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Crisis of presence and religious reintegration

2012; HAU-N.E.T; Volume: 2; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.14318/hau2.2.024

2575-1433

Ernesto de Martino,

Religion and Society Interactions

Previous articleNext article FreeCrisis of presence and religious reintegrationErnesto de MartinoErnesto de MartinoPDFPDF PLUSFull TextEPUBMOBI Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreTranslators’ prefaceAn introduction to “Crisis of presence and religious reintegration” by Ernesto de MartinoTobia FarnettiUniversity College LondonCharles StewartUnversity College LondonErnesto de Martino’s body of work includes several books on magic (e.g., 1947, 1959), an impressive historical and comparative anthropological study of funeral lamentation (1958), and an ethnography of a South Italian spirit possession cult elaborated around the bite of the tarantula and involving the performance of the tarantella, a style of music and dance that became popular throughout Italy (1961; Lüdtke 2008). At the time of his death in 1965, at the age of fifty-seven, he was working on a study of apocalyptic movements, published posthumously with the title La fine delmondo (1977). Collections of his shorter writings have appeared in Italy, as have publications of his fieldnotes, correspondence, and even his reading notes (2005a). Few of these works have been translated, which is part of the reason why de Martino is not so well known in the English-speaking world. Perhaps the recent translation of his monograph on “tarantism,” The land of remorse (2005b), and the appearance of the first book-length study in English of his thought (Ferrari 2012), will initiate a new appreciation. To these efforts we now add de Martino’s account of one of his central and enduring ideas, the “crisis of presence.”De Martino’s publications combine social scientific methods and interrogatives with deep humanistic learning in philosophy, history, and literature. He illustrates his arguments about the “crisis of presence,” for example, with materials drawn from Greek tragedy, the Icelandic Poetic Edda, and ethnographic reports from Australia. Therein lies a great deal of de Martino’s appeal and power to inspire. What has impeded the easy transfer of his ideas into English, however, is his assumption that readers comprehend the philosophy of his mentor, Benedetto Croce (1866–1952), and are familiar with Italian debates of the 1940s. Even if we mastered Croce’s thought—which we do not—there is not space here to explicate his complex philosophy of history properly. We can only indicate briefly that Croce insisted on presentism, the idea, in Collingwood’s words (1946: 202), that “all history is contemporary history.” History depends on the activation of the past in a present mind, in relation to contemporary concepts and interests. Historicity, for Croce, was human becoming according to the transcendental categories of aesthetics, logic, ethics, and economics. Hurricanes and earthquakes do not make history; people’s conceptions of such phenomena, and responses to them, do. The natural world does not possess the consciousness and reflectivity necessary to qualify as participating in history. Unfortunately, and embarrassingly from the point of view of anthropology, Croce also excluded “primitive” humans from history, as they did not respond to life rationally, but through resort to magic. In the article translated here, de Martino can be seen still struggling with his mentor’s ideas after his death. Although stating that “Croce was correct,” he nonetheless rejects Croce’s divide (taglio) between the human and non-human, but modifies the concept of the “divide” to apply to the internal risk within allhumans. This is the threatening divide between presence and the loss of presence provoked by moments of crisis, which negate culture and thus humanity.De Martino’s grounding in Croce’s philosophy gives his article an unusual orientation and a perplexing vocabulary. This vocabulary may well alienate prospective readers, yet it actually produces striking formulations such as “the crisis of presence,” which offers a deep anthropological perspective on precarity (Saunders 1995). Another novel formulation is de Martino’s idea that in the crisis of presence individuals experience “dehistorification.” Since everything is historical, losing presence—being cut off from the synthesizing process of historical becoming—is equivalent to losing history, or losing society. The anguish accompanying the loss of presence may begin to be managed by an even greater removal from history through rituals that place one in a timeless metahistory; what Eliade termed “illo tempore,” the time before time—archetypal time. Like cauterizing a wound, the resort to ritual (or “religious reintegration”) exaggerates the initial crisis on the way to healing it. An unfortunate individual falling out of history is conscripted, through ritual, into a larger step out of history, which reopens the person to values, and enables the reacquisition of everyday historicity.De Martino wrote this article in 1956 and at moments it sets off functionalist warning bells. He seems to fall into the trap of asserting that individuals mechanistically restore themselves to the status quo ante of sanity by resort to rituals established precisely for this purpose. Yet, de Martino thinks within a historicist paradigm, which assumes dynamism rather than homeostasis. Crises arise from the stagnation and fixation of that dynamic power that ordinarily propels the individual toward the future. Such moments arise unpredictably, symptoms of the human condition, which Heidegger described as “thrownness.” The crisis of presence is a momentary failure of the Hegelian synthesis according to which the givens of the past and the present should become something novel in the future. Reintegration is not a return to a stable cultural norm, but an exercise in creative, even revolutionary, power akin to the invention of culture described by Wagner (1981). Rather than functionalism, de Martino’s work bears the influences of phenomenology and existentialism, schools of thought that long remained outside the anthropological purview, but which have begun to be embraced in the last two decades. The field of anthropology has thus moved in de Martino’s direction and it may well be that nearly a half century after his death we are in a better position to understand what he was saying.ReferencesRobin G. Collingwood 1946. The idea of history. Oxford: Oxford University Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarErnesto de Martino. 