Sue Golding 
Poiesis and Politics as Ecstatic Fetish: 
Foucault's Ethical Demand* 
"Seduction is not a passive form of incitement." 
M. Foucault, History of Sexuality, pp. 95-6 
Toward the end of his third volume on the History of Sexuality, where-
upon he expressly links the "art of living" with the care of oneself, Foucault 
invites us to think through the moral and ethical implications of such a con-
nection. It is a troubled connection, indeed, a dangerous path, and we are 
forewarned of the trouble ahead. "...[A]s the arts of living and the care of 
the self are refined," says Foucault, "some precepts emerge that seem to be 
rather similar to those that will be formulated in the later moral systems. 
But one should not be misled by the analogy. Those moral systems will 
define other modalities of the relation to self: a characterization of the ethi-
cal substance based on finitude, the Fall, and evil; a mode of subjection in 
the form of obedience to a general law that is at the same time the will for 
a personal god; [...] a mode of ethical fulfilment that tends toward self-re-
nunciation. (Foucault, 1988: 239-40). 
At the risk of too rapidly citing these dangers or stating their implica-
tions in too coarse a way, here is what lies at the heart of the matter: on the 
face of it, comparisons of apples and oranges do not - because they cannot -
yield the same fruit. But why not? What is it that makes this comparison un-
tenable? 
It is not enough to point out the obvious, says Foucault; to wit: that these 
'latter [judeo-christian] systems', these 'modalities' might sound like, might 
even appear similar to, earlier modalities touching upon body and soul and 
the relations therein or thereabouts ascribed - but now, given a 'different' 
socialized horizontal history we might call 'the Law' (whether that Law be 
reconstituted with a different set of markers: the singularity of God, or rea-
son or renunciation or madness or whatever), that these comparisons must 
now come to an abrupt halt. Would it to be that there could be a transcen-
* An earlier version of this essay was presented at the London (UK) Foucault 
Conference, June 25, 1994 and at the International Congress of Michel Foucault, 
organized by Professor Paul Bouissac, University of Toronto and the Institut Michel 
Foucault [Paris], on Oct. 12-16, 1994, Toronto, Canada. That version, entitled, "The 
Politics of Foucault's Poetics, or, better yet: the ethical demand of ecstatic fetish," 
was subsequently published as part of the conference proceedings in J. Squires (ed.), 
"J'accuse", New Formations, (London: Lawrence and Wishart, May 1995). This is an 
enlarged version of the original article. 
Filozofski vestnik, XVIII (2/1997), pp. 17-31. 17 
Sue Golcling 
dental move or over-arching archimedean point, i.e., some kind of 'outside', 
however opaque or permeable or dynamic, that would allow us to decipher 
the belonging-together, the identity and, hence the comparison (or indeed, 
the dissimilarity), of these modalities.1 No, this is not why they are incom-
parable. Nor, on the other hand, is it enough to suspend a comparative 
association out of some kind of (formal) onto-theo-logical disengagement 
from the very concept of identity/difference and the dialectical contradic-
tion or limit therein implied or so synthesized, whilst retaining the very meta-
physics of transcendence itself. 
No. 
These comparisons cannot be made, as such, because a something 'else' 
or something 'other' is at play in Foucault's work, an elsewhere or otherness 
that is located precisely in the very parenthesis of representation; that is, in 
the nomadic 'in between' of the limit; in the unchartered and multiple (but 
no less specific) distancings and /o r journeyings required to make an iden-
tity, and therewith, a naming, a meaning - a 'some kind of' truth - possible.2 
1 Though Foucault will develop the question - and the actuality - of identity along 
quite a different route than that of his philosophic predecessor, we could also take 
some cues from Heidegger on this point: "If we think of belonging together in the 
customary way," says Heidegger, "the meaning of being is determined by the word 
together, that is, by its unity. In that case, ' to belong' means as much as: to be 
assigned and placed into the order of a ' together ' , established in the unity of a 
manifold, combined into the unity of a system, mediated by the unifying center of an 
authoritative synthesis. Philosophy represents this belonging together as nexus and 
connexio, the necessary connection of the one with the other. However, belonging 
together can also be thought of as belonging together. This means: the "together" is 
now determined by the belonging ... That is how things look - until we take a closer 
look and let the matter speak for itself." (Heidegger 1969: 29). 
