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An endorsement from Slavoj Žižek on the back of Henry's Krips' Fetish: An Erotics of Culture, suggests that the text is “arguably the best book on psychoanalytic social theory ever written.” In some ways the book might be considered a “reader's guide” to systematically understanding some of the more difficult concepts in Žižek. There is a careful and extended discussion of familiar themes: the fetishistic nature of ideology, the function of canned laughter, and the disavowal involved with a knowledge that is both affirmed and denied. There is also an original and smartly developed analysis of ideology and interpellation as effects that arise from a Lacanian conceptual ground: the objet a, the fetish, the gaze, pleasure, and repetition.
The fetish is a central concept for Krips, but it is one that exfoliates to explain an assortment of social practices. The first two sections of the book focus on a systematic understanding of the fetish. Krips begins this analysis with an extended discussion of Freud's grandson playing the Fort-Da game. For Freud, the fetish is a substitute for the mother's missing penis; for Krips, Lacan's conceptual framework shifts the fetish to a general structure of lack and disavowal. As a generalized human response to lack, the fetish does not function as a simple object. It is not a fantasy supplement useful to enable sex. Instead, the fetish functions within culture as a prop for a structural lack in the subject:
The fetish is a special instance of the objet a, one for which repression is breached to the extent that the subject more or less clearly recognizes the real source of his pleasure, and thus enters an economy of disavowal. In this way, the fetish is reconceived in a way that divorces it from its specifically Freudian meaning. (9)
Krips uses Lacan's discussion of Freud's Fort-Da discussion to illustrate. The grandson responds to his mother's absence by playing with a cotton-reel. Freud observes that the boy gains considerable pleasure b