In my second essay in Res (Pietz 1987), I traced the origin of the term" Fetisso." 1 I argued that it came to express a novel idea whose fundamental problematic lay outside the theoretical horizon of Christian theology despite its linguistic derivation from Christian juristic discourse as the Spanish and Portuguese word for" witchcraft." In that essay, the formation of the fetish idea in sixteenth-century Afro-European discourse was explored in terms of a shift in core concepts: the key Christian ideas about witchcraft were" manufactured resemblance" and" voluntary verbal pact," whereas the central concepts of the Fetisso were" personification of material objects" and" fixed belief in an object's supernatural power arising in the chance or arbitrary conjunctions." Indeed, I argued that what was most marginal and conceptually obscure for the Christian theory of witchcraft?" vain observances" and" veneficia"? became central in the notion of the Fetisso.

In the present essay I look more closely at the complex idea of the fetish found in the travelogues written by northern European merchants and clerics visiting black Africa, texts that were read and appropriated by radical intellectuals of what might be called the anti-Leibnitzian moiety among champions of the Enlightenment (a category broad enough to include figures as theoretically diverse as Hume, Voltaire, de Brosses, and Kant). In the first two sections, I reconsider the original idea of the Fetisso, not in order to contrast it with feudal Christian thought as in my previous essay, but in order to grasp its practical and ideological