1947. Il mondo magico. Torino: Einaudi. [Primitive Maggie: The psychic power of shamans and sorcerers. Sydney, Australia: Bay Books, 1972.]First citation in articleGoogle ScholarErnesto de Martino. 1958. Morte e pianto rituale: dal lamento antico al pianto di Maria [Death and ritual mourning: From ancient lamentation to the Virgin’s lament]. Torino: Einaudi.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarErnesto de Martino. 1959. Sud e magia [The south and magic]. Milano: Feltrinelli.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarErnesto de Martino. 1961. La terrra del rimorso [The land of remorse]. Milano: Il Saggiatore.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarErnesto de Martino. 1977. La fine del mondo: Contributo all’ analisi delle apocalissi culturali [The end of the world: Contribution to the analysis of cultural apocalypses]. Edited by Clara Gallini. Torino: Einaudi.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarErnesto de Martino. 2005a. Scritti filosofici [Philosophical writings]. Edited by Roberto Pastina. Bologna: Il Mulino.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarErnesto de Martino. 2005b [1961]. The land of remorse: A study of southern Italian tarrantism. Translated by Dorothy Louise Zinn. Introduction by Vincent Crapanzano. London: Free Association Books.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarFabrizio Ferrari. 2012. Ernesto de Martino on religion: The crisis and the presence. Sheffield: Equinox.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarKaren Liidtke. 2008. Dances with spiders: Crisis, celebrity and celebration in southern Italy. Oxford: Berghahn.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarGeorge Saunders. 1995. “The crisis of presence in Italian Pentecostal conversion.” AmericanEthnologist 22 (2): 324–40.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarRoy Wagner. 1981. The invention of culture. Revised and expanded edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.First citation in articleGoogle Scholar Notes Translators’ note: We are grateful to the journal Aut Aut for permission to publish this translation of “Crisi della presenza e reintegrazione religiosa”, which originally appeared in Aut Aut 31 (1956): 17–38.Tobia Farnetti is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology, University College London.Charles Stewart is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology, University College London.Crisis of presence and religious reintegrationErnesto DE MARTINOThe second chapter of my book Il mondo magico (1947) contained the sketch of a general theory of magic as a demarcated historical world. Yet it also offered something more: an attempt to rethink and test Benedetto Croce’s historicism on historiographic1 forms of experience which lay outside his scope, namely the history of magical and religious life in so-called primitive cultures. Since then, as happens so often, new ideas have occurred, and above all, new and more contextually detailed historiographic materials have come to light, and these have both modified and corroborated that first sketch. It therefore seems an opportune moment to return to that discussion at the point where it was abandoned.The fundamental thesis of Il mondo magico—which in truth far exceeded the historical field of “magic” on which it made its first steps—is the crisis of presence, to which magical practices would offer cultural resolution. But in the formulation of ten years ago this concept of presence remained tangled in a serious contradiction—at least insofar as it pretended to assert itself as a concept of a precategorial unity of the person. The conquest of this unity would have constituted the dominant problem of the “epoch” of magic. This contradiction did not escape Croce who, in his essay, “Intorno al magismo come età storica” (1949) [“On magism as historical epoch”] observed: On the other hand, De Martino emphasizes the risk of losing oneself, a risk that threatens the acquired unity of the spirit as well as its special forms. These forms defend themselves against that risk, that is, they continuously overcome the negative moment of error, evil, the brutal, into the positive moment of truth, beauty, the good, and so on. To emphasize this would in effect separate the unity of the spirit from its forms with an impossible divide. The forms of the spirit are not added onto that unity, but they are the unity itself, and thus trying to consider those in themselves would leave that unity worse than inert, empty. The age of magic, then, could not create the unity of the spirit because, like all the other ages that we like to carve out of the unique and continuous course of history, the age of magic was the action of that unity, and its categories. (1949: 202)With different emphasis Enzo Paci writes: In fact, talk of a drama which, through risk, constructs a vision of the world means to consider all of the categories and the forms. If humans were exclusively part of nature they would not exist, because they would not feel threatened by demise into nothingness, losing the constitutive human relationship—the relation between practice and theory; economics and moral law; between acting and knowing; between action and conscience. The ever-threatening barbarity, Vico’s Lernaean Hydra, is really the loss of the categories that constitute humans in their historicity. Nature becomes, then, just as in the magical world, diabolical; disintegrator of humans and their historical civilization, which, as Vico observed, loses its laws, its moral as well as juridical form. (1950: 26)Critique of this sort is compelling even if—as I have just shown—Croce and Paci present it with different emphases. Croce was correct: the “divide” (il taglio) within human history is “impossible” insofar as one could never think of a unity in itself that forms a particular—or even dominant—historical problem; a unity unconcerned with how and from what it became unity, and which resolution it shares in.2Human civilization and history are always reborn—today as in whatever more remote or archaic “then”—and thus they will be born in the future until the word “man” makes sense by virtue of the power of categorization according to determinate forms or values. Furthermore, cultural presence, that is, being-in-history (l’esserci nella storia), remains defined precisely by this categorizing energy. Nevertheless, within human history, the risk of a divide exists as madness shows. At the limits of madness stand exactly that inertia and void—the inertia and void of values; presence lost, as Croce noted. Since the relationship that establishes presence is the same relationship that makes culture possible, the risk of human history not existing takes shape as the risk of losing culture and receding without mitigation into nature. When such a risk rises up in a specific “critical” moment of historical existence, presence loses the power consciously to define it or overcome it, and it gets tangled up, entering into a profound existential contradiction with itself. Then presence enters into crisis precisely as presence, since its reality lies entirely in the act of defining or overcoming, according to values, the situations of its own history (this and nothing else is permissible to understand when one speaks of human ex-sistere).3 A radical risk arises then, a risk that is certainly not the loss of the mythical prior unity of the categories, but more the loss of the dynamic unity of the categories; the extinguishing of that energy of categorization according to values, which constitutes the reality itself of being-in-human-history—as Paci rightly pointed out.The psychic manifestations of the reality of this risk, and of the existential contradiction that characterizes it, are found in exemplary form in the very variable and empirical nosological classifications of psychiatry. Thus, because of its failure to go beyond a certain critical content, presence stands on the verge of further becoming, but in a suspended (inattuale) position. The reality of the world appears strange, mechanical, sordid, simulated, inconsistent, perverse, dead; and presence is felt as lost, dreamy, estranged from itself, and so forth.The madman is detached from the present, precisely because he cannot fully “be-there” (esserci in the present, being still anchored or polarized in an undecided critical moment of his own personal history, where the chance of any overcoming is reduced. Thus the person stands non-dialectically in presence; no longer as an instance of conscious awareness, or active memory, but as symptom.On the other hand, the unsurpassed content can assert itself by returning as uncontrollable psychic estrangement, dressed up in obsessions, phobias, and hallucinations, or even converted into certain organic behaviors that fall outside conscious control. Furthermore, when there is a risk that a particular critical content might not be surmounted, this content may enter presence as an obscure anguish of limits. It is as if critical content were asking for its “beyond”—that is some formal definition from the surpassing aspect of presence. Because this request remains unanswered, or without an adequate response, an unbridled allusive tension of content ensues, which can chaotically turn into anything, without, however, being able to exhaust the unrestrained allusive impulse (and it cannot do so because—for as long as the crisis lasts—the impulse is in itself inexhaustible, unable to find the formal, objectivizing, and qualifying definition of presence).Without doubt psychopaths attempt to employ specific techniques to defend themselves against the risk of their illness, but they fail because they are inadequate. Their inadequacy rests in the fact that they do not reestablish the spiritual dialectic. That is, they do not retake control of the psychic realities that are alienated, by reinserting them in the cultural circuit and redisclosing them to values. The “divide” (or trauma) persists, and with the divide, the illness. Among the inadequate responses—i.e., those not open to the world of values—one may take, for example, delusions of grandeur, in which the madman reacts to the extraordinary breadth of obscure callings deriving from the crisis by caricaturing himself proportionately. Thus the aggrandizement of self, characteristic of such deliriums, takes form. This is exaggeration instead of genius precisely because of the miserable feebleness of real values, and for the terrible cultural void that can be felt.Likewise, melancholic depression, with its monstrous sentiments of blame and abjection, contains an inadequate form of interpretive defense, which manifests itself precisely in these sentiments. This experience is certainly founded on a radical powerlessness of being-there, but so little open to values and history that it can sometimes take the form of a naturalistic cycle, that is, a periodic oscillation between depression and mania (the so-called manic-depressive psychosis). The limit case of inadequate defense is the blocked will of catatonic stupor when all possible contents become dangerous and every moment becomes hazardous for presence. Then one has the pathological reaction of psychic block, or the spasmodic attempt to make oneself the prisoner of a particular content. To maintain this imprisonment, all changes imposed from the outside are rejected up to the point of physical exhaustion, as in catalepsy, or repeatedly mirrored, as in echolalia or echomimicry.