2 We will return to this claim shortly when discussing Foucault's notion of a conversio ad 
se, developed mainly in the History of Sexuality, vol. Ill; i.e., the transformation of the 
self; its creation/making/inventing of "self-hoodedness" (self-mastery of the self-to-
self relation). Perhaps it is worth mentioning that this kind of distancing/spacing 
(which begins to produce a wholly different concept of otherness) can be found 
throughout his work - certainly the same themes resonate in his introduction to 
Herculine Barbine (1980); or in his work on transgression (Foucault 1977) or his 
imaginary dialogues with Blanchot (Foucault 1987a); or in his remarks on rationality/ 
truth games. For further reference to his development and use of fluidity and 
discontinuity, and the 'distancing' this requires and exploits for these truth-identity 
relations, see for example, his Death and. the Labyrinth (Foucault 1987b); "Politics and 
the Study of Discourse," and "The Problem Rationalities," (Burchell, et al. 1991: 53-
72; esp. 79-82, respectively); "Truth and Power," (Foucault 1972). On the other hand, 
perhaps it is also worth mentioning that by finding these threads throughout his 
work, this 'find' is not meant to imply that 'he always already knew what he was trying 
to say' and then just went about and said it, so that his work might be interpreted as 
18 
Poiesis and Politics as Ecstatic Fetish Foucault's Ethical Demand 
Indeed, this something else or something other is rather more like the 
unnameable space or domain of knowledge, self-knowledge, captured by 
Foucault in reference to Plato's metaphor of the eye: 
'How can the eye see itself?' [Plato asks]. The answer is apparently very 
simple, but in fact it is very complicated. For Plato, one cannot simply look 
at oneself in a mirror. One has to look into another eye, that is, one in 
oneself, however in oneself in the shape of the eye of the other. (Foucault 
1984a: 367) 
Here we begin to find clues for a different articulation of self-forma-
tion/self-knowledge, one which is formed, of necessity, from an 'other' re-
lation, not quite specified. Yet rather than the supposed deep and violent 
cut of identity drawn from exile or negation, for Foucault it will be but a 
queer and superficial wound; or, perhaps better put, it will be but a meta-
morphosis of surface distances, whose 'other' meaning is not constituted by 
recourse to a mediation born of contradiction - dialectic or otherwise. Like 
the gaping, open mouth of a pig before slaughter (is she laughing out of 
ignorance; is she screaming out of knowledge - maybe she is doing both, at 
exactly the same time) ,3 the perpetual corruption of an edge or boundary 
that stands neither as an 'outside' nor as an 'in' to any language-game, now 
quietly replaces what was once considered the absolute necessity of concep-
tualizing any identity - symbolic, real, or imagined; to wit, the im-mediate 
" /" of the ei ther/or . 
And yet, this something else or something other is not simply a 'trace' 
of the not-nameable representation standing before, beyond or beside the 
Law. Nor for that matter is it 'difference', if, by difference, we mean to say 
'not-the-same'. Nor, finally, is it 'lack', if by lack we mean an incommensu-
rable 'empty space' waiting to be filled. Apologies to Baudrillardians and 
Lacanians on this score, but this something else or something other is not a 
trace or a lack at all; nor is it an abyss, a shame, an embarrassment, an er-
ror, a negation, a castration, a sacramental rite, celebration or void. For we 
though it were one long univocal proposition or even celebration regarding sex, 
identity, politics - indeed, life itself. As one of the few creative intellectuals of our 
time - one whose intellectual work was also his artistry and, not surprisingly, his 
passion - Foucault had the creative nerve to deduce new propositions from his 
various works and, by way of example, encouraged others to do so too. "Leave it to 
the police and bureaucrats to see that our papers are in order"; he once chillingly 
threw back at the academic posers,"at least spare us their morality when we write". 
3 The image of the gaping wound as smiling pig as (morbid) metamorphosis was first 
brought to my attention through the wonderfully unconventional writings of Irving 
Massey (1976). 
19 
Sue Golcling 
are not dealing with representation, as in identity, in any of its symbolic order 
or symbolic disarray. Nor are we dealing with a representation around which 
an x or y can be reproduced or deduced or induced, leaving, in its wake, a 
remainder tout cout. 
Something much more excessive, or ungrateful and greasy, something 
much more melancholic, subtle, and in some ways, more precarious, is 
nagging at the skin of our so-called (and seemingly not comparable) fruit. 
