The purpose of the essay is to critically analyze the influence of J. Derrida’s deconstruction on David J. Gunkel’s book Deconstruction (MIT Press 2021). Gunkel’s handbook is aimed at making ...deconstruction a tool of critical thinking accessible to non-professionals. It turns out that accomplishing this task comes at the expense of precisely the critical potential of deconstruction itself. Gunkel is well aware that his arguments are sometimes superficial and overlook deeper problems that should be addressed. Such a failure takes the form of a fetishistic denial, which in psychoanalysis is summarized by the formula “I know well, but all the same.” In turn, deconstruction itself, insofar as it is separated from Kant’s transcendental philosophy and Hegel’s dialectics, becomes an academic ideology. Restoring its proper subversive potential can only be done by returning to a philosophy of reflection, in which the thinker himself must ultimately consider his own position as an author and bring it under criticism. This is the path that Gunkel avoids, because he could then no longer be the author of a handbook on deconstruction, rather than someone who practices deconstruction.
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Received: 4/11/2022. Reviewed: 13/12/2022. Accepted: 20/12/2022.
This text is one of the postdoctoral research products developed at the Instituto de Sociologia of the Universidade do Porto, aiming to understand how pop culture icons translate postmodern values. ...Here we are interested in observing how “Sex” reifies contemporary hedonism, and for this we resort to the concept of fetish in Freud and Marx to analyze discourses of power in their dialectical relationship with the ethos of the system. “Sex” translates the needs of fugitive sensory experiences into a society hungry for the eccentric and superficial, being interpreted as an expression of a time.
Capital Redefined HOSSEINI, S A Hamed; Gills, Barry K
2024, Volume:
1
eBook
Open access
Capital Redefined presents a unique perspective on the nature of “capital,” departing from the prevailing reductionist accounts. Hosseini and Gills offer an expanded perspective on Marxian value ...theory by addressing its main limitations and building their own integrative value theory. They argue that the current understanding of “value” must be re-examined and liberated from its subservient ties to capital while acknowledging the ways in which capital appropriates value. This is achieved by differentiating between “fetish value” created by capital and “true value” generated through various commons-based forms of coexistence. The authors propose a defetishization of value by rejecting the commonly accepted idea of its objectivity. They introduce their “commonist value theory,” which redefines capital as both the product and process of perverting the fundamental commoning causes of true value into sources of fetish value. Capital is theorized through a “modular” framework, where multiple intersecting processes constitute a comprehensive power structure, a “value regime,” representing an unprecedented degree of the domination of capital over life. Their theory reconciles two apparently incompatible views on the notion of value. One view encompasses all inputs involved in capitalist value production and conflates intrinsic and commodity values. The other warns against this conflation as it treats capital as an entity tightly associated only with commodity production and wage labor. The authors believe that establishing alternative forms of value creation based on normative principles of living in commons is crucial as an analytical base for criticizing existing power structures and economic systems. The book offers a theoretical foundation for transforming our life worlds toward “post-capitalist” futures. It appeals to scholars and students in various fields, such as political economy, capitalism, and post-capitalist studies, economic and political sociology, globalization, development studies, social ecology, and ecological philosophy.
In recent years, geographers and related social scientists have worked intensively against the fetishisation of ruins. The ruin fetish is widely considered as being problematic, because it does not ...allow us to face the complex reality of processes of ruination and instead turns the ruin into an object with a fixed meaning and transcendental value. This paper supplements this current state of research via the fetish concepts of Walter Benjamin and Jacques Lacan, who both grasp fetishisation through the inscription of fantasy into an object. This fantasy is not inherently bound to the fetish object, but persists depending solely on our standpoint to it. The paper elaborates on the ruin having to be perceived from a certain distance to obtain a status as fetish object by turning into a nostalgic rem(a)inder of loss. While the fetishist maintains a distance to the fetish object, the explorative view of ruins, dismissively coined as “ruin porn,” is distinguished by its manner of getting as close as possible to it. Ruin porn is therefore not, as it is often stated, the most recent peak of the ruin fetish, but rather a way of losing sight of the ruin’s aura, a way of turning the fetish object into a pile of waste. Artists, on the other hand, bear witness to something that lies beyond the factual givenness of the ruin and thus reintroduce the fetish back into it. Shifting between these ways of fetishising, defetishising, and refetishising ruins, the paper investigates the conditions of the ruin fetish and ultimately calls for a more serious engagement with fantasies as a way of getting with the ruin fetish instead of getting over it.
In recent years, geographers and related social scientists have worked intensively against the fetishisation of ruins. This paper supplements this current state of research via the fetish concepts of Walter Benjamin and Jacques Lacan, who both grasp fetishisation through the inscription of fantasy into an object. Shifting between ways of fetishising, defetishising, and refetishising ruins, the paper investigates the conditions of the ruin fetish and ultimately calls for a more serious engagement with fantasies as a way of getting with the ruin fetish instead of getting over it.
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What is moral progress? Are we striving for moral progress when we seek to "make the world a better place"? What connects the different ways in which moral agents, their actions, and the world can ...become morally better? This book proposes an explication of the abstract concept of moral progress and explores its relation to our moral lives.
The article tries to make the point that William Pietz's contributions were the first to make a history of the term based on his longue durée and of the matricial embedding of the conceptual and the ...material into the notion of the fetish. The second argument points that art history can take advantage of William Pietz's book in redifing the discipline.
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Building on Pietz's speculation about the construction of a "history of the fetish' that might be related to, yet stand apart from the fetish as a historical construct, this paper asks if there might ...be novel yet unmarked contemporary fetish-formations. Taking the later chapters of Pietz's volume, which focuses on capital and techno-political infrastructures, this essay suggests that non-fungible tokens, or "NFTs," might be thought of as failed fetishes, objects that work to occlude the material infrastructure that supports blockchain, yet do not cohere because due to contemporary technology, they lack the sensuous materiality required by Pietz's phenomenologically-shaped understanding of Marxism. Regardless of the correctness of this speculative claim about NFTs, this discussion suggests that Pietz's original, groundbreaking argument on the fetish still has relevance to, and a great deal of creative promise for, analysis in the current day.
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À partir de la nouvelle de Barbey d’Aurevilly, « Le plus bel amour de Don Juan », extraite du recueil Les diaboliques (1874), l’auteur fait l’hypothèse que la théorie sexuelle hallucinée au centre de ...la nouvelle n’est pas une construction mélancolique délirante révélant de bonnes qualités de mentalisation comme ce fut par exemple le cas pour Haitzmann rapporté par Freud. C’est au contraire une défaillance de la mentalisation dont Michel Fain démontre l’existence dans les névroses de caractère.
Video games have emerged as one of the most ubiquitous forms of media globally, exerting a considerable influence on our perceptions of other cultures. However, contemporary video games have ...perpetuated negative stereotypes about Brazilian favelas and their residents, prioritizing aesthetics and themes that fetishize poverty, precarity, and violence. This essay critically examines the (mis)representations of Brazilian favelas in video games, exploring their far-reaching implications for global perceptions of favelas and their residents, and their role in perpetuating negative stereotypes.
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