09 FETISHISM

"Human, all too human."
—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

The self is full of love relationships, which seem to be things. This happens because things are not simply things. They have never been. What then, is the substance of things? We don’t know, but we know their destiny, and this is to share ours because we are inextricably linked to them. Things are, perhaps, our salvation; in things we may find what it means to be human. This is, in short, the essence of mythical thought, and its substance is also ours.

The avant-garde Spanish writer Ramón Gómez de la Serna pointed out: “things save us, they are like us.” We are the soft thing with murderous circulation, able to live as beings as well as a set of hidden desires. How can we not give up on things when we are the same? Possibly because they want to tell us something but they can’t. They fall into our subconscious as if they fall into the depths of a cave—yes, once again, the myth. Who has no tenderness for things, no tenderness to feel them and embody them, is not human enough. Human, all too human. It is not that objects come alive in us, no; we are the ones who live them.

Perhaps it is necessary, as Walter Benjamin suggested, to “redeem the object as a thing, of its intrinsic value”. Perhaps we ought to free the object from “the monotony of utility”. Collecting, possessing, and using objects as an extension of human desires, to give them a life on their own, is the redemption of things, which complements the redemption of humankind. The need to possess and to assign qualities to objects reveals an interest in the varieties of the world, and at the same time, a fear of losing interest in the world, a fear of boredom.

—ENTKUNSTUNG