Film, Photography, and Fetish: The Analyses of Christian Metz

Abstract

Toward the beginning of The Imaginary Signifier, Christian Metz, in model expository form, spells out the question that propels his research: contribution can Freudian psychoanalysis make to the study of the cinematic signifier?' The answer he unwinds over the first part of the work can be extracted from his text with equal ease: As can be seen, the cinema has a number of roots in the unconscious and in the great movements illuminated by psychoanalysis, but they can all be traced back to the specific characteristics of the institutionalized signifier. I have gone a little way in tracing some of these roots, that of mirror identification, that of voyeurism and exhibitionism. There is also a third, that of fetishism.2 The project of my article is to analyze the soundness of Metz's attempt to apply this third psychoanalytic construct to the media of film and photography. Metz's key writings on the topic are separated by a relatively large time span (at least for a field prone to the sway of intellectual fashion) the essay Photography and Fetish first appearing in the journal October in 1985,3 and the chapter Disavowal, Fetishism in The Imaginary Signifier exactly a decade earlier. Their separation is useful, for one can detect elements of revision in the later work, and, on a simpler level, Metz's decision to return to these issues indicates a commitment to their basic relevance to photographic media. Following Metz's lead, then, let me spell out the question that motivates this article: What contribution can the concepts of disavowal and fetishism make to a study of the cinematic and photographic signifier? Because it serves as the impetus, and ideally the touchstone, for Metz's theoretical work on fetishism, let me begin by recapitulating Freud's well-known 1927 essay in which he first outlined the scenario of fetishism as a safeguard against castration anxiety.4 The male child, seeing for the first time the naked body of his mother, perceives the fact that the female lacks a penis. This lack contradicts his belief that all people possess a penis as he does and horrifies him because he construes the lack as indication that the mother has been castrated, and furthermore as indication that he too is in peril of a similar mutilation. The child's reaction is to disavow, to refuse to believe, what he has seen. But unable to repress the evidence of castration he has perceived, he doubles his belief in the phallic woman by devising a fetish a material object that functions as a