Translator’s Note

Introduction

1 The horseshoe

2 Corrupt fetishism: a nineteenth-century invention

3 How to philosophise with a hammer

4 The contradictions of modernity

5 Historical development

6 The status of theory

7 Fetishism, ethnology, cultural studies

8 A book is never alone

9 Acknowledgements

I Now That’s Some Thing – An Introduction to the World of Things

1 The Bartelby effect

2 “The rebellion of things”

3 “The Cares of a Family Man”

4 “Where a thing ends and where it begins”

5 Phenomenology of things

5.1 Edmund Husserl

5.2 Martin Heidegger

6 Humans – things – collectives

6.1 Bruno Latour’s approach

6.2 Who acts?

6.3 Articulated things

6.4 Fetish – factum – factish

7 Lifeworld and material culture

7.1 “That the things have us, and that it is not we who have the things”

7.2 The evolution of functional objects?

8 The order of things

8.1 Function

8.2 Meaning

8.3 Aesthetics

8.4 Abundance

8.5 Dedifferentiation

8.5.1 Last things

8.5.2 Melancholy and asceticism

8.5.3 Chaos – chora – rubbish

9 On the disappearance of things

9.1 “Pseudoreality Prevails”

9.2 Everything disappears

9.3 Around 1900: fragmentation and electricity

9.4 Speed

9.5 “Super-American city”

9.6 Digital networks

II Fetishism in Religion and Ethnography

1 Forbidden images and anti-idolatry

1.1 Biblical traditions

1.2 The Church Fathers

1.3 Thomas Aquinas and Nicholas of Cusa

2 Relics and statues: magical Christian images

2.1 The relic’s spell

2.2 The cult of images and effigies

3 The ethnographic prehistory of fetishism

4 The magical thingly quality of fetishes

5 Concepts of fetishism in the Enlightenment and the early nineteenth century

5.1 Charles de Brosses: writing-desk inventions

5.2 Hermann Andreas Pistorius: Protestant reactions

5.3 Philipp Christian Reinhard: embodiment and representation

5.4 Christoph Meiners: disorder and classification

5.5 Overview of the philosophers

5.6 Auguste Comte: the primal positivity of fetishism

6 On the path to ethnology

6.1 Max Müller: the condemnation of fetishism

6.2 Theodor Waitz: the confused worship of images

6.3 Edward B. Tylor: animism and fetishism

6.4 Adolf Bastian: colonialism and self-reflection

6.5 Fritz Schultze: trifles of the primitive mind

7 Magic and modernity

7.1 Marcel Mauss: the theory of magic

7.2 Aby Warburg: a theory of modernity in memory of its collapse

8 Nail fetish pilgrimage: magic and politics

9 Political idolatry

9.1 Fetishes, idols, power

9.2 The cult of Stalin und Stalinist architecture

9.3 Stalin the idol

9.4 Charismatic leadership

9.5 The Palace of the Soviets

III Commodity Fetishism

1 Introduction

2 The exchange of gifts and sacred things (Marcel Mauss, Maurice Godelier)

3 Inalienable things

4 The discovery of commodity fetishism in Karl Marx

4.1 Mystifications of criticism?

4.2 The slow discovery of fetishism in Marx

4.3 From Marx’s early writings to Capital

4.4 The fetishism of the commodity and its secret

4.5 The fetishisation of fetishism in Marx

4.6 Beyond Marx

5 Reification and the culture industry

6 Consumer culture and fetishism

6 Inalienable things: collections, museums, memory

IV Fetishism, Sexuality and Psychoanalysis

1 Sexology and its mythical fathers

2 Alfred Binet: the discovery

3 Richard Krafft-Ebing: collections of fetishists

4 Excursus on the rhetorical form of fetishism

5 Sigmund Freud: winding paths to fetishism

6 Fetishism as metapsychological concept

7 Wilhelm Stekel: theatricality and religion

8 After Freud: the differentiation of fetishism

8.1 Melanie Klein: presymbolic origins

8.2 Jacques Lacan and the phallus – with an excursus on primordial murder

8.3 Joan Riviere: womanliness as masquerade

8.4 Donald W. Winnicott and his followers

8.5 M. Masud R. Khan: alienation as perversion

8.6 Psychoanalysis of fetishism – fetishes of psychoanalysis

9 Cultural developments and feminist discoveries

9.1 The failures of psychoanalysis

9.2 She has, she bears, she is the fetish – but whose? – Marcia Ian

9.3 Intellectual fetishes – fetishes of intellectualism

9.4 Feminism and the criticism of fetishism

9.5 Food fetishism

9.6 Fashion and fetishism

9.7 Film and fetishism

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index