Critical fetishes.
Residues of
general economy
Critical Fetishes. Residues of General Economy is the first installment of The Red Specter’s projects. The collection of interventions presented here are argued as an interpellation and a reply to the logic of the market, which has managed to assimilate the neo-avant-garde project of the dematerialization of the art work and the consequent formalization and reduction of Conceptual practices. We have taken it upon ourselves to excavate an alternative archive of poetic, theore-tical and political strategies that recuperate, in a double movement, the ambivalence and complexity of the category of the fetish as the center of critical theorization of market society, and at the same time emphasize the fact that the notion itself emerges as a key concept of the relationship between
Enlightenment thought and colo-nialism. Given that the problem of the fetish occupies the intersection of a colonial imaginary with the production of different discourses and repertoires of analysis where a dislocated, spectral image of the economy is situated, we advance the premise that its displacement and radical inversion will conduct us to its theoretical nucleus and the possibility of un-drawing the limits—both real and poetic—of its phenomenology; that is, of its expe-rience with regards to theoretical and aesthetic fictions within art and capitalism.

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From the Eighteen
Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte

Karl Marx (1852)
If any section of history has been painted gray on gray, it is this. Men and events appear as reverse Schlemihls, as shadows that have lost their bodies. The revolution itself paralyzes its own bearers and endows only its adversaries with passionate forcefulness. When the “red specter,” continually conjured up and exercised by the counterrevolutionaries finally appears, it appears not with the Phrygian cap of anarchy on its head, but in the uniform of order, in red breeches.