Rather than the bold and sweeping morass of dialectical contradiction (sub-
jectivity v. objectivity - and the transcendentalism this implies - be damned!), 
Foucault is insisting upon an 'other ' as a 'something else', a bios, whose 
porous-like creation or invention, whose multiple-singularity is itself contou-
red by, while simultaneously contouring, the very processes (reciprocal, 
wandering, mannered) of tradition, custom, habit (1984a:344-51). To put 
this slightly differently, this strange kind of 'otherness' refuses the neat one-
to-one singularity/identity ratio of truth (meta-narrative or otherwise), 
wherein the 'other' comes to mean that which does not quite 'correspond' 
or 'fit in'. Indeed, this 'otherness' is completely at odds with one that might 
imply or mean a 'not-of-the-Something' - a point Foucault stresses often 
enough when writing directly on sex a n d / o r sex-as-gender. Otherness, the 
other, etc., cannot be reduced to or be equated with or seen as circum-
scribing the identity of 'those who do not fit in': the (straight) woman, the 
homosexual, the hermaphrodite, or all three.4 No more is otherness meant 
as the negatively configured, excessive 'blip' on the screen of dialectics, than 
is it meant to uncover the true, point-for-point, identity of Truth, and there-
with, of any identity, be that identity secret or wrong or even the norm.5 
Unlike the glib proclamation, which in days (not yet) gone by announced, 
4 Foucault is basically attacking the widespread but no less facile tendency of those 
political philosophies which forward in one way or another (either for progressive 
reasons or not) the concept of those who 'do not fit in' (which include, also: the 
Jews, people of colour, travellers, etc.). In reality those theories only take as a given 
exactly what they are trying to prove (around oppression, who is ' the enemy' and so 
forth). Interestingly enough, Adorno (1966) makes asimilar point in his "Critique of 
Positive Negation," though, unlike Foucault, Adorno tries to rescue the negative 
from a hegelian positivity and poorly understood freudianism, wherein for example, 
'woman', becomes 'other', and, in more contemporary times, as the female 'castrated' 
container (as it were) always-already pitted against and subsumed in terms of the 
'phallic-male' real. "Against this," says Adorno, "the seriousness of unswerving 
negation lies in its refusal to lend itself to sanctioning things as they are." (Adorno 1966: 
159) [my emphasis]. See also my "Curiosity," (Golding: 1995), where this point is 
detailed more extensively. 
5 For a glimpse into Foucault's development of the concept of other in relation to the 
identity as one which eo ipso rejects 'otherness' as an 'error, ' at least "as understood 
20 
Poiesis and Politics as Ecstatic Fetish Foucault's Ethical Demand 
"Wake up, young people from your illusory pleasures; strip off your disguises 
and recall that every one of you has a sex, a true sex" (Foucault 1980: x), 
there is no ' true sex' nor its exiled relative, the 'other'. There is simply the 
'strange history' of people who insist that this is so. 
If that be the case - if, that is to say, it is not the 'outside' negation of a 
that-which-lies-around-us - then what constitutes Foucault's handling of 
'other/excess'? In one word, though many more will follow, it is techne, in-
deed, a peculiar re-invention of the term, wherein techne becomes also the 
strategy of techne; a strategy of compulsion (as in: to compel); a strategy of 
style and manners (as in: to charm not without pleasure and attention to 
detail, to have grace, savoir faire); it is a strategy of use (as in to handle and 
be handled; to utilize; to exercise, exhaust; to corrupt; to resist; to invoke 
pleasure or pain or both). In short, it is a strategy of seduction.6 For let there 
be no mistake about it, this otherness points to a stylistics of existence, a 'being 
used', in the most profane and corrupting senses of the phrase: lying to hand. 
And yet, we are rather far away from Heidegger's techne as a transcendent 
"looking out beyond what is given at any time" (and the heterogeneous sense 
of time clipped out at the expense of 'space').7 We are even further from its 
in the most traditionally philosophic sense: a manner of acting that is not adequate to 
reality," see his fun little introduction in HerculineBarbin (Foucault 1980: x). 
6 This point will be played out in greater detail momentarily. But see in particular 
Foucault's, "Why the Ancient World Was Not a Golden Age, But What We Can Learn 
From It Anyway," "The Structure of Genealogical Interpretation," and "From the 
Classical Self to the Modern Subject (all in 1984a: esp. pp. 348-51; 353-58; 361-68, 
respectively) and "The Cultivation of The Self," "Self and Others," "The Body," (1988: 
Parts II, III, and IV). 
