The Fetish

Extract from The Two Secrets of the Fetish by Jean-Luc Nancy

"The fetish is better named than might appear. It is false, made, fabricated: it is produced. It is the production of desire based on the double genitive: produced by desire, producing desire, and in particular that of presence...It should touch us just for a single instant with its uniqueness, with its unique value. We strive toward it as we do the flip side of death, which puts on the reverse key, it, too, unique, of erasure in absence.
The fetish is not an idol and does not issue from religion. But it is value, sense, desire not for presence but as presence,...
The latin word pretium (whose sonorous syllables can be heard in precious) is likened by linguists to interpres. The relationship can work both ways: either the 'interpretation' derives from market value, or else market value derives from hermeneutics, and this latter is nothing other than the transmission and announcement of what precedes all sense and all value, the infinite price of the incredible presence."


Bernì