Fetish: This is What Professionals Do > Open

FETISHISM: The displacement of desire and fantasy onto different objects or fetishtube body elements (eg. a foot fetish or a shoe fetish), so as to obviate a subject's confrontation with the castration complicated. Freud got here to realize in his essay on "Fetishism" that the fetishist is in a position at one and the identical time to imagine in his phantasy and to recognize that it is nothing however a phantasy. And but, the actual fact of recognizing the phantasy as phantasy on no account reduces its energy over the person. Octave Mannoni, in an influential essay, phrased this paradoxical logic in this way: "je sais bien, mais quand-même" or "I do know very properly, but however." Zizek builds on this concept in theorizing the nature of ideology, which follows an analogous contradictory logic. Kristeva goes as far as to affiliate all language with fetishism: "It is perhaps unavoidable that, when a topic confronts the factitiousness of object relation, when he stands on the place of the want that founds it, the fetish becomes a life preserver, momentary and slippery, however nonetheless indispensable. But shouldn't be precisely language our ultimate and inseparable fetish? And language, exactly, relies on fetishist denial ('I know that, however just the same,' 'the sign shouldn't be the factor, but simply the same,' and many others.) and defines us in our essence as talking beings" (37).