The Two Secrets of the Fetish

Abstract

Jean-Luc Nancy's text, ‘The Two Secrets of the Fetish’, was commissioned for the catalogue of ‘Mixed Blessings’, a major exhibition of the work of Guillaume Paris, hosted by the Musée d'Art moderne et contemporain de Strasbourg from February to April 2002. This text was originally published in French and appears here in an English translation. Guillaume Paris's practice is complex but often centres around the processes of transformation of an object (sublimation, reification…) within a dialectic of commodity capitalism. The context of Paris's artistic practice draws him into a broad, multi-disciplinary discursive context and for this reason he regularly commissions essays for his catalogues from a diverse range of interests and often from authors outside of a professional visual art background. It is within this context that Jean-Luc Nancy's text is positioned through an examination of the fetish, a key aspect of Marx's thinking. But here the fetish is not present in the conversation to simply diabolize commodity capitalism, as a straightforward question of détournement. The interest here is more in how to reappropriate the power of the fetish rather than simply confronting it with pious denunciation. As Nancy remarks, this situation can be likened to the difference between the satyr and the saint.