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The article sheds light on Gramsci's use of the term fetishism. Despite not being as present and pervasive within the Prison Notebooks as other concepts, more deeply rooted in Gramscian scholarship (such as hegemony and historic bloc), fetishism is not as marginal in Gramsci's reflection as it is usually believed. Linking his understanding of the term to the one developed by Marx and by the later unorthodox Marxist scholarship, I shall argue that fetishism can be seen as a key component of Gramsci's theory of revolution or, better, of a theory of the failure of the revolutionary process. For this reason, the article will also link Gramsci's occasional reference to fetishism to his use of more developed concepts such as common sense, hegemony and passive revolution. Fetishistic views of reality, in Gramsci, appear as facilitating the conservation of the status quo, while the re-acquisition of individual and collective responsibility that comes along with de-fetishising practices is the necessary component of any revolutionary project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the spring and summer of 1906, while visiting the rural village of Gósol in the Spanish Pyrenees, Picasso executed his first woodcut, made two sculptures out of boxwood, and began to focus on the topoi of wood and the forest as avatars of primal matter and of that which lies beyond civilization. In a subsequent series of paintings, he used wooden supports for images that depict male and female heads that look as if they had been chiseled out of wood. Others represent nude figures in forest settings, with explicitly sexual gestures and poses connoting a range of attitudes. These little studied works provide an optic into Picasso's early exploration of the emergence of sexual identity as an inner psychic state, but one whose signs can be read through the body. Later, responding to the proliferation of cheap, industrially produced materials, including trompe l'oeil woodgrain wallpaper, Picasso began to treat woodgrain as a mere surrogate, one that marks its distance from actual wood through a variety of painterly and mechanical effects. No longer associated with "primitive" authenticity and the primordial forces of the forest, woodgrain now appears as a false sign open to conceptual play and metamorphosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discussions on the Anthropocene as the geology of mankind imply the question whether globalized technology such as energy technologies or A.I. ought to be first and foremost conceptualized as a strategy of the human in relation to nature or as a strategy of some humans over others. I argue that both positions are mirrored in the philosophy and sociology of technology through the concepts of technology as an extension and as a fetish. The extension concept understands technology as an extension of the human body and its capabilities, resulting in a local ‘inward’ perspective. The fetish concept offers a contrary ‘outward’ perspective by drawing attention to the global socio-material context of modern technology. Despite their differences, I argue that both concepts share an underlying operation principle of technology as functional simplification. Technology always involves a functional simplification of physical as well as social causality. Sociologists and philosophers of technology would do well not to give primacy to the former as it leads to the belief in technology as a universal tool that neglects how technology is not embedded in but consists of (unequal) social arrangements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of International Journal of Political Philosophy / Las Torres de Lucca is the property of Revista Las Torres de Lucca. Facultad de Filosofia, Ciudad Universitaria and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista Philósophos is the property of Revista Philosophos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper is based on an interpretation of the concept of phantasmagoria in Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project according to which its meaning implies an extension of Marx's understanding of ideology that makes it encompass modern society's field of ideas, the materiality of its cultural productions, and its forms of experience in their reciprocal interaction. On this basis, and taking into account the dreamlike component that Benjamin attributes to the phantasmagorical, the paper analyses what he calls the phantasmagorias of space, linked to the figure of the flâneur, and the phantasmagorias of time, that Benjamin associates with the character of the gambler. Given the correspondence that he also establishes between these two kinds of phantasmagoria, a hermeneutical hypothesis is proposed to explain their correlation, in addition to the significance that this acquires in the Arcades Project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a statement from an anthropological lens in the context of sanitary exceptionality under an institutional and citizenship crisis. It refers to a young population of Haitian residents with difficulties in exercising their right to a city inside the principles of sustainability, democracy, equity, and social justice who are integrated in a subaltern way. We revised some of the actions performed by the Chilean authorities in 2020 during the pandemic analyzing how they are affected from the perspective of their civil rights, focusing on informality, work, access to a living place, and the evaluation of the roots of the migratory project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Pedophilia is a deviant sexual interest subject to more public stigma and punitive attitudes than others. Pedophilia has received a disproportionate amount of scholarly attention in comparison to other deviant sexual interests. To address this, the present study offers a comparison of the public stigma and punitive attitudes associated with pedophilia, fetishism, and hypersexuality. Methods: Recruited in Australia, one-hundred and twelve individuals participated in an anonymous online survey. Stigmatising and punitive attitudes toward pedophilia, fetishism, and hypersexuality were assessed via sub-scales of perceived dangerousness, deviance, intentionality, and punitive attitudes. Results: Participants held harsher punitive attitudes toward people with pedophilia and thought them to be more deviant and dangerous than people with fetishism and hypersexuality. Participants perceived hypersexuality to be more dangerous and deviant than fetishism. No consistent combination of perceived dangerousness, deviance, and intentionality predicted punitive attitudes toward all conditions. Rather, combinations of punitive attitude predictors were unique across conditions. Conclusions: This research articulates the unparalleled public stigma and punitive attitudes faced by people with pedophilia, compared to people with fetishism and hypersexuality. Findings which suggest that public stigma is stronger for hypersexuality than it is for fetishism are relatively novel, as are the observed predictors of punitive attitudes toward each condition. Knowledge produced by this study contributes to an improved conceptualisation of how the public views individuals who experience deviant sexual interests.

