Month-to-month Overview | Younger Marx on Fetishism, Sexuality, and Faith

Once more in 1842, Marx took on a current coverage in Rhineland, which made gathering firewood in native forests an criminality. Peasants who have been charged with wooden theft have been “obliged to compensate the forest proprietor for the misplaced worth at a value estimated by the forester himself.”³ Marx ridiculed the criminalization of peasants’ conventional customary rights to entry the native forests in favor of the pursuits of the non-public forest house owners.

The savages of Cuba regarded gold as a fetish of the Spaniards. They celebrated a feast in its honor, sang in a circle round it after which threw it into the ocean. If the Cuban savages had been current on the sitting of the Rhine Province Meeting, would they not have regarded wooden because the Rhinelanders’ fetish? However a subsequent sitting would have taught them that the worship of animals is related with this fetishism, and they’d have thrown the hares into the ocean to be able to save the human being.⁴

In his 1843 critique of G. W. F. Hegel’s philosophy of proper, Marx spoke of fetishism when discussing the political backwardness of Germany compared to different European nations. Germany might have witnessed a collection of theoretical revolutions in its philosophical custom, however they hardly contributed to the waves of political revolutions and actual struggles storming by means of its French neighbor. Removed from having fun with the fruits of the continuing revolutionary progress in Europe, Germany would first must undergo a interval of decadence earlier than getting into a stage of political emancipation. This might outcome, in Marx’s opinion, in a painful historic expertise, simply “like a fetish-worshipper affected by the illnesses of Christianity.”⁵

Lastly, in his 1844 Manuscripts, Marx employed the time period for the primary time within the context of political financial system. Constructing an analogy between theology and financial system, Marx likened the Protestant degradation of “Catholic paganism” to the inferior mercantile-monetary system from the angle of “enlightened political financial system.” Fully unaware of the “subjective essence of personal property” (labor), the proponents of the mercantile system have taken “non-public property as a purely goal being for man,” therefore showing to later political economists as “fetish-worshippers.” Marx believed that “fetishism” utilized to the mercantilist view of personal property, because it took wealth to exist “solely as an object” and “diminished” it “to a quite simple ingredient of nature.”⁶

Elsewhere in the identical manuscript, Marx returned to the fetish theme, this time defining it in William Shakespeare’s aesthetic phrases (present in Timon of Athens), from the angle of the modern political financial system:

These nations that are nonetheless dazzled by the sensuous glitter of treasured metals and due to this fact make a fetish of steel cash aren’t but totally developed cash nations. The extent to which the answer of theoretical issues is a perform of observe and is mediated by means of observe, and the extent to which true observe is the situation of an actual and constructive principle is proven, for instance, within the case of fetish-worship. The sense notion of a fetish-worshipper is completely different from that of a Greek as a result of his sensuous existence is completely different. The summary hostility between sense and mind is inevitable as long as the human sense for nature, the human significance of nature and therefore the pure sense of man, has not but been produced by man’s personal labor.⁷

Marx’s preliminary preoccupation with the fetish theme is well-documented, however the first event that drew his consideration to fetishism—in addition to the early sources that knowledgeable his conception of the time period—is much less observed in previous scholarship.⁸

Younger Marx got here to delve into fetishism at a time when he was utterly overseas to, and unconcerned with, political financial system. As a contemporary philosophy graduate in 1841, he was requested by the Younger Hegelian Bruno Bauer to contribute a chapter to the latter’s quantity, Hegel’s Doctrine of Faith and Artwork. Marx started engaged on his piece as early as December 1841, however then determined to publish it as a stand-alone article in Arnold Ruge’s journal, Anekdota. Calling this textual content first “Treatise on Christian Artwork,” then “On Faith and Artwork, with Particular Reference to Christian Artwork,” and at last, “the article ‘On Artwork and Faith,’” Marx spent the primary half of 1842 composing this now-lost treatise. In his personal phrases, he was “drawn into every kind of investigations which is able to nonetheless take a reasonably very long time,” for “the article on non secular artwork…has steadily grown into virtually guide dimensions.” It was this treatise that prompted younger Marx to discover the fetish theme in depth for the primary time.⁹

