Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"A remarkable contribution to the anthropological, ethnographical and political literature." * Contemporary Political Theory *
“Pietz’s dazzling investigation of the fetish as an enigma of power—a material artifact and a source of spiritual authority at once—binds together colonial history, merchant capital, anthropological inquiry, and group psychology. His prescient framing of the concept as establishing social value and debt is indispensable reading in our era of disaster capitalism and commodity terrorism.” -- David L. Eng, University of Pennsylvania
“Assembling Pietz’s early programmatic texts and later, lesser-known ones, this book discloses the momentum and trajectory of a body of work that changed how we think about the fetish concept and so much more. As the excellent introductory essays make clear, this influence is at once profound and enigmatic, a function of the elusive phenomenon called ‘fetishism’ and of Pietz’s rigorous thinking. The book is a gift—mandatory reading for every critical thinker of the contemporary and its histories.” -- Rosalind C. Morris, Columbia University
“In this groundbreaking work of interdisciplinary scholarship, Pietz provides an illuminating genealogy of fetishism, one that is also a fascinating theory of persistent misrecognition—of others and ourselves. Here, at last, the celebrated deployments of the fetish by Hume, Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Freud are put into philosophical and historical context. Fetishism was an essential ideologeme in the European colonializing of the world; this book is an essential tool in its conceptual decolonizing.” -- Hal Foster, Princeton University
Table of ContentsForeword: William Pietz in the 1980s
Francesco Pellizzi
An Introduction to the Sheer Incommensurable Togetherness of the Living Existence of the Personal Self and the Living Otherness of the Material World
Stefanos Geroulanos and Ben Kafka
Editorial Note
1. The Problem of the Fetish
The Problem of the Fetish
The Truth of the Fetish
The Historical Field of the Fetish
2. The Origin of the Fetish
Facticius in Christian Theology: Idolatry and Superstition
Feitiçaria in Christian Law: Witchcraft and Magic
Feitiço in Portuguese Guinea
Fetisso: Origin of the Idea of the Fetish
3. Bosman’s Guinea and Enlightenment Discourse
The Discourse about
Fetissos on the Guinea Coast
African “Fetish Worship” and Mercantile Ideology
4. Charles de Brosses and the Theory of Fetishism
De Brosses’s Theory of Fetishism: The Hermeneutic of the Human Sciences and the Problem of Metaphor
Anti-universalist Hermeneutics
The Rhetoric of Fetish Worship in the French Enlightenment
5. Fetishism and Materialism: The Limits of Theory in Marx
The Semiological Reading of Marx
Marx and the Discourse about Fetishism
Religious Fetishism and Civil Society: The Critique of Hegel
Economic Fetishism: Marx on Capital
6. The Spirit of Civilization: Blood Sacrifice and Monetary Debt
African Fetishism and the Spirit of Civilization
Fetishism during the Colonial Conquest and the Problem of Human Sacrifice
Fetishism under Colonial Law and the Problem of Fatal Accidents
Debt, Fetishism, and Sacrifice as Concepts for Comparative Studies
7. Death of the Deodand: Accursed Objects and the Money Value of Human Life
The Unfortunate Death of the Honourable William Huskisson
Oliver Wendell Holmes on the Problem of the Deodand
The Pious Use Value of Accursed Objects and the Fiscal Body of the Christian Sovereign
The Incorporation of Capitalist Debt into the Sovereign Body
The Abolition of Deodand: The Money Value of Human Life and Immortal Bodies without Sovereignty
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
