“I know...but just the same" – this is Octave Mannoni's formulation of the structure of the fetish, and more generally of fetishistic thinking. The fetishist knows that an old, cherished belief is false but nonetheless continues to believe it. The nonetheless is not articulated, it is the fetish.”

“However, in fetishism the desired object is displaced; and in this context (“The Apparition” by Guy De Maupassant) it is the desiring object, so to speak. In other words, have we ever seen a boot in love with a fetishist?”

“When you make something fetish, ashes and dusts will laugh at you, because they know even the most valuable fetishes will turn into dusts and ashes!”

“When a belief vanishes, there survives it -- more and more vigorously so as to cloak the absence of the power, now lost to us, of imparting reality to new things -- a fetishistic attachment to the old things which it did once animate, as if it was in them and not in ourselves that the divine spark resided, and as if our present incredulity had a contingent cause -- the death of the gods.”

“Sometimes, when it is going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationary.”

“There is no more unhappy being under the sun than a fetishist who pines for a boot and has to content himself with an entire woman.”