Theories, like people, need their fetishes. I'm speaking not of the object fixations of the contemporary humanities but rather of those figures that, while extrinsic to a theory's methodology—even striking a sour or discordant lexical note—come to possess and animate that theory. Such, at least, was true for Marx's Capital, which derives a good deal of its analytic force from the sacramental magnificence of the spirit world. Indeed, the religious language of the fetish—irreducible to the logic of exchange value and the mechanics of equivalence that Capital extrapolates—is the motor of the text. It is so because the language of the fetish lies outside the terms of political economy. The fetish—Capital's indispensable outlier—denaturalizes the banal, violent fungibilities that are the capitalist lifeworld, wreaking its stomach-turning unveilings as if from another planet. Capital would not be Capital without its fetish.