***At the root of the radical crisis of presence lies the inability to put life (il vitale) into dialectic relationship with ethos and logos so that life, in this a-dialectical withdrawal, ceases to be a live and vital passion—which drives civilization and history—configuring itself instead as mere “suffering,” as impulsivity, parasitic representation, inexpiable guilt, and so on. This has been, if not noticed, at least glimpsed by some representatives of modern psychiatry. “The entire history of madness,” wrote Pierre Janet in 1889, “stems from the weakness of actual synthetic power, which is itself moral weakness and psychological misery. Genius, on the other hand, is a power of synthesis capable of forming new ideas, which no preexisting science could foresee: it is the highest degree of moral potency” (Janet 1889: 478).Here he talks of “moral potency”: and certainly this dialectical power, which transforms nature into culture, can truly be considered the fundamental human ethos. Animal vitality embraces and nourishes dialectical power in order to open it to singular, specific economic, political, juridical, moral, poetic, and scientific productions.Some psychoanalytic concepts—despite the distortion typical of this psychological school—can be taken, allusively at least, to indicate the same dialectical relationship. What Freud defines as libido (which he essentially considers in the form of sexual vitality) is, in reality, presence. It is the synthetic energy that overcomes situations according to distinct faculties of action. When Freud talks of the fixation of libido at a particular past stage, assigning to this fixation the possibility of neurotic regression, he confirms, within the frame of his theory, that mental illness is a critical content that has not been overcome, chosen and consciously defined by presence. Without doubt Freud, in conformity with the assumptions of his theory, gives decisive importance to the situation of the individual’s sexual life, which is ultimately the only crucial thing. Furthermore, he interprets fixation as a failed evolution of sexuality. Apart from this limitation, which is serious indeed, he nevertheless lets one catch a glimpse of the important concept of physical presence as energy that overcomes. Similarly the concept of complex suggests an undecided conflict in which presence has remained polarized, entering in existential contradiction with itself. Translation and sublimation hint at the retrieval and resolution of the conflict in a particular cultural “value”; and so on.But we find the most fitting precursor of the concept of crisis of presence not in modern psychology, but in Hegel, who on this matter has partly stated, and partly implied what is essential. What is here called “presence” corresponds to “self-feeling” 4 in Hegel, which he defined as follows: The feeling totality, as individuality, is essentially this: distinguishing itself within itself, and awakening to the judgment within itself, in virtue of which it has particularfeelings and stands as a subjectin respect of these determinations of itself. The subject as such posits them within itselfas itsfeelings. it is immersed in this particularityof sensations, and at the same time, through the ideality of the particular, in them it joins together with itself as a subjective unit. In this way it is self-feeling—and yet it is only in the particular feeling. (Hegel 2007: 114; § 407)5Now, the subject as self-feeling can be susceptible to illness; that is “to the disease of remaining fast in a particularity of its self-feeling, unable to refine it to ideality and overcome it” (Hegel 2007: 114; § 408). Here the risk of presence is posed with utmost clarity as the impossibility of overcoming one of its particular contents—that is to define it according to distinct forms of cultural coherence. For Hegel the physical subject is the being-itself (il se stesso) as coherent or rational consciousness. The pathological subject is this being-itself as prisoner of a particular content: The fully furnished selfof intellectual consciousness is the subject as an internally consistent consciousness, which orders and conducts itself in accordance with its individual position and its connection with the likewise internally ordered external world. But when it remains ensnared in a particular determinacy, it fails to assign that content the intelligible place and the subordinate position belonging to it in the individual world-system which a subject is. In this way the subject finds itself in the contradiction between its totality systematized in its consciousness, and the particular determinacy in that consciousness, which is not pliable and integrated into an overarching order. This is derangement. (Hegel 2007: 114–15; § 408)Obviously the limitations of the Hegelian self-feeling are the limitations and defects of Hegelian dialectics itself. The totality of the subject is not here the distinction of cultural forms, but still rational consciousness, understood as simple judgment in itself and as the referral of its feelings to itself: where it concerns the synthetic power through categories of action, or the unity-distinction of this faculty. However, aside from this limitation, Hegel understands with extraordinary acuity the substance of what I am calling “crisis of presence.” When Hegel states that the spirit is free and thus not susceptible to illness—while self-feeling can fall into a contradiction between its subjectivity, which in itself is free, and a particularity, which does not then become ideal but remains stuck in self-feeling—he is hinting at the idea that the spirit, that is the presence engaged in the categorization of cultural forms, is physical presence. On the other hand, the presence which does not push its contents over into the ideality of form is