As we have seen in the preceding chapters, the concept of fetishism is a key element in Homi Bhabha's critical lexicon, and in his interweaving of psychoanalysis, deconstruction and postcolonial theory. In Jacques Derrida's reading of sexual difference in Hegel and Genet in Glas, it also functions as an ironic architectonic and typographical structuring device of the text. In terms of the broader ethico-political concerns that are at the heart of Derrida's Specters of Marx, and of Gayatri Spivak's reading of Derrida, the operation of commodity fetishism in Marx is indissociably bound up with exchange value, and by extension informs any understanding of an economically or materially based ideology. Fetishism is at the same time a recurring trope in critical arguments against postcolonial theory, or deconstruction, or a postcolonial theory that draws on deconstructive strategies. In fact, there has been such a resurgence of critical interest in the phenomenon of fetishism that we could be said to be witnessing a kind of fetishization of fetishism in contemporary cultural theory. Arguments against postcolonial theory and deconstruction commonly point to their over-abstraction, their a-politicism and a-historicism, or their inattention to economic or material socio-political conditions, such that an investment in theory (supposedly at the ‘expense’ of the socio-political and the material) is itself described as a form of fetishism, a turning of the gaze away from the ‘proper’ object of analysis and a displacement onto a substitute, improper object. Benita Parry's dismissal along these lines of Spivak's and Bhabha's work is typical.