We have no idea a lot as to what Marx might have argued within the treatise, however we do have a tough thought in regards to the scope of his investigations, because of the notebooks that he left behind. These notebooks, referred to as the Bonn Notebooks, include a bunch of excerpts that he had assembled whereas engaged on the treatise. The excerpts embody a variety of inventive and spiritual themes, from early Italian Renaissance artwork to the religious-aesthetic traditions of historic Greece and Egypt and the non secular and anthropological chronicles of India, Persia, Africa, Siberia, and North America. Throughout the framework of the treatise, Marx made use of seven sources in whole, the final 5 of which have been dedicated to fetishism and idolatry: Carl Friedrich von Rumohr’s Italian Investigations, Johann Jakob Grund’s The Portray of the Greeks, Charles de Brosses’s On the Worship of Fetish Gods, Karl August Böttiger’s Concepts on Artwork-Mythology, Christoph Meiners’s Common Crucial Historical past of Religions, Benjamin Fixed’s On Faith, and Jean Barbeyrac’s Treatise on the Morals of Church Fathers.¹⁰

Whereas the excerpts aren’t accompanied by Marx’s feedback, they supply some clues as to his attentional patterns, signifying what he thought of related and noteworthy. Marx’s excerpts from de Brosses open with the latter’s definition of fetish: “objects of worship [of] sure Divinities that the Europeans name fetishes, a time period coined by our merchants in Senegal from the Portuguese phrase fetisso, which suggests fairy, enchanted or divine factor, or giver of oracles; this from the Latin root fatum, fanum, fari.”¹¹

De Brosses, in Marx’s excerpts, depicted fetish worship as an financial system of trade whereby the worshiper gives presents or makes sacrifices to the deities to be able to obtain desired outcomes. For instance, Marx transcribed his declare {that a} “new Fetish is first overloaded with presents, with a solemn promise to honor it as a cherished patron.” The fetish artifact is taken severely by the worshiper so long as it’s believed to embody a cluster of guarantees that meet the worshiper’s expectations. On this vein, the next comment by de Brosses was necessary to Marx: when the natives of central and western Africa want rain, de Brosses wrote,

They place empty vessels earlier than the altar; if they’re at conflict, they put swords and spears there to ask for victory; in the event that they want meat or fish, they place bones there; to be able to receive palm wine, they depart on the foot of the altar the small knife used to make incisions within the tree; with these marks of respect and confidence they consider that they’re positive to acquire what they ask for; but when some misfortune happens, they attribute it to some simply resentment on the a part of their Fetish, and all their efforts flip to discovering the means to appease it.¹²

De Brosses’s catalogue of fetish objects was not restricted to inanimate objects. It additionally included a bunch of animal species, certainly one of which was important sufficient to catch Marx’s consideration. On this regard, Marx took word of de Brosses’s portrayal of the traditional Egyptian sacralization of cats: “If the home have been to catch hearth, [Egyptians] would hasten particularly to save lots of the cats from the blaze; this makes it significantly evident that the worship involved the animal itself, which was not thought of a mere emblem.”¹³

Meiners’s guide on the historical past of religions was one other theoretical useful resource that Marx totally studied. Closely influenced by de Brosses’s account of fetishism, Meiners had ambitiously prolonged de Brosses’s catalogue of fetish objects to cowl non secular sexuality. When taking excerpts from Meiners’s guide, Marx centered specifically on Meiners’s chapter, “Historical past of Phallus and Lingam,” which was positioned below the overall heading, “Historical past of Fetishism.” Anticipating Sigmund Freud’s account of penis envy, Meiners seen fetishist phallus cults as a symptom of “impotent males or barren girls or potential spouses [who] have chosen the phallus as their fetish, or sorcerers and monks [who] have advisable the phallus as a fetish to 1 and to the opposite.” Marx, in his notes, seems to have paid particular consideration to the phallus fetish in numerous cultural geographies, from India and Egypt to Greece and medieval Europe. Regarding an Indian phallus ceremony, as an illustration, Marx famous Meiners’s remark that “Indian brides sacrificed their virginity to feelingless priapium.” Within the more moderen Indian custom, it was not unusual to witness Indian kings who have been “not allowed to have intercourse with the bride…till she had devoted her virginity to the deity.”¹⁴ The sublimity connected to the fetishized phallus within the Indian rites was necessary sufficient to Marx to excerpt the next passage in full:

Married girls from the sect of yogi pilgrimaged to a unadorned gigantic penitent who accepted the worships of the pious below the shade of a tree close to Surat [in India]. The priapium of this penitent which appeared to belong extra to an ass than to a human being was pierced on the foreskin and tamed, because it have been, with a golden ring. The younger girls fell down in adoration earlier than the mighty priapium, took it devoutly of their palms and kissed it, receiving the blessing of the yogi. The yogis are probably the most ardent and on the identical time probably the most sacred worshippers of the lingam.

