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AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND DAVID COPPERFIELD'S TEMPORALITIES OF LOSS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 August 2005

Kevin Ohi
Kevin Ohi
Affiliation:
Boston College
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Extract

GLOSSING FREUD'S FAMOUS EXAMPLE of “shine on the nose/glance at the nose” (Glanz auf der Nase), Christopher Pye suggests that the familiar account of the fetish (as a simulacrum standing in for a missing object) does not capture what is exemplary about the example, that is, the way the act of looking is crystallized in the object seen, a shine equated with a glance. In that conflation, one can recognize the ultimate grounds for the fetish's captivating properties, as well as the entire economy of repudiation and renewed loss it embodies. Not simply a reassuring compromise object in place of a loss, the fetish actively plays out and shores against that originating split in the experience of being inscribed within– ‘fascinated’ by–the gaze as it derives from elsewhere. (176 n.17)

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 33 , Issue 2 , September 2005 , pp. 435 - 449
Copyright
© 2005 Cambridge University Press

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