7 From Heidegger's An Introduction to Metaphysics (1961) as quoted in Fynsk (1993: 
p. 120). Fynsk, in succinctly extrapolating upon Heidegger's use of techne, clearly 
maps out the way in which that usage leads squarely back to the negation, the disaster, 
the error, the wronged, and so on. He writes, in part: "'Techne' Heidegger defines 
as 'knowledge': the transcendent 'looking out beyond what is given at any time, by 
which the Being of what is is disclosed and realized - opened and held open - in the 
work as a being. Techne, Heidegger says, provides the basic trait of deinon in the 
sense of ' the violent' . . .Man is deinon in that he moves in the violent action of 
'machination' (mechanoen) that Heidegger defines in terms of techne, but man is the 
strangest or most uncanny (to deinotation), in that in his opening of paths in all the 
realms of being, he is constantly 'issueless': 'he becomes the strangest of all beings 
because, without issue on all paths, he is cast out of every relation to the familiar and 
befallen by ate, ruin, catastrophe.' ...Man is 'without issue on all paths' because his 
violent and venturesome way-making must shatter against death, 'this strange and 
uncanny thing that banishes us once and for all from everything in which we are at 
home.' . . . As man ventures to master being in techne, he constantly stands before the 
possibility of death. To stand before death is fundamentally to stand in the possibility 
21 
Sue Golcling 
Benthamite predecessor of a pleasure/pain utility.8 For the physicality of 
this terrain (if, indeed, there is a singularly dimensional te r ra in) , its 
'materiality' emerges out of, and byway of, the so-called 'in between' of the 
stitched together discourse, the fleeting in between of an infinitely beating 
strange-time called 'the present' (despite the fact this entire remark has been 
resting on pre-the Christian martyrdom). In philosophic prose, it is a mi-
metic re-presenting of the present around which this something else or some-
thing other is created by virtue of its being there (as in: 'over there ' , 'over 
here' and the relative webbings and weaves in between and around that t / 
here) - to which our varied customs, manners and so on, permit us - and 
indeed, demand of us - to make use. 
That is to say, then, that this 'other ' self/identity self becomes, simply, 
the expression of multi-particled selfnesses, made meaningful, made into a 
something 'else' - a kind of gaseous 'nodal point ' of self - due precisely to 
its having been attracted/seduced, and therewith, sutured, into a oneness 
(of sorts) not because of beauty (per se) or desire (per se) or even magnet-
ism (per se) but precisely because it can be - and must be - used. Techne. 
Cohesive relations, processes, wanderings, traditions, fleeting nodal points, 
dreams, even the sweat (or especially the sweat) of the body loins, are all 
grist for the mill, all 'props' for establishing the multiple-as-a-singular-unity, 
establishing, in other words, the that which lies around us, the elsewhere or 
otherness, as us-, but an 'us' as 'selfhood' quite distinct from the wholly-
formed Truth of the Cartesian ego-I, self-reflexive sense of self. "If A = A as 
of disaster - downfall into the placeless and issueless, the event of Umheimlichkeit itself. 
... Disaster, then, is not only possible, it is necessary. Man is driven to assume his 
essence as Dasein in techne by Being that requires a place of disclosure." (Fynsk 1993: 
pp. 120-21). 
8 Of course, as is well-known from his Principles of Morals and Legislation, Bentham's 
utilitarianism, and the notions of 'use ' and 'usefulness' that stem from this, operates 
by way of a zero-sum game of pleasure and pain, or, what he calls the agression/ 
resistance principle of physics (Bentham 1988: see chapters III-V). This presupposes, 
amongst other things, a fully formed cogito, and a self-reflexive self, whose self-
hoodedness (self-mastery of the becoming of self) is based on the concept that being 
is intrinsically 'good'. But to accept this, is also then to take as a given that reality is 
precisely-and only - the reality of each individual perse . At the end of the day, this 
would mean, finally, that 'use' a n d / o r 'discovery' (techne) would encompass the 
(individual) desire of her or his own pleasure for its own sake. Or to put this slightly 
differently, it would be to accept that, as the human animal is intrinsically benevolent, 
yet this benevolence only exists to the degree to which whatever we may do (for or to 
each other), we would do it to advance ourselves first and foremost: the 'use' of a 
thing would be judged accordingly. Foucault is not invoking or even hinting at this 
type of 'use'. 
22 
Poiesis and Politics as Ecstatic Fetish Foucault's Ethical Demand 
an identity is reformulated as I = I (Fichte)," concludes Joan Stambaugh in 
her introduction to Heidegger's Identity and Difference, "and by Schelling as 
'more precisely the indifference of the subject to the object'," (Heidegger 
1969), we can say that for Foucault, it is no more nor less than a path or 
field of compressed/ multiple [relative] relations informed, conformed, 
indeed reformed as a kind of double headed arrow of I-selfs < - > I-selfs. 
Foucault puts it like this: 
"In Epictetus there are 2 exercises: sophistic and ethical. The first 
borrowed from school: question-and-answer games. [...] The second 
are ambulatory exercises. In the morning you go for a walk and test 
your reactions to that walk. The purpose of both exercises is control of 
representations, not the deciphering of truth. They are reminders 
about conforming to the rules in the face of adversity. [...] For Epictetus, 
the control of representations means not deciphering but recalling 
principles of acting and thus seeing, through self-examination, if they 
govern your life. It is a kind of permanent self-examination. [But in 
the e n d ] You have to be your own censor." (Foucault in (Martin, et al. 1988: 
p. 38, my italics)). 
