Fetish

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (216)

1. #01

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.155

   *Presenting Complaints*

   Theoretical move: This passage introduces a clinical case study centred on a fetish (boots), using the presenting complaints and symptomatic constellation to frame the subsequent analytic investigation; it is primarily clinical scene-setting rather than theoretical argument.

   he clearly identified as a long-standing fetish: boots, and in particular black shiny boots. They played a central role in virtually all of his masturbation fantasies at the time.

2. #02

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.158

   *Signifying Contributions*

   Theoretical move: Through detailed clinical reconstruction of a boot fetish, Fink demonstrates that the fetish object is constituted through a dense web of overdetermined signifiers that simultaneously mark and collapse sexual difference, functioning as a condensation of ambiguous sexual meaning rather than a simple substitute for a missing object.

   the boot became, for W, a marker of sexual difference and nondifference: it came to stand in for an important ambiguity around sexual difference.

3. #03

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.160

   *Life Events and the "Primal Scene"*

   Theoretical move: Through the extended clinical case of W, Fink demonstrates how a fetish object (the boot) condenses and organizes questions of sexual identity, castration anxiety, racial identity-crisis, and the primal scene into a singular signifying structure, showing how homophony and 'verbal bridges' operate as the unconscious logic linking disparate symptomatic formations.

   The boot allows me to repudiate sexual difference. He said that it puts him in the position of certainty, which is a male position, to his mind.

4. #04

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.161

   **Course of Treatment and Assessment of Progress**

   Theoretical move: Through clinical case narration, Fink argues that analytic work effects structural change by allowing the analysand to reclaim his body from the Other's desire—not through brilliant interpretation but through the gradual elaboration of fantasy and dream-work—and frames the analyst's proper aim as furthering the analysand's Eros rather than imposing a concept of the Good.

   The enunciation and elaboration of all these intriguing statements about the fetish object seem to have led to its disappearance after about three years of psychoanalysis.

5. #05

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.167

   BOTH/AND LOGIC IN A CASE OF FETISHISM

   Theoretical move: The passage uses a clinical case to demonstrate how a fetish object (fabric/hem) functions as a plug for the lack in the (m)Other, where the symptom of imaginary stabbing and its fetishistic alleviation are shown to be structurally organized around the subject's encounter with sexual difference and the mother's desire.

   Fabric served as a kind of transitional object or fetish object having something to do with the plugging up of a special opening or lack in the Other

6. #06

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink

   **Complicating Factors**

   Theoretical move: The passage makes a clinical-technical argument that the analyst's affective stance (equanimity vs. anxiety) functions differently depending on the structure of the patient's pathology—specifically distinguishing masochistic from fetishistic configurations—and that the analyst's non-interventionist position with respect to medications illustrates the analytic stance of non-suggestion.

   perhaps because fetishism was more salient in his case than masochism

7. #07

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.171

   **Case Conceptualization**

   Theoretical move: Through detailed case conceptualization of a boot fetish, the passage argues that the fetish object functions as a substitute Name-of-the-Father — a signifier that compensates for the failure of the paternal function to intervene in the mother-child dyad — while simultaneously resolving castration anxiety through a both/and structure that holds lack and its filling together.

   The boot can thus be seen here as a Name-of-the-Father, a name of something the mother wants that is located beyond the child, something that is other than the child.

8. #08

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.174

   **Note**

   Theoretical move: This passage is non-substantive: it consists of a brief clinical note on the structural permanence of fetishism and an authorial preface acknowledging conference presentations and colleagues, with no sustained theoretical argument.

   a fetish plays an important psychical role (that can, perhaps, come to be filled by something else) that is a permanent feature of the fetishist's psyche

9. #09

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.177

   INTER(OED)DICTIONS

   Theoretical move: This clinical vignette (from Bruce Fink's case presentation of "Slater") traces the formation of a fetishistic fixation on the female buttocks, situating it at the intersection of anatomical ambiguity around sexual difference, paternal transmission of a scopophilic/sadistic enjoyment, and the compulsive logic of fantasy—illustrating how a symptom organizes itself around a specific object that both screens and gestures toward an unresolved question about sexual difference.

   his fixation on butts must be hiding something, something found around the other side

10. #10

    Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.268

    **Two-person psychology.** > **Four-person (or more).** > CRITIQUE

    Theoretical move: This passage is a book index (chunks 268-269 of Fink's *Against Understanding, Volume 1*), listing concepts and page references across the text; it is non-substantive as theoretical prose and serves only as a navigational apparatus.

    fetishism case study [137–56]; boot fetish [137–8, 139–40, 141, 142–3]; castration anxiety [145, 154–5]

11. #11

    Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.47

    The Subject of Freedom > What subject?

    Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that the Kantian subject of practical reason must pass through a moment of radical alienation and impossible choice (the 'excluded choice' of pure determinism) before attaining freedom, and that this structure—where the subject's fundamental disposition (Gesinnung) is itself chosen by a transcendental act of spontaneity that has no meta-foundation—is homologous to the Lacanian insight that the Other of the Other is the subject itself, grounding a 'psychoanalytic postulate of freedom' operative in the analytic cure.

    The most pointed example here would be that of fetishism: a certain object, for instance, may leave person A completely cold, whereas in person B it can incite a whole series of actions, procedures and rituals, without person B being able to do anything about it.

12. #12

    Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.76

    <span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > **Creative labor** > **The capitalist phantasmagoria**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Marxist film theory is grounded in a structural homology between the capitalist logic of appearance/essence contradiction and the cinematic apparatus itself, and traces this argument through Eisenstein's montage theory and Benjamin's aura theory as two foundational attempts to wield cinema as a dialectical-critical instrument.

    the bounded contours of the object incline us to think that the object exists for its own sake, possessing intrinsic properties

13. #13

    Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.102

    <span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > **Creative labor** > **Some motifs in Marxist film analysis**

    Theoretical move: Marxist film analysis requires a dialectical articulation of economic/industrial context with formal analysis, insisting that mediation—not context alone—is the indispensable category, because it is in filmic form itself that social contradictions are materialized and ideology exposed from within.

    another consideration for Marxist film analysis is thus the functioning of film as a commodity, a thing that is bought and sold, consumed and exchanged

14. #14

    Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.119

    <span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > <span id="page-111-0"></span>[Marxist Film Theory](#page-5-2) and [Fight Club](#page-5-2)

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that *Fight Club* comprehensively mediates the contradictory capitalist mode of production and performs a Marxist theoretical practice of its own, revealing that cinematic form—not merely plot content—is the primary site through which ideological and political contradictions are worked through, and that transformation of the mode of production necessarily entails transformation of the medium itself.

    The Marxist concern with economic relations encompasses how things are produced, but also how they are consumed. Just as a commodity can be produced for one purpose but popularly used for another

15. #15

    Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.134

    <span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > **Mode of production in Fight Club** > **The capitalist gothic**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that *Fight Club*'s gothic aesthetic formally mediates and exposes the capitalist mode of production's concealed contradictions, functioning as a cinematic equivalent of Marx's own gothic rhetoric of illuminating the "hidden abode of production" — thereby treating the film's visual and spatial form as a site of Marxist theory-in-practice.

    Where bourgeois apologists praise the shine of gold, Marx frequently reassociates wealth with the labor that generated it: 'Capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.'

16. #16

    Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.160

    <span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > **Ideology in Fight Club** > **Cinematographic innovations**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Fight Club's cinematographic innovations—particularly the IKEA catalog sequence, reverse-tracking CGI shots, and multi-camera construction—formally enact Marxist analytical procedure by foregrounding labor, mediation, and the gap between commodity and its conditions of production, making the film's style itself a materialization of Marxist critique.

    the IKEA sequence uses form to call our attention to gaps between the commodity and the labor that produces it, whether that commodity is an airbubbled glass dish or a Hollywood movie.

17. #17

    Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.182

    <span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > **Periodizing Fight Club**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that *Fight Club*'s formal self-reflexivity and technical inventiveness give it enduring theoretical purchase because the film's form continuously mediates and generates ideology in tandem with shifting capitalist contradictions — establishing a Marxist link between cinematic form and political economy as the overarching interpretive principle of the book.

    Its critique of commodity culture may not resonate with millennials, who have traded stuff for experiences, but its targeting of the credit economy surely does.

18. #18

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.34

    MOSE S AND THE PROPHETS

    Theoretical move: Capitalism's staying power derives not from its socioeconomic flexibility but from a psychic structure that mirrors the logic of desire: it promises an ultimate satisfaction through accumulation while structurally ensuring that satisfaction can never be reached, thereby allowing the subject to perpetuate enjoyment through the very failure to realize desire.

    Capitalism offers the promise of belonging with every commodity and with the commodity as such, but the subject can never buy the perfect commodity, or enough of them, to unlock the secret of belonging.

19. #19

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.38

    THE DI V I SION OF THE OBJEC T

    Theoretical move: Capitalism's psychic appeal is not grounded in human nature but in the alienation from nature produced by the signifier: because signification introduces a constitutive gap between signifier and signified, subjects are structurally oriented around lack and the impossible search for a satisfying object, and capitalism exploits this by presenting the commodity as a contingent — rather than necessary — remedy for the absence that signification installs at the heart of desire.

    As commodities, objects appear whole and present opportunities for the subject to achieve fulfillment. Capitalism doesn't eliminate the division in the world reflected in signification, but it does present this division as a contingent rather than as a necessary obstacle.

20. #20

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.110

    EV IL , BE THOU M Y G O OD

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that sacrifice—not self-interest—is the structural motor of capitalism, and that the consumer's enjoyment of commodified labour depends on fetishistic disavowal: the co-existence of knowing and not-knowing that conceals the worker's sacrificial surplus value. Surplus-jouissance is thus grounded in a structural obscuring of loss, not mere ideological manipulation.

    For psychoanalysis, the fetish enables the subject to disavow the necessity of loss. It is a failure of knowing that implies another level of knowledge.

21. #21

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.116

    C ONDITION S OF THE WOR K IN G C L A SS IN THE C ON G O > IN V E N TIN G FOR MS OF WA STE

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that capitalism's psychic motor is not utility but sacrificial jouissance: the modern subject's enjoyment is structured through fetishistic disavowal of sacrifice, and Keynes's discovery that wasteful spending outperforms productive spending confirms that capitalism is organised around the pleasure of useless expenditure rather than need-satisfaction, dismantling the ideological myth of utility from within.

    Only through the fetish can the modern consumer enjoy the miseries that produce the objects to be consumed.

22. #22

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.232

    M ARX C ON TR A M ARX

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that Marx's apparent self-contradiction between the desublimating logic of capital (Communist Manifesto) and the sublime mystification of the commodity (Capital) is not a break but a causal sequence: capitalism destroys traditional transcendence only to reinstate it as an immanent sublime internal to the commodity form, whose jouissance derives precisely from its inutility.

    In what is probably his most important philosophical and political discussion, Marx analyzes this transformation in the 'Fetishism of Commodities' section of the first volume of Capital.

23. #23

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.236

    THEOLO GIC AL COMMODITIES

    Theoretical move: The commodity's sublimity is a purely formal effect produced by the structure of capitalist exchange—specifically by the barrier/packaging that functions as the object-cause of desire—rather than by any content; advertisements are therefore the true site of satisfaction, since they sustain the promise of transcendence that no empirical commodity can deliver.

    No seller can avow that the commodity owes its sublimity to form rather than content. Instead, the seller emphasizes that the Mercedes Benz or even the Ford Focus is a car without equal.

24. #24

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.241

    DR I V IN G THE C AR OFF THE LOT

    Theoretical move: Capitalism exploits the structure of desire by keeping the sublime perpetually deferred in a futural immanence: the commodity's sublimity evaporates at the moment of acquisition, compelling the subject to artificial strategies (security systems, anticipated threats) that recreate distance—and the Hegelian critique of Kantian morality's 'future sublime' doubles as an implicit critique of capitalism's own deferral structure, pointing toward a 'present sublime' as the condition of an egalitarian alternative.

    Commodities are sublime—they abound in 'metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties'—because we see them through the shop window.

25. #25

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.244

    HEGE L'S C ON TR IBU TION TO THE C R ITIQUE OF COMMODIT Y FETISHISM

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that Hegel's critique of the Kantian 'ought' (Sollen) provides the philosophical lever for a critique of commodity fetishism: where Kant relocates the sublime immanently but retains its futural distance, Hegel collapses that distance by insisting the moral deed is already accomplished, a move that, translated into political economy, destroys the commodity's hold by locating satisfaction in the form itself rather than deferring it to future fulfilment.

    the commodity form itself as already realized. The promise is already its fulfilment. This shift of perspective, which removes sublimity from the future, destroys the commodity's power over us.

26. #26

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.246

    A SATI SFIE D OR IE N TALI SM

    Theoretical move: McGowan argues that orientalism is a structural product of capitalism's commodity-sublime logic — the exoticism of the Other is an extension of commodity fetishism — and that Coppola's *Lost in Translation* performs an antiorientalist move not by revealing an 'authentic' Japan but by relocating sublimity in the act of sublimation itself, thereby invalidating the Other as commodity and opening a Hegelian path beyond capitalist accumulation.

    The exoticism of the other is the extension of the fetishism of the commodity, and it remains the prevailing attitude toward the other today.

27. #27

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.250

    THOSE FOR W HOM C APITALI SM I S N OT SUBLIME EN OUGH

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that fundamentalism is the internal psychic product of capitalism's broken promise of sublimity, while the true theoretical-political task is to become 'Hegelian rather than Kantian' about the sublime—recognising that failure and immanence, not transcendence, constitute the real nature of the sublime, thereby emancipating oneself from capitalism's obfuscations.

    the fundamentalist accepts the logic of the promised sublimity of the advertisement, though she or he seeks the fulfillment of this promise in what she or he views as the ultimate commodity—a return to the solid ground of genuine belief

28. #28

    Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.297

    . THE M AR K ET'S FETI SHI STIC SUBLIME

    Theoretical move: This passage (a footnote/endnote section) develops the theoretical grounding for the chapter's argument that commodity fetishism produces a sublimity rooted in immanent transcendence—a structure Hegel makes possible and Marx theorizes—while also deploying Lacanian concepts (subject supposed to know, lack) to critique orientalism and capitalism's psychic appeal.

    Marx's analysis of the fetishism of the commodity and its immanent transcendence is unthinkable outside the background of Hegel's philosophy.

