The Problem of the Fetish

William Pietz is an intellectual historian and political activist. Francesco Pellizzi is the cofounder and editor of RES: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics. Stefanos Geroulanos is professor of history at New York University and the author of several books, including (with Todd Meyers) The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe. Ben Kafka is a psychoanalyst and associate professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University. He is the author of The Demon of Writing.

Foreword: 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