The Magic of the Others, and Ours. Ernesto De Martino and the Techniques of Presence

The essay rereads Ernesto De Martino’s theory of magic as outlined in his book The World of Magic. More particularly, it examines the concept of "presence" and interprets the field of presence - with its polarization between the subjectivity of the subject and the objectivity of the object - as a peculiar effect of magical ritualism. The essay then raises a more general problem or hypothesis concerning the ritual nature of all forms of subjectivity as well as of objectivity. In this sense, any mode of "evoking" and ritually framing a somehow stabilized and shared form of subjectivity and objectivity would represent a form of magic. Historically and geographically, such modes tend to differ greatly from each other. In the world of magic, the lability of the evoked presence stands in the foreground, while slipping into the background in all those techniques (such as the ones the contemporary West daily relies on) which present themselves as no more or not simply magical ‘techniques of presence’. From this point of view, it remains to be pondered and shown, on the one hand, why the evocation operated by the techniques of non-writing peoples implies the constitutive instability of the evoked presence; and on the other hand, what mitigates or "forcludes", in the writing peoples, the experience of the same lability, which in all probability is far from being absent or definitively exorcized. Our hypothesis concerns the difference between presence techniques based on voice and "evocation", and presence techniques based on writing, i.e. on the effects of this transcription on the structural lability of voice.

Keywords: Crisis, death, invocation, magic, presence, subject, technique, voice, writing

Federico Leoni, La magia degli altri, e la nostra. Ernesto De Martino e le tecniche della presenza in "PARADIGMI" 2/2013, pp 67-78, DOI: 10.3280/PARA2013-002006