29. #29

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.110

    [The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-005) > The foundation of our research: free association

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the "golden age" of psychoanalysis was undone by the cultural absorption of its interpretive vocabulary, and that analysts' recourse to non-mediated access (the "third ear," affect, lived experience) represents a regression into the Imaginary; the remedy lies in privileging the Symbolic/signifier, whose irreducible triangularity (the Other as third) keeps psychoanalysis from collapsing into a dyadic imaginary relation.

    the imaginary deceives while the symbolic is analyzable, as exemplified by Freud's discussion of the logic behind the forgetting of words and the configuration of fetishism.

30. #30

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.112

    [The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-005) > Mirages and other narcissistic extravagances

    Theoretical move: Lacan's satirical critique of mid-century psychoanalytic institutionalism — its narcissistic 'good object' ideology, fetishization of technique, and anal-stage ritualism — is shown to ultimately serve his core theoretical claim that the unconscious is structured like a language, grounding rhetorical tropes as defenses and linking style to the Real beyond meaning.

    The deification of defecation and fetishization of the treatment frame meets a willing partner in the deadening tendencies of the obsessional neurotic

31. #31

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)

    [Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation: “Psychoanalysis and Personality Structure”](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-009) > III. On the ideals of the person

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the psychoanalytic cure works by progressively exposing object *a* as the cause of the subject's desire and fading, thereby enabling the analysand to traverse their fundamental fantasy, reduce ego-ideal identifications, and face the irreducible aporia of castration as the proper terminus of analysis.

    this model does not account for how it can also play the role of a fetish object in perversion, an object that must be present for desire to occur at all

32. #32

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.141

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > The Worship of Love

    Theoretical move: The passage uses Lacan's provocative claim that Christianity is "the one true religion" as a pivot to interrogate the relationship between religion, meaning-production, and psychoanalytic concepts: it contrasts Judaism's lack-driven, interpretively open relation to the sacred text (anticipating Lacanian theory of das Ding and the signifier) with Christianity's capacity to "secrete meaning" in response to the real, setting up the theoretical question of what Christianity adds to Lacan's framework that Judaism cannot.

    To the extent that fetishism, as Freud defined it, functions to disavow uncertainty by appeal to the stabilizing influence of the fetish object, the Jewish relation to the word of scripture cuts against the fetishizing tendency.

33. #33

    Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.188

    Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Cash Is the Thing!

    Theoretical move: Boothby argues that money in capitalist culture functions as a phantasmatic incarnation of *das Ding*, structuring social relations by both intensifying and defending against the anxiety produced by the unknown Thing in the Other — capitalism thereby operates as a religion, with the market economy displacing the "human economy" of gift-exchange that kept subjects entangled with the Other's desire.

    Where things are more enigmatic, is when it is no longer a commodity that is at stake but the fetish par excellence of money.

34. #34

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.84

    I > 2 > Finding Our Lost Enjoyment

    Theoretical move: Capitalist ideology distorts the death drive by forging a false link between enjoyment and accumulation, concealing that our actual enjoyment derives not from obtaining the object but from the experience of its loss; emancipatory politics consists in revealing this 'map of enjoyment' — that we enjoy the absent object, not the present one.

    Accumulation allows us to have objects, but it doesn't allow us to have the object in its absence.

35. #35

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.219

    I > Th e Politics of Fantasy > Marx with the Philosophers

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Marx's political project shares a fundamental structure with Western philosophy's politics: both treat the critique of fantasy as the precondition for authentic political action, identifying fantasy (whether as commodity fetishism, individualist ideology, or the mystification of profit) as the barrier to class consciousness and emancipation — thereby making the attack on fantasy the sine qua non of Marxist politics.

    Marx's war on the mystification inherent in capitalism reaches its apogee with the critique of commodity fetishism. He sees commodity fetishism as the fundamental barrier in the way of proletarian class consciousness, and commodity fetishism has the precise structure of fantasy.

36. #36

    Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.340

    I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 9. Beyond Bare Life

    Theoretical move: This endnotes section theoretically anchors the main argument by linking the capitalist valorization of "bare life," the death drive's role in value-creation, the fetishistic function of afterlife imagery, and the structural necessity of the unconscious (as science's elided gap) to Lacan, Heidegger, Marx, and Agamben — positioning psychoanalysis as the discipline that occupies the subject-shaped gap that science must repress.

    this image of the afterlife functions as a fetish enabling the believer to embrace the value-creating power of death itself.

37. #37

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_142"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_page_0161"></span>***P*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_148"></span>**perversion**

    Theoretical move: Lacan redefines perversion not as deviant sexual behaviour but as a distinct clinical structure, characterized by the operations of disavowal (in relation to the phallus) and a specific positioning of the subject as object/instrument of the Other's jouissance—inverting the structure of fantasy—and argues this structure is equally complex to neurosis, differing not in richness but in the inverse direction of its structuration.

    This is most evident in FETISHISM (the 'perversion of perversions'; S4, 194), where the fetish is a symbolic substitute for the mother's missing phallus.

38. #38

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_ncx_66"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_page_0084"></span>***F*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_ncx_70"></span>**fetishism**

    Theoretical move: The passage traces the Lacanian reworking of fetishism: shifting Freud's account from a realist (penis-substitution) to a symbolic-linguistic framework (phallus-substitution), extending disavowal as the constitutive mechanism of perversion in general, and ultimately destabilising Freud's claim that fetishism is an exclusively male perversion by proposing that the real penis can itself function as a fetish for heterosexual women.

    Freud argued that fetishism (seen as an almost exclusively male perversion) originates in the child's horror of female castration. Confronted with the mother's lack of a penis, the fetishist disavows this lack and finds an object (the fetish) as a symbolic substitute for the mother's missing penis.

39. #39

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_142"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_page_0161"></span>***P*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_154"></span>**preoedipal phase**

    Theoretical move: Lacan reconceives the preoedipal phase not as a dyadic mother-child relation but as an imaginary triangle mediated by the phallus, arguing that psychoanalytic structure requires a minimum of three terms; the intervention of the real drive and then the father as a fourth term disrupt this triangle, and all perversions originate in identifications within it.

    whether it be the mother, or the imaginary phallus (or both, as in fetishism)

40. #40

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_193"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0219"></span>**split**

    Theoretical move: Lacan radicalises Freud's 'splitting of the ego' from a pathological phenomenon specific to fetishism/psychosis into a universal and irreducible structure of subjectivity itself: the subject is constitutively divided as an effect of the signifier and of speech, making any ideal of full self-presence impossible.

    splitting of the ego'...as a process, observable in fetishism and psychosis, whereby two contradictory attitudes to reality come to exist side by side in the ego

41. #41

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_142"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_page_0161"></span>***P*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_151"></span>**phobia**

    Theoretical move: Lacan retheorises phobia not as a clinical structure but as a "revolving junction" (plaque tournante): the phobic object functions as a signifier without univocal sense, enabling the subject to work through the impossibilities blocking passage from the Imaginary to the Symbolic, and phobia thereby occupies a gateway position between the two great neurotic structures and perversion.

    The link with perversion can be seen in the similarities between the fetish and the phobic object, both of which are symbolic substitutes for a missing element and both of which serve to structure the surrounding world.

42. #42

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_43"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0056"></span>***D*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_53"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0068"></span>**disavowal**

    Theoretical move: Lacan systematically tightens Freud's concept of disavowal by restricting it exclusively to perversion and contrasting it rigorously with repression (neurosis) and foreclosure (psychosis), while reframing its object from the perceived absence of the penis to the structural lack of the phallus in the Other — making disavowal the denial that lack causes desire.

    the belief that desire is caused by a presence (e.g. the fetish).

43. #43

    Civilization and Its Discontents · Sigmund Freud

    7

    Theoretical move: Freud advances the paradoxical thesis that the superego/conscience is not merely the product of drive-renunciation imposed by external authority, but that drive-renunciation itself dynamically generates conscience, which in turn demands further renunciation — a reversing of the causal relation that explains why virtue intensifies rather than appeases the severity of conscience.

    primitive man behaves. Having met with misfortune, he puts the blame not on himself, but on the fetish, which has clearly not done its duty, and whips it instead of punishing himself.

44. #44

    Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures · Mark Fisher

    <span id="Chapter2.htm_page42"></span>Ghosts Of My Life: Goldie, Japan, Tricky

    Theoretical move: Fisher deploys hauntology as the master concept to read English art pop (Japan, Sylvian) and Tricky's music as sites where class anxiety, spectral identity, and the alien/android figure converge, arguing that identification with the alien/void — rather than authentic selfhood — is the politically charged gesture that links postpunk, art pop, and 1990s British music across racial and class lines.

    every Sign selected with a fetishistic fastidiousness

45. #45

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.22

    **Introduction**

    Theoretical move: The passage establishes that Lacan's "return to Freud," crystallized in "The Freudian Thing," pivots on the prosopopoeia of Das Ding-as-truth ("Me, the truth, I speak") to reclaim the unconscious as structured like a language against the ego-psychological betrayal of Freud's discovery by the IPA mainstream.

    Lacan emphasizes Diana's surprise and connects it to the experiences of 'unexpected discoveries,' ones sometimes eventually leading to phobic or fetishistic phenomena, encountered in what Freudian analysis describes as 'infantile sexual investigations.'

46. #46

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.68

    **3** > <span id="page-63-0"></span>Soon after, I add:

    Theoretical move: Johnston argues that Lacan's relationship to Hegel is one of productive ambivalence rather than outright rejection: Hegel's "cunning of reason" (List der Vernunft) is read by Lacan as proto-psychoanalytic, such that Hegel's own philosophical system undergoes a dialectical self-subversion—the truth of the Freudian unconscious speaks through Hegel's speech about truth, even as Hegel remains deaf to its implications. The unconscious (as speaking Ding) is unavoidable, surfaces in dreams/slips/jokes, and exists exclusively on the surface of symbolic inscription rather than hidden in psychical depths.

    Lacan himself might have in mind, in relation to the nose of Pascal's Cleopatra, Freud's case of a fetishist attracted exclusively to a certain 'shine on/of the nose' (Glanz auf der Nase) encountered in particular faces

47. #47

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.132

    **6** > <span id="page-128-0"></span>**7 Interlude**

    Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of ego psychology, developed through the prosopopoeia of a talking lectern in "The Freudian Thing," demonstrates that ego psychology's own theoretical premises cannot distinguish the ego from an inanimate object, thereby refuting its claims to autonomous ego-subjectivity and exposing its capitulation to Anglo-American cultural and scientific norms as a betrayal of Freud.

    the dynamism of function/operation is captured and mitigated by the inertness of thing/object ('It's the latest fetish').

48. #48

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.40

    JACQUES LACAN ECRITS > Overture to this Collection

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the signifier (figured as the purloined letter) governs subjects' acts, fates, and very being through its displacement and detour, such that subjects do not possess the letter but are possessed by it—demonstrating the priority of the signifier over the signified and illustrating repetition automatism at the level of intersubjectivity.

    she brings out her very being therein by founding it outside the law, which ever contains her—due to the effect of origins—in a position as signifier, nay, as fetish.

49. #49

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.448

    The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > /. *The Meaning of the Letter* > *II. The Letter in the Unconscious*

    Theoretical move: Lacan reformulates the Cartesian cogito through the Freudian discovery of the split between subject of the signifier and subject of the signified, arguing that the unconscious operates through the rhetorical mechanisms of metaphor and metonymy—which are identical to the mechanisms of symptom-formation and desire respectively—thereby grounding psychoanalysis in a structural linguistics of the unconscious rather than in ego psychology or biologism.

    the fascinating image of the fetish becomes frozen... at the very point of suspension of the signifying chain at which the screen-memory is immobilized.

50. #50

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.452

    The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > /. *The Meaning of the Letter* > *II. The Letter in the Unconscious*

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's fetishism case to demonstrate that the unconscious operates through linguistic (signifying) displacement across languages, then turns this into a polemical defense of the "intellectual" dimension of Freudian sexuality against Ego Psychology's moralization of psychoanalysis.

    I will cite the 1927 article on fetishism and the case Freud reports there of a patient for whom sexual satisfaction required a certain shine on the nose

51. #51

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.458

    The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > /. *The Meaning of the Letter* > 777. *The Letter, being, and the other* > *Notes*

    Theoretical move: This passage consists entirely of footnotes and editorial additions to "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious," acknowledging theoretical debts (to Jakobson, Saussure, Freud) and polemical remarks (against the IPA and ego psychology), with no sustained new theoretical argument — it is apparatus, not exposition.

    "Fetischismus," GJFXIV, 311.

52. #52

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.527

    The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power > 777. *Where Do We Stand Regarding Transference?*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that reducing analytic technique to an imaginary object-relation ordered by "distance" — and its corollary, the collapse of the analytic situation into "reality" — produces conceptual impasses that force analysts toward the exercise of power rather than genuine engagement with the subject's being; only proper conceptualization of the symbolic register (signifier, phobic object, castration, transference) can prevent this decline.

    the fundamental fetish in every perversion as an object perceived in the signifier's cut.

53. #53

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.588

    The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > ///. *On the Ideals of the Person* > FIGURE 3

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses his optical model to demonstrate its own limits: while the model clarifies the imaginary register and its mirror-play of ego-ideals, it cannot account for the symbolic function of objet petit a, which structures desire as a relation to absence and grounds the true end of analysis — not narcissistic identification but the subject's confrontation with its own abolition in fundamental fantasy.

    the role of a fetish in perverse structure, as the absolute condition of desire.

54. #54

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.600

    The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > The Signification of the Phallus 685 *Die Bedeutung des Phallus*

    Theoretical move: The phallus functions as the privileged signifier of desire precisely by being veiled—its Aufhebung (disappearance/raising) institutes the subject's Spaltung and governs the differential relations between being/having, demand/desire, and the asymmetrical positions of the sexes under the phallic mark.

    the organ that is endowed with this signifying function takes on the value of a fetish thereby.

55. #55

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.634

    Guiding Remarks for a Convention on Female Sexuality > *VII. Misrecognitions and Biases*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that feminine sexuality cannot be reduced to phallic mediation or developmental schemas (Jones, Fenichel), but must be understood through the structural interplay of castration, the Other's desire, masquerade, and the specific position of women with respect to the object—culminating in the claim that female homosexuality reveals desire itself as structured around a sublation of the object and a jouissance contiguous with itself rather than subordinated to the phallic signifier.

    it is owing to the distance that separates the fetishistic form of love from the erotomaniacal form of love. We should find its salient features in the most ordinary lived experience.

56. #56

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.658

    Guiding Remarks for a Convention on Female Sexuality > *On a book by Jean Delay and another by Jean Schlumberger¹*

    Theoretical move: Through a reading of Madeleine Gide's act of burning her husband's letters, Lacan identifies a structural truth: the letter comes to occupy the place from which desire has withdrawn, and Madeleine's uncompromising feminine act opens a void in the Other's being that comedy (not tragedy) illuminates—pointing toward the fetishistic nature of subjectivity and the gap between desire and the beloved object.

