ABSTRACT
Auguste Comte is famous as the founder of positivism and sociology. However, his understanding of the relation between fetishism and positivism is relatively unknown. Comte opposed the general European consensus about fetishism: that it was a concrete, primitive form of thought to be overcome in the development of true reason. Rather, he thought that like positivism, fetishism resulted from a direct engagement with things and phenomena, free of mystifying metaphysical abstractions. Over the course of his voluminous writings, he returned to fetishism repeatedly, culminating in his final advocacy of what he called “neo-fetishism.” What is surprising about Comte on fetishism is that it changes the general perception of positivism as an “anti-subjectivist” scientism. Rather, Comte thought that fetishism contained important possibilities for what he called a “subjective synthesis.” He called this subjective synthesis “neo-fetishism.” “Neo-fetishism” itself involved the elaboration of a strange, self-reflective form of writing that expressed an integration of affect and reason, “poetry and mathematics.” This generalization of fetishism opens the way to thinking about the general question of the relation between mind—which always operates according to both affect and reason—and things.