Opposite to the constructive attachment to the phallus cult of India, the Romans, Meiner famous, “honored and topped the ass for shielding [the virgin goddess] Vesta from the violence of priapium.” Marx transcribed his declare that medieval Europe was not overseas to this phenomenon of priapism, as “barren girls honored a St. Guerlichon [a priapic statue]…in Normandy St. Giles and in Anjou a St. René.… Even in trendy occasions, the sacred Cosmo and Damiano have been devoted to Isernia within the Neapolitan phalli and priapii. Monks provided on the market on the holy competition complete baskets stuffed with waxed priapii. The patrons devoted the priapii to the saint after having kissed it devoutly. This competition was abolished solely in 1781.”¹⁵

It’s fairly putting that on this narrative, the phallus object emerges not solely as an artifact of worship, but additionally as a commodity to which non secular meanings have been connected. But it was Fixed, reasonably than Meiners, who mentioned fetishistic faith in broader industrial language.

Whereas Marx carefully attended to Fixed’s strategy to the Indian lingam cult, Fixed’s redefinition of fetishism appears to have additionally been important for Marx. For instance, Marx was drawn to Fixed’s account of non secular sexuality in Indian rites. Fixed defined the Indian phallus cult as half and parcel of priestly corruption that aimed to use non secular sentiments of unusual believers: the “lingam turns into a sacred object…when a solemn ceremony has confined the god throughout the newly sculpted idol.”¹⁶ It was, in keeping with Fixed, “not the non secular sentiment that compelled…the daughters of India to have interaction in lascivious dances earlier than the Lingam; it was the monks of this obscene divinity.” This priestly exploitation could possibly be discovered additionally in “feminine Babylonians” who “prostitute[d] themselves,” or “Syrian girls” on the ceremonies of Adonis at Byblos who “provided the sacrifice of their chastity. Peoples subjected to monks handed from abasement to license, and from orgies to despair.… The phallus was planted on sepulchers, and the identical phallus was drenched in blood.”¹⁷

Marx didn’t miss out on that Fixed captured the non secular motivation behind fetish worship by way of a “industrial trade that man establishes…together with his god.” The fetishist “appears to see if this god has adequately acquitted itself of the engagements he supposedly contracted. And if the steadiness doesn’t sq., the worshipper abandons or punishes the deity, strikes it or breaks it, consigns it to the flames or the deep.”

Fixed’s condemnation of fetishism stemmed from his perception that fetishism “diminished” faith to “commerce” and “profitability.” Counterposing “disinterested…sentiment” on one facet, and egoistic “curiosity” on the opposite, Fixed went on to argue that non secular adherents transfer “from one fetish to a different, at all times in search of a extra trustworthy ally, a extra highly effective protector, a extra zealous confederate.… The fetish is a grasping, egotistical being allied to a human being as egotistical as it’s, though weaker. The sacrifices it rewards solely consult with it. The duties it imposes consist in victims, in choices, and in expressions of submission—agreed-upon foreign money that will probably be required sooner or later. It’s cost demanded by the fetish for the safety it accords.”¹⁸

These interconnections between commerce, faith, and sexuality have been additionally current in Böttiger’s historic documentary of religions—one other theoretical supply of Marx below the affect of de Brosses. One chopped sentence transcribed by Marx mentions the “Gaditanic ladies” who labored as feminine prostitutes in Spain on the time of the Roman kingdom. When excerpting this designation from Böttiger, Marx should have considered a earlier excerpt the place Böttiger made a comment on Alexander the Nice’s directive to reconstruct the Belus Temple in Babylon, a widely known location for sacred prostitution. Marx additionally took under consideration Böttiger’s record of examples of sacred prostitution from different geographies. For example, Marx excerpted Böttiger’s depiction of hieróduloi, temple slaves who served a “nice Asiatic goddess of nature” within the Pontus area close to the Black Sea and in Cappadocia of center Anatolia. In Marx’s excerpts, he writes that the hieróduloi have been concerned in “quaestus meretricious [prostitution] and consecrated whore commerce.”