The purpose of this essay is to study Walter Benjamin's reflections on the phenomenon of fashion in the Arcades Project in order to clarify the dialectical nature that he observes in it. To this end, I first examine the important role of fashion, thanks to its valorisation of novelty, in capitalism's tendency towards the commodification of all things and in the development of the commodity cult. In connection with these aspects, I analyse how this social phenomenon contributes to the emergence of the view of history distinctive of capitalist society, linked to an ideal of progress that masks its social statism. Finally, an interpretation is offered of the political significance that Benjamin attaches to fashion both in terms of its relation to the task of the materialist historian and the utopian side that this phenomenon would include. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Pedophilia is a deviant sexual interest subject to more public stigma and punitive attitudes than others. Pedophilia has received a disproportionate amount of scholarly attention in comparison to other deviant sexual interests. To address this, the present study offers a comparison of the public stigma and punitive attitudes associated with pedophilia, fetishism, and hypersexuality. Methods: Recruited in Australia, one-hundred and twelve individuals participated in an anonymous online survey. Stigmatising and punitive attitudes toward pedophilia, fetishism, and hypersexuality were assessed via sub-scales of perceived dangerousness, deviance, intentionality, and punitive attitudes. Results: Participants held harsher punitive attitudes toward people with pedophilia and thought them to be more deviant and dangerous than people with fetishism and hypersexuality. Participants perceived hypersexuality to be more dangerous and deviant than fetishism. No consistent combination of perceived dangerousness, deviance, and intentionality predicted punitive attitudes toward all conditions. Rather, combinations of punitive attitude predictors were unique across conditions. Conclusions: This research articulates the unparalleled public stigma and punitive attitudes faced by people with pedophilia, compared to people with fetishism and hypersexuality. Findings which suggest that public stigma is stronger for hypersexuality than it is for fetishism are relatively novel, as are the observed predictors of punitive attitudes toward each condition. Knowledge produced by this study contributes to an improved conceptualisation of how the public views individuals who experience deviant sexual interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Intersecoes: Revista de Estudios Interdisciplinares is the property of Editora da Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (EdUERJ) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista Eleuthera is the property of Universidad de Caldas and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this paper, we propose to account for the blame addressed to vaccine skeptics and “anti-vax” (VS and AV) by considering their attitude as the result of the psychological mechanism of denial, understood in a psychodynamic manner. To that effect, we draw on a secondary account of our clinical experience in two hospital units (psychiatry and intensive care unit), and on openly available media material. First, we lay out how VS and AV can be understood as the result from fetishist risk denial, a specific psychological transaction with an object by which VS and AV people feel intimately protected; this object is viewed as so powerful that its protection makes the vaccine appear irrelevant. Second, we show how this mechanism can explain the specific content of the blame frequently addressed to VS and AV, who are reproached with being selfish by vaccinated people and caregivers. We contend that, contrary to common belief, they are thus blamed because they force others (and especially caregivers) to compensate their lack of self-protection and preservation, which derives from their exclusive relation to an almighty object. While such a relation accounts for the unwillingness to consider vaccination, it also explains the harshness of the blame voiced by caregivers, who feel helpless in most situations as they cannot effectively force VS and AV to take care of themselves and others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Material Religion studies religion through its material aspects such as food and foodways, clothing, architecture, images, postures, etc. everything that is not discursive. Dealing with body and objects, it breaks with Eurocentric methodologies about religion based on texts only. Little explored in the