Feminizing the Fetish: Psychoanalysis and Narrative Obsession in Turn-of-the Century France

by Emily Apter

Shoes, gloves, umbrellas, cigars that are not just objects—the topic of fetishism seems both bizarre and inevitable. In this venturesome and provocative book, Emily Apter offers a fresh account of the complex relationship between representation and sexual obsession in turn-of-the-century French culture. Analyzing works by authors in the naturalist and realist traditions as well as making use of documents from a contemporary medical archive, she considers fetishism as a cultural artifact and as a subgenre of realist fiction. Apter traces the web of connections among fin-de-siècle representations of perversion, the fiction of pathology, and the literary case history. She explores in particular the theme of "female fetishism" in the context of the feminine culture of mourning, collecting, and dressing.

294 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 15, 2018

About the author

Emily Apter is Professor of Comparative Literature and French at New York University. Her published works include The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature and Continental Drift: From National Characters to Subjects.

Reviews

[samantha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Emily S. Apter and William. Pietz, Fetishism as Cultural Discourse (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1993).
Emily S. Apter, Feminizing the Fetish: Psychoanalysis and Narrative Obsession in Turn-of-the Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).
• Preface
o The interdisciplinary approaches that I employ to look at the topic of fetishism in this book-narratological, New Historical, hermeneutical, feminist, and psychoanalytical-have often proved difficult to reconcile.
o I began with an interest in that fin-de-siecle ethos of morbid sexual obsession permeating realist narrative and the early history of psychiatry alike, and ended with a constellation of abstract analytical and political concerns: the poetics of reification and specularity, the relation between theories of the gaze and the textual representation of scopophilia ("love of looking"), the gendering of perversion, the question of how to critique the history of feminist social constructionism without relinquishing the subtleties of masquerade, travesty, and mystification.
o Fetishism to most people connotes a monothematic if "kinky" or unorthodox subject. x
o Though I am intrigued by the aesthetics of erotic symbolism, displacement, substitution, and the cutting or splitting of anatomical totalities (le corps morcele) implicit in localized fixations, I never intended to write a book organized around variety-show fetishes.
o What interested me more than a catalog of motifs was the sensibility infusing historic bourgeois phantasms, subterranean longings, and gender performances.
o I have sought to emphasize a broader, less gender-restricted conception of partial ob ject substitutionism in sexuality, thereby culturally and historically relativizing those all-purpose referents, the surrogate male phallus and the phallic mother.
o “reading of the fetishism of reading”
o Freud marched [perversions] by his audience in deliberate order: led by homosexuals, coprophiliacs, fetishists, necrophiliacs-all those, that is, in whom the sexual object had undergone some change-his grotesque cortege was completed by exhibitionists, sadists, and their counterparts, the masochists-those in whom the sexual aim had been altered. But the marching order seems less important than the frieze itself as a sign of the power of the visual in Freud's method.
• 1. Fetishism in Theory: Marx, Freud, Baudrillard
o MARX
 Karl Marx spoke of an object's hidden value-its fetish character-as a "secret" 1
 “socioeconomic hieroglyphic and opaque verbal sign” 1
o FREUD
 "affective ambivalence"
 “the fetish as spurious, surrogate” 4
o BAUDRILLARD
 audrillard here identifies the uncanny retroactivity of fetishism as a theory, noting its strange ability to hex the user through the haunting inevitability of a "deconstructive turn."
o SUMMARY OTHER HISTORY 3-
 In the twentieth century, I suggest, the concept of fetishism (despite "damaging" criticism) has gone from being negatively to positively valorized in a number of ways. If Kant, Marx, and Freud gave it infelicitous ascriptions, then Georges Bataille and fellow members of the College de Sociologie, intent on shattering the complacencies of bourgeois civilization, recuperated fetishism as a form of transgressive idolatry.
 Caught between specular absences, Freud's fetishist seems to operate entirely in the realm of the simulacrum, generating a copy or surrogate phallus for an original that never was there in the first place. The Lacanian reformulation of this paradigm pictures the fetishist-subject caught between "having" and "being" a maternal phallus that he or she can ultimately never possess, thus vacillating between illusory mastery on the one hand, and phantasms of lack or the permanently barred subject position on the other.
o EARLY PATHOLOGIZATIONS
 In the field of medical speculation on literary examples, the eighteenth century, widely re9arded as the last age of true libertinage, held a privileged place. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Retif de la Bretonne, and later the Marquis de Sade consistently surfaced as the prototypes for nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century sexology. From Alfred Binet's interpretation of Rousseau's masochistic tendencies in his article "Le Fetichisme dans l'amour" ( 1 887) to the reflections of the doctors Avalon and Charpentier in "Retif de la Bretonne fetichiste" ( 1 9 1 2), through to Havelock Ellis's discussions of "retifisme" qua foot fetishism in his famous Studies on the Psychology of Sex ( 1 936) and Maurice Heine's analyses of de Sade's newly discovered oeuvre, readings of eighteenth-century literary texts were legion
 Binet, Ebing
 Synechdoche in fetishistic récit
• Conclusion
o I have sought to uncover ways in which male writers created a kind of fetishistic fiction pegged on simulations of a woman's consciousness. 244
o Exploring epiphenomena distilled from a fin-de-siecle culture of femininity-bibelot-collecting, sartorial narcissism, religious selfstigmatization, maternal melancholia, and the sadomasochistic phantasms surrounding maid service-I examined the ways in which forms of female fetishism unrecognized as such by psychoanalysis intersected with male fetishizations of femininity.
o THESIS: By emphasizing the degree to which male authors of this period depended on fetishistic fictions of femininity I have tried to feminize the fetish itself, de-monumentalizing the fiction of castration anxiety predominant even today, locating a kind of female phallus in the sartorial superego, and dislodging (if ever so slightly) gendered canon alignments.

[S.D. Curran · Rating 3 out of 5]

Long and dry, but informative

This reads like someone’s dissertation - I know that because I wrote one. This book traces the history of fetishism (not just latex and other crap we see today), with a focus on 19th century literature. The fetish of acquiring things which have some sexual under or overtone, is still alive and well today.

[Luba Senkiw · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful Essay

This book really elucidated the misogyny that existed in the works of Freud, Derrida, Lacan, etc. What a wonderful expose!