    When their fetishistic nature appeared it gave rise to the kind of laughter that greets subjectivity caught off guard.

57. #57

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.669

    Guiding Remarks for a Convention on Female Sexuality > Kant with Sade

    Theoretical move: Lacan advances the "Kant with Sade" thesis by demonstrating that Sadean experience supplies the missing third term of Kantian moral philosophy—the object (as voice, as Dasein of the tormenting agent)—while showing that jouissance, fantasy, and desire structure Sadean experience through the matheme ($ ◇ a), which formalizes the non-reciprocal relation between the split subject and object a.

    When jouissance petrifies in the object, it becomes the black fetish, in which can be recognized the form that was verily and truly offered up at a certain time and place, and still is in our own time, so that one can adore the god therein.

58. #58

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.762

    On Freud's "Trieb" and the Psychoanalyst's Desire > Science and Truth

    Theoretical move: Lacan advances a structural typology of relations to truth-as-cause (magic, religion, science, psychoanalysis), arguing that science operates through a foreclosure of truth while psychoanalysis distinguishes itself by foregrounding material cause in the form of the signifier's impact—and that the phallus, as gnomon of lack, knots together the division of the subject, fetish, and the analyst's own position.

    he protects himself with a phobia, and which he at the same time covers over with a surface upon which he erects a fetish—that is, the existence of the penis as maintained albeit displaced

59. #59

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.367

    The Freudian Thing > *The Thing's Order* > *Interlude*

    Theoretical move: Lacan exposes Ego Psychology's "operational" concept of the ego as theoretically vacuous by demonstrating, through an extended prosopopeia of a lectern, that any thing can be granted the same predicates (signifier-dependence, preconscious, consciousness-semblance) attributed to the ego—the genuine difference lying not in phenomenological interiority but in the fact that the subject speaks, which is the very point the ego-psychologists evade.

    It is autonomous! That's a good one! It's the latest fetish introduced into the holy of holies of a practice that is legitimated by the superiority of the superiors.

60. #60

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.786

    Appendix II: Metaphor of the Subject¹ > *Significance* > *Le signifiant* > NOTE S T O "SEMINA R O N 'TH E PURLOINE D LETTER' "

    Theoretical move: This passage consists entirely of editorial/translator's endnotes to Lacan's "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter,'" providing philological, lexical, and contextual annotations on specific terms and references; it makes no independent theoretical argument.

    En position de signifiant, voire de fetiche (in a position as signifier, nay, as fetish)

61. #61

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.112

    BookX Anxiety > **VIII**

    Theoretical move: The passage reframes Objet petit a not as the intentional object *of* desire (in the phenomenological/Husserlian sense) but as the *cause* of desire that lies *behind* it, prior to any internalization; this reconfiguration is then used to distinguish the structural positions of sadism and masochism as different modes of identification with the object.

    the fetish has to be there. The fetish is the condition by which his desire sustains itself.

62. #62

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.357

    **xx** > **Notes** > Chapter XVIII The Voice of Yahweh > Chapter XXII From Anal to Ideal

    Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index/reference section from Seminar X, listing concepts, proper names, and bibliographic entries alphabetically; it contains no independent theoretical argument.

    fetish 102-4

63. #63

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.92

    BookX Anxiety > **THAT WHICH DECEIVES NOT**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that desire and the law are not antithetical but identical — both functioning as a single barrier barring access to das Ding — and that this insight, masked in the Oedipus myth, is Freud's decisive answer to the philosophical question of desire's relation to law, which philosophy has always elided.

    why, not being one who detests girls, I'm even fonder of a little shoe.

64. #64

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.122

    WHAT IS A PICTURE? > WHAT IS A PICTURE?

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that mimicry—the split between being and semblance enacted through masks, lures, and displays—structures both animal and human relations to the gaze, but the human subject is distinguished by the capacity to isolate and play with the screen/mask, thereby mediating rather than being captured by imaginary capture.

    the being gives of himself; or receives from the other, something that is like a mask, a double, an envelope, a thrown-off skin, thrown off in order to cover the frame of a shield.

65. #65

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.167

    SEXUALITY IN THE DEFILES OF THE SIGNIFIER > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the historical break between astrology and astronomy—where the signifier's implicit function delayed the rupture—as an analogy to argue that the unconscious may be understood as a "remanence" of an archaic junction between thought and sexual reality, positioning sexuality as the reality of the unconscious and implicitly contrasting his own structural approach with Jung's psychical-world solution.

    at the heart of positivist doctrine, a religious theory of the earth as a great fetish, perfectly coherent with a statement to be found in Comte

66. #66

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.167

    SEXUALITY IN THE DEFILES OF THE SIGNIFIER > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the break between signifying systems and sexual reality (illustrated through the history of science separating astronomy from astrology) poses the central question of whether the unconscious represents an archaic junction between thought and sexuality—a question that Lacan uses to distinguish his position from Jung's.

    we still see, at the heart of positivist doctrine, a religious theory of the earth as a great fetish, perfectly coherent with a statement to be found in Comte

67. #67

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.238

    **Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965** > **Seminar 18: Wednesday 12 May 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analyst's position as "subject supposed to know" is structurally paradoxical—Freudian discovery itself forecloses the possibility of a complete knowledge-subject—and grounds the subject's existence not in a harmonious closure of signifiers but precisely in the *lack* of a signifier, which is further illustrated by contrasting the God-like Newtonian subject of absolute knowledge (who "is nothing" because he lacks nothing) with the subject that only emerges where knowledge is incomplete.

    what such a supposition would involve, what it would force us to sustain, in terms of a sort of fetish function of the analyst with respect to this position of knowledge.

68. #68

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.237

    **Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965**

    Theoretical move: The analyst's position is defined not as a bearer of knowledge but as a structural marker — a "boundary mark" or "joist" — of the impossibility of sustaining knowledge, aligning the analytic function with the field of the impossible rather than with mastery.

    Might not the position of the analyst be summed up effectively in this something that we might call, not at all the fatalism of knowledge but fetishism

69. #69

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.238

    **Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965** > **Seminar 18: Wednesday 12 May 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Subject Supposed to Know functions as a structural necessity for analytic engagement, yet the very foundations of psychoanalysis—grounded in the lack of a signifier—preclude any closed, totalizing knowledge; the subject is constituted not as the support of a harmonious signifying system but precisely through the gap where a signifier is missing, and this is illustrated through the contrast between Newtonian "absolute knowledge" (where the subject vanishes into God) and the Freudian discovery that grounds subjectivity in lack.

    what it would force us to sustain, in terms of a sort of fetish function of the analyst with respect to this position of knowledge

70. #70

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.237

    **Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965**

    Theoretical move: The passage locates the analyst's position not as a bearer of knowledge but as the very marker of knowledge's impossibility — a "fetishism" that installs the analyst as the boundary-point where knowledge fails to sustain itself, thereby defining the Real as the field of the impossible.

    the position of the analyst be summed up effectively in this something that we might call, not at all the fatalism of knowledge but fetishism

71. #71

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.87

    Madame le Docteur Parisot

    Theoretical move: Through a close reading of Dragonetti's analysis of Dante's *Divine Comedy*, Lacan deploys the Narcissus myth and the figure of counterfeit money to theorize how the fraudulent (mis)recognition of the image-as-truth constitutes a fundamental structure of conscience and desire: the subject, captivated by its own reflection, mistakes the image of nothing for the real, such that malice (latent falsification) becomes the originary condition of every conscience.

    For Sinon the true spring has become this image of water with which dreaming consciousness is capable of slaking its thirst.

72. #72

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.16

    **Seminar 3: Wednesday 15 December 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the topological and mathematical structures he introduces (the circle/disc, the cut, the Klein bottle, torus, etc.) are not merely illustrative but are themselves signifiers that constitute the subject through lack—the historical "obstacles" in mathematics (negative numbers, imaginaries) are not failures of intuition but structural moments of the subject's constitutive lack as produced by the signifier.

    I am astonished that no one has remarked in the article by Freud on fetishism the use of the verb vermessen and one can see that in its three uses in this article he designates the lack in the subjective sense, in the sense that the subject misses out.

73. #73

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.30

    D - The (o) as fetish

    Theoretical move: Lacan's theorisation is distinguished from post-Freudian authors by its privileging of a negative/reflexive approach to the object: rather than marking the positive qualities of the object (e.g. the phallus as terrifying instrument), Lacan follows Freud's logic of the Medusa to argue that the fetish object functions as a veil over castration — a witness to the lack in the field of the Other.

    The case of fetishism to which he gives a lot of attention is the apologue of this reflective mode. The object of the fetish will be the witness, the veil of the castrated sexual organ - of the lack in the field of the Other.

74. #74

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.7

    **Seminar 2: Wednesday 8 December 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the vase-as-hole (the mustard pot) as a structural model for the symbolic order and the object of science, arguing that the material cause is the hole itself rather than any positive substance, and that science becomes possible precisely when the object is approached as lacking—a move that also grounds the distinction between the signifier's phonematic and logical poles in a new graph.

    it is enough to read the article that Freud wrote quite intentionally to show it, which is called Fetishism, what is involved in the Spaltung

75. #75

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.30

    D - The (o) as fetish

    Theoretical move: Lacan's theoretical distinctiveness lies in his privileging of a negative or reflective approach to the object, exemplified by his reading of fetishism: the fetish is not defined by the positive qualities of the object but as the veil/witness of the lack (castration) in the field of the Other.

    The case of fetishism to which he gives a lot of attention is the apologue of this reflective mode. The object of the fetish will be the witness, the veil of the castrated sexual organ - of the lack in the field of the Other.

76. #76

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.7

    **Seminar 2: Wednesday 8 December 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan grounds the symbolic order in the primacy of the hole (lack/void) over presence, arguing that the object of science, the vase as symbolic creation, and energetics all converge on the same structural point: what matters is not what fills the void but the void itself — a thesis that links the subject of science (Descartes/Frege) to the functioning of the signifier and forecloses any meta-language.

    it is enough to read the article that Freud wrote quite intentionally to show it, which is called Fetishism, what is involved in the Spaltung

77. #77

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.16

    **Seminar 3: Wednesday 15 December 1965**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that topological figures (Klein bottle, projective plane, torus) and the function of the cut/writing are not mere intuitive aids but index the constitutive structural lack of the subject produced by the signifier — a lack whose diverse historical forms (negative number, imaginary number) are not reducible to intuitive impurity but to the signifier's constitution of the subject.

    I am astonished that no one has remarked in the article by Freud on fetishism the use of the verb vermessen and one can see that in its three uses in this article he designates the lack in the subjective sense, in the sense that the subject misses out.

78. #78

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.174

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 16: Wednesday 12 April 1967**

    Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the concept of 'jouissance-value' as the structural analogue of exchange-value in the Marxist commodity form, arguing that castration is the subtraction of penile jouissance that produces woman as the 'object of jouissance'—thereby rewriting the Lévi-Straussian exchange of women and the psychoanalytic theory of castration through a unified logic of value.

    with what Marx and ourselves call the fetish, namely, this extracted, fixed, use-value, a hole somewhere - the only point of insertion necessary for any sexual ideology.

79. #79

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.174

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 16: Wednesday 12 April 1967**

    Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the concept of 'jouissance-value' as structurally homologous to exchange-value in Marx's commodity analysis, arguing that castration operates as the subtraction of penile jouissance that transforms woman into the 'object of jouissance' (the homme-elle), thereby grounding the sexual act in a logic of value equivalence that founds the social/symbolic order.

    with what Marx and ourselves call the fetish, namely, this extracted, fixed, use-value, a hole somewhere - the only point of insertion necessary for any sexual ideology.

80. #80

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.201

    **Annex 3**

    Theoretical move: Lacan's annex summary argues that the psychoanalytic act is the pivotal moment of passage from analysand to analyst, structurally constituted by the objet petit a, and that this act—which dismisses the very subject it establishes—grounds an ethics of jouissance, exposes the fault in the subject supposed to know, and requires that there is no Other of the Other (no metalanguage) as the condition for a consistent theory of the unconscious.

    he comes to raise an idolatrous prayer to 'his ear', a fetish that has arisen in his breast along a hypocondriacal path

81. #81

    Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.201

    **Annex 3**

    Theoretical move: Lacan's seminar summary argues that the psychoanalytic act—the transition from analysand to analyst—is constituted by and through the objet petit a, such that it enacts a 'subjective dismissal' (destitution of the subject supposed to know) and grounds a new ethics of psychoanalysis organized around the structural negativity of the sexual relation and jouissance rather than norms or sublimation.

    he comes to raise an idolatrous prayer to 'his ear', a fetish that has arisen in his breast along a hypochondriacal path.

82. #82

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.284

    Seminar 18: Wednesday 30 April 1969

    Theoretical move: Lacan displaces the classical inside/outside opposition—via commodity, money, Berkeley's idealism, and Aristotle's optics—to argue that the scopic field is structured not by a synthesising subject in a darkroom but by the objet petit a as lack/stain, a third term missing from both ancient and modern accounts of vision.

    Where things are more enigmatic, is when it is no longer commodity that is at stake but the fetish par excellence of money.

83. #83

    Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.335

    Seminar 21: Wednesday 21 May 1969

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that enjoyment (jouissance) is structurally excluded from the symbolic system of knowledge, yet is thereby realised as the Real; this exclusion—figured through the phallic signifier—organises all clinical structures (neurosis/psychosis), and the triad of enjoyment, the Other as locus of knowledge, and the objet petit a provides the proper framework for understanding both infantile biography and the analytic encounter.

    Someone who knew that I was looking for one gave this pen to me... it was in fact fetishistic.

