Troubles with Materiality: The Ghost of Fetishism in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

The theological period of humanity could begin no otherwise than by a complete and usually very durable state of pure Fetichism [sic], which allowed free exercise to that tendency of our nature by which Man conceives of all external bodies as animated by a life analogous to his own, with differences of mere intensity.Auguste Comte, Cours (1830Ð1842)