Pleasure and Political Subjectivity
Fetishism from Freud to Agamben
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 15030782 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Amy Swiffen (0000-0001-8953-2131, corresponding author), Catherine Kellogg (0000-0003-2798-4225) |
| Year | 2011 |
| Volume | 14 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Publication date | 2011-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Theory & Event (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1092-311X • E-ISSN: 2572-6633 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/tae.2011.0005 |
| OpenAlex | W2012509736 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 4 |
Freud's interest in sexual fetishism – an interest that spanned his entire career – lay in the way that fetishistic pleasure does not result from repressing a forbidden desire, but rather in displacing desire from a forbidden object onto an object available for use. In this way, fetishism recognizes the 'law of the father' but manages to evade an effect of its force. Our argument here is that the fetishistic relationship to law that Freud described can be used to understand aspects of Giorgio Agamben's influential approach to contemporary debates concerning law and sovereignty that have confused critics, specifically, the call to sever the nexus of violence and law as the only true political action. Said slightly differently, Agamben's invocation of 'whatever being' and a form of life after the state of exception, represents the limit threshold of law, but it is a limit that becomes evident only at the level of private enjoyment. The implication of our argument is that Agamben's utopian pronouncements are not best understood as theories of political action at all, but rather as fantasies of life untouchable by the violence that sovereign law requires
Aesthetics · Death drive · Epistemology · Fetishism · Object (grammar · Pleasure · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Sovereignty · Subjectivity · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy · Law · Philosophy · Political Theology and Sovereignty · Psychology
| Citations per year | 0.07 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2012 - 2012 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |