Sarah Hammerschlag: I read two of your essays, “An (Un)Natural History: Tracing the Rhinoceros Horn in Egypt” and “Occult Epidemics,” as works of restoration—attempts to “coax from objects made visible” to us by means of colonial violence the voices of Black Africans brought into Egypt through the slave trade. The stories told in these records are vestiges of cultural repression. Read otherwise, they reveal the aftermaths of the nineteenth-century Egyptian slave trade, and can provide clues to the knowledge, traditions, and practices that arrived with the influx of unwilling migrants to Egypt from Sudan and Abyssinia. What is remarkable in your essays is how documents claiming to be scientific and reasonable, and claiming to represent values like hygiene and science, can be reread in light of facts surrounding their composition to be records of fear, anxiety, and guilt. You show us how attention to the unseen—how looking below the surface of fear and anxiety—reveals “a multifaceted archive of displacement and dispossession,” one that attests to the resilience of those who preserved their traditions in the face of oppression.
My essays are, in a very different sense, about the legacy of African practices—or at least the legacy of European perception of African practices and about what cannot or does not appear in the historical record. I write as an intellectual historian working mostly on twentieth century French philosophy and literary theory. I came to an interest in the history of the fetish from its role in the philosophy of religions. This interest led me back to William Pietz’s essays on the topic and also into some engagement with J. Lorand Matory’s The Fetish Revisited. Tracking the history of this concept, I contend in my essay for Critical Terms, can do some work toward decolonizing the field of philosophy of religion.
I use the term “decolonizing,” however, with some trepidation because, in my case, it does not—and cannot—involve the claim to uncover alternatives to the current tradition. Philosophy appears in this history not as a history of “reason” understood as a neutral concept but as a tradition forged through its opposition to denigrated others. The history of the migration of this term from the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century records of African exploration and exploitation into eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophical discourse (e.g., Kant, Hegel, Comte) reveals the complicity of modern philosophy with imperialism and colonialism and the anxieties around the concepts of reason and spirit, which can only be delineated by means of contrast. The term made its way into these texts by means of the travelogues of early eigteenth-century traders and colonizers, such as William Boseman, head merchant of The Dutch West India company, and then into the earliest texts of German and French philosophy of Religion where it functioned predominantly to mark out irrational and capricious practices against which right religion could be defined. This history is certainly not one that I can claim to be narrating for the first time. I do think, however, that teaching it within the field of philosophy of religion concretely changes how we understand the discipline.
My interest in what cannot appear in the historical record is more concretely developed in my essay on French philosopher Sarah Kofman for Devotion. But there it is developed quite differently. I begin with the experience of standing in the stacks and noticing how her corpus does not appear among her philosophical peers in the B2430 section of the library. This is the case, I argue, because she resisted the very form of philosophical mastery that is achieved by besting those who came before you and claiming to say something original. It is her refusal to take up that position, her insistence that such an operation always involves an act of violence that hides behind the claim to knowledge, that also accounts for the fact that her books are all shelved as commentaries—secondary works about others. She is for me thus a model of what it might mean to be a fetishist: one who says, to quote Jacques Derrida, “if I have to choose between the thing itself and the substitute, I’ll let go of the thing itself.”
Taylor Moore: Thanks for getting us started, Sarah. It seems to me that both of our work attempts to bridge or narrate simultaneous abundances and silences in the archives we work with. We are also both interested in the materialities (archival or otherwise) that facilitate, deepen, and disrupt those conditions.
I was struck by your search for Sarah Kofman in the B2430 section of the library. You show how the scattered placement of her work represents the unclassifiable nature of her method and how she is remembered. I was fascinated both by Kofman’s refusal to be read as “an object to be mastered” but also how this refusal reflected the acknowledgment that scholarly work (and maybe even life itself) is a “process of becoming.” It also reflects the intimacy that is necessary to read her.
This resonates with my work on amulets and the people who used them in colonial Egypt in several ways. These objects are intimate archives of lives and desires: a charm to protect a pregnancy or still a cheating husband, a green pellet to secure employment, or shells to divine the future. Yet, these objects and people are rarely analyzed on their own terms. How they are seen and interpreted is influenced by the anthropologists that collected them, the curators that catalog them, the Egyptian officials that warned against their use, and those that write their histories.
