2

THE TWO SECRETS OF THE

FETISH

JEAN–LUC NANCY

“Commodity fetishism”: Marx’s formula has been imprinted on the largest and most
resistant of cultural memories. It has become almost anonymous, or rather synonymous
with Marx’s very name, as is the case with certain coined terms (cogito, categorical
imperative . . .). This privilege could only be due to a very particular virtue. Such a
virtue is that which not only consists in characterizing, in the strict sense of the word (to
typify a property or an essence), but even in characterizing in such a way that the char-
acter (the stamp, the seal) is somehow inscribed on the thing itself and can no longer be
detached from it, or at least without some loss in the substance of the thing.
In Kantian terms: the intuition presented under the word “fetishism” is printed or
traced indelibly onto the concept of “commodity,” giving rise to a schema “commod-
ity,” from which a new image, and thus a new idea, ensues. Not just the commodity as
the fetish—as if this were one of its traits or one approach among others—but rather the
essence of the commodity revealed as fetish, so that the fetish character would remain
once the approach was shifted or the “secret” of its “mystical character” was revealed.
(As we know, these are all Marx’s own terms.)
As is also known, the secret consists in that the commodity value (or exchange
value) of the object (or product), which seems to be its intrinsic or immanent property
(parallel in this way to its use value, which is extrinsic and completely relative to its
utilization in a given sociotechnical context) only covers, masks or represses the origin
of its pure or absolute value—this last value being nothing other than the living human
labor of the producer, which the act of production incorporates into the product. But the
commodity value deflects this incorporated creative life toward equivalence within an
exchange, where the producer (the worker) finds himself surreptitiously stripped of the
part of the value that the mercantile calculation does not exchange for the maintenance
of its labor force, but rather sets to the account of capital.

* * *

Here we are not concerned with addressing the problems associated with the evaluation
or the appreciation of living work as it is related to the intensification or the very cre-
ation of value (“the surplus-value”), nor with respect to the extortion suffered by the
creator of value (the valuable and value-making man, the living man as maker, as giver
of prices in an absolute fashion) to the benefit of the one who accumulates value in the
form of general equivalence, creating mercantile prices through a common currency.
Currency is the fetish, where fetishism is fixed: belief in the value of the market price
itself. The critique of political economy—that is, the critique of the economy as poli-
tics—reveals the inanity of this belief, and if this critique cannot measure the hidden
and mysticized or mystified value in monetary terms, the principle of this critique re-

diacritics / summer 2001 diacritics 31.2: 3–8 3

mains no less, but even more so, the incommensurability of the value creator and the
marketed product.
Alienation is not measurable. It is at the same time the principle of the critique and
its impasse from the moment that we would like to, and indeed that we should, oppose
one measure to another: the critical measure of the fetish against the mercantile measure
through the fetish.
In contrast, what we would like to sketch out here would have the following hy-
pothesis as a point of departure: does not the strength of Marx’s formula derive from a
power other than that of the only critique thus broached? Is there not another energy,
and another enigma, slipped into the first, adding itself to the revelation of the secret,
even exceeding this revelation and perhaps in this fashion displacing just a bit the secret
itself (precisely because it is not measurable)?
This other power would derive from “fetishism” itself. That is to say that when we
first consider it as an image it could very well play another role, going almost so far as
to invert the distribution proposed above regarding the Kantian indexes of intuition and
of concept. In other terms, perhaps the word “fetish,” with the metaphor that it activates
(or the supposed metaphor: this is precisely what is at stake), suffers such a strong and
lasting impact from Marx’s formula because as we pronounce this formula we don’t just
remain with the literal transposition of the fetish metaphor. Nor do we stop at the con-
ceptual grasp of what the image would add to the intuition. Yet the image of the fetish
would remain as a fetish-image that would schematize the commodity, that is, that would
present the commodity to us in such a way as to give it a meaning or even a semantic
value that could no longer be merely reduced to an illusory appearance and a revealed
reality.1

* * *

The origin of the image chosen by Marx is clear: he was familiar with a story that
related how, in the Caribbean, the gold of the conquerors had become a fetish among the
indigenous population. This fetishizing was therefore at the same time parallel and sym-
metrical to that of the commodity itself: the Europeans’ money becomes a fetish while
the indigenous people perceive its virtue among the conquerors, a power whose nature
appears to them as something mysterious or supernatural. Marx’s early reading of this
story goes back to his student years and his then marked interest in the analysis of
religious forms, and in particular (from the point of view of our immediate interest),
Charles Des Brosses’s Du culte des dieux fétiches, written in the eighteenth century. For
Marx, fetishism first represented, in consonance with those readings, the most “puerile”
form of the “religion of sensuous desire” in which “fantasy arising from desire deceives
the fetish-worshipper into believing that an ‘inanimate object’ will give up its natural
character in order to comply with his desires” [CW 1: 189].
From this period on, for Marx the task of philosophy will be to “burst the orderly
hieroglyphic husk” [CW 1: 196] with which religions envelop the truth of the world.
Later, speaking of “fetishism,” he calls for the destruction of religion’s illusion by de-
nouncing its artificial character. The fetish is in fact the artifice par excellence or par
essence, according to the etymology of the word, from the Portuguese feitiço, “artifi-
cial.” For the conquerors, the natives’ “fetishes” are false gods, that is, idols, in the
monotheistic sense of the term. As Moses did with the golden calf, Marx wants to re-

1. This hypothesis has certainly more than one point of origin and developments in several
works on Marx. Here, we have no scientific aims.

