[D66] the bourgeois subject and commodity fetishism

[Antid Oto]

"The point worth repeating again and again is that, in Marx's notion of
fetishism, the place of the fetishist inversion is not in what people think they
are doing, but in their social activity itself:a typical bourgeois subject is,
in terms of his conscious attitude, an utilitarian nominalist — it is in his
social activity, in exchange on the market, that he acts as if commodities were
not simple objects, but objects endowed with special powers, full of
"theological whimsies." In other words, people are well aware how things really
stand, they know very well that the commodity-money is nothing but a reified
form of the appearance of social relations, i.e. that, beneath the "relations
between things," there are "relations between people" — the paradox is that, in
their social activity, they act as if they do not know this, and follow the
fetishist illusion. The fetishist belief, the fetishist inversion, is displaced
onto things, it is embodied in what Marx calls "social relations between things."

"


"So, when a critical Marxist encounters a bourgeois subject immersed in
commodity fetishism, the Marxist's reproach to him is not "Commodity may seem to
you a magical object endowed with special powers, but it really is just a
reified expression of relations between people"; the actual Marxist's reproach
is rather "You may think that the commodity appears to you as a simple
embodiment of social relations (that, for example, money is just a kind of
voucher entitling you to a part of the social product), but this is not how
things really seem to you — in your social reality, by means of your
participation in social exchange, you bear witness to the uncanny fact that a
commodity really appears to you as a magical object endowed with special powers"…

"

http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/articles/the-interpassive-subject/

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