The Fetish

Reviews / Votes

Brilliantly debunking received understandings of fetishism as an individual perversion or as a consumerist obsession, and effectively severing it from its ideological and moralistic anchorings, Massimo Fusillo theorises the fetishist gaze as an inexhaustible site of creative production and compares it to the processes of literary composition and artistic creation. Richly interdisciplinary and convincingly argued, using philosophy, psychoanalysis, aesthetics, anthropology, and feminist, queer, and postcolonial theory as critical frameworks, Fusillo draws examples across a wide variety of genres-literature, film, the visual arts, photography, popular culture, and performance-to demonstrate the ways in which fetishism and artistic creativity project passions, impulses, and memories on to everyday objects and produce alternative worlds. Original and highly innovative in content and style, the book's relational approach to the fetish challenges allegiances to hierarchal knowledge and absolute identities, compelling a radical rethinking of our critical paradigms for the comparative study of literature and culture. * William J Spurlin, Professor of English, Brunel University London, UK * This is a remarkably well-integrated volume with a clear purpose: to redefine and interpret 'the fetish' in a broad range of works, from Marx and Freud to contemporary cinema. It offers brilliant exercises in close reading and unassailable overall arguments. It should establish itself as an important reference point in literary and cultural theory. * Jean Bessiere, Professor of Comparative Literature, Universite Sorbonne Nouvelle, France * Brimming with new ideas and examples, Massimo Fusillo's thought-provoking The Fetish leads us into a magic land where concrete objects radiate boundless energy. Seductive or violent, theatrical or incomprehensible, these objects inhabit the works of art and literature, be they realist, modernist, or post-modernist, and fill them with an irresistible power to attract. The most respectable traditional literature and the oddest contemporary art are thus shown to share crucial common interests. * Thomas Pavel, Gordon J. Laing Distinguished Service Professor in Romance Languages and Literature, University of Chicago, USA, and author of The Lives of the Novel *