84. #84

    Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.140

    **Seminar 8: Wednesday 19 May 1971**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that writing is equivalent to jouissance within the discourse of the analyst, and that the non-inscribability of the sexual relationship is the fundamental failure at the heart of language—a failure that the letter (as in Poe's purloined letter) stages by feminising those under its shadow and by making truth structurally dependent on fiction.

    this sign, I mean the letter, is indeed that of the woman 'because she valorises her being in it, by establishing it outside the law, which still contains her through the effect of its origins, in a position of signifier, indeed of fetish'

85. #85

    Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.177

    **Seminar 8: Wednesday 19 May 1971** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 16 June 1971**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that every discourse is structured as a semblance, and that the four discourses—particularly analytic discourse—circle around the fundamental impossibility of the sexual relationship, a void that is managed (but never resolved) through the composition of jouissance and castration; surplus-jouissance, as the Freudian analogue of Marxian surplus value, names the point where the semblance of discourse is anchored to this constitutive gap.

    it is around money, around capital as such that there operates the pivot of this exposure that makes the fetish reside in this something, a turning back of thinking, to put it back in its place, and very precisely qua semblance

86. #86

    Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.170

    **X** > **XI** > **1**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the primordial signifier (Wahrnehmungszeichen) is the condition of possibility for memory, historicization, and neurosis, while its foreclosure (Verwerfung) constitutes the distinctive mechanism of psychosis—a "hole in the symbolic" rather than a reworking of reality—thereby reframing Freud's Verneinung and the neurosis/psychosis distinction in strictly signifier-based terms.

    the end of the text on 'Fetishism' refers quite directly to what I'm now explaining to you. There Freud makes an essential revision to the distinction he had drawn between neurosis and psychosis

87. #87

    Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.308

    **XXIII** > **XXIV** > **"Thou art"**

    Theoretical move: Lacan repositions the existentialist notion of "openness of being" as philosophically inadequate for analytic work, proposing instead that being's openness must be re-situated within determinate "gaps of being" that psychoanalytic experience reveals—while also previewing the following year's seminar theme on object relations, phobia objects, and fetishes.

    I shall introduce this by a comparison between the objects of phobia and fetishes, two series of objects. You can already see straight off how different they are in their catalogue.

88. #88

    Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.414

    FAREWELL > FROM HANS-THE-FETISH TO LEONARDO-IN-THE-MIRROR

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the scholarly correction of Freud's mistranslation (kite vs. vulture) in the Leonardo essay not to discredit Freud but to isolate what is genuinely original in that text: the introduction of the phallic mother as the child's imaginary relation to the phallus-as-lack, which also marks the inaugural structuring of the imaginary register and the first appearance of narcissism in Freud's work.

    FROM HANS-THE-FETISH TO LEONARDO-IN-THE-MIRROR

89. #89

    Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.72

    Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE SIGNIFIER AND THE HOLY SPIRIT > THE DIALECTIC OF FRUSTRATION

    Theoretical move: The father's symbolic function intervenes to maintain a triadic distance between mother, child, and phallus, preventing the child from having to identify herself as the imaginary phallus—a failure of this distance opens the path toward fetishistic object-formation in pre-Oedipal relations.

    what is most characteristic of preoedipal object relations, namely the birth of the object as a fetish.

90. #90

    Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.189

    THE FETISH OBJECT > THE PHALLUS AND THE UNFULFILLED MOTHER

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that perversion in general, and fetishism in particular, is structurally grounded in the child's pre-Oedipal attempt to trick the unfulfillable desire of the mother by turning himself into a deceptive object—thereby constituting the intersubjective relation and the ego's stability—while also marking the danger of regression to an oral-devouring figure (Medusa) that underlies both phobia and perversion.

    the perversion of all perversions known as fetishism for this is the one that shows not only where it truly lies, but also what it is the object is tantamount to exactly nothing. It's just a worn-out garment, a cast-off rag.

91. #91

    Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.173

    THE FETISH OBJECT > IDENTIFICATION WITH THE PHALLUS

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes two ways the penis enters the imaginary economy — as compensatory oral object and as the phallus marking the mother's lack — and argues that access to the missing phallus as substitutable object requires passing through two successive phases: symbolic primal identification (superego formation) and narcissistic specular identification (mirror stage), the latter being the precondition for the subject's discovery of lack and its offer to substitute itself for the missing phallus.

    Next time I will be picking up from where I've left off today, with the relation between the Ego-ideal, the fetish, and the object qua missing object, that is to say, the phallus.

92. #92

    Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.377

    XVIII CIRCUITS > P(M) (M')

    Theoretical move: Lacan concludes his analysis of Little Hans by arguing that Hans's resolution of the phobia follows an atypical Oedipal path—owing to the father's shortcoming—that installs an imaginary paternity and a narcissistically structured object relation, formalised topologically as p(M)(M')~(α/φ)Π, and closing with a parallel to Freud's Leonardo study to underscore the structural necessity of a fourth (animal/residual) term beyond the trinity.

    For Hans, woman will never be anything other than the fantasy of these little sister-girls... This is not altogether a fetish, because equally this will be the true fetish, if I may say so.

93. #93

    Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.160

    THE FETISH OBJECT > IDENTIFICATION WITH THE PHALLUS

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses transvestism as the symmetrical complement to fetishism to argue that garments and the scopic relation both function around the *lack* of the object rather than its presence, and extends this to the "girl = phallus" symbolic equation, showing that in each case the subject's position vis-à-vis the phallic object (bringing, giving, desiring, replacing) is structurally distinct—while the imaginary "almightiness" of the Other is ultimately grounded in, and sustained by, an irreducible lack.

    desire qua perverse. It is upon this veil that the fetish comes as a figuration of precisely what lacks beyond the object.

94. #94

    Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.87

    Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE SIGNIFIER AND THE HOLY SPIRIT > ON ANALYSIS AS BUNDLING AND THE CONSEQUENCES THEREOF

    Theoretical move: By analysing a clinical case (Lebovici) where misidentification of the phobic object as "phallic mother" and countertransferential interventions drive the subject from phobia into perversion and ultimately passage à l'acte, Lacan argues that conceiving the analyst as a real object (the "bundling" model) distorts the analytic relation and produces pathological rather than therapeutic effects.

    If there is one thing that lies at the root of the fetishist position then it is very precisely that the subject comes to a standstill at a certain level in his investigation and observation of woman, inasmuch as she has or has not the organ that is called into question.

95. #95

    Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.116

    Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE PERVERSE WAYS OF DESIRE > A CHILD IS BEING BEATEN AND THE YOUNG HOMOSEXUAL WOMAN

    Theoretical move: Lacan analyses the three stages of the beating fantasy to argue that perverse fantasy represents a radical desubjectivation in which signifiers are preserved in "pure state" - stripped of intersubjective signification - and that this structure (like the fetish as screen-memory) reveals the valorisation of the imaginary image as a frozen residue of unconscious speech articulated at the level of the big Other; perversion is therefore not a pre-Oedipal relic but is fully constituted through and by the Oedipus complex.

    Picture for a moment what you know about the fetish, for instance. You are told that it is explicable by what lies beyond but which is never seen, and for good reason, namely the penis of the phallic mother.

96. #96

    Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.388

    XVIII CIRCUITS > 'ME DONNERA SANS FEMME UNE PROGÉNITURE'

    Theoretical move: Lacan recapitulates his trajectory from intersubjective schema (subject/Other/little other) toward discourse and object-as-signifier, then formalises the Oedipus complex and castration complex as interlocking symbolic structures, arguing that the Name-of-the-Father introduces a radical symbolic dimension into the child-mother relation, and that the phobic object functions as a metaphor standing in for this symbolic gap.

    The first object that I isolated in its function as a signifier was the fetish

97. #97

    Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.342

    XVIII CIRCUITS > TRANSFORMATIONS > ^I (o P°)

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that in the Little Hans case, the phobic signifier (the horse) operates as a transformation mechanism: the father's symbolic intervention partially unloads anxiety by introducing a castration-threat function the real father cannot sustain, forcing Hans to convert anxiety about real movement into a symbolic schema of substitution (detachable elements), a process crystallized around the veil/drawers episode which rules out fetishism and inaugurates the plane of instrumental signification.

    Hans will never be a fetishist... They conserve their virtue, so to speak, only when they are functional, when they continue to sustain the lure of the phallus.

98. #98

    Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.333

    XVIII CIRCUITS > TRANSFORMATIONS > Of Children bound in Bundles

    Theoretical move: Lacan reads the Little Hans case as structured around the imaginary phallus of the mother, arguing that the horse phobia functions as a crystallising signifier that organises Hans's libidinal development, while the successive fantasies punctuate transformations in the signifying configuration—and that Hans's ultimate heterosexuality is won at the cost of a narcissistic, fetishistic relation to women as imaginary objects.

    She was in her chemise, but the chemise was so short that I saw her widdler... You can recognise here the structure of the rim or the fringe that typifies fetishistic apprehension.

99. #99

    Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.406

    FAREWELL > FROM HANS-THE-FETISH TO LEONARDO-IN-THE-MIRROR

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that little Hans's case resolves not through a properly symbolised castration complex and superego formation, but through identification with the maternal phallus as Ego Ideal — a structurally atypical Oedipal outcome that positions Hans as a fetish-like object, leaving him on the margins of full phallic symbolisation and masculinity.

    a personage who in some respect has become and this is what I'm driving at something like a fetish object.

100. #100

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.219

     ON THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX > ON THE CASTRATION COMPLEX

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the castration complex emerges as the necessary structural resolution to an impasse created when the child's real drive (the stirring of the real penis) disrupts the imaginary phallic luring game with the mother; the symbolic father's intervention re-orders what was an unresolvable imaginary deadlock, while the phobia (Little Hans) functions as a substitute signifier for the absent paternal term.

     it's around this, and only around this, that the fetishist's relationship with his object can be articulated.

101. #101

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.157

     THE FETISH OBJECT > THE FUNCTION OF THE VEIL

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the fetish-veil (object as screen between subject and the absent maternal phallus) from the enveloping fetish as protective aegis (identification with the mother), and further shows how the Real's irruption precipitates acting-out on the imaginary plane—illustrated by reactional exhibitionism as a symbolic equivalence between phallus and child that cannot be symbolically assimilated.

     structurally speaking, this mackintosh contains relations on its own account and indicates a position that is somewhat different from that of the shoe or the girdle in so far as strictly speaking they are themselves directly in the position of the veil between subject and object.

102. #102

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.453

     FAREWELL > AUSTRIA-HUNGARY > XXIII 'Me donnera sans femme une progéniture9 > XXIV From Hans-the-Fetish to Leonardo-in-the-Mirror

     Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index section of Seminar IV, listing names, concepts, and bibliographic references with page numbers; it contains no original theoretical argumentation.

     Greenacre, Phyllis 'Further Considerations Regarding Fetishism' 78 ... Hunter, Dugmore 'Object-Relation Changes in the Analysis of a Fetishist' 152

103. #103

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.165

     THE FETISH OBJECT > IDENTIFICATION WITH THE PHALLUS

     Theoretical move: Lacan reframes the Freudian impasse between identification and object-choice by grounding both in the symbolic structure of the love relation and the oral drive, arguing against the Kleinian symmetry of introjection/projection and proposing instead that the drive always targets the real object as a part-object of the symbolic object—a dialectic of frustration and need that structures the constitution of the object from the outset.

     Here we are in the presence of a character that is fetishised or made fay, these being fundamentally the same word since they both connect via the Portuguese feitiço to the Latin factitius.

104. #104

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.193

     ON THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Freudian equation Penis=Child as the pivot for a structural account of how the phallus slides from the imaginary to the real differently for boys and girls, arguing that the girl's entry into the Oedipus complex is paradoxically simpler because her path via lack leads directly to the father as real bearer of the phallus/child, while the boy faces the deeper difficulty of acceding to the symbolic father function.

     from the first we have been singling out two exemplary objects, the fetish object and the real object.

105. #105

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.124

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE PERVERSE WAYS OF DESIRE > A CHILD IS BEING BEATEN AND THE YOUNG HOMOSEXUAL WOMAN

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the case of the young homosexual woman to demonstrate how perversion arises from a structural permutation within the Imaginary-Symbolic-Real triad: when the symbolic father intrudes into the imaginary plane as a real event (giving a child to the mother), the subject identifies with the paternal function and reorganises her desire around what the love-object lacks (the symbolic phallus), revealing that love is essentially a gift of what one does not have.

     Mr Winnicott spots very clearly the relationship these objects must have at their terminal point with the fetish. He is wrong to call them primal fetishes but they are indeed its point of origin.

106. #106

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.152

     THE FETISH OBJECT > THE FUNCTION OF THE VEIL

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the fetish is constituted not through metaphor but through metonymy: it is the point in the symbolic-historical chain where the subject's history is arrested, functioning as a screen-memory that marks the onset of repression and veils the beyond-zone where the phallus-as-presence-absence should appear, while the subject's erotic life oscillates between imaginary identifications due to insufficient symbolization of the ternary (Oedipal) relationship.

     What constitutes the fetish, the symbolic element that fixes down the fetish and projects it onto the veil, is taken from the historical dimension. It's the moment when the image comes to a standstill.

107. #107

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.82

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE SIGNIFIER AND THE HOLY SPIRIT > ON ANALYSIS AS BUNDLING AND THE CONSEQUENCES THEREOF

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the normal Oedipal resolution installs the subject symbolically as bearer of the phallus through a paternal pact, and that when this symbolic mediation fails, imaginary solutions (fetishism, perversion) emerge as substitute modes of binding the three imaginary objects — with fetishism paradigmatically analysed as an oscillating specular identification between mother and phallus that can never achieve symbolic stabilisation.

     The scheme that I'm giving you here is none other than the scheme for fetishist perversion... To love a slipper is really to have the object of one's desires in easy reach.

108. #108

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.33

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THEORISING THE LACK OF OBJECT > <span id="page-22-0"></span>THE THREE FORMS OF THE LACK OF OBJECT

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analytic object must be theorised across three distinct registers—Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary—and that the psychoanalytic tendency to reduce reality to organic/material substrate misrecognises symbolic Wirklichkeit; Winnicott's transitional object is reinterpreted as belonging to the imaginary register, setting up the distinction between the imaginary object and the fetish that the subsequent elaboration of the three forms of lack of object will require.

     they seek to explain the origin of a fact like the existence of sexual fetishes. They are led to see, as far as they can, what the common points are between the infant's object and the fetish.

109. #109

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.322

     XVIII CIRCUITS > PERMUTATIONS

     Theoretical move: Lacan reads Little Hans's successive transgressive fantasies as a mythical permutation-structure — a series of attempts to articulate and exhaust every form of an impossible solution to the deadlock between the maternal and paternal circuits — and uses this to distinguish Hans's neurotic trajectory from the perverse (fetishistic) path that remained structurally available to him.

     the path Hans could have taken on the side of what culminates in fetishism

110. #110

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.21

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THEORISING THE LACK OF OBJECT > <span id="page-7-0"></span>INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques object-relations theory's biologistic and adaptationist framework by showing that the object's function is not complementary satisfaction but a defensive structure against fundamental anxiety—exemplified by the phobic object and the fetish—and proposes that the essential difference between phobia and fetish (both responses to castration anxiety) must be grasped through a rigorous structural analysis of the object, not through developmental mythology.

     fetishes are seen to fulfil a function that in analytic theory is also articulated as a protection against anxiety and, oddly enough, against the same anxiety, that is to say, castration anxiety… the object has a certain function of complementation in relation to something that presents as a hole, even an abyss, in reality.

