All stones can become oceans: experiments on “fetishism” as archive

Abstract

This article offers a critical investigation of the concept of “fetishism” through conceptual and methodological experiments with the colonial archive. By mobilizing categories such as “line,” “impression,” and “dialectical machine,” it seeks to excavate the historical, political, and epistemological layers of the term, approaching it as a field of dispute and invention. Historical and ethnographic images are activated as critical operators, composing a visual montage that challenges the text and expands its reflective power. Drawing on authors such as William Pietz, Walter Benjamin, Suely Rolnik, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Georges Didi-Huberman, the text articulates an experimental grammar of the archive, suggesting ways to reactivate the silenced memories of fetishism and its deviant uses. It is thus a poetic-political exercise in memory-making, which reclaims fetishism as an unstable, residual, and insurgent territory.