4
verse the mercantile idols.2 Gold and money are “crystallizations” of the monetary ab-
straction, and for this reason they are “fetishes.”3 Hence, the magic of money. But in this
way, “the riddle presented by money is but the riddle presented by commodities; only it
now strikes us in its most glaring form” [CW 35: 103].
Thus, from this point on Marx will speak of the “fetishism of political economy”
[Oeuvres 2: 412], since political economy is based on the belief that the commodity
form is the apparition or the very incarnation of the product. (We should note that today
in commercial speech “product” is used to designate a reality—an object or a service—
synthesizing the Marxian concepts of product and merchandise. Today the emphasis
has shifted from metallic money to electronic money, and it is ultimately the production
that is directly fetishized.) Marx writes, “this brings to completion the fetishism pecu-
liar to bourgeois political economy, the fetishism which metamorphoses the social, eco-
nomic character impressed on things in the process of social production into a natural
character stemming from the material nature of those things” [CW 36: 227].

* * *

But does this revealing of the secret really disclose the nature of production? Is the
creation of value really presented as such? That is, does the living humanity inscribed in
a work become visible as something other than the idea of an incommensurable mea-
sure? By definition, he who topples idols promises the truth of a god that is neither
ensured nor saturated by any presentation. It is always a negative theology that which
unmasks idolatries: and the divine superessence, at the same time that it confirms the
transcendence and authority of the true god, does not itself appear.
The revealed secret is called “revealed secret” and “demystified fetish”—but this
expression does not yet show the truth of production, or rather the truth of the producer
in person or in subject, the truth of his singular and communal existence, whose future
portrait Marx at times sketches out. But let us recognize that if he came upon us in
person, the living (natural, not artificial: the nonfabricated fabricator) producer would
offer his face, his true presence. He would present himself, and he would be presented
to us. Still, what theology or philosophy finds reprehensible in the idol is presence as
the presentation of truth.
Thus, it is also in this respect that something in theology and philosophy keeps art
at a distance, be it a hostile or attentive distance, a reproachful or a respectful one. Here
everything revolves discreetly around art, around its artifices and its false gods. . . .
Around art and production, around production as art or around art as the presentation of
a living producer. . . . Around an artificial, artful presentation of this very natural yet
social life and production of society itself. . . .

* * *

Still, it is precisely here where the word “fetish” might very well retain a fetish charac-
ter, slipped under its critical function (or critical-onto-theological function). By saying
“commodity fetishism,” one announces a demystification. Nevertheless, since there is
not (yet) any presence that can substitute for that of the fetish (and can there be any?),

2. At times Marx uses the word “idol” [for example, CW 1: 226; Oeuvres 2: 97].
3. We should also remember that in the Bible the falsity of idols is often tied to the presence
of precious metals, valuable woods, gems, and ivory.

diacritics / summer 2001 5

one must prevent the disillusionment of the demystification. As a result, the fascination
and the luster of the fetish continue to adhere to its own denunciation. One uncovers the
secret, but the word “fetish” still shelters an undisclosed secret: the very presence of the
thing, whether it is named commodity or product, paid for in cash or by credit card,
worshipped or utilized, the thing itself, the pro-duced thing: the thing driven to the
foreground, brought forward in the strange element of presence in and for itself.

* * *

(Let us imagine the rather obscure bond between the conquerors—fascinated by these
gods, so puerile yet so present and so precious, present because they are precious,
precious because they are present—and the conquered peoples, subjugated by the yel-
low metal so visibly/invisibly powerful among those powerful invaders. God for god,
luster for luster, mystique for mystique, a vertigo of precious presences and their devo-
tions, execrations, consecrations, and exorcisms. The word “fetish” says all of that
from the moment of its double entry, one through the false and the other through the
true.)
(So the word “fetish” fetishizes itself, in the same manner as do other words that
speak of the false, the phony, the tawdry, the lustrous, the artful, and of course the
simulacrum of art—whether it be the most austere and the most secretive, whether it be
the artfulness of the secret of art, the great art that has neither measure nor market,
neither artifice nor religion. . . .)
Behind the unveiled secret, another more convoluted secret cloaks itself—one that
perhaps will never be revealed absolutely: it is that of presence in general, which might
never be exempt of fetishism, that is, of the force of the desire by which I reach toward
this presence in order to see it, touch it, and savor it, at least from the moment that
“presence” does not designate the inert being of what has been put there (what has been
placed there) and which is not even there, nor there, nor beyond, no matter where it is
placed.
The fetish is the being-there of a desire, an expectation, an imminence, a power and
its presentiment, a force interred in the form and exhumed by it. Whether one considers
it in the context of magic, of psychoanalysis, or the jubilant and almost incantatory use
of the word in Marx, the fetish possesses a double secret: the one that critical analysis
shows to be the paltry monetary secret, and the other that which remains in the intensity
of a presence, which precisely as presence retains its secret, and its presence is in this
keeping of the secret. Still, it is enough to suspend one’s gaze, even upon a product or
currency; the intensity of the gaze is enough (and this is not its intentionality: on the
contrary, it is what differs from the phenomenological intentionality and what defers it);
its intension instead of its intention suffices for the enigma of the second secret to reveal
itself in turn, that is, for it to become ever more enigmatic.

