The Returns of Fetishism

Charles de Brosses and the Afterlives of an Idea

Charles de Brosses,Rosalind C. Morris,Daniel H. Leonard, Daniel H. Leonard

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780226464893
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

For more than 250 years, Charles de Brosses's term "fetishism" has exerted great influence over our most ambitious thinkers. Used as an alternative to "magic, " but nonetheless expressing the material force of magical thought, de Brosses's term has proved indispensable to thinkers as diverse as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Lacan, Baudrillard, and Derrida. With this book, Daniel H. Leonard offers the first fully annotated English translation of the text that started it all, On the Worship of Fetish Gods, and Rosalind C. Morris offers incisive commentary that helps modern readers better understand it and its legacy.The product of de Brosses's autodidactic curiosity and idiosyncratic theories of language, On the Worship of Fetish Gods is an enigmatic text that is often difficult for contemporary audiences to assess. In a thorough introduction to the text, Leonard situates de Brosses's work within the cultural and intellectual milieu of its time. Then, Morris traces the concept of fetishism through its extraordinary permutations as it was picked up and transformed by the fields of philosophy, comparative religion, political economy, psychoanalysis, and anthropology. Ultimately, she breaks new ground, moving into and beyond recent studies by thinkers such as William Pietz, HartmutBöhme, and Alfonso Iacono through illuminating new discussions on topics ranging from translation issues to Africanity and the new materialisms.

After de Brosses:

Fetishism, Translation, Comparativism, Critique

ROSALIND C. MORRIS

After the publication and modest sensation of Du culte des dieux fétiches, Charles de Brosses fell into relative oblivion. His authority among the philosophes never really granted, his name was reduced to a signature or a footnote. Nonetheless, the term to which his name is forever appended quickly gained traction and circulated widely, traveling well beyond the circle of his readers. Within a generation, de Brosses’s coinage of the term “fétichisme/fetishism” had healed into the lexicons of the philosophy of religion and the emerging critical project of political economy, where it joined the already sedimented term “fetish” as what we might call the naturalized alien of comparativism’s incipient discourse.

A crucial task for any history of the term, and for every reader of de Brosses, must be to grasp what is at stake in the production of the abstract noun, of “fetishism” or, indeed, “the fetish,” as something more and beyond a fetish or fetishes. At once designating an assemblage of practice and belief and, with it, an epistemic structure, “fetishism” is a term functioning as a medium of comparativist practice, one premised on a new kind of humanism, which it both anchors and troubles to the point of undoing. Nonetheless, its itinerary entailed as many metamorphoses as it did citations, and it is therefore important to mark the major destinations on that circuitous translational path.

It would be impossible, of course, to survey the entire literature on fetishism produced since the late eighteenth century, or that which enabled de Brosses’s innovation in the centuries prior to his writing. Thousands of tomes have been generated, and as many secondary commentaries have proliferated to explain, dispute, reframe, and synthesize the concept and to map its sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit appearance in the intellectual traditions of philosophy, psychology, psychoanalysis, economics and political economy, literary criticism, art history and media studies, and the human sciences more broadly. In what follows, I have focused on what I believe to be the most significant deployments and theoretical elaborations of the term, and on its uptake in the most influential works of what remains a Western canon. My strategy has been to undertake close readings of the main texts in which the term functions, to follow the progression between the works of signal writers, to track the shifts in the concept as it metamorphoses over their oeuvres, and to note the departures between them. Here, in addition to rereading de Brosses’s original treatise to clarify the extent of his innovation, I focus on Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, and Lacan. But I also devote considerable attention to the discourses that were enabled or summoned by these writers, including the historicist critique of William Pietz, as well as the works of anthropologists and literary critics, media theorists and cultural critics. The latter part of the present text is devoted to the reproblematization of fetishism that arose in the course of general critiques of political economy and Western philosophy by surrealist, feminist, and poststructuralist thinkers.