Brazilian academia, it arouses many doubts, since it is not only a matter of mentioning and describing the usage of objects and body practices in religions, neither means to analyze its symbolisms, but rather, it is a matter of reviewing categories like body, things, fetishism, idolatry, animism, concepts used along history to diminish religiosities in the colonial contexts. This paper aims to clarify what Material Religion is and to show how to give voice to nonwestern epistemologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Collectivus. Revista de Ciencias Sociales is the property of Universidad del Atlantico and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper explores the politics of fetishism in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. It contends that the characters in Coetzee’s novel appear to consciously suspend the danger that is often associated with strangers. They willingly interact with those in their neighborhoods and consciously suppress the warnings of mishaps or misfortune that such strange encounters may entail. This study is a textual analysis of the selected text to examine all the encounters, specifically those between Lucy and the natives, as well as those of Bev Shaw with David Lurie. In the post-colonial period, such abnormal behavior notably reveals a distinct feature of fetishism among the colonizer and the colonized, as it does in Coetzee’s characters. In order to achieve this objective, Coetzee’s novel is the primary text, while Sara Ahmed’s concepts of “Stranger Fetishism” and “Encounters” serve as a theoretical framework for this investigation. The objective of this research is to analyze the ambiguities of characters in the novel, such as Lucy’s passive response to her rape and Bev’s ironic behavior with David. Eventually, the discussion leads to the unfolding of their personal intents, which are deliberately kept undercover to satisfy their personal interests. This research intervenes in the current scholarship on postcolonial studies by bringing fresh reading perspectives on Coetzee’s text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Polyembolokoilamania is a condition seen in a medical or surgical emergencies where the person, sometimes repetitively, inserts various foreign bodies through body orifices or skin to obtain gratification often associated with background psychiatric diagnoses. We present three cases where one patient with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) presented with urethral polyembolokoilamania, one with Excoriation disorder presented with multiple pin-piercing behavior through the skin and one case of OCD presented with anal polyembolokoilamania. Treatment of the underlying Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders curbed such behaviors successfully in all three cases emphasizing the importance of treating background psychiatric disorders in such conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is organized in three sections. In the first section, we discuss the relevance of comparative psychology to clinical issues by relating resistance to extinction to psychological disorders involving anxiety, addiction, and fetishism. In the second section, we review areas of comparative psychology that deal in one way or another with the general problem of treating an insignificant event as it were significant. We describe research on supernormal stimuli, evaluative conditioning, acquired drives, incentive sensitization, and consummatory response theory. In the third section of the paper, we present new research on second-order sexual conditioning of male Japanese quail related to the consummatory response theory. First-order conditioning was conducted by pairing the presentation of a terrycloth object (CS1 or conditioned stimulus 1) with copulation with a female (the US or unconditioned stimulus). The male quail came to approach the terrycloth object during the first-order conditioning phase. In addition, about half of the quail also showed conditioned consummatory responses directed towards the terrycloth object. During the second-order conditioning phase, the terrycloth object was used to condition responding to a light (CS2) in the absence of further exposures to the unconditioned stimulus. Birds that showed conditioned consummatory behavior towards CS1 persisted in this behavior during the second-order phase and showed successful second-order conditioning of the light. In contrast, birds that failed to develop conditioned consummatory responses to CS1 showed rapid extinction and minimal second-order conditioning. The implications of these finding for learning theory and for psychopathology are discussed.