Marx’s excerpts from Barbeyrac don’t gravitate in the direction of fetishism and the phallus cult, however revolve across the sexual morality of the early church fathers, which starkly contrasts with what later Christians thought of sinful seductions of idolatrous pagans. For instance, Marx targeting monotheistic concepts of advantage, which discourage believers “from satisfying…the needs of the flesh” and warn towards “illegal marriage.” Excerpting a quote from Pseudo-Justin’s De Resurrectione, Marx singled out the early Christian interpretation of immaculate conception: that an individual can come into being “with out human intercourse,” and that God “overruled the procreation related to illegal lust.” Opposite to pagan idolatries that sometimes elevated sexual rites as a part of their worship practices, early Christians distinguished themselves by maintaining their morals away from each procreative and desire-driven sexuality. Relating to this comparability, Marx reproduced a quote from Ambrosius’s Exhortatio virginitatis, as quoted by Barbeyrac: “When a younger woman loses her prime by means of the consummation of marriage, she loses what’s hers when strangers unite together with her. The reality, then, is what we’re born as, not what we’re remodeled into…remaining in virginity and in celibacy brings one nearer to God.”¹⁹

To this finish, Marx transcribed Origen of Alexandria’s interpretation of the ascetic’s personal castration “for the sake of the dominion of heaven.” As well as, Marx quoted from Clement of Alexandria’s Stromata, which pointedly expressed what the early Christians thought of to be the sexual and ethical degeneracy of polytheistic communities: As “idolatry is the division of God from the one into the various, so fornication is the apostasy from one marriage to many.”²⁰

As beforehand talked about, the Bonn Notebooks don’t say a lot about Marx’s personal conceptualization of fetishism, however they offer an thought as to what Marx discovered related throughout non secular and anthropological contexts. In his writings, younger Marx virtually invariably employed the time period fetishism negatively, emphasizing the subordination—both deliberate or involuntary—of the fetishist to the overwhelming energy ascribed to the worship object. For younger Marx, fetish signified the blockage of supersensible human schools by the dazzling glitter of objects of sensuous want. By projecting supernatural qualities into pure entities or inanimate artifacts, the fetishist makes an attempt to ascertain a relationship of trade with superior powers, whom he holds accountable for sustaining an financial system of presents and sacrifices. This financial facet of fetish worship is critical insofar because it signifies that, when introducing the idea of fetishism into political financial system for the primary time in his 1844 Manuscripts, Marx didn’t solely switch the time period from a spiritual to a non-religious subject. Fairly, this factors to a homology: whereas Marx’s sources singled out an financial system of trade in fetish practices, he traced a fetishistic, quasi-religious sample within the political financial system of cash and personal property.²¹

It’s telling that in his Feedback on James Mill, Marx drew on the similarity between cash as a medium of trade and Christ because the mediator between humanity and God. A financial medium attains energy by means of an trade relationship, simply as Christ attains energy over believers and their God. In his feedback, Marx writes that this “mediator should turn out to be a veritable God, because the mediator is the actual energy over that with which he mediates me. His cult turns into an finish in itself. Separated from this mediator, objects lose their value. Thus they’ve worth solely in as far as they signify him, whereas it appeared at first that he had worth solely to the extent to which he represented them.”²²

Apparently, Marx returned to the pressure of the financial medium in his 1844 Manuscripts, reframing its efficiency by means of sexual tropes. If cash can be utilized to purchase every little thing and acceptable all objects, it will probably turn out to be seen as “the object most value possessing.” As Marx wrote: “Cash is the pimp between want and object, between life and man’s technique of life.”²³ He then elaborated on the reciprocal relationship between cash and its proprietor:

That which exists for me by means of the medium of cash, that which I will pay for, i.e. which cash should purchase, that am I, the possessor of the cash. The stronger the ability of my cash, the stronger am I.… I am ugly, however I should purchase the most stunning girl. Which implies to say that I’m not ugly, for the impact of ugliness, its repelling energy, is destroyed by cash.… [Money] is the seen divinity.… It’s the common whore, the common pimp of males and peoples.²⁴

Recall that, in these manuscripts, Marx outlined fetish as a fabric reification of magical qualities into the pure properties of corporeal objects. He got here throughout this form of phenomenon earlier in his readings, as recorded within the Bonn Notebooks. He rigorously thought of Catholic worship of saintly relics, condemned by Protestants both as fetishism or idolatry; the cult of Indian lingam, Roman Priapus, and the Greek phallus worship, categorized by Meiners, Böttiger, and Fixed as fetishism, and by early Christians both as paganism or idolatry.