For the most part, my aim is exegetical—in the hopes that a series of textual explications and explicitations will enable the reader to assess contemporary debates on the fetish and fetishism with a greater sense of the term’s many and historically shifting significations. To the extent possible, I have not attempted to pit one writer against another or to decide among competing and contradictory positions as they emerged over time, and certainly not by assuming the merely chronological displacement of prior models. Nor have I attempted to assign relative veracity or even explanatory efficacy to one or another theorist. This essay is an exercise in the critical history of ideas, supplemented by the reading practices of a somewhat more capacious, because anthropological, conception of historical textuality and textual historicity. Because the discourse of fetishism is not a function of accumulating positivities, nor the result of consensus-building through negation, I have not hesitated to recount those elements of the canonical texts that repeat or recycle prior texts. If this generates an occasional sense of déja vu, that should allow the reader to comprehend more fully the involuting and often self-reproducing nature of the discourse of fetishism.

The basic structure of the text that follows here is, at the broadest range of its arc, chronological. Nonetheless, as the postpositivist historians have taught us, we grasp historically prior moments only retrospectively. Genealogies are constructed in terms of the categories by which knowledge has been produced and according to the shifting criteria of relevance that structure the processes of archivization. For this reason, and despite a generally chronological arc, the text vacillates between primary sources and their archival remediations. Thus, for example, after discussing the work of John Locke, the text turns to Pietz, who provided the first sustained attempt to locate the origin of the term “fetishism” not in de Brosses’s mind but in the violent, cross-cultural encounter between Portuguese traders, their Protestant critics, and West African cultural traditions. The reason for this move is that it is not possible (or at least it is inadvisable) to think of that early space of encounter, or to revisit the primary texts, without accounting for the epistemic conditions of their authorship, the structured biases that informed them, or the limits of understanding that framed them—as well as those that have informed their rereading. In doing so, we are greatly assisted by Pietz’s intellectual historiography. Had he not undertaken his meticulous investigation of the term in an imperial zone—one that marked the term with the specter of irrationality and a crisis of value tantamount to madness—it would not be possible to understand how and why Locke could choose it to exemplify tautology and an incapacity to signify. And it is for this reason that discussions of the eighteenth century give way in this essay to those of the twentieth in the initial section of the book. Similar moves mark the later sections of the text; an investigation of psychoanalytic readings of fetishism follows Freud through Lacan and is then followed by a return to the early part of the twentieth century, to take up what ethnologists and artists were doing during the same period. To be sure, the ethnological literature informed the psychoanalytic discourse, but the trajectories of the term, and the analytic projects to which it was appended, varied from discipline to discipline.

It is a central aim of this essay to show how the internal histories of disciplines and discourses proceeded in ways that were discontinuous from adjacent disciplines and discourses. Often, the emergence of fetishism as a focus of theoretical labor and interest in one discipline coincides with its diminishment or disavowal in another. A strictly and totalized chronology, in which one abandoned the writings of Kant for those of Protestant missionaries, then returned to Hegel, before joining the anthropologists and returning to Heidegger, for example, would leave us blind to the particular itineraries of fetishism within given disciplines and would thus limit an ability to discern the historical metamorphoses within them that were enabled by changing conceptions of the role played by fetishism, or of the distribution of reason and the function of the aesthetic, the place of Africa in the imagination of Western self-sameness, and so forth. Therefore, to contain but also recognize the degree to which discussions of fetishes and fetishism have always been threatened by a tyranny of detail and, simultaneously, to make a history of fetishism reveal a history of institutionalities as well as ideas, I have made disciplinary history the principle of textual organization. It is my hope that doing so makes visible the recursivity and repetitiveness (as well as the reversals and revisions), the uneven fortunes and the oft-secreted influences that have inflected writings about fetishes, the fetish, and fetishism. It is only on this basis that we can grasp why, since the turn of the millennium, the concept of fetishism has returned, as both an object of proprietary knowledge-claims and a proposed remedy, whether explicit or implicit, for a world threatened by human technological excess.

