Suchergebnisse

"Ideological Fantasies" is an argument for the continued importance of thinking Marxism and psychoanalysis together in the conjunction of "queer" and "capital." Both, within a certain Western tradition, are preoccupied with understanding how ideology fashions subjectivities. By revisiting a textual scene in the genealogy of capitalism where commodity fetishism makes its appearance as a rhetorical construction—Leon Battista Alberti's treatise on the family—I show how ideology works phantasmically to "eternalize" or "universalize" historical contingency, even as the historicization of this fantasy (its relegation to the "origins" of kinship and exchange) produces the effect of concealing the repeated return of the same in late capitalism. Commodity fetishism is the name of one of the most explicit figural convergences of psychoanalysis and Marxism, and its critical genealogy continues to be haunted by spectral appearances of gender, sexuality, and racialization, particularly where the to-be-commodified object is concerned. What I focus on is how a particular—and multiply displaced—subjectivity inhabits the scene of commodity fetishism and how commodity fetishism structures and marks not only the objects but also the subjects of exchange, creating "real abstractions" that have not ceased to perform their ideological work.

This essay, originally delivered as a response to Leo Bersani's presentation "Father Knows Best" at UC Berkeley's "Queer Bonds" conference, provides a critical appraisal of Bersani's reading of Claire Denis's film Beau Travail, exploring both the film's neo- and postcolonial implications and its radical reconfigurations of subjectivity. Already implicit in Bersani's reading is a question about the limits of a certain psychoanalysis for reimagining subjectivities less agonistically forged than narrative traditions in the West, which Freud inherits, allow. Further, Bersani explores the possibilities of an impersonal, nonnarrative radicalization of subjectivity through analyses of form in the work of art. This essay focuses, rather, on the ways narrative and visual textualities remain agonistically tethered to embodied subjectivity in the work under consideration, and asks whether and how subjectivity might be reconceived otherwise, even as genealogical inheritance continues to haunt its instantiations.