Considerably, the interconnections between fetishism, sexuality, and faith resurface, if solely in passing, in a footnote to Capital, quantity 1. The reference doesn’t seem within the famed part of the primary chapter titled “Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret,” the place he speaks of the “unbelievable type of a relation between issues”—a relation that seems each on this planet of commodities and the “misty realm of faith,” however within the subsection “Hoarding,” present in chapter 3 (“Cash, or the Circulation of Commodities”).²⁵

There, Marx reproduces a brief passage from a 1503 letter from Christopher Columbus, through which the latter refers to gold as “an exquisite factor! Its proprietor is grasp of all he needs. Gold may even allow souls to enter Paradise.”

The parallel between Columbus’s fascination with this dazzling treasured steel and younger Marx’s account of the mercantilist fetishization of personal property, gold, and cash is clear. Mirroring his earlier views on cash as a common medium, Marx once more discusses the convertibility of every little thing into cash: “Every little thing turns into saleable and purchasable.” He goes on to look at the Catholic fetishization of sacred relics. He observes that these objects lose their energy as soon as they turn out to be topic to financial trade: “Nothing is immune from this alchemy, the bones of the saints can not face up to it, not to mention extra delicate res sacrosanctae, further commercium hominum [consecrated objects, beyond human commerce].” In a subsequent footnote, Marx reminds the reader that all through European historical past, thieves had robbed monasteries to be able to promote their relics, turning non secular objects into cash. Echoing the Bonn Notebooks, he strikes on to the topic of the traditional temples, significantly in Greece, which “served because the dwellings of the gods of commodities. They have been ‘sacred banks.’ With the Phoenicians, a buying and selling folks par excellence, cash was the transmuted form of every little thing. It was, due to this fact, fairly so that the virgins who on the feast of the goddess of affection gave themselves to strangers ought to provide to the goddess the piece of cash they obtained in cost.”

The next footnote is reserved for a quote from Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, starting “Gold! yellow, glittering, treasured gold!” As soon as once more recalling his 1844 Manuscripts, a first-chapter part on fetishism explores the character of the “fetish character” and the “illusions of the Financial System”; that’s, the misperception of gold and silver not “as a social relation of manufacturing, however within the type of pure objects with peculiar social properties.” That this fetishism receives the epithet of “magic of cash” within the second chapter brings to thoughts Marx’s notes on de Brosses concerning the etymological origins of the phrases fairy, enchanted, and divine factor.²⁶

Younger Marx’s notes on magic, drawn from excerpts from Böttiger, reveal a nuanced distinction between the magic of cash and the magic of non secular fetish objects. Fetish and magic, not like cash, don’t determine in Böttiger’s account as an impersonal common medium. In fierce non secular wars, as an illustration, one may see that within the “conflict campaigns of the Persian monarchs, Persian hearth worship and magism fought with hearth and swords the opposing fetish worship and idolatry,” as within the circumstances of Xerxes within the fifth century BCE (towards “the idol within the Belus Temple in Babylon” and “pictures of gods” in Greek temples) or the Persian kings within the sixth century BCE (“Cambyses towards the Egyptian paganism”).²⁷

The social and political standing of magic and fetishism/idolatry was relative and interchangeable on this context, relying on their native or overseas origins. For instance, the “Greek was simply as aggravated by the barbaric sounds of the magic components” of the enemy as by “the deformities of the deities who dominated in that magical realm.… For the Greeks and Romans, this demonic magic sport has at all times been against the law towards their fatherland faith or not less than an object of contempt.” The Romans have been hostile to “astrologers and magicians,” going as far as to forcefully expel and exile them. The magical powers of overseas fetish/idolatrous objects weren’t denied by native populations, however they have been perceived as a risk to the home monopoly on non secular beliefs. In Capital, the identical language of magic stands out in Marx’s characterization of “fetishes endowed with a will and a soul of their very own,” “dazzling to our eyes.” One outstanding distinction between Marx’s early and late conceptions of fetishism is that, whereas within the ancient times he approached the phenomenon of fetish from the angle of an exterior observer, his later writings are these of an inner observer because the fetishization of cash emerges throughout the modern mode of capitalist manufacturing. In his later works, Marx was involved not with fetishism as such however with “fetishism peculiar to the capitalist mode of manufacturing” because it “arises from the peculiar social character of the labor.”²⁸

