Fetishism, 1927, 1614, 1461

Abstract

This chapter attempts an (admittedly oblique) approach to the question of how modern postcolonial narratives (for instance, of sexuality) might be useful for reading the Middle Ages, and, inversely, of how the medieval might be implicated in an understanding of modern (post)colonial dynamics. I look first to Freud’s writing on fetishism as providing a useful if problematic way of conceiving not just sexuality but also the unequal and violent interracial, inter religious contacts of both colonial and medieval moments. Freud’s theory, however, cannot be seen as just a modern (and hence neutral and objective) analytical tool for understanding psychic and social relations. Looking backward from the Freudian moment to its early modern prehistory, we can see that the Freudian and post-Freudian treatment of fetishism is indelibly marked by an earlier, racialized discourse of the fetish. That discourse haunts Freud’s treatment of the “perversions, “ which might indeed be seen—if only in part—as continuing that classification of human subspecies and races that accelerated with the “age of discovery.” But the early modern discourse of the fetish also has its prehistories, and I conclude by considering how, in a certain fetishistic movement, that discourse both depends on and denies the medieval.

This chapter considers part of the history and prehistory of the fetish in order to call attention to the ways in which a certain fetishistic logic—a simultaneous denial and recognition—characterizes the development of interlocking Western discourses of sexual perversion, religious/racial distinction, and historical periodization.