111. #111

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.373

     XVIII CIRCUITS > AN ESSAY IN RUBBER¬ SHEET LOGIC

     Theoretical move: Lacan formalises the paternal metaphor through the Hugo poem on Boaz and Ruth, showing that the father's function is constitutively metaphorical (substitution + castration complex), and applies this formula to the case of Little Hans to explain how the horse-phobia acts as a substitute metaphorical mediator when the paternal metaphor is absent, while also distinguishing phobic and fetishistic objects as "milestones" of desire in the real that are nonetheless only accessible through signifying formalisation.

     They may indeed warrant the name object, but one cannot overemphasise the special character of this qualification as an object which it is necessary to introduce once the objects we are dealing with are phobias or fetishes… milestones of desire in the case of the fetish

112. #112

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.55

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE SIGNIFIER AND THE HOLY SPIRIT

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the child's symbolic positioning as phallus for the mother is not directly accessible to the child but requires symbolisation; phobia is distinguished from perverse solutions (fetishism, identificatory fusion) as a specifically symbolic appeal—a 'call for rescue'—that introduces the paternal third term to manage the gap opened by the mother-child-phallus triad.

     Why in fetishism does the child come more or less to occupy the position of the mother in relation to the phallus?

113. #113

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.39

     Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THE SIGNIFIER AND THE HOLY SPIRIT

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Id (Es) is not a brute physical or energic reality but is organized and articulated like a signifier, thereby reframing the analytic notion of libido as a purely abstract measure (akin to energy) that operates at the level of the imaginary, and situating the body image and clinical objects (phobia, fetish) within the signifier/signified relation rather than within developmental-stage object theory.

     Similarly, you have been able to note how, across the board, the number of sexual fetishes remains fairly limited. Why so? Apart from shoes, which play such a stunning role...

114. #114

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.149

     THE FETISH OBJECT > THE FUNCTION OF THE VEIL

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the fetish must be understood not in terms of an imaginary deficiency (the real penis) but as a substitute for the symbolic phallus qua absence — the phallus that exists only insofar as it circulates in symbolic exchange as both present and absent — thereby locating fetishism within the structure of the veil/curtain, where the object stands in for a constitutive lack that is simultaneously affirmed and disavowed.

     the fetish is a symbol. In this respect, it is placed at the outset almost on the same footing as any other neurotic symbol.

115. #115

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.409

     FAREWELL > FROM HANS-THE-FETISH TO LEONARDO-IN-THE-MIRROR

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the closing lessons on Little Hans and the opening of the Leonardo da Vinci case to articulate how the doubling of the maternal figure structures the subject's final equilibrium, pivoting from the fetish-resolution of Hans to Freud's analysis of Leonardo's childhood memory as the screen-memory of a fantasy of fellatio and maternal identification.

     FROM HANS-THE-FETISH TO LEONARDO-IN-THE-MIRROR

116. #116

     Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.188

     THE FETISH OBJECT > THE PHALLUS AND THE UNFULFILLED MOTHER

     Theoretical move: The phallus functions as the master signifier of the symbolic order not by virtue of anatomy but because of its structural role as a constitutive lack: the mother's desire is organised around her lack of the phallus, and the entire pre-Oedipal dialectic—including the genesis of perversion—is a game about where the phallus is and is not, always necessarily veiled.

     nor is it a matter of fetishism particularised, a fetish that is worn by the subject.

117. #117

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.431

     **THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the resolution of the castration complex does not hinge on having or not having the phallus as an organ, but on the subject's recognition that she/he *is not* the phallus; the Phallus functions as the signifier of desire itself, and the case of the obsessional woman illustrates how misrecognizing this—treating the phallus as an object to be possessed rather than a signifier of desire—leads to analytic impasse.

     Notice in this respect that fetishism, especially shoe fetishism, is almost never observed in women. Hence, the significance of the appearance of the phallic signification of shoes at this point in the analysis.

118. #118

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.76

     THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE GOLDEN CALF**

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's analysis of witticisms to establish metonymy as the foundational structure of the signifying chain — the "transfer of signification along the chain" — on which metaphor (substitution) depends, while also linking the metonymic function to the sliding of meaning, fetishistic displacement of desire, and the irreducibility of linguistic ambiguity (the impossibility of metalanguage).

     I situated the essence of all fetishistic displacements of desire, its fixation, in other words, before, after or alongside, or at any rate on the threshold of, its natural object. This was about establishing the fundamental phenomenon that we can call the radical perversion of human desires.

119. #119

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.71

     THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE GOLDEN CALF**

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that metonymy is irreducible to metaphor by using Heine's "Golden Calf" witticism to show that the wit resides not in metaphorical substitution but in a metonymic displacement that subverts the metaphor; this is grounded in a structural distinction between desire and need, where need is always refracted through the laws of the signifier before it can appear as demand.

     the fetishistic value of gold, which I do not mention without reason here, since precisely this fetishistic function... is itself only conceivable in the signifying dimension of metonymy.

120. #120

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.334

     **SIGNIFIER, BAR** AND PHALLUS

     Theoretical move: The phallus is constitutively barred from the signifying order — it is the signifier of the Other's desire — and this structural bar is what introduces castration for both sexes, producing asymmetrical dilemmas: the woman must *be* the phallus (identifying with it as desired object) while the man must *have* it, yet both are divided from their being by this impossible relation to the phallic signifier.

     It's inasmuch as the penis is initially a substitute - I would go so far as to say a fetish - that the child, he too, is, then, in a certain way, a fetish.

121. #121

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.492

     **EXPLANATION OF THESCHEMAS** > 3 **Concerning the Oedipus complex**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Oedipus complex is a structural prerequisite for theorizing pre-Oedipal configurations (perversion, neurosis, homosexuality), and uses the superimposition of two schemas—one imaginary, one intersubjective—to give 'identification' a precise topological meaning: the mutual substitution of subjects in speech.

     the imaginary mother-phallus-child triad introduced last year with respect to the most primitive perversions like fetishism.

122. #122

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.275

     **THE GIRL AND THE PHALLUS**

     Theoretical move: The phallus as the third term in the mother-child relation constitutes an insurmountable obstacle to the child's desire to be the exclusive object of the mother's desire; the resolution of this impasse requires a partial renunciation whereby desire becomes alienated desire — i.e., desire-as-demand, signified through the signifier.

     If it is necessary for the mother to be phallic, or for the phallus to be put in the mother's place, then we have fetishism.

123. #123

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.220

     FROM IMAGE TO **SIGNIFIER - IN PLEASURE AND IN REALITY**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the illusory object cannot be adequately theorized through the imaginary alone but only through its function as a signifying element within a signifying chain — the mirror stage installs a double movement (imaginary identification with the body-image vs. symbolic identification along the ego-ideal axis) whose structural schema is necessary to distinguish identification from idealization, illusion from image, and to account for perversion, fetishism, and psychosis without reducing them to instinctual or genetic regression.

     one small woman's shoe may very precisely be what provokes in a man the emergence of this energy that is said to be intended for the reproduction of the species. The whole problem is there.

124. #124

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.175

     **THE THREE MOMENTS OF THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX (I)**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Oedipus complex must be articulated through the structure of the paternal metaphor: the Name-of-the-Father substitutes for the mother in the signifying chain, and this symbolic operation is what installs the phallus as the privileged imaginary object mediating the child's relation to the mother's desire — establishing a metaphorical (not merely sociological or empirical) connection between the symbolic father and the imaginary phallus.

     We showed an exemplary perversion in fetishism, in the sense that the child there has a particular relationship with the object of what lies beyond in the mother's desire, whose predominance and value of excellence, as it were, he has observed and to which he attaches himself to by way of an imaginary identification with the mother.

125. #125

     Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.269

     **THE GIRL AND THE PHALLUS**

     Theoretical move: Lacan reviews the Freud-Jones debate on female sexuality to argue that the phallus functions not as a natural drive object but as a signifier — and, pivotally, that in the little girl's Oedipal relations the phallus operates as a fetish rather than a phobic object, a distinction that advances his own structural account beyond both Freud's biologism and Jones's naturalist counter-argument.

     If you recall the difference I have drawn between a phobia and a fetish, we can say that here the phallus is playing the role of a fetish rather than of a phobic object.

126. #126

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.493

     TOWARD SUBLIMATION

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the object of desire (objet a) is constituted as the signifier of desire-for-desire—not as a complement to instinct—and that the phallus functions not as a biological referent but as the privileged signifier of the Other's desire; desire is located in the gap between two signifying chains (repressed and manifest), while the Real is defined by inexorable return to the same place, and analytic interventions that reduce transference to current reality miss the essential dimension of desire.

     A fetish is in fact the fur, edge, fringe, or frill, the thing that hides, and nothing is better designated to serve the function of signifier of the Other's desire.

127. #127

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.327

     OPHELIA, THE OBJECT

     Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the structure of fantasy ($◇a) by distinguishing how the object of desire (objet petit a) takes the place of the symbolically deprived phallus, and then uses this framework to differentiate perversion (emphasis on the imaginary pole, a) from neurosis (emphasis on the barred subject, $), with Hamlet serving as the privileged illustration of neurotic fantasy through his constitutive subjection to the Other's time.

     The fetishistic character of the object of human desire is most blatant there. All of desire's objects are fetishistic in character.

128. #128

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.453

     THE EITHER/OR CONCERNING THE OBJECT

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques both a 1956 Parisian article that collapses the distinction between perverse fantasy and perversion, and the broader tradition of object-relations theory (Abraham, Ferenczi, Klein, Glover), arguing that the structural position of desire — defined by irreducible distance from the object — cannot be reduced to an individual developmental conquest of reality; perverse fantasy illuminates the very structure of unconscious fantasy as such.

     it is in certain perversions that it plays a decisive role - for example, the distance of an object [from oneself] is obviously far more manifest in the phenomenology of fetishism.

129. #129

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.246

     IMPOSSIBLE ACTION

     Theoretical move: Lacan pivots from the structural analysis of Ella Sharpe's case (organised around the phallus as primal identification) to Hamlet as the privileged modern analogue of the Oedipus complex, arguing that Hamlet's "scruples of conscience" are a symptomatic, conscious formation whose unconscious correlate—structured around the castration complex and the opposition between being and having the phallus—remains to be articulated via Lacan's own concepts of desire.

     the 'double rule of three' I used to organize the two stages of the relationship between the subject and the more or less fetishistic object.

130. #130

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.464

     THE EITHER/OR CONCERNING THE OBJECT

     Theoretical move: The passage articulates the structural logic of the phallus as signifier through the "either/or" formulation — one either *is* the phallus or *has* it — and deploys this to distinguish feminine desire from neurotic desire, where the neurotic regresses to a metonymic substitution in which "not having" disguises an unconscious identification with being the phallus, while the ego usurps the place of the barred subject in the dialectic of desire.

     desire has a relationship to being, even in its most limited, restricted, fetishistic, and, in short, its stupidest form

131. #131

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan

     449. "Your daughter is mute" > 457. "I am thinking, therefore I am" ,

     Theoretical move: This is an editorial/footnote passage providing bibliographic references and source annotations for Lacan's Seminar VI, covering Lacan's variations on the Cartesian cogito, Gillespie's articles on fetishism and perversion, and Freud's unfinished essay on ego-splitting. It is primarily non-substantive apparatus.

     Here are the exact references to the articles by W. H. Gillespie that are cited by Lacan: "A Contribution to the Study of Fetishism," IJP 21 (1940): 401-15

132. #132

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.479

     THE FUNCTION OF SPLITTING\* IN PERVERSION

     Theoretical move: Lacan argues that perversion inverts the neurotic's proof-structure: where the neurotic must ceaselessly prove desire's existence, the pervert takes it as given, and organises his entire construction around identifying with the phallus-as-object inside the mother, using the fetish or idol to symbolise the split between symbolic identification (I) and imaginary identification (i(a)) — a structure illustrated paradigmatically through male and female homosexuality and confirmed clinically via the anecdote of Gide's marble.

     He will have the phallus - whether this object has transformed into a fetish, in one case, or into an idol, in the other.

133. #133

     Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.474

     THE FUNCTION OF SPLITTING\* IN PERVERSION

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the structural difference between neurotic and perverse desire turns on how each subject bears the "cut" or split: the neurotic indefinitely defers his desire in metonymic evasion, while the pervert directly identifies with the split/cut as constitutive of fantasy—a distinction Lacan develops by critiquing Gillespie's anatomical reduction of ego-splitting and by reading Gide's fantasies as evidence that perverse identification with the phallus operates differently from neurotic castration anxiety.

     He is a thirty-year-old fetishist. In the course of his analysis, it comes out that his fantasy is to be split in two by his mother's teeth while he penetrates her.

134. #134

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.154

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *ÂGALMA*

     Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Greek term *âgalma* — traced through its etymological ambiguities (sparkle, admiration, envy) and its literary uses in Homer and Euripides — to recover the original psychoanalytic discovery of the partial object as the pivotal point of desire, against Ego Psychology's domestication of that discovery into a "totalising" genital-oblative love that falsely resolves the subject/object opposition.

     the fetishistic function of round rocks at the center of a temple … What is the fetish of such and such a tribe, for example, from a bend in the Niger? It is something unspeakable and shapeless

135. #135

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.153

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *ÂGALMA*

     Theoretical move: Through a close reading of Alcibiades' speech in Plato's *Symposium* and a verse from Euripides' *Hecuba*, Lacan argues that *âgalma* names the hidden precious object inside the other that captures desire — a specifically psychoanalytic notion whose fetishistic function displaces the dyadic dialectic of beauty with a triadic topology of the subject's relation to the symbolic.

     I am not talking in riddles here. I am giving you the key to the question by saying that this term always emphasizes the fetishistic function of the object.

136. #136

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.265

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES** > **REAL PRESENCE**

     Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes Φ (the phallus as symbolic/unconscious function operative for all speaking subjects) from φ (the imaginary phallic unit of measurement that organises the obsessive's erotic object-equivalences), arguing that in obsessive neurosis the phallic function is not repressed but emerges consciously and avowedly at the level of symptom, which is precisely what must be explained against both Bouvet's theory of imaginary introjection and a naïve psychologism.

     my friend Georges Favez who, speaking to you about what the analyst is, and about his function for the analysand, concluded that, in the final analysis, the analyst takes on a fetishistic function for the patient.

137. #137

     Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.423

     **M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > <span id="page-411-0"></span>**Translator's Endnotes** > **Chapter X -** *Âgalma*

     Theoretical move: This passage consists of translator's endnotes for Seminar VIII Chapter X, providing scholarly apparatus — source citations, terminological clarifications, and textual variants — for Lacan's use of agalma, Che vuoi, logical time, the maternal phallus, and oblativity. It is primarily philological and bibliographic rather than advancing a theoretical argument of its own.