This brings us to the Latin, reasonably than the Portuguese, etymological origin of fetish: factitius, that’s, human-made, manufactured, fabricated, the product of a human hand.²⁹ This definition doesn’t seem in Marx’s excerpts from de Brosses, however Marx, in each is early and later works, was clearly accustomed to it. Within the aforementioned 1842 mockery of the Rhine Meeting, Marx drew on the amnesia of fetish worshipers who create gods for themselves, however as quickly as they’re created, the devotees neglect that “these gods are [their] personal handiwork.” Equally, within the 1844 Manuscripts, he distinguishes the mercantile discount of property and wealth to the pure properties of fabric substances (treasured metals) from the later viewpoint of “enlightened political financial system.” This was, for Marx, just like each the Catholic condemnation of polytheistic religions and the Protestant condemnation of Catholic relic worship. Following this line of reasoning, he discovered it acceptable “to name Adam Smith the Luther of political financial system.” The identical analogy reappears in Capital, through which Marx weaves collectively the remedy of “pre-bourgeois types of the social group of manufacturing…by [later] political financial system” and the remedy of pre-Christian religions by “the Fathers of the Church.”³⁰

Within the case of the early church fathers, Marx’s excerpts within the Bonn Notebooks—the Barbeyrac excerpts specifically—reveal that Marx’s repeated references to diachronic downplaying of an ancient times in historical past, from a later perspective, was partially knowledgeable by non secular sexuality. Whereas Marx doesn’t explicitly articulate each single facet of fetishism in his later theorizing, re-reading the sections on fetishism in mild of the Bonn Notebooks offers a distinct valence on, and gives new insights into, the theoretical-historical background of his conception of fetishism.