In this paper, we propose to account for the blame addressed to vaccine skeptics and “anti-vax” (VS and AV) by considering their attitude as the result of the psychological mechanism of denial, understood in a psychodynamic manner. To that effect, we draw on a secondary account of our clinical experience in two hospital units (psychiatry and intensive care unit), and on openly available media material. First, we lay out how VS and AV can be understood as the result from fetishist risk denial, a specific psychological transaction with an object by which VS and AV people feel intimately protected; this object is viewed as so powerful that its protection makes the vaccine appear irrelevant. Second, we show how this mechanism can explain the specific content of the blame frequently addressed to VS and AV, who are reproached with being selfish by vaccinated people and caregivers. We contend that, contrary to common belief, they are thus blamed because they force others (and especially caregivers) to compensate their lack of self-protection and preservation, which derives from their exclusive relation to an almighty object. While such a relation accounts for the unwillingness to consider vaccination, it also explains the harshness of the blame voiced by caregivers, who feel helpless in most situations as they cannot effectively force VS and AV to take care of themselves and others.

This paper explores the politics of fetishism in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. It contends that the characters in Coetzee’s novel appear to consciously suspend the danger that is often associated with strangers. They willingly interact with those in their neighborhoods and consciously suppress the warnings of mishaps or misfortune that such strange encounters may entail. This study is a textual analysis of the selected text to examine all the encounters, specifically those between Lucy and the natives, as well as those of Bev Shaw with David Lurie. In the post-colonial period, such abnormal behavior notably reveals a distinct feature of fetishism among the colonizer and the colonized, as it does in Coetzee’s characters. In order to achieve this objective, Coetzee’s novel is the primary text, while Sara Ahmed’s concepts of “Stranger Fetishism” and “Encounters” serve as a theoretical framework for this investigation. The objective of this research is to analyze the ambiguities of characters in the novel, such as Lucy’s passive response to her rape and Bev’s ironic behavior with David. Eventually, the discussion leads to the unfolding of their personal intents, which are deliberately kept undercover to satisfy their personal interests. This research intervenes in the current scholarship on postcolonial studies by bringing fresh reading perspectives on Coetzee’s text.

The essay analyses the social and aesthetic meanings of the intérieur in reference to Tolstoy’s short novel The Death of Ivan Il’ič. Relying on Walter Benjamin’s considerations on the bourgeois intérieur, the essay interprets the indissoluble link between the world of the inanimate (object) and the fetishization processes of the social body. This analysis briefly integrates two films, The Irony of Fate and Loveless, which revisit the legacy of Tolstoy’s story, showing the dialectic between home and house as its decisive paradigm.

Objectives: With this research, we aimed to assess the level of fetishism in Romania, to explore the gender and sexual orientation differences and to inspect its relationship with sexual satisfaction and well-being. Methods: This study analyses data from 525 participants from the non-clinical population. Results: The analyses showed that some levels of fetishism are present in almost 70 % of the sample, that queer participants report higher scores and that it does not impact sexual satisfaction and well-being. Conclusion: These findings can be used for a better understanding of fetishism and its impact by both clinicians and individuals with fetishes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The object of this article are the analyses of the phenomenon of social integration of the proletariat, carried out by Erich Fromm and Max Horkheimer in the 1930s. Besides texts by both authors, the article resorts as well to empirical research conducted in the beginning of the decade within the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. More specifically, the study on "character structure" of German workers (coordinated by Erich Fromm) is analyzed, being also considered the main results of the studies that had as their objects changes in sexuality and in the authority structure of European family at the time. The article shows how Horkheimer made use of central concepts of Marx's thought when examining the topics of those studies, resulting in a perspective capable of apprehending ongoing social changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cinema is one of the tools that republish and establish definitions of gender in society. So it can be assumed that the filmmaker can subvert and conceal these concepts in this way. Chantal Ackerman uses arrangements to consult with feminists and the dominant elite to expose hidden ideological contradictions. It seems permissible for the characters in the film to be challenging the traditional characters and so selecting the most special posts in these fields, by accepting many different norms for women. It is assumed that he wants to show in his works, by the reflecting women in the field of work, family and society, how affect the ideology and discourse of gender the formation of attitudes and perceptions of individuals, its relations and social interactions.This is manifested in the content of these films, feminist theory in postmodern, feminist literature, such as Laura Malloy will be used, and who believes the birth of creativity. There is always a way to change the code, which has become power. These images prove cinematically that the domestic lives of women is an artistic thing. In other words the private lives of women are being destroyed by the forces of history as much as they are living in the political arena. Besides that, unquestioning, unchallenged, and irreversible pressure on women in family roles, such as in prison, is social stupidity. And eventually leads to destruction. This is the kind of violence that can lead to more violence.

