Dal feticcio al quasi-oggetto. Comunicazione e memoria delle cose

In the western thought the fetish is traditionally related to an inadequate substitution in meaning and relationship construction. This interpretation is in Marx’ fetishism of the goods, in the Freud’ sexual fetishism, or in the latest conceptualisations. The Michel Serres’ thought allows us to replace the fetish, in its quality of quasi-object, in the centre of the collective production. And by the comparison with a particular kind of quasi-object, the joker, perfectly represented by money, incarnation of the abstract, it’s possible to think of the ambivalence that seems to characterize the contemporary objects, shared out between a typically social abstract symbolic and a symbolic deep-rooted in the bodies, in the Langue, in personal stories and knowledge.