This 'kind of permanent self-examination' and 'self-censorship' is what 
Foucault short-hands as 'technologies of the self; i.e., a 'logic of the techne,' 
a logic of seductions (plural) of the self to the self which creates the necessary 
distance or path for a conversio ad se, a conversion of the selves into self as self. 
(Foucault 1988: p. 65ff; 1986: p. 29ff).9 In Foucault's preliminary and ancient 
cartography of the self-to-self relation, this distance gained or accumulated 
amounts to (or circumscribes) nothing other than the social and constitutive 
self in its fluid fullness: where the other and its something come together to 
form a self-contained self; a self wherein finally "one 'belongs to [one] self," 
says Foucault, where "one is 'his own master'; one is answerable only to one-
self, one is suijuris; one exercises over oneself an authority that nothing limits 
or threatens; one holds the potestas sui." (Foucault 1988: p. 65, my empha-
sis).10 Indeed, this technology of the self is but a discursive human geogra-
phy, a kind of permeable civil fortress of self-hoodedness/self-mastery that not 
only emphasizes control in the sense of establishing a peculiar masterliness 
9 In Part Two, "The Cultivation of the Self," he writes, "... one had best keep in mind 
that the chief objective one should set for oneself is to be sought within oneself, in 
the relation of oneself to oneself." (1988: pp. 64-5). In the earlier referencing cited 
above (Foucault's second volume to the History of Sexuality - The Use of Pleasure), 
similar themes are raised though here he is speaking of a 'decipherment ' of the self 
by oneself, rather than the relation per se. 
1 0 As Seneca writes: "The soul stands on unassailable grounds, if it has abandoned external 
things; it is independent in its own fortress; and every weapon that is hurled falls short 
of the mark." (Seneca, Letters toLucilius) as quoted in Foucault (1988: pp. 82,5). 
23 
Sue Golcling 
of sorts that can defy limits or threats without, at the same time, incubating 
in its wake the hegelian predisposition of the master/slave dialectic, but also 
emits of itself a specific ethics of control; the (ethical) control of the perpetual 
self-creating/self-inventing self. 
How different is this from the cogito of a Western metaphysics! How 
different is the fruit of this 'otherness' from the more contemporary attempts 
to which we have not only beared witness, but often assume!11 
With this different use of reason, we have before us a beheaded rational 
mastery of self, a multiple personality order, controlling and controlled at 
the fleeting threshold of pleasured self-uses - a metamorphosis, a conversio 
ad se, a kind of flight of fancy nothing less than 'ecstatic' - sans a teleological 
'desire' or transcendental 'ought to be'.12 And yet, its transitory momentum 
belies an oddly stable, though distinctly imaginative, mapping of the self, 
which, in this read, becomes both infinitely changeable and rigidly concrete, 
circumscribing an impossible arena of both self-possession (as in ajuridical 
model of possession) and nomadic self-rule. For this is an "ecstatic flight," 
as Bernauer casts it; a pleasured flight, which requires an entire prepara-
tion linking body with soul without re fe ren t to the Western forms of 
masterliness, in the name of the Father or of Desire or Lacuna or Law. 
(Foucault 1984c: p. xiii). One's time becomes "full time;" indeed, becomes 
focused, disciplined, dirty/gritty time, with the Oracle at Delphi - 'know 
thyself - looming large. Indeed, in this multiple/singularity of self, unified 
(if this be the word) by the peculiar seductive acts of the 'being used', there 
is no space at all for the what will later be described by Nietzsche as "toxic 
time," that is, the wasted, mediocre time, of the modern self-reflexive Be-
ing-as-Time. 
The desiring subject is dead. 
And in its wake, the pleasure/using 'other' of self-related-self re-emerges, 
one whose very relations invents/creates an ethics of pleasure, in the fullest 
sense of the phrase: to cultivate pleasure, be it raw pain, transformative, 
melancholic, meditative, nomadic. Foucault thus writes: 
1 1 In responding to a query on 'postmodernism', and whether or not the term is worth 
keeping, Foucault raises the issue of how one 'reads' the different uses of reason, its 
historical effects, its limits and its dangers. I point this out in order to underscore that 
by accepting or even paying attention to the 'greek' conversio ad se, this is not meant 
to imply or demand "some cheap [nostalgia for] some imaginary past form of happiness 
that people did not, in fact, have at all." (Foucault 1984b: p.248). On the other hand, 
it is not meant to designate it as 'wrong' either. Indeed, there is no moralistic 
implication - though, as one might already detect, an ethical one is ready to hand. 
