The Machine-Phallus: Psychoanalyzing the Geopolitical Economy of Masculinity and Race

In Freud the fetish is not only a “protection” against castration; it is also a “memorial” to it: the fetish may occlude recognition of castration, but it cannot erase it; sometimes the fetish reinscribes castration in its very form. The trauma is never undone, its threat never exorcized. And so it is with the machine: it may figure a new totality, a dynamic phallic body, but it cannot rectify the old fragmentation nor make good the originary castration of the subject. In this way the double logic of the prosthesis may replicate that of the fetish: the prosthesis cannot undo its reason for being; it may even underscore that the subject is defined in lack. [Foster, 1997, pp. 14-15]