A Fetiche Is a Fetiche: No Knowledge without Difference

Because fetishism has been repeatedly inscribed as the other of liberalism’s Reason, but also as its most alluring object, and because fetishism itself has come to name a form of misrecognition in which originary events are endlessly displaced, disavowed, and supplemented, we can preface this intellectual history with the so-called father of classical liberalism, namely John Locke. Locke wrote before de Brosses ever coined his term, of course. It is therefore in the movement from the metaphorizing of fetishes as paradigmatic objects at the limit of understanding, in Locke’s work, to the creation of the first “science” of fetishism, represented by de Brosses’s treatise, that we see what was at stake in the Burgundian philosopher’s first efforts at systematization.

“A fetiche is a fetiche,” wrote Locke, just as “a spirit is a spirit” and “a soul is a soul.” With these three formulaic identities, he introduces his chapter “Of Trifling Propositions,” the eighth in book 4 of An Essay concerning Human Understanding (1689). In Locke’s estimation, these propositions do not close around themselves by virtue of a gnostic verity, the kernel of which can be accessed through a shibboleth. Rather, they are statements of mere identity, no more capable of producing understanding than any act of designation; to assert that “what is, is” can “bring no increase to our knowledge.”1 Knowledge is already amenable to quantification and is implicitly analogized to value here. It is therefore important that Locke chooses for his examples of valueless identities three enigmatic terms that refer to three nonsensible referents. In so doing, he simultaneously stages an epistemological problem and uses epistemically inaccessible objects as exemplars of a strangely redoubled phenomenon in which that which is outside or beyond the logic of valorization is also that which, when defined self-referentially, exhibits and constitutes a failure of understanding.

By Locke’s account, the propositions listed above are merely a function of “trifling with words.” Neither qualifying the term by delineating its definitive attributes, nor linking it to more encompassing or as yet unknown categories via intermediary terms, identical propositions are, according to Locke, simply redundant. They are bereft, he might have said, of reason’s value-adding function. Reduplication, which is a feature of many languages in the world, was, for many early modern and Enlightenment thinkers, and especially students of comparative philology, a mark of linguistic immaturity.2 Locke was attributing to identical propositions the qualities of reduplication as then conceived, according to which “circumlocution and equivocal terms” can never lead to new knowledge, but only to the repetition of the same.3 But what was being repeated? Not the ideas, “whose identity and diversity will always be perceived, as soon as clearly the ideas themselves are.”4 The putative need for definitional clarification, falsely satisfied by maxims and identical propositions, emerged, for Locke, only because of a nominal confusion: “If there ever happen any doubt about it [the understanding of ideas], it will always be found to be about the names, and not the ideas themselves.” And so, Locke, using a fetish, a spirit, and a soul as his prime examples, makes words the locus of misunderstanding. Behind and beyond words, and only there, lay the truth of ideas. This was the rationalist rendition of the confusion of tongues said, in the biblical tradition, to have originated in the second fall, at Babel. Against this state of debased nature, empiricism offered the (nonetheless disputable) consolation of access to the origin of ideas.

Let us note the privileged place of the “fetiche” along with the spirit and the soul, in Locke’s conception of linguistic redundancy and intellectual sterility. At the time of his writing, the latter two entities were generally presumed to be inaccessible to the senses, and the epistemological obstacles to understanding them were thus partly determined by the aporia between the sensible and the knowable—which aporia Locke attempted to close and Kant later insisted be held open. It is thus significant to find in Locke’s text an analogy produced by apposition, one that insinuates a comparable problem for fetishes. The analogy is, however, sustainable only insofar as a fetish is recognized as a word. Moreover, this problematic relation between word or sign and concept governed the entire future history of fetishism’s discourses, along with the related epistemological question of the protoconcept’s relation to facticity.

In the writings on the topic that preceded Locke’s text, and that proliferated among missionaries and merchants, fetishes, though often understood as the result of a mistaken valorization of “trifling things,” are conceived not as insensible phenomena whose presumptive existence must nonetheless be described, but rather as a kind of excess of the sensible, a materiality without spirit. William Pietz, who has written most knowingly about this linkage of fetishes with trifles, tells us that Locke had in his library a copy of Willem Bosman’s A New and Accurate Account of the Coast of Guinea, although he could only have acquired it a year before his death in 1704, before its translation into English.5 It was nonetheless Bosman who provided the description and interpretation of fetish worship as the central feature of the religious practice in coastal West African societies on which later theorists, and especially de Brosses, relied.