1 2 This point is made more forcefully in James Bernauer 's excellent study on Foucault, 
especially in his chapter six, "Ecstatic Thinking" (1991: pp.171-84). 
24 
Poiesis and Politics as Ecstatic Fetish Foucault's Ethical Demand 
"It was against the background of this cultivation of the self, of its themes 
and practices, that reflection on the ethics of pleasure developed in 
the first centuries of our era. As for the definition of the work that must 
be carried out on oneself, it too under [went], in the cultivation of the 
self, a certain modification: through the exercises of abstinence and 
control that constitute the required askesis, the place allotted to self-
knowledge becomes more important. The tasks of testing oneself, 
examining oneself, monitoring oneself in a series of clearly defined 
exercises, makes the question of truth - the truth concerning what one 
is, what one does, and what one is capable of doing - central to the 
formation of the ethical subject. Lastly, the end result of this elaboration is 
still and always, defined by the rule of the individual over himself. But 
this rule broadens into an experience in which the relation to self takes 
the form not only of a domination but also of an enjoyment without 
desire and without disturbance." (1988: pp.67, 68) 
This "rule", which broadens into an experience forms an 'other/self 
(as the multiple-other-selves-of-the-that-which-lies-around-us), whose cohesive-
ness, in its metamorphosing seduction, presences an ethics of self-creation. 
An ethics, as Foucault says, "which would not be their expression in the sphere 
of ideology; rather, [...] would constitute an original response to them, in 
the form of a new stylistics of existence." (Foucault 1988: p.71) 
So it is that this fleeting relation of pleasure and its uses, this metamor-
phosis of self to self, is captured by Foucault with the term 'stylistics of exist-
ence' , an ecstatic flight of invention - and seduction - which is no less than 
the ethico - political art of carving out one's life, should one be willing to 
journey onto the surface of the risk. Its metonymic rhythms, its poetic beat-
beatings - repetitive, lyrical and distinct - have no a priori moral agency, 
though its cohesive synthetics emit nothing short of an ethical demand, an 
ethical demand made 'real' by virtue of its having been coagulated into a 
multiple something, whatever this something - or for that matter, its multi-
plicity, may be. A politics of 'making real' at the level of otherness, if ever 
there was one. 
All this may be very interesting for our ancient boys and girls adhering 
(or otherwise) to the dream spaces of an Artemedorius or a Lucilius or a 
Seneca; but what does it have to do with us? The 'us' of a judeo-christian-
hindu-moslem worldly world? The 'us' of a capitalist and racist and sexist 
and homophob ic and he terophobic and genderphobic world? For, as 
Nietzsche intones in his The Gay Science, and quite rightly, too: 
"§152. The greatest change. - The illumination and the colour of all things 
have changed. We no longer understand altogether how the ancients 
experienced what was most familiar and frequent - for example, the 
day and waking. [...] Every wrong had a different effect on men's feel-
25 
Sue Golcling 
ings; for one feared divine retribution and not merely a civil punish-
ment and dishonour. What was joy in ages when one believed in devils 
and tempters? What was passion when one saw demons lying in wait 
nearby? What was philosophy when doubt was experienced as a sin of 
the most dangerous kind - as sacrilege against eternal love, as mistrust 
of all that was good, high, pure, and merciful?..." (Nietzsche 1974: 
pp.196-7). 
The first answer must include, as Gramsci would put it, this 'common 
place' remark: that as every philosophy brings with it layers of politics, and 
vice versa, it then also brings forward a specific set of questions (and 'an-
swers,' not to put too simplistic a spin on it) about being human, of what 
this humanity consists, and what kind of societies should best promote what-
ever 'is' or 'is to become' the 'is'; whatever, that is to say, is / to become 'nec-
essary.' If that be the case, it is entirely plausible to suggest that a self-reflex-
ive unity (of self) has embedded in it a certain set of interests with respect to 
personhood, body, property, community, and the like. Conversely, it is 
equally plausible to suggest, then, that with quite a different concept of self 
- one which is inherently multiple - a whole series of 'common places' are 
re-mixed and re-masticated to inform yet another set of interests, a re-newed, 
re-packaged, resusicated set of interests time-travelled and squarely landing 
within the glories (or not) of an information-cybernetic age. A rather odd 
eternal return, one that holds out the promise of a 'something different. ' 
And yet, a small recourse to Nietzsche, once again, may be necessary. 
"§158. An inconvenient trait. - To find everything profound - that is an 
inconvenient trait. It makes one strain one's eyes all the time, and in 
the end one finds more than one might have wished." (Nietzsche 1974: 
p.198). 
Second answer, then: Let us be very careful not too strain too intently. 
