To my own surmise, it appears as if this Dandiacal Sect were but a new

modification, adapted to the new time, of that primeval Superstition,

Self-Worship; which Zoroaster, Confucius, Mohamed, and others strove

rather to subordinate and restrain than to eradicate; and which only in the

purer forms of Religion has been altogether rejected. Wherefore, if any one

chooses to name it revived Ahrimanism, or a new figure of Demon-Worship,

I have, so far as is yet visible, no objection.

Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

Another dandy infatuated with the idea of attaining the beauty of objects:

In 1876, Dean Burgon, Vicar of St. Mary, Oxford, expressed the following opinion from the pulpit: “When a young man says, not in polished banter but in sober earnestness, that he finds it difficult to live up to the level of his blue china, there has crept into the cloistered shades a form of heathenism which it is our bounden duty to fight against and to crush out if possible.” The young man he was referring to was one of the most popular students of this famous institution, an Irishman named Oscar Wilde.¹

The form of heathenism vicar Burgon accused Wilde of was, of course, idolatry. An idolatry that, if it is one who to wants to rise “to the level of his blue china,” is equivalent to a worship of one’s self. Secularization of the being, which begins to be self-sufficient, to become its own fetish. Thus, aside from a dissociation from spiritual or religious interests, secularization implies an enclosure of the subject and its natural capacities in the realm of the commodity; a state of self-sufficiency normally reserved for objects. From a religious point of view Dandyism, as Carlyle argues, implied a closure to the act of being and, as such, could be seen as practically satanic.

It is worth noting that the dandy, as a secularized version of the sovereign, no longer aspires to the divinity that used to invest his ancestors, he aspires to legitimize his position by elevating himself to the dignity of objects. That is, he makes the exchange value of the commodity his claim to sovereignty, thus bringing the abstract and immaterial to the surface, and the surface (use value) to the depths. A metaphysical inversion between inside and outside (2.3). 

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1. Carlos Primo and Leticia García, “Una apología del dandismo”, 19. ↩︎