Sulzberger Parlor, Barnard College
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.
A book launch and panel discussion with:
Emily Apter, French and Comparative Literature, NYU
Dorothea von Mücke, Germanic Languages, Columbia
Andrew Parker, French and Comparative Literature, Rutgers
Nahum D. Chandler, Humanities, UC Irvine
Africana Studies (Barnard) event, cosponsored by IRWGS, ICLS, and The Institute for African Studies
