The confusion of Marxian and Freudian fetishism in Adorno and Benjamin

Philosophy Today

Volumn 46, Issue 4, 2002, Pages 429-443

  Mioyasaki, Donovan ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO   (Canada)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 70449922737     PISSN: 00318256     EISSN: 00318256     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/philtoday200246429     Document Type: Article

References (17)

1. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: The Modern Library/Charles H. Kerr and Company, 1906), p. 83
2. Sigmund Freud, "Fetishism," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, (London: Vintage/Random House, 2001), 21:152-53
3. Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in The Standard Edition, 7:153
4. Walter Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 188
5. See also Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations, Section III, pp. 222-23
6. Benjamin, "Work of Art," p. 220
7. Theodor W. Adorno, "On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening," trans. Maurice Goldbloom, in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: The Continuum Publishing Company, 1998), p. 279
8. Compare Freud, "Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defense," The Standard Edition, 23:277, "He [the fetishist] created a substitute for the penis which he missed in females. . . . He ef-fected no more than a displacement of value."
9. Marx, Capital, p. 84
10. Benjamin, "Baudelaire," p. 194
11. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in The Standard Edition, 18:31-32
12. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 18:15
13. Freud, The Ego and the Id, in The Standard Edition, 19:34
14. Adorno, "On the Fetish Character in Music," p. 287
15. Compare ibid., p. 297: "But technically consistent, harmonious mass music purified of all the elements of bad pretense would turn into art music and at once lose its mass basis. All attempts at reconciliation, whether by market-oriented artists or collectively-oriented art educators, are fruitless." Such severely pessimistic conclusions in Adorno's essay bear strong traits of Marxian alienation, the illusion that the given exhausts the possibilities of the real
16. Freud, The Ego and the Id, pp. 34-35
17. Freud, "The Economic Problem of Masochism," The Standard Edition, 19:167