“Décadence avec élégance”: from literary decadentism to material anthropology, analysing comsumption

Abstract

Based on a brief analysis of the “damn” character attributed to consumption, this article proposes to investigate the relationship between subject and object in the consumption of fashion and lifestyle, based on two distinct sources of reading – the classic work of Decadentism (the criticism of the fin-de-siècle in the late 1800s) Joris-Karl Huysmans’ À rebours, and Daniel Miller’s classic of the contemporary Anthropology, Stuff. The text proposes an analysis of the character Jean des Esseintes, a consumer dandy devoted to an aestheticization of life, before the vision of material culture proposed in Miller’s theory where things are “rescued” from its superficiality to an own ontology that interacts and transforms people.