Abstract
Abstract In her essay, “After de Brosses” (2017), Rosalind C. Morris briefly considers the historical importance of the concept of the fetish on the relatively recent movements of new materialism, but she does not engage with Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology. This essay addresses this gap and focuses on the influence of the fetish on Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology by focusing on Graham Harman’s conception of objects and Quentin Meillassoux’s theory of arche-fossils. In short, I am offering a posthumanist theorization of the fetish in order to argue that Object-Oriented Ontology can be considered, at points, to be a fetish-oriented ontology and that this notion of the fetish allows us to think about philosophical considerations of objects in a new light.
Highlights
In her essay, “After de Brosses” (2017), Rosalind C
Morris briefly considers the historical importance of the concept of the fetish on the relatively recent movements of new materialism, but she does not engage with Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology
I am offering a posthumanist theorization of the fetish in order to argue that Object-Oriented Ontology can be considered, at points, to be a fetish-oriented ontology and that this notion of the fetish allows us to think about philosophical considerations of objects in a new light
Summary
In the 1960s, anthropologists began to study the linkages between the discipline of anthropology and colonialism. “The vocal organ takes on, as nearly as it can, the form,” de Brosses writes: of the very object it wants to depict with the voice: it produces a hollow sound if the object is hollow, or a harsh one if the object is rough; in such a way that the sound resulting from the form and from the natural movement of the vocal organ placed in this position becomes the name of the object.36 This theory is more than a simple version of onomatopoeia because it makes speaking even more “magical” or material than representing a word with the sounds of the word (such as the word “hiss” for a snake or “buzz” for a bee); on the contrary, this notion of language is almost like a form of witchcraft – a fanciful semiotics that locates the feitiço in the word itself. The movements of Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology embrace certain tenets that are found in the conceptualization of the fetish
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