* * *

Not “why is there something and not nothing?” but “how is there something?” or rather,
not just how is a product made present, but also how is a presence produced. What is the
power of the present, of presenting, of being-present? What power produces it and what
force is in turn exercised by it? How to treat this untreatable enigma?—That is the
desire, its tension. The transaction is attempted [tentée] by the god or by the currency.

6
 * * *

The fetish is better named than it appears. It is an artifice, a fact, something made: it is
produced. It is the production of desire according to the double genitive: produced by
desire and producing desire, namely, the desire of presence. We know that there are
beings: it is just a matter of knowing. But that these beings present themselves and
present themselves to the point of touching us, that only one of these beings or each one
of them—myself being one of them—touch us for a single instant through their singu-
larity, through their unique value—that’s what we desire. We reach toward them as
toward the other side of death, which posits the inverted, equally unique touch of ef-
facement in absence.
It is not religion that brings forth the idol: it is value, indeed, meaning, and desire,
not of presence but rather desire as presence, the presentation of the Being of beings,
sweet and lacerating, impossible to convert into a commodity, priceless, without equiva-
lence and without divine prevalence. The idol’s distant luster shines in the double bot-
tom of all evaluation, of all value, the desire to give something a price without turning it
into a commodity or worshipping it, without expecting anything in exchange for it. The
Latin word pretium, whose sonority we hear in precious, is associated by linguists with
the Latin interpres—a correlation that can work in two directions: either “interpreta-
tion” derives from the mercantile value, or the mercantile value derives from hermeneu-
tics, which is nothing other than the transmission and the declaration of what precedes
all meaning and all value, the infinite price of unbelievable presence.
The fetish is presence accumulated in its sign, presence collected into a sign, brought
back to it.4 Therefore, it also makes the sign valuable as presence, signifying itself,
present without signifying anything else. A presence that produces the sign and a sign
that produces presence, a double artifice in whose lacework the imminently strange is
incrusted—a pebble tied up in a reed, a doll with shell eyes, a rosary of sequins, an
odorous rag, a lock of hair, a packet of detergent, a mothball, a piece of colored gela-
tin—a pure sign, a pure present, the familiar uncanny of the power of nothingness. How
does one deal with that? The god or the currency attempt the transaction. But when one
does not trade, one remains before the untreatable; this is called at times art or thought.
But it’s better not to fetishize any name.
The double structure of the commodity: on the one hand, the secret today long
known (everyone is familiar with it, which certainly does not prevent it from function-
ing, thanks to the vigilance and ingenuity of fetish-makers), and on the other hand, the
desire for value or else value as desire, a sign reaching toward nothing. Mixed up be-
tween the two, there are some overtly religious commodities or some overtly commod-
itylike religious practices, certain feeble sorts of magic in search of effects that are like
the inverse of this desire. One would think one was seeing the well-known scenario: in
Renaissance Italy, a street preacher is ignored by the crowds because everyone is trying
to see the marionettes at a nearby puppet show. The preacher then waves his crucifix as
he shouts, “Ecco il vero Pulcinella!” Could he be saying more of the truth than it ap-
pears? If desire were always seeking the true Pulcinella, in the sense that this marionette
would be . . . truth itself, not revealed like a ridiculous secret, but showing itself truth-
fully as the farce which the will to truth really is (or the will to value, to a first and a last
sense—and that itself being truth: unexpected, nondeified, nonfetishized truth, but shaken
as a joyous and disturbing fetish. As Nietzsche said, “the buffoon and the saint are the

4. We follow Heidegger’s indication concerning the fetish, commented on by Werner Hamacher

in “Peut-être la question,” Les fins de l’homme [Sein und Zeit, qtd. in Hamacher 353]. Translator’s
note: For an English translation of this passage, see Being and Time 112–13.

diacritics / summer 2001 7

most interesting human types,” but he ends up making a choice: “As a disciple of
Dionysus, I would rather be a satyr than a saint.” Satyrs, pulcinellas (little Neapolitan
chickens), fetishes: so many manifestations of this that there is nothing to reveal, and
also of the fact that the secret consists in not revealing anything. This is the very art of
art or the very art of life.
Translated by Thomas C. Platt

WORKS CITED
Hamacher, Werner. “Peut-être la question.” Les fins de l’homme. Dir. Philippe Lacoue-
Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy. Paris: Galilée, 1981. 345–65.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson.
New York: Harper and Row, 1962.
Marx, Karl. Collected Works. Trans. Richard Dixon et al. New York: International Publ.,
1975. [CW]
________
. Oeuvres. Paris: Gallimard, 1982.