Abstract: This study attempts to reveal the concept of commodity fetishism, with its distinctly postmodern concern of body and beauty, as reflected in Louis de Berniéres’s novel Birds Without Wings. In his work, Berniéres tries to emphasise the material exorbitance of the body and reconsiders some master concepts of Marxist and Freudian discourse, such as fetish and commodity, with reference to use-value and exchange-value of the body and beauty. This study argues that Louis de Berniéres’s novel Birds Without Wings departs from both Marxist and Freudian representation of fetishism, and exhibits instead the social and discursive practices that encourage the fetishisation of objects, as well as the postmodern preoccupation with commodity-body-sign through the lenses of Jean Baudrillard. Louis de Bernières’s characters imagine that they can determine their own value in the world, as they are modern men, but they inevitably come to acknowledge that, as a result of modernity, their body and identity become enmeshed as signs in a symbolic exchange, their value being established by outer phenomena and not by themselves. In their plight for their own authority, these characters see only the annihilation of their assertions, since they become objectified in the political economy of signs, representing only symbolic or static beings whose worth is determined in the exchange process. Öz: Bu çalışma meta fetişizmini ve onunla belirgin bir şekilde bağlantılı olan postmodern beden ve güzellik kavramlarını Louis de Berniéres’nin Kanatsız Kuşlar isimli romanında yansıtıldığı şekliyle ortaya koymaya çalışır. Berniéres eserinde bedenin materyalist aşırılığını vurgulamaya çalışır ve Marksist ve Freudcu söylemdeki fetiş ve meta gibi bazı ana kavramları bedenin ve güzelliğin kullanım değeri ve değişim değeri kavramlarına referansta bulunarak yeniden değerlendirir. Bu çalışma Louis de Berniéres’nin Kanatsız Kuşlar romanının fetişizmin yansıtılması açısından hem Markist hem de Freudcu yansımadan ayrıldığını ve onun yerine Jean Baudrillard’ın bakış açısıyla meta-beden-işaret kavramlarıyla takıntılı postmodern yaklaşımla beraber eşyaların fetişleştirilmesini destekleyen sosyal ve söylemsel uygulamaları sergilediğini savunur. Louis de Berniéres’nin karakterleri, modern insanlar olarak bu dünyadaki değerlerini kendileri belirleyebileceklerini hayal ederler ancak modernitenin bir sonucu olarak bedenlerinin ve kimliklerinin sembolik değişimde işaret tuzağına düşmesi, değerlerinin kendileri tarafından değil dış etkenler tarafından belirlenmesi durumunu nihayetinde kabullenmek durumunda kalırlar. Kendi hakimiyetlerini ifade etme çabalarında, işaretlerin politik ekonomisinde nesneleştirildikleri yani değişim sürecinde değerleri yalnızca sembolik ve sabit olarak yansıtıldığı için sadece tezlerinin yok olduğunu görürler.

Sohn-Rethel always insisted on the necessity of solving the conflict between the use of dialectic in the social sciences and the use of a logic of exclusion in the natural sciences. This article reconstructs the way in which modern physics since 1900 has eliminated the categorial divorces that characterized classical physics and, according to Sohn-Rethel, reflected the binary logic of private property in commodity-producing societies. Nature, as hypothesized by the natural sciences, turns out to be a fetish.

In her essay, “After de Brosses” (2017), Rosalind C. Morris briefly considers the historical importance of the concept of the fetish on the relatively recent movements of new materialism, but she does not engage with Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology. This essay addresses this gap and focuses on the influence of the fetish on Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology by focusing on Graham Harman’s conception of objects and Quentin Meillassoux’s theory of arche-fossils. In short, I am offering a posthumanist theorization of the fetish in order to argue that Object-Oriented Ontology can be considered, at points, to be a fetish-oriented ontology and that this notion of the fetish allows us to think about philosophical considerations of objects in a new light.

This article tries to resume Karl Marx’ concept of “commodity fetishism”, not just as a phenomenon of conscience, but as being the real heart of capitalist society based on abstract labor and value, money and commodity. This concept is often misunderstood, as well as the concept of “narcissism”. Following Freud and Christopher Lasch, the article underlines the sociological side of narcissism and how this pathology is the psychological counterpart to commodity fetishism, forming thus the typical subjectivity of consumerism.