Upon first glance, the intimacies embedded in these objects may seem difficult to unearth. This is largely due to the history you recount in your work on “the fetish” and its history in European thought. I take Matory’s approach to this history as reflecting not African culture or religious practice, but anti-Black racism. Western scholars and Egyptian elites cast these objects as archives of superstition, primitive beliefs, and charlatanism. Salvage anthropologists, folklorists, and doctors gathered the amulet collections I work with in the Pitt Rivers Museum and the Ethnographic Hall of the Egyptian Geographical Society in an effort to document them, their use, and the beliefs they represented before modern education and reform rendered them extinct. Or, so they hoped. Amulets and folk knowledge no longer represented the sensibilities of the modern nation, but, as historian On Barak argues, they continued to haunt it.
In my work, I deploy the method of decolonial materialism and a narrative form called the “amulet tale” to disrupt the exoticization or and fetishization of these objects to reorient and re-inscribe these objects and their human and spiritual interlocutors back into their sociocultural and political contexts. This allows for more intimate readings of these objects in the lives of their users. It also reveals how occult practitioners were central to the shaping of scientific knowledge and technological expertise in modern Egypt. Each amulet holds its own story. Together they form a chorus that rings clear. The objects and the practices they represent did not die in the wake of the modern state or the scientific production it claimed to produce. They shaped both.
I also follow Matory’s lead in showing British and American anthropologists, scientists, and curators as the only “fetishists” in this story, and that their desires and anxieties animated how history was—and continues to be—written about amuletic objects as well as the assumptions made about those who used them.
To disrupt these Eurocentric readings, we must see these objects not just as inanimate representations of other cultures and religions but rather as spirited objects. We also have to acknowledge and embrace the unseen. I mean this in many senses. The unseen are the nonhuman spiritual agents that animate them or were channeled to use them. But reading the unseen in the archive also entails interpreting the effects of something without necessarily being able to grasp its cause or identify “the smoking gun.” It requires a commitment to telling the stories that do not readily float to the surface of one’s material. I think that this resonates with Latour’s point in Reassembling the Social that “the social is only traceable when it is being modified.”
Hammerschlag: The way you restore the desires and anxieties of the British and American scientists is brilliant. This is exactly what I see Kofman doing in so much of her work—particularly around the figure of the woman and the mother, and revealing sites in texts by Plato, Freud, Nietzsche and others where the fear of the maternal is lying just beneath the surface of argumentation. What I love about Matory’s work is that he too restores desire and anxiety to his analysis of Marx and Freud but at the same time reveals, like Kofman, his own desires as a scholar. In his work, we are all fetishists in that sense. We must read his readings of Marx and Freud as animated by his interests as well. He’s not showing us “the real;” he’s reading what is considered real as an interested and invested scholar with his own prejudices and desires. Kofman does the same. I have tried since reading her to emulate this practice in my analysis of her and others. I think that is what you mean by “intimacy.” To my mind, reading and interpreting in intimate relation with our objects of study is one of the ways in which we undermine our own tendencies toward mastery.
Moore: That is a great point. In Possibilities, David Graeber writes that if the “fetish” is still a term worth engaging, we should understand it as a revolutionary one—as a metaphor for social creativity and critical imagination—and as a reminder that people are “in a constant process of imagining new social arrangements and then trying to bring them into being.” I think this aligns with your reading of Matory, as well as your reading of (Kofman’s reading of) The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicholas Tulp. We are always in the process of becoming and, as you say in your chapter in Devotion, “we too will soon be a corpse on the table.” We choose which worlds we bring to life. Those choices are political. And it is never too late to imagine and build new worlds. This is an important lesson both for scholarly work and, I would argue, an urgent call to action in our current moment.