     Lacan may be alluding here to the so-called maternal phallus and its role in fetishism. Cet objet infantile (this infantile object) might also allude to the infant as a (phallic) object.

138. #138

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.156

     *Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 15*: *Wednesday 28 March 1962*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Jones's concept of 'aphanisis' misidentifies the source of anxiety in the castration complex by conflating the disappearance of desire with repression; true anxiety is always about the object that desire dissimulates (the void at the heart of demand), not about desire's disappearance—and this misrecognition occludes the decisive function of the phallus as the instrument mediating desire's relation to the big Other.

     he is a vile piece of cheaply sold stuff that there would be no reason even to preserve as an antique slave who at least constituted himself, imposed respect for himself, by his market value. — you should note not a fetish

139. #139

     Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.104

     *Seminar 10*: *Wednesday 21 February 1962* > *Seminar 11*: *Wednesday 28 February 1962*

     Theoretical move: Lacan positions desire as an unsurpassable "truth function" at the heart of analytic practice, articulates the Death Drive and Life Drive (Eros/libido) as structured around the signifier and the phallus, and uses the Kantian critique of pure reason—especially its categories, pure intuition, and the synthetic function—as an analogy to illuminate the relationship between subjectivity, the body, and desire, while invoking the Kant/Sade parallel to show that desire exceeds all pathological (comfort/need) determinations.

     Pain is not simply, as the technicians say, exquisite by nature; it is privileged, it can be a fetish.

140. #140

     The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.53

     II. Can Psychoanalysis Constitute the Kind of Ethics Necessitated by our Times?

     Theoretical move: Lacan critiques the ego-psychological reduction of desire to libidinal object-relations (oral/anal/genital stages), arguing instead that desire has no proper object but only the Thing as its impossible horizon, and that the commandment to love one's neighbour exposes the irreducible ambivalence (love/hatred) that makes any ethics of psychoanalysis inseparable from sublimation, the death drive, and the laws of speech that encircle das Ding.

     a man, seeking his want-to-be beyond his need… is inclined toward inconstancy, or, more exactly, toward a duplicating of the object, whose affinities with what there is by way of fetishism in homosexuality have been very curiously explored in analytic practice

141. #141

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.78

     chapter 2 > The acousmatics of the voice

     Theoretical move: The acousmatic voice structurally resists 'disacousmatization': its source is constitutively concealed, meaning ventriloquism is not an exception but the very condition of voice as object—the voice emerges precisely in the void from which it supposedly stems, operating as both surplus-of-body and no-more-body (plus-de-corps), and thus as the operator of the impossible division between interior and exterior.

     the fetishism of the voice, which fixes the object at the penultimate stage, just before confronting the impossible fissure from which it is supposed to emanate... The voice as a fetish object consolidates on the verge of the void.

142. #142

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.206

     Notes > Chapter 3 The "Physics" of the Voice

     Theoretical move: This endnote apparatus advances several interlocking theoretical arguments: the drive's aim/goal distinction (via Lacan) explains why the oral drive circles an eternally lacking object rather than reaching satisfaction; the acousmatic voice is shown to be structurally tied to phantomology when seen/heard fail to coincide; and the trompe-l'œil/lure distinction illuminates how deception operates at the level of the sign rather than verisimilitude.

     the subject's interest comes to a halt half-way, as it were; it is as though the last impression before the uncanny and traumatic one is retained as a fetish.

143. #143

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.13

     A Voice and Nothing More

     Theoretical move: The passage introduces the voice as a third object irreducible to either its function as a vehicle of meaning or as an aesthetic fetish, arguing that psychoanalysis alone can sustain fidelity to this "object voice" — a surplus effect that escapes both interpellation and aesthetic sublimation.

     The aesthetic concentration on the voice loses the voice precisely by turning it into a fetish object; the aesthetic pleasure obfuscates the object voice.

144. #144

     A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.40

     A Voice and Nothing More > The linguistics of the non-voice

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the non-linguistic voice (laughter, singing) is neither simply outside linguistic structure nor fully captured by it, and that the singing voice's apparent surplus-meaning is a structural fantasy/illusion that functions as a fetish disavowing castration—the very condition that gives the voice its fascination. The object voice (objet petit a) is precisely what aesthetic or religious idealization of the voice conceals.

     it turns it into a fetish object—we could say the highest rampart, the most formidable wall against the voice.

145. #145

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.77

     Orthopsycbism > The Mirror as Screen > Cause and the Law

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's theory of cause—tied to failure, the materiality of language, and the equivocations of the signifier—surpasses both the covering-law model and Hart/Honoré's norm/deviation framework, while simultaneously critiquing "historicist" and "psychological" constructions of the subject (illustrated through the Clerambault case) as unable to account for how subjects are overdetermined by meanings they never consciously experience.

     Confronted by the possibility of any fact's being able to provide proof not only of a specific psychological intention but also of its contrary... the psychological fantasy supposes a subject behind the facts

146. #146

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.124

     Orthopsycbism > Guilty versus Useful Pleasures > Fantasy and Fetish

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that perversion (specifically fetishism) inverts the structure of fantasy: where the neurotic subject constitutes itself in relation to the object a as an externalized image of loss, the pervert positions himself as the object a in its real form, becoming the instrument of the Other's enjoyment rather than a desiring subject—and Clerambault's fetishistic photographs thereby expose, rather than obscure, the utilitarian fantasy's dependence on the supposition of an obscene Other jouissance.

     The fetish, then, must be 'rigorously of no use' to the pervert, who makes no claims on any rights to enjoyment and who busies himself with them only for the sake of the Other.

147. #147

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.193

     Detour through the Drive

     Theoretical move: The shift from classical detective fiction to film noir is reinterpreted not as a narrative identification of hero with criminal but as a topological transition between two orders—desire (sense, the signifier, the fort/da game as lack) and drive (being, jouissance, repetition-as-satisfaction)—which Copjec maps onto a broader historical transition from an Oedipal order of desire to a contemporary order of drive in which jouissance is socially commanded rather than privately protected.

     These protections have been eroded by our society's fetishization of being, that is, of jouissance.

148. #148

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.88

     Orthopsycbism > The Mirror as Screen > Colonies and Colonnades

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Clérambault's obsessive passion for fabric was not idiosyncratic but was conditioned by a historically specific revolution in the concept of "type"—one that, beginning in the early nineteenth century, replaced sensuous/symbolic description of objects (buildings, costumes) with functional/structural classification, a logic that equally subtended both colonial aesthetics and architectural modernism.

     few will feel that it justifies his taking 40,000 of them!

149. #149

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.119

     Orthopsycbism > Guilty versus Useful Pleasures > Fantasy and Fetish

     Theoretical move: Against Ferguson's reading of the sublime as escape from utilitarian claustrophobia, Copjec (following Freud/Lacan) argues that utilitarianism itself is constituted by the flight from the superego's obscene law and from repressed desire, such that the colonial fantasy of the veiled Other functions as utilitarianism's own symptom—the positive bodying-forth of the surplus jouissance it structurally denies.

     we find in them, I would argue, not simply another version of the fantasy but precisely a perversion of it. For these 40,000 photographs focused on one rigidly adhered-to object choice-cloth-betray not simply a fantasy of cloth but a fetishization of it

150. #150

     Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.135

     Signification and Desire > The Ability to Say the Wrong Thing

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the signifier structurally unites lack and excess, making comedy the fundamental mode of signification rather than communication; subjects engage excessively with language not to convey meaning but to seek satisfaction and fill their constitutive lack through an appeal to the desire of the social authority.

     Communication functions as a fetish to obscure the desire to impress our listeners with our speech.

151. #151

     Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.222

     Notes > Index > **INDEX**

     Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index section listing proper names, works, and topics referenced in the book, with no theoretical argumentation.

     fetish, 124

152. #152

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

     I

     Theoretical move: Freud distinguishes inhibition from symptom by grounding inhibition in ego-function restriction—caused either by excessive eroticization of organs, conflict-avoidance with the id or superego, or energy depletion—while symptoms are processes operating outside or upon the ego, making the two conceptually non-equivalent even when clinically overlapping.

     Other disturbances result where the sexual function is combined with particular factors of a perverted or fetishistic nature.

153. #153

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *God rid me of God* > *The Bible and conceptual idolatry*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Bible itself enacts a structural resistance to conceptual idolatry through the irreducible plurality and contradiction of its divine descriptions, combined with a theological insistence on God's unrepresentability — such that revelation always occurs through concealment, and no single ideological or systematic reading can legitimately colonize the text or the divine.

     the image became an idol to the people and eclipsed the genuine experience of God

154. #154

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > TOWARDS ORTHOPRAXIS: BRINGING THEORY TO CHURCH > *Prosperity*

     Theoretical move: The passage uses a liturgical parody of prosperity theology and self-centred faith to enact a critique of orthopraxis versus orthodoxy: authentic faith is demonstrated not through correct doctrine, Bible-reading, or worship practices, but through transformative action oriented toward the neighbour — a theological move that deploys the logic of transgression to expose ideological religion as a fetishistic crutch that substitutes symbolic performance for genuine ethical engagement.

     religion can so often be used as a type of alchemy that seeks to use faith as a raw material from which to derive spiritual, emotional and even material wealth

155. #155

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that orthodoxy must be reconceived from 'right belief' (Greek-influenced, propositional) to 'believing in the right way' (Hebraic-mystical, praxis-oriented), thereby transcending the binary between absolutism and relativism by grounding theological knowing in love rather than correct doctrinal affirmation.

     to construct a conceptual idol built from the materials of our mind

156. #156

     How (Not) to Speak of God · Peter Rollins

     HOW (NOT) TO SPEAK OF GOD > Part 1 > *God rid me of God* > *The idolatry of ideology*

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the philosophical critique of ideology and the biblical prohibition of idolatry share a common root (the Greek *eidos*, essence), thereby allowing a theological discourse to appropriate ideological critique not as its enemy but as a mirror of its own tradition's anti-idolatrous impulse.

     the conceptual idol refers to any system of thought which the individual or community takes to be a visible rendering of God

157. #157

     Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.47

     POWERS OF HORROR > SOMETHING TO BE SCARED OF

     Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that phobia is an "abortive metaphor of want" — a drive-level substitute for the unnamable void that precedes objectal relation — and that language itself functions as a founding fetish that both enables and forecloses the full traversal of that want, making writing the privileged (if not analytic) site for metabolizing abjection.

     is not exactly language our ultimate and inseparable fetish? And language, precisely, is based on fetishist denial ('I know that, but just the same,' 'the sign is not the thing, but just the same,' etc.)

158. #158

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.78

     **The Sartorial Superego** > **Colonies and Colonnades**

     Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Clérambault's obsession with drapery was not idiosyncratic but historically conditioned by a structural revolution in the concept of "type" (from sensuous/symbolic characterization to functional/constructive definition) that linked colonial ethnography, Beaux-Arts architecture, and functionalist modernism through the shared framework of utility as the essential parameter of classification.

     those in which the bodily form has completely disappeared retain their enigmatic quality, for what is thus obscured in these cases is the very prop on which the drapery's purpose hangs.

159. #159

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

     <span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_nts_r1.htm_page237"><span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_nts_r1.htm_pg237" class="pagebreak" title="237"></span></span>**Notes** > **Chapter 2**

     Theoretical move: This endnotes section for Chapter 2 develops the theoretical argument that the gaze arises from linguistic rather than voyeuristic/fetishistic assumptions, that the cinema is better understood through the concept of the "nonspecularizable" than through the mirror/screen analogy, and that a properly Lacanian account of the subject requires distinguishing the unreturned gaze from imaginary identification and aggressivity.

     It is generally argued that the gaze is dependent on psychoanalytic structures of voyeurism and fetishism, presumed to be male.

160. #160

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.116

     **The Sartorial Superego** > **Fantasy and Fetish**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Clérambault's project was dismissed precisely because it made visible an irreducible split between utility and fetishistic excess — a splitting that utilitarian rationality structurally cannot acknowledge, making the lectures a symptom of the very division they demonstrated.

     his doubling and splitting of his project into a consideration of cloth's usefulness and his fetishization of its useless, overbearing presence were precisely the problem

161. #161

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.183

     **Locked Room/Lonely Room: Private Space in Film Noir** > **Detour through the Drive**

     Theoretical move: The shift from classical detective fiction to film noir is theoretically recast not as a narrative inversion of identification but as a structural choice between desire (sense, language, lack) and drive (being, jouissance), homologized through Freud's fort/da game and mapped onto a broader historical transition from an Oedipal order of desire to a contemporary order of commanded jouissance with political consequences.

     These protections have been eroded by our society's fetishization of being, that is, of jouissance.

162. #162

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.66

     **The Sartorial Superego**

     Theoretical move: The passage uses the case of Clérambault to distinguish between three epistemological constructions of the subject—psychological, psychoanalytic, and historicist—arguing that psychoanalysis dissolves the fantasy of a subject with secret inner knowledge by replacing "lived experience" with the overdetermination of the subject by the signifier, thus also critiquing historicism's reduction of subjects to pathological experience.

     Clérambault, dispassionate observer or impassioned fetishist? Aesthete or man of the world?

163. #163

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

     **The Sartorial Superego** > **Fantasy and Fetish**

     Theoretical move: By distinguishing neurotic fantasy (barred subject in relation to objet a) from perversion (subject positioning himself *as* objet a, becoming agent of division in the Other), Copjec argues that Clérambault's fetishistic photographs do not simply reproduce the colonialist fantasy of cloth but pervert it—exposing the fantasy's structural dependence on the supposition of an obscene, useless enjoyment of the Other that the fantasy simultaneously requires and disavows.

     fetishism is, as Freud claimed, 'particularly favourable' for studying the splitting of the ego in the process of defense; as a perversion, it ex-planes it, unfolds the split onto a flat surface and thus conveniently displays it for the analyzing eye.

164. #164

     Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec

     <span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_nts_r1.htm_page237"><span id="Copj_9781781688892_epub_nts_r1.htm_pg237" class="pagebreak" title="237"></span></span>**Notes** > **Chapter 4**

     Theoretical move: This is a notes/bibliography section for Chapter 4, providing scholarly citations and brief glosses for key theoretical moves in the chapter, including references to Lacan's "Kant with Sade," extimacy, enunciation vs. statement, fetishism, and perversion — but doing no primary theoretical work itself.

     Sigmund Freud, 'Fetishism,' in SE, vol. 21, p. 154.

