Capitalism’s New Clothes by Colin Cremin

Author:Colin Cremin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pluto Press

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Guilt fetishism

We arrive at the point in this chapter where the various arguments can be brought together and linked with an element only brushed upon so far, the enjoying mode of left-liberal ethics, and bring forth the concept of guilt fetishism. Freud wrote a short essay on fetishism primarily about a man whose arousal was obtained from the shine on a woman’s nose. Freud interpreted the shine as a substitute for the man’s inability to come to terms with the fact that women have no penis. There is a dual aspect to this, however, in an affirmation and denial of castration. The fetish signals both the acknowledgement of and vulnerability to castration (symbolically referring to a loss of power rather than a literal penis) and a denial of and triumph over castration through the discovery of a lost object, the shine on the nose in this case. Money has a similar appeal in becoming the fetishised object of exchange arousing a desire for enterprise. The commodity fetishist ascribes to money value that it does not intrinsically possess (a penis) as a way to come to terms with the social relations it denies (castration). In Freud’s example, the fetish is surplus to normal psychosexual behaviour. With commodity fetishism, money is a normalised surplus. In other words, the fetish is the condition by which money obtains symbolic value for capital to circulate and is not generally regarded a perverse fixation. Guilt fetishism relates to fetishism in both a Freudian and Marxist sense.13

Christopher Lasch cites Erich Fromm, who argued that feminism, Marxism and psychoanalysis have converged to form a ‘patricentric’ personality. It is a person who ‘experiences suffering as guilt instead of injustice, accepts his lot instead of trying to change the social conditions that make him unhappy, and “identifies with the aggressor” instead of attempting to unite the victims of aggression against the prevailing social system.’ (1984:228) The COCI seeks to generalise this phenomenon. The object the guilt fetishist gets off on is every failed attempt to satisfy a desire to rid itself of the image of suffering, enjoying the repeated failures to take political action.

First, guilt fetishism is an excessive fixation on an image of a person suffering castration/lack of food, shelter, basic civil liberties and so on. These objects serve as empty vessels into which guilt can be transferred every time we make a donation. Campbell Jones (2010) makes this point about transference in his essay on recycling. Everyone is called upon to recycle and so no one in particular is held to account for ecological destruction. Recycling is a means by which we transfer or get rid of our guilt. As Žižek writes,

By surrendering my innermost content, including my dreams and anxieties, to the Other, a space opens up in which I am free to breathe: when the Other laughs for me, I am free to take a rest; when the Other is sacrificed instead of me, I am free to go on living with the awareness that I did atone for my guilt, and so on.

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