How would you describe your methodological approach to reading? What do you choose to animate in your scholarly work? I approach my work as a historian and as a storyteller as an act of mediumship. I believe that channeling historical subjects through the material conduits they leave behind is one of the many ways that STS and religious studies scholars might endeavor to do the messy work of sensing past and present social worlds. Historian of science Joanna Radin, for instance, recently wrote about her mystical obsession with Michael Crichton. Archival documents, art and literature, ethnographic and ritual objects, and even the organization of a library are all gateways to other worlds, readings, and knowledges. I noticed that in your essay on Sarah Kofman, you call her “your guide.” What kind of channeling does your work entail?
Hammerschlag: The question of how we read and the affective dimension of reading was really at the heart of the whole Devotion book that I wrote with Amy Hollywood and Constance Furey, and in which the Sarah Kofman essay appeared. We were interested in the demands that books make upon us and the commitments that are entailed in trying to see the world from another’s point of view. What we called “devotion” and what you refer to as “channeling” are somewhat proximate. In both cases, a certain suspension of agency is involved. I think the one difference might be in the emphasis I want to place on fiction. I am interested in restoring value to the fetish and the apotropaeon as objects used to avert evil and misfortune partly because of the ways in which these forms can function without making claims to transcendence or immateriality. They can serve instead as means through which we express our longing for security and protection while at the same time advertising their fictionality—thus allowing us to oscillate between expression and divestment.
What I see as important about your work and Matory’s is their capacity to show the similarities between the thinking of the scholar and the practitioner. I agree that revealing symmetries between scholarly and religious practices is particularly important for religious studies scholars. I take that to be one way in which you understand your own work as a kind of medium. When I wrote that I took Kofman as my guide when writing the essay for Devotion, I think I meant something similar. I wanted to channel her in the way she channeled her subjects. That meant allowing her to speak through me but also allowing me to speak through her. I think she often attributed her own insights to others by doing commentary. In this, I also tried to follow her lead.
This brings me to the question of how I want to be read and how I hope readers might be changed by my work. I have to say, first of all, that the thing about a book is that it is the most mysterious of material objects, especially a book that I have written. The work feels so intimate to me when I am writing but so foreign when it has been printed between two covers. I have both a fear of the object and a desire to distance myself from it—to disown it. Thus, when people tell me they’ve read something I’ve written, it doesn’t feel like anything they say about the book or the essay has any relationship to me. Nonetheless, with the Kofman essay, I did think of writing the essay as an act of devotion and thus wanted it to change Kofman’s reception. I wanted others to share the same affection for her that I had grown into and via that affection to change how they read the corpus of “great philosophers”: to develop a more irreverent relationship to the tradition and thus to write and think with more play, more pleasure, more irony.
I imagine that as your work has a kind of Benjaminian quality, providing life and voice to those who have been deprived of it by the historical record, you might approach your work with more reverence, which only seems right. Where I am trying to tear down scholarly edifices, you need to build new ones. Perhaps our work then is flip sides of the same coin?
Moore: Absolutely the same coin. My work seeks to reinscribe value to people, knowledge, and objects who, for many reasons, are no longer valued by some—or whose value has shifted over time. (In light of our conversation, maybe I should say “re-animate” rather than “reinscribe” value here, but I am happy to lean into my magical Marxism.) I read your work on Kofman in this light.
In your entry on the “fetish” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies you mention that a history of the fetish reveals a “counter-history…for how the study of religion may have developed otherwise.” I guess you can say I am invested in writing contrapuntal counter-histories: histories that disrupt—that don’t tie up beautifully or provide simple answers or solutions. This requires tearing down scholarly edifices as well as imagining new forms and narrative modes to conjure what some scholars call “otherwise worlds.” I have always been interested in the power of the “dream” and the “imagination” in critical thought from Marx and Foucault to Françoise Vergès and Elizabeth Povinelli to Afrofuturism and the Black radical tradition and beyond. Your question also brings to mind a quote from one of my favorite short stories, “The Circular Ruins,” by Jorge Borges: “…the task of molding the incoherent and dizzying stuff that dreams are made of is the most difficult work [one] can undertake…” I think the quote beautifully illustrates the magical work we do as writers and scholars—transmuting immaterial ideas and images in one’s mind into a material reality on the page. Once on the page, or out in the world, it has the power to inspire the imagination of others.
