Friend's hamster as fetish for dead wife
anecdote · personal/autobiographical ·
retold in 6 talks
A friend whose young wife died of cancer appeared unnervingly calm, always stroking a hamster she had loved. A year later when the hamster died, he instantly broke down and attempted suicide. Žižek uses this as the clinical model of fetishist disavowal: the hamster allowed him to deny that his wife was dead.
≤2000talks it is told in, per year2026
As told 6
“Where is your hamster? I claim that all cynics have, if you look closely... a hamster.”
“Through this fetish, he was able to accept rationally that the wife is dead... When half a year later the hamster died, he immediately tried to kill himself.”
“While talking about her, he always held a hamster, his dead wife's favorite pet object, gently playing with it. This hamster was his fetish: a living disavowal of her death.”
What it carries
one story, many jobs: the ideas this anecdote is deployed to argue, one tally mark per use (an idea page shows the same relation from the other end, as its shelf of stories)
Its cast and sources
populated by
Patricia Highsmith3Gustáv Husák1Igor Bavčar1Wallace Stevens1William Golding1Jacques Le Goff1Michelangelo1Philippe Pétain1
alongside works
Every retelling 6
A friend whose young wife died of cancer appeared unnervingly calm, always stroking a hamster she had loved. A year later when the hamster died, he instantly broke down and attempted suicide. Žižek uses this as the clinical model of fetishist disavowal: the hamster allowed him to deny that his wife was dead., illustrating fetish,disavowal,Verleugnung,Je sais bien mais quand même
A friend whose wife died of cancer handled it calmly while playing with a hamster; when the hamster died months later, he tried to kill himself. The hamster was the fetish, the small lie enabling rational acknowledgment of the wife's death while blocking its existential weight., illustrating fetishist mode of ideology,fetish,ideology today
A man whose wife died of cancer coped calmly, always holding her pet hamster while speaking of her. When the hamster died a year later, he had a total breakdown requiring hospitalization. The hamster was the fetish embodying the disavowal of his wife's death., illustrating fetish,disavowal,symbolic efficiency,fetishist mode of ideology
A Slovenian friend's wife died of cancer; he could discuss her death calmly while stroking his wife's pet hamster. When the hamster died a year later, the friend immediately broke down and attempted suicide, revealing the hamster as the fetish object that had blocked the full subjective impact of the loss., illustrating fetish,fetishist ideology,isolierung
A friend's wife dies of cancer, but he only breaks down when his wife's pet hamster dies; the hamster was a 'fetish' that allowed him to disavow the wife's death until the substitute was gone., illustrating fetish,psychoanalysis
A husband whose wife died of cancer continued functioning normally until his wife's pet hamster died, at which point he broke down. The hamster served as a fetish object embodying the wife, allowing him to disavow her death until the fetish was lost., illustrating fetish,cynical reason