Shall we just steal a small leaf from Foucault's 'book', nodding to the infi-
nite quagmire of change and in attempting to do so, avoid the profound? 
One step backward, two steps ahead: let us link Foucault's notion of the 
ecstatic flight with the contemporary armour of fetishistic play to create what 
could be called, conceptually or otherwise in our less-than-world-historic 
times, 'ecstatic fetish'. 
As we have seen, with this (seductive) notion of the ecstatic, a peculiar 
relation is formed based on the multiple singularity of otherness which dis-
rupts, out of necessity, the convenience of ' e i ther /or ' polarities (and with 
it, e i ther /or politics). For the "other" that an ecstatic self-to-self relation 
exposes, is at best a 'quasi-negation' that plays with, circumscribes, and dances 
across the surface of each and every limit. We find then, a kind of otherness/ 
identity, say for example, in being gay, that has little to do with being 'anti'-
26 
Poiesis and Politics as Ecstatic Fetish Foucault's Ethical Demand 
its supposed polar opposite (in this case, the so-called straight). Instead it 
elucidates a concept of self-as-other; i.e., a self no longer singular, unified 
and whole, but eliding multiplicities, self-as-selves-in-the-plural, based on the 
erupting surfaces between and amongst 'internal' and 'external' polarities. 
To be clear, and to have some fun (why not?), let's move onto a queerer 
version of this thing called 'fetish,' and the ethics of multiplicity to which it 
may (or may not) speak - resurrected and now laid out across the some-
what masturbatory (but in any case no longer inconspicuous) use of the 
phrase 'the relation of the self-to-the-self.' For it can certainly be said that 
fetish/fetishism, whilst including, initiating or cementing codes of behaviour 
and dress sense, does so in a way that neither privileges nor ignores this 
multiple sense of 'otherness' and with it, this multiple sense of excess whose 
'negation' is no longer to be sought in the contradiction of the limit, but 
indeed, its rupture. By saying this, I want to disengage the concept (and/or, 
indeed, the reality) of fetish from being thought of as a signifier of death or 
of a failed mourning or of a melancholia-writ-large-and-inescapable - as one 
finds in contemporary remarks on the subject.13 I do not wish to say that 
fetish is not at all connected to death or to grieving or to a weirdly cathected 
fashion sense - it is just to say it is not connected like that. 
If one follows Foucault's general indications on the impossibility of 
homogeneous otherness and the like, we get a different read of the terrain. 
Fetish becomes a far more delicate, though like silk, rather durable, con-
struction. Fetish becomes a far more raw (and explicit) bleed, though like 
blood, changes colour the moment its presence surfaces to air. Fetish be-
comes a far more complicated joke - some say a 'compacted story', funny 
and alive, though precisely and at the same time, rather desperate and cling-
ing, painful, stillborn, and even gut-wrenching. Laugh till she cried. (And 
then cried for more?) Yes, why not? 
For fetish, if it is anything at all, in at least being all these contradictory 
and mutating 'doubles', is precisely and only the multiple singularity of itself. 
One could say it entails, inscribes and delimits a kind of ripped and 
shared hermaphrodism (and I do not use this word lightly) which is not a 
metaphor 'standing in' for anything else. Neither is it an 'empty' container 
waiting to be filled by some endless struggle between this thing called, (for 
example) heterosexual desire, this thing called homosexual desire, and this 
1 3 The best example of this problem can be found in Lorraine Gammon and Merja 
Makinen (1994); but we find it, albeit it much more complex and meaningful ways, in 
works as varied as Freud's initial (1905) "Three Essay on Sexuality," his "Mourning 
and Melancholia; and most recently in Derrida (1986), "Like the Sound of the Sea 
Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man," pp. 155-249. 
27 
Sue Golcling 
thing called bisexual desire mutated into one pair of rubber stockings, one 
certain 60's hairstyle, one opened and smiling or tortured mouth . The 
fetishization of these creatures: male, female, transgendered beings, h o m o / 
lesbo/bisexed erotics, hairstyles and hose, cannot quite be reduced, how-
ever microscopic, to some kind of impenetrable mass, stuck together and 
'understood' only in terms of their opposition, contradiction or annihila-
tion. 
For its synthesis, its moment, is not a 'something' that can be flung open 
and brought to public light, public scrutiny or even public 'liberation'. It is 
far too vampiric for all that. The meaning of the fetish both disappears and 
hovers at the very instant it seems most near to hand. There are neither truths 
nor secrets in a fetish; no discovery, no bringing to the surface its authentic 
point of departure; indeed, no 'authentic' point at all. This does not mean 
that it is meaningless; or that it describes no limit or can be seen as an infi-
nite regression. 