165. #165

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.292

     <span id="ch6.xhtml_p281" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 281. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Conclusion > 4. The Master Signifier

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian master signifier (phallus) is grounded in the paradoxical intersection of the imaginary and symbolic constituted by the objet a, and that "phallocentrism" does not underwrite masculine superiority but rather reveals that masculinity is structurally defined by lack and anxiety, such that penis envy is most acutely suffered by those who possess a penis.

     masculinity is fraught with a special anxiety of potency and is especially disposed toward the reassurance of fetishistic supplements.

166. #166

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.95

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 2 </span><span id="ch2.xhtml_p71" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 71. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Between the Image and the Word > The Ratman's Phantasy

     Theoretical move: Boothby argues that the Ratman case exemplifies how perceptual intensity (the positional) is produced by an imperceptible confluence of signifiers (the dispositional field), demonstrating that the unconscious is "structured like a language" in the most literal sense: an overdetermined morphemic matrix ("rat") generates a blinding phantasmatic image that simultaneously conceals its own conditions of production.

     the prototype of the fetish object is found in the immediate periphery of the missing maternal phallus or is located at a site contiguous with it (hair, lace, garters, etc.).

167. #167

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.210

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 4 </span><span id="ch4.xhtml_p191" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 191. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>The Freudian Thing > Thing or No-thing

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that *das Ding* is not merely Freud's technical term for the unknowable kernel of perception, but the Real core inhabiting the very heart of the Imaginary, thereby redefining the imaginary as the power of the veil (appearance over emptiness) and sublimation as the art of making das Ding simultaneously present and absent — with 'extimacy' as the structural name for this paradox.

     We compared this arresting of attention at a point perceptually adjacent to an unacceptable focus with the process by which the fetish is established at some point along the path leading to the mother's missing phallus.

168. #168

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 2 </span><span id="ch2.xhtml_p71" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 71. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Between the Image and the Word > <span id="ch2.xhtml_p72" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 72. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>In the Shadow of the Image

     Theoretical move: Boothby argues that Freudian cathexis/anticathexis can be re-read through Gestalt figure-ground dynamics, and that this perceptual automatism is ultimately grounded in Lacan's Imaginary order — whose constitutive power to unify perceptual objects is inseparable from an effect of méconnaissance.

     The preceding instances, including that of the fetish, prompt us to seek a role for the figure-ground relation in the activity of repression in general

169. #169

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby

     <span id="Index.xhtml_p323" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 323. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Index

     Theoretical move: This is a non-substantive index passage (letters F–G) from Boothby's *Freud as Philosopher*, listing terms and page references with no argumentative or theoretical content.

     Fetish, fetishism 76–77, 95, 209, 273, 292

170. #170

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.65

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter One </span><span id="ch1.xhtml_p17" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 17. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Toward the Unthought Ground of Thought > The Unthought Ground of Thought in the Freudian Unconscious

     Theoretical move: Boothby argues that psychoanalysis occupies a privileged position among the human sciences because it uniquely targets the "unthought ground" of thought—what he calls the dispositional field—rather than remaining within the space of the representable; Foucault's reading of *Las Meninas* and of the cogito/unthought dyad, together with Freud's early holistic neurology and his theory of condensation/displacement, are marshalled to show that psychoanalytic interpretation is nothing other than the excavation and restructuring of this conditioning field.

     The strangely compelling claims of certain memories, dream images, compulsive ideas, phobias, and fetishes in which the psychoanalyst discerns the workings of the unconscious are describable by the phenomenologist as the coming-to-presence of somehow exceptional or privileged appearances.

171. #171

     Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.76

     <span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 2 </span><span id="ch2.xhtml_p71" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 71. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Between the Image and the Word > <span id="ch2.xhtml_p72" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 72. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>In the Shadow of the Image

     Theoretical move: Boothby argues that Freud's neurological mechanism of "side-cathexis" (from the Project for a Scientific Psychology) and the psychoanalytic phenomena of resistance, screen memories, and fetishism all operate through the same structural logic: a gestalt shift in which a peripheral perceptual element metonymically substitutes for and occludes the threatening focal content, a logic that Lacan explicitly links to the imaginary ego's function of méconnaissance.

     the process of substitution is metonymical. The choice of fetish object is made in a lateral movement across the field of the perceptual tableau of the maternal body.

172. #172

     The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond Belief · Peter Rollins · p.88

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>THE FIDELITY OF BETRAYAL > <span id="contents.html_page_vii"></span>CONTENTS > God’s name as a noun

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that dominant theological and popular religious traditions (from the Lilith myth through Descartes and creationism) share a common structure of grounding faith in God as an object of rational contemplation and reflection, and that this objectifying move—treating religious truth as a factual claim of the same ontological status as scientific statements—is the central problem the author seeks to displace in favor of a different understanding of faith's source.

     This desire has so infested Christian thought today that the truth of Christianity is viewed as connected to a series of objective facts about this source.

173. #173

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage uses a parable and a prefatory commentary to argue that the letter/text (scripture, spectacle, words) can become an obstacle to the living Word or message it is meant to convey, and that authentic engagement requires inhabiting the message rather than merely possessing or reciting it. The parable of "The Payoff" enacts this by staging a reversal in which apparent self-betrayal (confession of hypocrisy) turns out to be a form of fidelity.

     many of us have been so taken up by what we perceive to be the conceptual splendor of the Bible that we fail to note the message that is housed in the words

174. #174

     The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.122

     <span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>

     Theoretical move: The passage deploys the Marxist concept of fetishism to argue that belief is primarily enacted through practice and context rather than conscious conviction, and that genuine change requires transforming the symbolic/material environment in which subjects are embedded, not merely altering intellectual assent.

     Karl Marx called this activity of disbelieving in one's mind while believing in one's activities 'fetishism.' The fetish is any object that we know is not magical or special in any way, yet is treated as though it were special or magical.

175. #175

     Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

     I

     Theoretical move: Freud establishes inhibition as a restriction of ego function—distinguished from symptom by being a process *within* the ego rather than acting upon it—and identifies two mechanisms: avoidance of conflict with the id (via excessive eroticization of organs) and avoidance of conflict with the superego (self-punishment), alongside an energic-economic account of generalized inhibition.

     Other disturbances result where the sexual function is combined with particular factors of a perverted or fetishistic nature.

176. #176

     Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.111

     *Unexpected Reunions* > **Dialectics for Marx**

     Theoretical move: The passage advances, via Postone's reading of Marx, the argument that dialectics is not a universally applicable method but a historically determinate critical form that arises with and is co-extensive with capitalist commodity production — meaning Marx's Capital constitutes an immanent critique of both Hegel and Ricardo rather than a synthesis or simple inversion of them, with the critique of labor in capitalism (not from the standpoint of labor) as its proper standpoint.

     the famous subsection of the first chapter of Capital, on commodity fetishism, evokes the religious structure of the commodities, albeit at two different 'levels' – that is, religion being a phenomenon that belongs to the superstructure, while commodity fetishism pertains to the economic base.

177. #177

     Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.89

     *Unexpected Reunions* > **Obscured Reduction and Abstract Naturalization**

     Theoretical move: Political economy's reduction of the worker to an animal paradoxically depends on a specifically human capacity for limitless self-reduction (the 'voided animal'), and by naturalizing this act of reduction it simultaneously naturalizes property relations, abstract exchangeability, and temporality itself—abolishing historical time in favour of the eternal repetition of the natural present.

     Reductive acts of abstraction generate through the practice of exchange something new, the money-form, on which they seem to rely in the first place.

178. #178

     Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.106

     *Unexpected Reunions* > <span id="chapter02.xhtml_notesSet"></span>**Notes**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that capitalism is not a non-philosophical system but rather the most abstract social system in history, and that philosophy's task is to dialectically articulate the present by accepting the full consequences of capital's dissolution of solidity—a task requiring Hegel's logic of negativity to read Marx's critique of political economy.

     although it is very clear that commodities do not have the attributes inscribed to them, only through a dialectical analysis can one show how they are nonetheless treated as if they had them.

179. #179

     Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza

     *Unexpected Reunions* > **Getting Used To It**

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that capitalist political economy performs a reductive operation that collapses the Hegelian distinction between mechanism (as precondition of freedom) and freedom itself, turning workers into pure mechanical second-nature beings bound together by a "chemism" of money—thereby revealing capitalism as a composite of mechanism and chemism that reduces subjective ends to abstract un-life.

     the effective value proportions 'established by a social process that goes on behind the back of the producers' – Heinrich speaks of a 'universal background lighting' provided by fetishism

180. #180

     Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.69

     *Unexpected Reunions* > **Caving**^{**<a href="#chapter02.xhtml_fn-3" id="chapter02.xhtml_fn_3">3</a>**}

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that capitalism functions as a self-naturalizing "realm of shadows" in which the fetishistic objectivity of commodities generates a constitutive ideological inversion that is not an epistemological error but a structural feature of everyday practical life under capitalism, making critique analogous to Plato's cave allegory reread through Marx's Capital.

     the practical engagement with the 'purely fantastic objectivity' of commodities, an objectivity that Marx explicitly describes as 'imaginary.'

181. #181

     Reading Marx · Slavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · p.67

     *Unexpected Reunions* > **Caving**^{**<a href="#chapter02.xhtml_fn-3" id="chapter02.xhtml_fn_3">3</a>**}

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that emancipatory thought is structurally indebted to Plato's cave allegory, which frames emancipation as a mythologized counter-myth requiring exit from naturalized conditions of disorientation; it then traces this structure through Descartes, Rousseau, Marx, and Badiou, proposing that capitalist society functions as a modern cave whose ideological enchainment is analogous to Platonic mimesis and sophistry.

     we know we are just dealing with a mere 'fantastic objectivity' (Marx), but it nonetheless starts to affect our inner life.

182. #182

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Three <span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-862"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-1095"></span><span id="theorem_iii_the_three_unorientables.xhtml_IDX-2455"></span>Unorientables > [Cross-Capping Class Struggle](#contents.xhtml_ahd16)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that class struggle is not a conflict between objectively determinable social groups but a constitutive antagonism—a diagonal cut across the entire social body—that functions as the point of subjectivization suturing the "objective" social field itself; this is demonstrated through Marx's unfinished analysis in Capital Vol. III and the Stalinist "subkulak" deadlock, showing that the One (Master-Signifier) introduces self-division rather than totalization, and that class struggle operates as a failed but necessary pseudo-totalization when full dialectical analysis breaks down.

     one of the names of this strange 'ideology' in the very heart of the economic process, of the 'illusion' which sustains reality itself, is 'commodity fetishism'

183. #183

     Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.325

     **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The World With(out) a <span id="scholium_34_the_world_without_a_snout.xhtml_IDX-138"></span><span id="scholium_34_the_world_without_a_snout.xhtml_IDX-2118"></span><span id="scholium_34_the_world_without_a_snout.xhtml_IDX-2519"></span>Snout

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Badiou's Being/Event duality must be supplemented by a third term—the Death Drive—which names the immanent distortion of Being that precedes and enables the subject's fidelity to an Event; against Badiou's residually Kantian finitude, a properly Hegelian-materialist move problematizes the very positivity of finite reality (the "human animal") rather than accepting it as given.

     'Event' ultimately names a minimal 'fetishization' of the immanent distortion of the texture of Being into its virtual object-cause?

184. #184

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the Lacanian perspective on ideology inverts the Marxist critique: where Marxism attacks false universalization, Lacanian analysis targets over-rapid historicization that blinds us to the Real kernel that returns as the same. The homology between surplus-value and surplus-enjoyment (objet petit a) shows that enjoyment is constitutively an excess—a structural lack that drives the capitalist machine—and that Marx's own failure to think this paradox explains both his vulgar evolutionist formulations and the historical irony of 'real socialism'.

     this difference corresponds to the one which distinguishes the Freudian from the Marxian notion of fetishism: in Marxism a fetish conceals the positive network of social relations, whereas in Freud a fetish conceals the lack ('castration') around which the symbolic network is articulated.

185. #185

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Žižek, via Sohn-Rethel's concept of 'real abstraction', argues that the commodity-form harbours an unconscious of the transcendental subject: the formal categories of pure reason (Kantian a priori) are already at work in the act of commodity exchange before thought arrives at them, making the symbolic order the external 'Other Scene' where thought's form is staged in advance—and this structural misrecognition is the fundamental dimension of ideology.

     it offers a kind of matrix enabling us to generate all other forms of the 'fetishistic inversion'

186. #186

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     PREFACE

     Theoretical move: Against the standard critique of Hegel as fetishizing abstraction, Žižek argues that the true Hegelian move is the opposite: abstracting from empirical over-determination to isolate the notional/signifying determination, whereby language (Aufhebung as signifying reduction to the 'unary feature') makes potentiality visible as such - it is appellation that 'posits' a thing's inner potential.

     of fetishizing abstraction: from a dialectical perspective, one should see not just the thing in front of oneself, but this thing as it is embedded in all the wealth of its concrete historical context.

187. #187

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     PREFACE

     Theoretical move: Žižek uses Hegel's critique of both Kant and Anselm to argue that being is not a simple addition to a concept but is itself internally conditioned by notional determinations — and that money serves as the exemplary object whose existence is constitutively dependent on collective symbolic belief, thereby anticipating the ideological analysis of the book.

     the irony in the fact that Kant talks about thalers, that is, about money, whose existence as money is not 'objective', but depends on 'notional' determinations

188. #188

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that ideology is not false consciousness about reality but reality itself insofar as it is sustained by non-knowledge; this is mapped onto Marx's "invention of the symptom" — the logic by which a particular element (e.g. labour-power, the proletariat) simultaneously belongs to and subverts a universal (freedom, equivalent exchange), with commodity fetishism explained as the structural displacement of fetishism from interpersonal domination to relations between things at the passage from feudalism to capitalism.

     commodity fetishism is 'a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things'.

189. #189

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that ideology cannot be fully grasped through discourse analysis (interpellation/symbolic identification) alone; its ultimate support is a pre-ideological kernel of enjoyment structured in fantasy, and therefore ideology critique must be supplemented by a logic of enjoyment that 'traverses' social fantasy and identifies with the symptom — demonstrated through the case of anti-Semitism, where 'the Jew' functions as a fetish embodying the structural impossibility of 'Society'.

     'Jew' is a fetish which simultaneously denies and embodies the structural impossibility of 'Society'

190. #190

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that ideology operates not at the level of false consciousness (knowledge) but as an unconscious fantasy structuring social reality itself — a "fetishistic inversion" that persists even under cynical distance — and supports this with a Lacanian account of belief as radically exterior and materialized in social practice rather than interior and psychological.

     their social reality itself, their activity, is guided by an illusion, by a fetishistic inversion.

