ABSTRACT
Shoplifting is a fetishist’s crime. When those who can afford to pay submit to the compulsion to steal from a store, they have fallen under the spell of the object, believing that it holds out the promise of a happiness that is both below and beyond price. Both fetishism and shoplifting are ways of casting value differently, as both the fetishist and the shoplifter proclaim that the object’s value is a secret known only to themselves. Both involve a redetermination of the relations between subjects and objects, raising questions about how a thing comes to be legitimately one’s own. Psychoanalysis conceives of kleptomania as a form of female fetishism: The kleptomaniac pockets fascinating objects to compensate for a gap within herself she both knows and doesn’t know is there. 1 And, as cultural critics have come to rehabilitate “perversions” as symptoms of culture rather than of pathology, as ways of knowing rather than as mistakes, kleptomania has borrowed some of the glamour with which the concept of fetishism has recently been invested. For Leslie Camhi, for example, writing about the literature of the late nineteenth-century department store, female kleptomania is a critical activity, stealing the cover off the fraud of femininity itself:
It is an entire social order that the female kleptomaniac calls into question by her actions. It is, perhaps, this very gamble with an entire social identity that compels her, the unconscious need to establish the fraudulence of inherited wealth and social position.… Thus the difference between buying and stealing, or between normal women and thieves, becomes increasingly attenuated, because the commodities that are bought or stolen are used to produce and maintain the permanent fraud of feminine sexuality, the deception of the feminine masquerade.… Femininity is always already stolen, a dissimulated mask, veil, or fiction of difference that functions, like fetishism, through the substitutional logic of the same.
(1993: 38–39)