Balzac, who met Brummell during the latter’s exile in Calais, argues that by “making himself a dandy, man becomes a piece of boudoir furniture, an extremely ingenious mannequin that can pose on top of a horse or a chaise lounge […]”¹ By becoming a dandy, man becomes an object, a wax effigy that represents the new secular sovereignty (1.14). This, however, is not necessarily a demotion. In fact, Barbey d’Aurevilly suggests that in portraying dandyism in its purest state and emptying himself as a subject, Beau Brummell “elevated himself to the rank of object.” (il s’éleva au rang d’une chose)

The collapse of the dandy into an object points towards the intersection dandyism's metaphysics (2.3) and commodity metaphysics (2.9). By rising to the rank of an object, Brummell renounces his use value (for, what is the use of a dandy?) to focus on the exchange value that turns any commodity into a fetish, an enchanted object. In the case of the dandy, the exchange value is the status, the phantasmagorical and immaterial form, which emanates from his physical presence and his social standing. From this point of view the dandy is a commodified human or, better still, a human in the form of a commodity, a human-commodity. Lacking true subjectivity and resembling a product, this human-object is, to some extent, inhuman. Moreover, it could be argued that as an object, the celebrity belongs to the lineage of the homo sacer: it is, like the devotus, a “living dead” which has ceased to be in the legal ordering of the world of the living to enter the pecuniary ordering of the market.

1. Honoré de Balzac, Treatise on Elegant Living ↩︎