ABSTRACT
It is common to treat the various ideas grouped under the word “fetishism” as fundamentally concerned with material objects. Thus William Pietz begins his history of the concept by distinguishing the fetish in its “irreducible materiality” from the idol, which is the iconic image of some immaterial original (1985: 7). But the allure that the supposed fetish holds for some and the anxiety it provokes in others have less to do with objects than with the problems that objects pose for subjects. For example, Marx’s (1967) commodity fetish is not simply a way of misunderstanding goods but a way humans misunderstand themselves. In the process of attributing life to things, they lose some of their own humanity and come to treat themselves as objects in turn.
