fetishist disavowal

is simply put, the notion 'I know very well, but even still'. It is, for example at work in the logic behind the joke 'of course, I don't believe a horseshoe brings good luck, but I was told it works even if you don't believe it'.

The point, of course, is that, for the belief to be operative, the subject who directly believes needs not to exist at all: it is enough precisely to presuppose his existence, to believe in it, either in the guise of the mythological founding figure who is not part of our reality, or in the guise of the impersonal 'one' ('one believes. . . '). (Zizek 'how to read lacan' : 26) . . . fetishist disavowal of belief works in ideology: seeing a horse-shoe on his door, the surprised visitor said that he doesn't believe in the superstition that it brings luck, to which Bohr snapped back: 'I also do not believe in it... I have it there because I was told that it works also if one does not believe in it!' (Zizek 'how to read lacan' : 26)

is the idea that 'I know very well that things are the way I see them.

In one of the Marx brothers' films, Groucho, when caught in a lie, answers angrily: 'Whom do you believe, your eyes or my words'' This apparently absurd logic renders perfectly the functioning of the symbolic order in which the symbolic mask matters more than the direct reality of the individual who wears this mask. This functioning involves the structure of what Freud called 'fetishist disavowal': 'I know very well that things are the way I see them, that the person in front of me is a corrupted weakling, but I nonetheless treat him respectfully, since he wears the insignia of a judge, so that when he speaks, it is the law itself which speaks through him'. So, in a way, I effectively believe his words, not my eyes. (28)

fetishist disavowal, n.Definitions

fetishist disavowal