomena?
Here I will say “Yes, you are right in pointing to the paradoxical Moebius ring twisting around a free flowing internal life in such a way as to bind it into the external rules of a psychoanalytic establishment that wishes to control and dominate this internal life.” Whereas, as we know, a true Moebius would become an organic part of that internal life and help to give it expression. 
In my chapter on psychoanalysis, I introduce this troubling situation by reviewing some of my earlier commentaries on fetishism. I begin by discussing how the sexual fetishist uses his fetish to subdue the erotic vitalities of his partner. “To the sexual fetishist, the lifeless, or nearly lifeless body is far preferable to a desiring body that might assert its own ambiguous energies.” In the conclusion to this introduction to psychoanalytic fetishism, I return to the previous chapter which is about the Archive Fever of biographers. “The writing of a biography is meant to bring to life the life story of a living or once living subject. However, all too often the archive fevers that plague that noble enterprise succeed in squelching those vitalities.” In summary. one could say that, all too often, enterprises that pose as giving life often prevent the life forces from expressing themselves. And this sad state of affairs, unfortunately is true of the formal psychoanalytic training given in most psychoanalytic institutes. As I say (p.113 of  Falsi Idoli) The fetishistic structure of the training of psychoanalytic candidates brings out the irony in a most dramatic way. For, if ever a cultural endeavour had been devised to augment and sustain life, and triumph over the forces of death, it is psychoanalysis. And yet, the training of psychoanalists is conducted in an atmosphere designed to murder psychoanalytic creativity.
I then pose the question of how a process based on an ideal of free association can come to life in a process founded on law and order. According to the principles of the fetishism strategy, anything that threatens to be freely flowing and mobile must be bound. Even some staunch defenders of the free association process are often frightened of anything that might modify established psychoanalytic principles and therefore proclaim “We should try to keep what we already have - cultivate the land that has been cleared and guard against the return of the jungle and against corrosion13. As Derrida put it in his introduction to Archive Fever, there is a tension between the analyst’s investment in the “mercurial and flowing” energies of the analytic situation which allow the unforeseen, unknown and possibly errant vitalities of the patient’s innermost psychic reality to emerge, and the principles of law and order that are perpetuated in the psychoanalytic institutes.
We might ask, “What is it about the creative vitalities of the clinical situation that might be so frightening to the senior analysts responsible for the training of psychoanalytic candidates? In his essay “Thirty methods to destroy the creativity of psychoanalytic candidates14.” Otto Kernberg proposed answer to this question, “Where there is a spark, there may develop a fire particularly when this spark appears in the middle of dead wood. Extinguish it before it is too late.” Kernberg, without knowing it, is stating the second principle of the fetishism strategy. Fetishism transforms ambiguity an uncertainty into something knowable and certain and in doing so snuffs out any sparks of creativity that might ignite the fires of rebellion15. 
Near the conclusion of this chapter, I make a recommendation to psychoanalysts. I propose a method of keeping the process of analysis alive and moving, by inviting their attention to the third principle of the fetishism strategy.  Fetishism brings certain details into the foreground of experience in order to mask and disguise other features that are thus cast into the shadows and margins. For example, the powerful presence of the erotic surfaces disguises and covers over the absences that would otherwise remind us of something traumatic16.” 
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.

:: note ::

1. Recently translated into English, The Sex-appeal of the Inorganic, London-New York, Continuum, 2004.

2. Peter Greenaway, The Pillow Book, GB, 1995.

3. When fetishism strategy fails, these impulses erupt, and madness, violence, rape, body mutilation, incest and murder result. (Ed. n.)

4. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever. A Freudian Impression, Chicago and London, University of Chicago  Press, 1996; Mal d’archive, Paris, Galilée, 1995.

5. Here Louise Kaplan quotes Natasha Vita More as in Culture of Fetishism.

6. Kevin Warwick, I, Cyborg, University of Illinois Press, 2004.

7. R. Scott, Blade Runner, USA, 1982.

8. P. K. Dick, Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep?, 1968.

9. Steven Spielberg, Artificial Intelligence – A. I., USA, 2001.

10. James Cameron, Terminator, USA,1984.

11. Ridley Scott, Alien, USA, 1979.

12. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke University Press, Usa, 1991

13. Author’s italic.

14. In ‘’International Journal of  Psychoanalysis’’, n. 30.

15. Author’s italic.

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.