"Essential."

Choice

“With this impeccably translated and carefully annotated edition of Charles de Brosses’s On the Worship of the Fetish Gods, Morris and Leonard reconsider the relations that objects hold with the world at large. Dazzling at every turn, the editors’ essays that frame the translation argue for the vitality and beauty of things that live with us. This book informs and exhilarates.”

Tom Conley, Harvard University

“This work celebrates the long and ‘happy productivity’ of the concept of fetishism. According to Morris, ‘de Brosses bequeathed to us what may be one of the most powerful conceptual operators of comparatavist critique of the modern era.’ And it is this that makes de Brosses worth rediscovering today—fetishism stands for the persistence of the irrational in modern rationalism, at once a sign of reason’s failure and a symptom of reason’s self-delusion.”

Christopher Bracken, author of Magical Criticism: The Recourse of Savage Philosophy

“Through Morris’s and Leonard’s lucid, highly readable translation, Charles de Brosses’s On the Worship of Fetish Gods has been made available to an English readership for the first time in this richly annotated edition. Situated at the intersection of philology and ethnoanthropology, The Returns of Fetishism provides a provocative counter model to David Hume’s Natural History of Religion. Morris’s essay shows how de Brosses’s materialist concept of the fetish inspired Marx and Freud, their followers, and their critics. With the publication of this book we have an important resource for the critique of ideology and the history of theory.”

Dorothea E. von Mücke, Columbia University

"The Returns of Fetishism sheds some much needed light on the history of this 'concept for that which fails to conceptualize,' giving us not only a new translation of de Brosse’s 1760 text but a 43-page introduction by Daniel Leonard. . . and a 186-page afterword by Rosalind Morris following the subsequent deployments of fetishism in the work [of] thinkers like Kant, Hegel, Freud, Marx, Lacan, Bataille, and Derrida. Scholars of the history of comparative religion, anthropology of religion, and continental philosophy of religion will find this book to be a valuable resource in elucidating a highly significant and long-debated concept."

Brian Collins | Religious Studies Review