ABSTRACT

With this chapter comes the end of our particular history of the fetish. At the beginning of this book the fetish was a remainder, nothing more than a residue left behind by the operation of critique at the dawn of modernity. Critique, it was suggested early on, should be understood as a way of counting: it takes into account certain things and not others, even if the latter are included in the set. For instance, it discounts the fetish as archaic or obscure. The same goes for those who maintain an engaged subjective stance and make common cause with the fetish. They are all adjudicated against as archaic, and relocated to ‘less enlightened’ eras, ripe for intervention and developmental transformation. More precisely, as Mladen Dolar says (1991), they become unplaceable.