Stroke can lead to various late-presenting complications that manifest weeks to months after acute stroke. While sexual dysfunction is common among stroke patients, hypersexuality and paraphilia are rare manifestations. This case series presents five cases of paraphilia showing the onset of abnormal sexual behaviors following an incident of stroke. The paraphilias in these five cases include sexual sadism, exhibitionism, transvestic fetishism, sexual masochism, fetishism, and zoophilia. Each case presents a unique manifestation of atypical sexual tendencies along with neuroimaging data and treatment approach. This case series contributes to the knowledge about the relationship between the incidence of stroke and the onset of paraphilia., Competing Interests: Human subjects: Consent was obtained or waived by all participants in this study. Conflicts of interest: In compliance with the ICMJE uniform disclosure form, all authors declare the following: Payment/services info: The medical writing support was funded by Lupin Limited, India. Financial relationships: All authors have declared that they have no financial relationships at present or within the previous three years with any organizations that might have an interest in the submitted work. Other relationships: The authors, though currently working in different organizations, have previously worked in the same organization when the case histories were collated., (Copyright © 2024, H. K. et al.)

"Reading Capital: Foucault, Benjamin, Marx". Foucault and Benjamin exploited different themes and categories from Marx's Capital, in accordance with their topics of interest and theoretical and political options. Foucault concentrated on the analysis of the relations of production as it concerned the disciplining of the working class by capital. Benjamin, based on the commodity fetishism, on the fascination of consumption and the mere patent consumer display in department stores. Both interpretations of Marx are treated in this article as complementary and convergent. In effect, starting from Marxian foundations, they allow us to trace a well-equipped genealogy of the submission of living beings to the modern relation of capital: a submission that continues under new forms in current capitalism. This text ends concluding this, opening a path yet to explore at the same time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to make a preliminary psychopathological reflection on masochistic perversion based on the ideas of Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze. To do so, it takes the Lacanian assumption according to which the perverse subject seeks to interrogate and recover the portion of the subtracted jouissance to make way to a subject. Then, an attempt is made to realize this assumption by taking back two fundamental aspects of the masochistic staging described by Deleuze: fetishism and idealization. Finally, it is proposed that both mechanisms seek the production of a positive object in the masochistic staging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Thélème is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Cuestiones de Filosofia is the property of Universidad Pedagogica y Tecnologica de Colombia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Frankfurt School has introduced “critical theory” as the best way to challenge capitalist societies, and to question the conventional standards. Art and literature, in this respect, are convenient devices through which the true face of capitalism can be revealed. Capitalism has enthralled people to accept its rules as facts and it is the mission of art and literature to wake them up. However, Frankfurt School thinkers are not optimistic and think it is almost impossible to challenge capitalist notions and change the base effectively. This existentialist attitude is what is employed in both Ahmad Mahmoud’s “A Familiar Tale” (1991) and Woody Allen’s “The Kugelmass Episode” (1977). Although these writers are set in societies far apart, one in Iran and the other in USA, their characters, especially their protagonists share the same feelings and problems of modern life. At first glance, it seems the authors have portrayed modern man and his challenges of life objectively; however, a closer look at the texts reveals something else. Mahmoud and Allen have employed the same techniques in their texts to criticize capitalism, the very shadow of which clouds their societies. They have portrayed the plights of modern man in the modern world and have put the blame on the capitalist system. In this respect, the parallelism drawn between these two short stories can be discussed in two ways; first, in the chosen style and second, in their depicted society and its influence on the characters. The writing techniques employed by both authors and the existing parallelism can be drawn in three respects: the choice of the medium of short story, third-limited viewpoint and open ending. These three techniques help the selected works to make the impact of their criticism significant. The second section clarifies how the two selected writers approach their aim through content. They criticize dehumanization of people in capitalist societies and its immediate consequences such as commodification and internalization.

This article examines an epistemological dilemma at the center of social and environmental impact assessment: where and when the "system boundaries" that define the extent of an energy technology with socio-environmental impact should be drawn. We demonstrate how system boundaries give rise to different epistemological problems, first, when socio-environmental impact is studied across commodity chains, notably in life cycle assessments (LCA), and second, when socio-environmental impact is given a spatial, or areal, dimension. More than just posing epistemological problems, however, we argue that system boundaries present an ethnographic problem and that they should be exposed to cultural as well as political analysis. As cultural artefacts, system boundaries sustain different power-serving worldviews, and the way system boundaries are drawn in discussions on energy transitions calls into question how the existence of energy technologies relies on a geographical displacement of environmental load, including flows of resources, land, and emissions. We observe a human inclination to perceive objects as co-extensive with their physical boundaries, for example through commodity fetishism, but in truncating the global material relations that sustain energy technologies, the socially uneven resource flows that metabolize them are obscured.