Maybe this is a great place to shift from the immaterial to the material. I loved your point about the book being “the most mysterious of material objects.” As someone who works with grimoires and magical texts and hates reading their own writing, I completely understand the sentiment. What role does the material object—mysterious books or otherwise—play in your work?
Hammerschlag: As an intellectual historian, materiality factors into my scholarship most clearly when I am doing archival work. Right now, I am working on the philosophical writings of Susan Taubes. In November, I got a chance to work through her papers and notebooks which reside for the time being in the upstairs room of her son’s garage in the Catskills. There I saw the suitcase she had traversed the Atlantic with and was able to hold and read the many notebooks from her childhood through her adulthood. I definitely suffer from “archive fever.” I feel moved by the aura of the object. Sometimes, it is less about what I retrieve from the archive to include in my own scholarship and more about how such tactile intimacy alters how I think about my subjects. I have a sense in the archive that I can tap into the process by which a text or an idea came into being. In Sarah Kofman’s archive this was literally a matter of seeing how she had cut and taped her drafts together. I could see her in her apartment in Paris laying all the pages on the ground and going at them with scissors.
I also think that attention to the material often reveals the social world that is crucial to the emergence of art and ideas. I am super excited, for example, about my colleague Matthew Harris’s work on Sun Ra because his attention to the material culture that circulated around the Arkestra in its earliest days reveals a community invested in the otherworldly right here on the southside of Chicago. This includes the bookstores where esoterica was sold, the parlors where people met, and the women and men who populated that world. Reading his work has changed the way I relate to the streets and buildings near to where I live. I saw much of the same kind of insight in your essay, “An (Un)Natural History.” You restored the social world to the rhinoceros horn by illuminating, as you so beautifully put it, “the networks, actors, and economies whose bodies and labor are generally rendered invisible in Eurocentric histories of global science.”
Moore: Such incredible imagery! I also really like your phrase “tactile intimacy.” This is precisely what I was thinking earlier when I mentioned channeling. There is something profound about inhabiting the space of the archive and handling the materials we work with. I was awestruck during my research with the amulets and charms in the Winifred Blackman collection at the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford. It was surreal. It was such an honor to be in the presence of these objects from plant and animal matter to anklets and amulet pouches to rocks and shells. It was also the first time in my research that I was able to physically handle materials that might have been handled by practitioners and users. This led to a series of similar visions to yours of Kofman in her apartment that really enhanced my understanding of the world they were a part of.
I remember pulling this one object from the box: a hen’s egg dyed bright red. It seemed hollow yet weighted and rolled with an interesting tilt. I made out the name “Sheikhah Manisah” penciled in English on one side. Who was she? Blackman left no notes about the object’s provenance or use. Seeing this egg, just like many other objects in those boxes, led me to ask many questions. Most are still unanswered.
Can we return to irreverence, play, and irony? How do you inject irreverence and play into your work and your life? I see myself and my approach as incredibly irreverent, especially in terms of disciplinary conventions and narrative form. I just think it is interesting to think about this question of reverence and irreverence in light of our earlier discussion about devotion, intimacies, and interests in your work with Kofman. Your critical terms entry on the fetish invokes Latour’s On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods. This idea of scientific thinking as a form of esotericism brings us back to this overarching question about the relationship between religious studies and STS, and the relationship between scholarly practice and religious practice. This is all to say, maybe we are both irreverently reverent—or reverently irreverent? Maybe all scholars should be?
Hammerschlag: It is on this point that I have found Bruno Latour’s Factish Gods most useful. He nicely reveals something about the relationship of science and religion—and indeed about the nature of creativity when talking about Louis Pasteur and Candomblé divination in tandem. When he cautions that fermentation would not have its place in the world “if things had to be divided up into causes, interiorities and representations,” I think about my own creative process and how and when my critical drive stymies it. Like most people, I work better when I prioritize receptivity over judgment. Unlike Latour, I am not against critique, but I am against a critical mode of policing myself and others—using judgment against others to preserve one’s own sense of being in the right. I’ve learned this from Derrida as well: The very nature of how we are inscribed in the history of metaphysics entails that I can only be right if someone else is wrong. Irreverence cannot undo that dynamic, but it can unsettle it.