According to Pietz, “it was Bosman’s explicit thesis that African fetish religion in particular and African social order in general were founded entirely upon the principle of interest.”6 It is thus notable that this dimension of fetishes is largely absent in Locke’s writing, where the term denotes the kind of thought that is incapable of discerning difference, let alone originating surplus in and through difference. This does not mean that his invocation of the term “fetish” was not colored by what Pietz describes as the phantomatic conflation of European mercantile economic logics and African ritual forms in the space of asymmetrical trade relations; Locke’s turn to the word “fetish” as an example in the description of tautological forms, misrecognized by their authors as valuable when, in fact, they were mere trifles, bears more than passing resemblance to the general structure of fetishism that Pietz claims emerged in the representations of African religion more broadly. But before we venture into a reconsideration of the history so meticulously described and elegantly analyzed by Pietz, and before we examine the aftermath of fetishism’s invention as a term of comparative analysis, we must linger for a moment on the question of the word that anchored Locke’s earlier analysis. For fetishes and trifles had been linked before Bosman stamped that relation with the imprimatur of his authority. Moreover, the fetish had been established as a problem of language before fetishism itself was coined in an act for which its author, Charles de Brosses, felt obliged to ask his reader’s tolerance.

Of the Word: Rereading de Brosses

It must appear jejune to assert the fact that fetishism—and the term “fetish” (or fétiche) from which it is derived—is a word. Nor can this fact distinguish the term from any other. And yet, more than almost any other concept, the invocation and discussion of fetishism has, historically, been accompanied by an explanation of its status as a word. Etymologies proliferate in even the briefest excursuses on the term and the phenomena to which it ostensibly refers. William Pietz is only one of hundreds whose endeavor to understand fetishism takes the form of a history that “stresses the importance of the word itself.”7 Two qualities of the term as such stand out in these myriad and shifting labors to fix and to explain the meaning of both fetish and fetishism. The first is the foreignness of the term, which is almost always remarked, except in the Portuguese, whence it is said to have originated. (As we shall see, however, there are scant references to fetishes, let alone fetishism, in Portuguese accounts of African religion; those accounts generally remain within the idiom of idolatry when commenting upon the so-called worship of inanimate objects.) The second quality connected to this foreignness is the self-reflexivity of the texts addressing fetishism, an attribute arising from the word’s irreducible opacity and its apparent resistance to translation.

One labors almost in vain to find an account outside of Portuguese or Spanish, even in the seventeenth century, that does not introduce or describe a fetish with a discussion of its derivation from the Portuguese feitiço. Many supplement this initial explanation with further etymologies, noting the Latin root of the Portuguese (and other Romance language) terms and, occasionally, their cognates in Anglo-Norman, Anglo-Saxon, or Old English. Often enough, such lexical lessons seem to be intended to rectify popular or scholarly misconceptions, and there is a strong proprietary tendency in such efforts. One of the aims of this essay is to expand the conception of etymology to include not only the roots directly traceable within a strict and philologically austere history of the Portuguese and hence Latin-derived idiom of the fetish, but also the clusters of terms that were associated with or falsely adduced as origins. These origins were often supplied by virtue of what linguists call morphological segmentation based on visually or auditorially perceived affinities between the word “fetish” and other “technically” unrelated words.8 Charles de Brosses himself thought that the term “fetish” could be linked to the root “fae,” meaning enchantment, but, as Bruno Latour has recently remarked, no one else recognized this root, nor did anyone else reproduce this aspect of his etymology—except obliquely in their r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• “Fetishism (Supposing That It Existed)”: A Preface to the Translation of Charles de Brosses’s Transgression
• Introduction: Fetishism, Figurism, and Myths of Enlightenment
• A Note on the Translation
• On the Worship of Fetish Gods; Or, A Parallel of the Ancient Religion of Egypt with the Present Religion of Nigritia
• After de Brosses: Fetishism, Translation, Comparativism, Critique
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index