This article explores technology fetishism in academic libraries as an irrational form of worship. Academic libraries participate in networks of prestige through their investments in technology and its fetishistic rhetoric. To counter the myth of technology as a neutral good, this article draws on contemporary fetishism theory and specifically the work of Bruno Latour to trace how technology is entangled with social relations and upholds hegemonic power. All technology is laden with human thought, feeling, and intent. However, Modern fetishes are dispersed into culture and obscure these entanglements, hiding materiality and obscuring the visibility of labour. This article considers library technology through the lens of fetishism, specifically considering the ways in which discovery layers shape research. Confronting fetishism enables academic library workers to reimagine more human-centered approaches to technology and to bring to light embedded whiteness and sexism in library practices. There is an urgent need to reconfigure our relationships with technology given its entanglement with research and the unexamined power that fetishism holds.

Public indebtedness is a mechanism for maintaining power relations between central and peripheral countries, as it perpetuates the dependency observed in colonial times. In order to obscure this situation and allow it to continue, developed countries rely on the imposition of neoliberal guidelines in underdeveloped countries, which led to the fetishization of public debt, as they take it as a key element in the economy, despite its perniciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1886, psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing published Psychopathia Sexualis, the first manual for diagnosing sexual perversions, thus creating a new perspective for the study of sexuality. To this day, his approach directly influences the idea of contemporary human sexuality. This study intends to resume the history of the concept of fetishism described in Psychopathia Sexualis to show how, according to Krafft-Ebing's psychiatric theory, fetishism became more than a pathology or sexual peculiarity and designates the initial manifestation of the process of sexual instinct in human beings, thus becoming a key concept of the theory of sexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In this article, I deal with some new aspects of the late-modern constitution of subjectivity, related to the use of new communication technologies. By developing some intuitions associated with an interpretation of contemporary social life based mostly on Marx’s conception of fetishism, I hope to offer a provisional account of a few consequences of such developments for the conception of the self. I differentiate among several dimensions of a process through which the self-objectification enhanced by those developments leads to self-fetishisation and self-commodification, as well as capitalisation, and indicate its possible contradictions. I argue that while self-objectification is in itself not a problem, reflecting only a shift towards a conception of authenticity which is no longer related to something like an inner true core, self-fetishisation and its consequences contradicts this process’ own promises.

This article examines Roman Polanski's film Repulsion from a psychoanalytic perspective by attending Julia Kristeva's notion of abjection. This paper deals primarily with two main focal points. First, it focuses on the film's portrayal of the protagonist, Carole's abjection, her problem of non-differentiation, as evidenced by her relation to the maternal body and to corporeality. Secondly, the article investigates how the film positions its viewers with regard to Carole. It questions how Repulsion impels its spectators to engage Carole with a similar non-differentiation by generating a complex web of ambiguities with regard to the differentiation between external/internal, objective/subjective and reality/fantasy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study attempts to reveal the concept of commodity fetishism, with its distinctly postmodern concern of body and beauty, as reflected in Louis de Berniéres's novel Birds Without Wings. In his work, Berniéres tries to emphasise the material exorbitance of the body and reconsiders some master concepts of Marxist and Freudian discourse, such as fetish and commodity, with reference to use-value and exchange-value of the body and beauty. This study argues that Louis de Berniéres's novel Birds Without Wings departs from both Marxist and Freudian representation of fetishism, and exhibits instead the social and discursive practices that encourage the fetishisation of objects, as well as the postmodern preoccupation with commodity-body-sign through the lenses of Jean Baudrillard. Louis de Bernières's characters imagine that they can determine their own value in the world, as they are modern men, but they inevitably come to acknowledge that, as a result of modernity, their body and identity become enmeshed as signs in a symbolic exchange, their value being established by outer phenomena and not by themselves. In their plight for their own authority, these characters see only the annihilation of their assertions, since they become objectified in the political economy of signs, representing only symbolic or static beings whose worth is determined in the exchange process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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