Endnotes

1. ↩ Karl Marx, “Proceedings of the Sixth Rhine Province Meeting: First Article. Debates on Freedom of the Press and Publication of the Proceedings of the Meeting of the Estates,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 1, (New York: Worldwide Publishers, 1975), 147.
2. ↩ Karl Marx, “The Main Article in No. 179 of the Kölnische Zeitung,” in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 1, 189.
3. ↩ Robert Nichols, “Disaster and Kleptocracy,” in Daniel Bensaïd, The Dispossessed: Karl Marx’s Debates on Wooden Theft and the Proper of the Poor (Minneapolis: College of Minnesota Press, 2021), xiii–xiv.
4. ↩ Karl Marx, “Proceedings of the Sixth Rhine Province Meeting: Third Article Debates on the Regulation on Thefts of Wooden,” in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 1, 262–63. The primary two sentences are taken from Charles de Brosses’s guide on fetishism, to which I’ll flip in a second.
5. ↩ Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Proper: Introduction,” in Karl Marx, Early Writings (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 253.
6. ↩ Karl Marx, “Financial and Philosophical Manuscripts,” in Marx, Early Writings, 341–42, 344.
7. ↩ Marx, “Financial and Philosophical Manuscripts,” 364. For a current evaluation of Marx’s utilization of the Shakespearean time period glitter (Glanz), see Christian A. Smith, Shakespeare’s Affect on Karl Marx: The Shakespearean Roots of Marxism (New York: Routledge, 2022), 39, 160–65.
8. ↩ See, by the use of comparability, Mikhail Lifshitz, The Philosophy of Artwork of Karl Marx (London: Pluto Press, 1976), 35–39, 58; Margaret A. Rose, Marx’s Misplaced Aesthetic: Karl Marx and the Visible Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge College Press, 1984), 61–69; Alfonso Maurizio Iacono, The Historical past and Principle of Fetishism (Hampshire: Palgrave, 2016), 103–13; Hartmut Böhme, Fetishism and Tradition: A Totally different Principle of Modernity (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014), 244–48; William Pietz, “The Downside of the Fetish, I,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 9 (1985): 5–17; William Pietz, “Fetishism and Materialism: The Limits of Principle in Marx,” in Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, ed. Emily Apter and William Pietz (Ithaca: Cornell College Press, 1996), 119–51; Roland Boer, Criticism of Earth: On Marx, Engels and Theology (Leiden: Brill: 2012), 177–84; Rosalind C. Morris, “After de Brosses: Fetishism, Translation, Comparativism, Critique,” in The Returns of Fetishism: Charles de Brosses and the Afterlives of an Thought, ed. Rosalind C. Morris and Daniel H. Leonard (Chicago: College of Chicago Press, 2017), 191–204.
9. ↩ Bruno Bauer, “Bruno Bauer an Arnold Ruge. 6. Dezember 1841,” in Der Redaktionsbriefwechsel der Hallischen, Deutschen und Deutsch-Französischen Jahrbücher (1837–1844). Band 2: Der Briefwechsel um die deutschen Jahrbücher um die deutsch-französischen Jahrbrücher (Juli 1841–Januar 1843), ed. Martin Hundt, (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010), 890; Marx and Engels, Collected Works, 1, 382–89.
10. ↩ Karl Marx, “Exzerpte zur Geschichte der Kunst und der Faith (Bonner Hefte),“ in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA2) (Berlin: Dietz, 1976), 293–376.
11. ↩ Charles de Brosses, “On the Worship of Fetish Gods; Or, A Parallel of the Historical Faith of Egypt with the Current Faith of Nigritia,” in The Returns of Fetishism, 48; Marx, “Bonner Hefte,” 320.
12. ↩ De Brosses, “On the Worship of Fetish Gods,” 48–49; Marx, “Bonner Hefte,” 321.
13. ↩ De Brosses, “On the Worship of Fetish Gods,” 70; Marx, “Bonner Hefte,” 323–24.
14. ↩ William Pietz writes in a footnote that “for late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century historians of historic faith together with Robert Payne Knight, J. A. Dulaure and Meiners, phallicism and fetishism have been distinct phenomena.” In Meiners’s case, Pietz is mistaken, as Meiners categorizes priapism as a type of fetishism. See, by the use of comparability, William Pietz, “Fetishism and Materialism,” 134, fn. 44; Christoph Meiners, Allgemeine kritische Geschichte der Religionen. Erster Band (Hannover: Helwingische Hof-Buchhandlung, 1806), 251–52. Except in any other case famous, all translations are my very own; Marx, “Bonner Hefte,” 336.
15. ↩ Marx, “Bonner Hefte,” 335–36.
16. ↩ Benjamin Fixed, On Faith: Thought-about in Its Supply, Its Kinds, and Its Developments, trans. Peter Paul Seaton Jr. (Carmel, IN: Liberty Fund, 2017), 216; Marx, “Bonner Hefte,” 352.
17. ↩ Fixed, On Faith, 50, 375; Marx, “Bonner Hefte,” 355.
18. ↩ Fixed, On Faith, 126–27; Marx, “Bonner Hefte,” 347–48.
19. ↩ Marx, “Bonner Hefte,” 330, 334, 369–70, 854–55.
20. ↩ Marx, “Bonner Hefte,” 374, 861.
21. ↩ Right here, I’m drawing on the conception of homology as depicted in Devin Singh, Divine Forex: The Theological Energy of Cash within the West (Stanford: Stanford College Press, 2018), 17-22; David Hawkes, Idols of the Market Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in English Literature, 1580–1680 (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 17, 52.
22. ↩ Marx, “Feedback on James Mill,” in Early Writings, 260–61.
23. ↩ Marx, “Financial and Philosophical Manuscripts,” 375.
24. ↩ Marx, “Financial and Philosophical Manuscripts,” 377.
25. ↩ Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1990), 165.
26. ↩ Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 176, 187, 229, 320, 330; de Brosses, “On the Worship of Fetish Gods,” 48.
27. ↩ Marx, “Bonner Hefte,” 330.
28. ↩ Marx, “Bonner Hefte,” 330–31; Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 165, 187, 1003– 46; Iacono, The Historical past and Principle of Fetishism, 74.
29. ↩ For the etymological origins of fetish and fetishism, see William Pietz, The Origin of Fetishism: A Contribution to the Historical past of Principle, PhD diss. (Santa Barbara, CA: College of California, 1988), 49–135.
30. ↩ Marx, “Proceedings of the Sixth Rhine Province Meeting,” 147; Marx, “Financial and Philosophical Manuscripts,” 342; Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 175.