191. #191

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the classical ideology-critique model (false consciousness, "they do not know it but they are doing it") is insufficient against cynical reason; the deeper, untouched level of ideology is that of ideological fantasy, which operates not in knowing but in doing—subjects are "fetishists in practice, not in theory"—so that the illusion is inscribed in social reality itself, not merely in consciousness.

     They are fetishists in practice, not in theory. What they 'do not know', what they misrecognize, is the fact that in their social reality itself, in their social activity - in the act of commodity exchange - they are guided by the fetishistic illusion.

192. #192

     The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

     INTRODUCTION

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Marx and Freud share a fundamental homology in their interpretative procedures: both move beyond unmasking hidden content (latent dream-thought / labour-value) to analyze the secret of the *form itself* (dream-work / commodity-form), and that this formal analysis—rather than hermeneutical content-extraction—is the true theoretical contribution common to both, grounding Žižek's project of reading Hegel through Lacan for a theory of ideology.

     In both cases the point is to avoid the properly fetishistic fascination of the 'content' supposedly hidden behind the form

193. #193

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.43

     Mladen Dolar > Hegel's Materialism

     Theoretical move: Dolar argues that Hegel's critique of substantiality constitutes a latent materialism: by demonstrating that matter is itself a product of thought (an abstraction, a *Gedankending*), Hegel does not dismiss matter but dissolves the very framework of substantiality—'substance is subject'—thereby opening the only path to a materialism worthy of its name, one that finds its psychoanalytic heir in the *objet petit a* as the subject's inscription into the Real rather than a correlate of consciousness.

     the materiality of the supra-sensuous, the spectral materiality as presented in the world univocally ruled by the commodity form

194. #194

     Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism · Russell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · p.104

     Elementary Marx > Dialectical Materialism > Notes

     Theoretical move: This notes section is non-substantive in theoretical terms — it is a bibliographic apparatus documenting sources, lecture provenance, and scholarly citations for a chapter on fetishism, materialism, Hegel, and Marx, with occasional quotations that gesture toward the chapter's arguments about dialectical materialism, negation/dissolution, and the Hegel-Marx relation.

     my essay 'Dialektična filozofija: O fetišizmu in materializmu pri Heglu in Marxu' ('Dialectical Philosophy: On Fetishism and Materialism in Hegel and Marx')

195. #195

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.53

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Parallax of the Critique of Political Economy

     Theoretical move: Žižek, following Karatani's Kantian reading of Marx, argues that the parallax gap between production and circulation is irreducible and constitutive of Capital's movement—value is generated "in itself" in production but actualized only retroactively through circulation (futur antérieur)—and that this structural antinomy cannot be resolved by privileging either side, making Capital's self-movement a "spurious infinity" rather than Hegelian dialectical closure.

     even the most sophisticated theorists of reification, those of commodity fetishism, from the young Lukács through Adorno up to Fredric Jameson, fall into this trap

196. #196

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.143

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > interlude 1

     Theoretical move: The passage reads two Henry James novels—*The Wings of the Dove* and *The Golden Bowl*—as ethical and libidinal allegories: in *Wings*, Densher's "moral masochism" (fake love for Milly's memory) constitutes the real betrayal, while in *Golden Bowl*, the cracked bowl functions as the signifier of the barred Other that structures intersubjective relations, and the incest motif encodes the link between capitalist brutality and familial protection/violation.

     his attitude toward the works of art he collects is that of possession, not of true sensitivity to their beauty

197. #197

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.173

     Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Toward a New Science of Appearances

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the Lacanian, Freudian, and Marxian "demystifications" share a common structure: they reveal not a hidden reality behind appearances but a split *within* appearance itself—between "the way things really appear to us" and "the way they appear to appear to us"—and that this ontological structure (paralleled in quantum physics) is more radical than any naturalist or perspectivist account of subjectivity.

     commodity fetishism, which designates a kind of proto-'ideology' inherent to the reality of the 'economic base' itself

198. #198

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.57

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Parallax of the Critique of Political Economy

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Marxian "parallax" consists in the irreducible, non-synthesisable gap between the logic of economy (commodity-form as socio-transcendental a priori) and the logic of politics (antagonism), such that the bracketing which produces each domain is not merely epistemological but inscribed in "real abstraction" — and that post-Marxist "pure politics" (Badiou, Rancière, etc.) mistakes by reducing economy to an ontic sphere while Karatani's Kantianism fails to go beyond a transcendental X that leaves the fetishism of Power intact.

     the table continues to be that common, every-day thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent.

199. #199

     The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.123

     The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > Too Much Life!

     Theoretical move: Žižek argues that shame, castration, and the "undead" lamella are not opposed but structurally co-produced: the noncastrated remainder (lamella/objet petit a) is not what escapes castration but precisely what castration generates as its own surplus, collapsing the distinction between lack and excess into a Möbius-strip parallax.

     Lacan's formula of the fetishist object is a above minus phi (castration)—objet petit a fills in (and simultaneously bears witness to) the gap of castration.

200. #200

     The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan · Todd McGowan · p.250

     29 > **20. Steven Spielberg's Search for the Father** > **21. D. W. Griffith's Suspense**

     Theoretical move: Hitchcockian suspense is structurally distinguished from Griffithian suspense by refusing to resolve desire through fantasy: rather than stabilizing desire via a fantasmatic resolution, Hitchcock divides desire between two antagonistic, logically opposed possibilities, thereby forcing a traumatic encounter with the impossible object and the antagonistic nature of desire itself.

     already perforated to facilitate the fetishistic cutting up of the body of the text

201. #201

     The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two · Alenka Zupančič · p.89

     <span id="page-33-0"></span>part i

     Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that sublimation is not a surrogate for drive-satisfaction but *is* drive-satisfaction, and that the Real is located in the interval between the object of satisfaction and satisfaction-as-object; collapsing this gap in either direction (fetishism or Don Juan's hyper-realization) generates the superego injunction to enjoy. She then pivots to Nietzsche's figure of the "middle" (noon/midday) as a non-synthetic beyond that parallels this Lacanian logic of constitutive duality.

     the danger of eliminating the gap in question by trying to inscribe 'satisfaction as object' in the 'object of satisfaction' (which could be one definition of fetishism, commodity fetishism included)

202. #202

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.60

     **Object Relations Psychoanalysis** > **The Other of the Other**

     Theoretical move: The passage assembles a keyword-style theoretical compendium covering four major Lacanian concepts — the Other of the Other, Orientalism, Phenomenology, and the Phallus — arguing above all that the Phallus is a paradoxical signifier of exception whose apparent mastery/phallic authority is illusory, dependent on a veil and collective obedience, and structurally tied to castration, lack, and the death drive.

     The exoticism of the other is the extension of the fetishism of the commodity

203. #203

     Theory Keywords · Various

     **Sublime**

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that while capitalism ostensibly operates under a logic of self-interest and utility, the commodity itself generates a paradoxical "capitalist sublime" that depends on a break from utility — thereby inverting Kant's sublime (which bridges self-transcendence to morality) into an immanent, fetishistic form that nonetheless captures subjects through the commodity's inutility.

     Every consumer and producer within capitalism falls victim to the sublimity of the commodity that derives from the commodity's inutility.

204. #204

     Theory Keywords · Various · p.31

     **Fantasy** > **Fetish**

     Theoretical move: The passage theorizes the fetish as a structural mechanism that enables subjects to simultaneously know and not-know about lack and castration, arguing that commodity fetishism and Freudian fetishistic disavowal are mutually reinforcing, and that the fetish's efficacy depends on its performative effect remaining opaque to the subject.

     A fetish can play the very constructive role of allowing us to cope with a harsh reality: fetishists are not dreamers lost in their own private worlds, they are thoroughgoing 'realists'

205. #205

     Theory Keywords · Various

     **Fantasy** > **Fetishistic Disavowal**

     Theoretical move: Žižek's concept of fetishistic disavowal is deployed to argue that capitalist ideology is uniquely powerful because it displaces belief onto commodities themselves, so that the cynical postmodern subject who disavows belief is nevertheless structurally caught in ideological capture - a move that links Marxist commodity fetishism to Lacanian logic of the Other as the site of belief.

     commodity fetishism...class domination did not simply disappear but rather returned in the disavowed mode of fetishistic relations between things

206. #206

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.196

     Žižek Responds! > [Hospitality, Hostility, and the “Real” Neighbor](#contents.xhtml_ch8)^{<a href="#8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_en8-1" id="8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_nr8-1">1</a>} > De-Racializing the Palestinians, or the Palestinians as Neighbors

     Theoretical move: The passage defends Žižek's concept of "Zionist anti-Semitism" against Chaouat's critique by arguing that it is Chaouat who performs an ideological splitting, and that Žižek's position is grounded not in anti-Semitism but in a universalist commitment to égaliberté — the claim that anti-Zionist Jews are themselves victimized by recycled anti-Semitic topoi.

     the bad Jew, like Judith Butler, who fetishizes diasporic Judaism and falsifies the history of Zionism

207. #207

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.222

     Žižek Responds! > [On Žižek’s Theory of the Subject](#contents.xhtml_ch9)

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Žižek's theory of subjectivity, while providing a powerful diagnosis of capitalist modernity through the lens of the death drive, constitutive negativity, and commodity fetishism, remains insufficiently concrete for emancipatory politics because it lacks an account of the determinate social forms of capitalism and a theory of how the incomplete, anxious subject can become a revolutionary agent — a gap that neither Lacan nor Marx alone can fill.

     his account remains tethered to the most speculative moment of Marx's exposition of capital, commodity fetishism.

208. #208

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.142

     Žižek Responds! > [Ideology Critique as an Existentialist Choice](#contents.xhtml_ch6) > The Ideology of Marx

     Theoretical move: The passage traces the history of ideology theory from Marx through Althusser to argue that neither Marx's "false consciousness" model nor Althusser's interpellation model can account for the unconscious dimensions of ideological investment—a gap that Žižek fills by recentering ideology theory on the desiring subject rather than the economic infrastructure.

     commodity fetishism hints at the way enjoyment, fantasy, and desire shape the social order. In commodity fetishism, the commodity presents itself and engages the consumer in such a way that they are distracted by the allure of the commodity

209. #209

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.217

     Žižek Responds! > [On Žižek’s Theory of the Subject](#contents.xhtml_ch9)

     Theoretical move: Bou Ali reconstructs Žižek's theory of the subject as a non-ontological point of negativity that is extimate to symbolic structure, correlative to the objet a as object-cause of desire, and grounded in the retroactive (Nachträglichkeit) constitution of the Real as cause—arguing further that this account of subjectivity is inseparable from Lacanian sexuation, read against both Hegelian dialectics and Kantian antinomies.

     in the Sublime Object of Ideology … he grounds his analysis in Marx's notion of commodity fetishism

210. #210

     Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.203

     Žižek Responds! > [Hospitality, Hostility, and the “Real” Neighbor](#contents.xhtml_ch8)^{<a href="#8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_en8-1" id="8_iek_and_derrida_hospitality_hostility_and_the_real_nei.xhtml_nr8-1">1</a>} > Žižek with Derrida

     Theoretical move: By threading Derrida's concept of autoimmunity through Žižek's critique of the refugee crisis, the passage argues that genuine political engagement requires acknowledging the constitutive non-coincidence of the self (autoimmunity), which simultaneously grounds the impossibility of pure identity/community and enables the global class solidarity that must replace both liberal humanitarianism and right-wing nativism.

     he does not want a toothless, depoliticized respect of the other that only fetishizes the racialized refugees and their way of life.

211. #211

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.137

     [CAPITALISM’S LACK AND ITS DISCONTENTS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_4) > <span id="chapter4.xhtml_pg_137" aria-label="137" role="doc-pagebreak"></span>**THE EMPTY SUBJECT**

     Theoretical move: Capitalism's privileging of the general equivalent structurally empties out subject identity, reducing every particular to an interchangeable commodity form; this systemic annihilation of identity is not a contingent feature but the core logic of capitalism, which simultaneously liberates subjects from traditional mythic identity while rendering any chosen identity alien, contingent, and worthless.

     The subject becomes itself nothing but the empty commodity form… Money is the vehicle through which particulars perpetuate the capitalist structuring principle.

212. #212

     Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.125

     [CAPITALISM’S LACK AND ITS DISCONTENTS](#contents.xhtml_toc1_4) > **A NEW FORM OF OBEDIENCE**

     Theoretical move: McGowan argues that capitalism inaugurates a historically novel form of obedience in which the structuring principle reproduces itself unconsciously through subjects' pursuit of private particular interest, making self-deception not merely useful but structurally necessary—and thereby rendering insistence on particularity the new mode of conformism rather than resistance.

     When he discusses commodity fetishism, he indicates the discrepancy between how people treat the commodity and how it appears to them.

213. #213

     Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.56

     **STRANGE BEDFELLOWS** > **42** Strange bedfellows

     Theoretical move: The passage argues that Freud's revolutionary contribution was not pansexualism but the discovery of a constitutive negativity/lack at the heart of human sexuality—a structural incompleteness that distinguishes the drive from instinct—and contextualizes this within the historical collaboration and theoretical divergence between Freud and Hirschfeld over the origins and nature of sexuality.

     Hirschfeld broke new ground by proposing that transvestism was a separate sexual variation differing from fetishism and homosexuality.

214. #214

     Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.61

     **CHANGING SEX, CHANGING PSYCHOANALYSIS** > **"Not in the least pathological"**

     Theoretical move: Through a detailed reading of Gutheil's case of Elsa B., Gherovici demonstrates how early post-Freudian psychoanalysis reduced gender variance to fetishism, penis envy, and the castration complex—thereby subordinating clinical nuance to a normative, heterosexist medical model—while simultaneously showing that Elsa's own framing of her condition anticipates a non-pathological, subject-centred understanding of trans identity.

     Stekel's subtitle, The Phenomenon of Fetishism in Relation to Sex, makes explicit a wish to systematize the structure of all sexual deviations as a single entity under the model of fetishism.

215. #215

     What Is Sex? · Alenka Zupančič · p.156

     From Adam's Navel to Dream's Navel > Chapter 3

     Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/endnotes section (Chapter 3 footnotes) containing bibliographic references and brief theoretical glosses; it is not a substantive theoretical argument in its own right.

     This, of course, is also what is at stake in fetishism.

216. #216

     Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? · Mark Fisher

     What if you held a protest and everyone came?

     Theoretical move: Capitalist realism is not undermined by anti-capitalism but structurally sustained by it: through fetishistic disavowal and interpassivity, ideological fantasy operates at the level of unconscious behavior rather than explicit belief, so that gestural anti-capitalism (Hollywood films, Live 8, Product Red) performs critique on our behalf while leaving capitalist relations intact.

     we are able to fetishize money in our actions only because we have already taken an ironic distance towards money in our heads.