Rather, it is to say that fetish is the surface and the departure and the 
arrival; it's whole point is that it is a squished up line at the very moment of 
its being a dot (and/or vice versa: an elongated dot cleverly doubled as a 
line); a process and an end-point, endlessly processional and finitely punc-
tuated; the very threshold of a compacted story, a narrative that could never 
become 'meta'; never become 'spectacle' as such. Its presence, like all 
presents, is simply impossible (here, there, and gone at the exact same in-
stant); a virtual 'to be', a mastery of the coming of masterliness. A radical 
mastery: being a perfectly imperfect autonomous mastering, as de Sade 
would say, one without submission to a fixed and totalized Other. It is rather 
a virtual mastery, a radically impure mastery - de-sanitized over and again 
on the slippery slope between and amongst the relation of self to self. 
An obsessional, virtual, metonymic surface. An unreal (but, on the other 
hand, no less real), floating, magical, pleasure seeking surface, shot through 
with the absurdity of the cruel, of the dead, of the wronged. Isn't life funny!? 
Isn't life grand?! A cyberspace of present tense passion, of perpetual move-
ment going nowhere in particular, but going there with speed and agility 
and attentiveness to detail, nonetheless. Not a becoming of self, not an imma-
nence as such; not a telos unfolding either to the known or unknown truth 
of self-awareness self; not a Law because, by definition, Law (and therewith, 
truth). Simply a coming without the 'be'; a coming without the identity rela-
tion of the 'to be'; a coming to the surface of the present tense presence; 
superficiality in all its glory, re-making and re-preseni-ing the radical plural-
ity of self without recourse to the always already signed, sealed, and deliv-
ered self-given self. 
28 
Poiesis and Politics as Ecstatic Fetish Foucault's Ethical Demand 
For fetish is simply, if it is anything at all, history with a Pop, the singu-
larly self-identified-self, blown to smithereens, undone and redone in the 
sacred image of mutated selves, cyber-selves; variegated selves of the re-
thought-out selves, bent and re-designed in the instant coming of its come, 
by self-immolation self-exhibitionism, self-abuse, all fitted neatly into corset 
and collage. A mutilated series of selves (any selves), a repetitive series of 
selves, well-rehearsed some might say (ritualised, most would say) through 
the mirrored multiplicity of space in between (and amongst) the snap-crackle-
pop of leather, latex and lace self forming selves. 
Translation: No more 'inside' v. the 'outside' of individual body selves. 
No more self-reflexive self. Fetish as a kind of marker, horizon, even a kind 
of 'skin' for the politically, emotionally liberal-impaired self; nothing more 
and nothing other than the infinite metamorphoses of the self into selves 
(or vice versa); the transformative mutations whose strange but somehow 
famil iar (though utterly unchartered) pluralities meld into oddly coher-
ent, albeit risky, wholes — holographic wholes - making metamorphosis, and 
with it, fetish, the very staff of identity itself. An identity which is no more or 
less than the excessive ecstatic flights of seduction in all its varying 'other' 
possibilities. Indeed, one could say that fetish is precisely the 'other' of Be-
ing, in all the multiple flawed and time worn senses of the verb: to be. 
In the fetish world: a world that is not community and not geared to-
ward a 'something' (but is rather that heterogeneous sense of coded regu-
lations and conduct spoken of earlier), we have before us then a peculiar 
imaginary of variegated impossibilities, an oozing excessivity of the self no 
longer outside the very processes of change, and therewith, no longer out-
side our grasp or reduced to a singular, opaque and unblemished purity. 
Could it not be said, without overstating the case that we have the possibility 
(or anyway, 'a' possibility) of routing out, if nothing else, a damning fascist 
logic of the fixed whole-truth-and-nothing-but-the-truth-so-help-us-god moral-
ity. And in its place? A fleeting, mutinous, fetishized, politics of existence, a 
peculiar form of ethics: social and multiple, mannered and refined, con-
tinuous in its rupturing of the aesthetic form (though aesthetic nonetheless); 
a kind of political-[aesthetic]-ethics whose integrity is graspable only at its 
multiple "other" crossing. 
Ecstatic fetish: it is not a Profound Thought worthy of grounding any 
vision. It is a small, fleeting, ethical demand at the point of inventing the 
double joke of a multiple self: at the nei ther /nor threshold of a fetish gone 
to light; at the ne i the r /nor pleasure of the come. 
A new dance step; a borrowed dance step; an old re-packaged dance 
step. Is this not precisely what a constant tango with ecstatic fetish - the 
29 
Sue Golcling 
conversio ad se of our day and age - invents, sweats out, [re-] presents, and 
plays with, over and again? One small aspect of contemporary resistance to 
domination and insistence on change, not to mention: fun. 
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31