Roberto Calasso - Ardor

A wide and variegated procession of beings had populated the vast realm of analogy, from the jade plaques of the Maoris to the plates of signaturae in the books of the last pansophists of seventeenth-century hermetism — and onward, up to Baudelaire’s web of correspondances , where “fragrances, colors and sounds respond to each other.”

What was all this about? Thought — but certainly a kind of thought no trace of which was to be found in the histories of philosophy, except on odd occasions. Why? Mauss never posed the question, but he gave one of those brilliant answers that we find scattered among his dispersed writings: “Philosophy leads to everything, provided there’s a way out of it.” It is a phrase applicable to all times — to the past as well as to what would be the future when Mauss wrote it (in 1939). It was tacitly assumed by the leading anthropologists of the twentieth century that philosophy — at least in the form it had assumed at universities after the French Revolution — is not thought itself, but only one of many forms of thought, a kind of springboard. An assumption, however, that should never be declared. Such an idea was well respected up until Lévi-Strauss. But it was Mauss himself who revealed the hidden goal in his conception of anthropology: “I will even go as far as saying that comprehensive anthropology could replace philosophy, because it would include within itself the very history of the human spirit that philosophy presupposes.”

If a jade pendant that adorns the breast of a Maori noblewoman can gather within itself all the heavens, all the worlds, and all the gods, and even God — as Mauss ventured to suggest — then what would come of the various distinctions between primitive and civilized, between people who had no writing and those who did, between simplicity and complexity? Things would have to be thought out and described in another way. For the French anthropologist, who had grown up in a period and atmosphere of positivism, that “little man” of hard stone which he had discovered in a large folded plate at the British Museum would become a talisman, as it was already for the Maori noblewomen. It could be said that Mauss’s whole body of work, his tireless, ragged, ramified inquiry toward a “comprehensive anthropology,” had found its demon protector in that small being.

If the Maoris, whom Mauss’s predecessors had regarded as exemplifying primitive man, had developed “a complete classification of things of a type no less clear and incisive that any of the other cosmological mythologies produced in the ancient world,” then in what way might those systems of correspondences be judged? First of all, the Maoris were placed on the same level as not only ancient China and the Mesopotamian civilizations, but also the Hermetic tradition in Europe. It brought together a prodigious mix of times, places, and circumstances. And a problem immediately arose: how, by what criteria, can systems of correspondences be evaluated? The usual answer among anthropologists, that those systems were to be judged according to their social function, was not enough. It was clear that, in their subtlety and intricacy, they went far beyond any application in society. In them was an irreducible superabundance of thought. Exactly as in the prescriptions of the Vedic ritualists. Those systems were a mode of thought. They were the substance of thought — and that thought was waiting only to be recognized as such: in the same way as the thought of Spinoza or Leibniz is considered or judged. At this point it seemed clear what a subversive gesture Mauss had made toward the traditional way of thinking when he placed himself under the protection of Tiki. And perhaps it could now be seen what really lay hidden behind some of his apparently innocuous phrases. Such as these: “Philosophies and sciences are languages. Consequently, it is a matter only of speaking the best language.”

The first step, when considering systems of correspondences, is to recognize their vastness, complexity, precision, subtlety, and their arrangement on multiple levels. The second is to ask why, in such different situations and times, thought has felt it necessary to take on these forms. Mauss also tried to get to this second step, but made only the gesture of doing so. Only newly accepted into the Société de Philosophie (the circumstances are always telling in Mauss’s life), he found himself — in his own words—“paying for it [that honor] by immediately providing the spectacle of two sociologists savaging each other.” The incident involved Lévy-Bruhl, who had just read a paper, “La Mentalité primitive,” and Mauss, who then proceeded to attack him.

For Lévy-Bruhl, the word that opens all doors was participation. And this was what Mauss found objectionable. Not because the word did not point in the right direction. But because Lévy-Bruhl used it with a vagueness and haziness that he suggested, wrongly, was part of the notion itself. And this gave Mauss the chance to touch a central nerve: “‘Participation’ is not only a confusion. It presupposes an effort to confuse and an effort to make things similar. It is not a simple resemblance, but a homoíōsis [assimilation]. From the very beginning there is a Trieb [a drive], a violence of the mind on itself in order to overcome itself; from the very beginning there is the wish to bond.”

Using for once, quite strangely, a Freudian word such as Trieb , Mauss is pushing toward the source of the bandhus , those “nexuses” that make up the web of correspondences. And, with this desire to connect, he discovers a violence of the mind toward itself. A moment of suspense, astonishment, fear, as if he were setting foot in forbidden territory. Here we were approaching the childhood amnesia of knowledge, a barrier of fire and darkness. Mauss said no more on that occasion. But he resorted to an ethnographical object, as he would do with the Maori tikis. When he found himself at a crucial junction in knowledge, which threatened to overturn it, Mauss adopted a peculiar strategy, without declaring it: he abandoned the role of anthropologist and took on the role of a museum guide pointing out various exhibits. This time it was not jade jewels but masks: “At the Trocadéro museum there are certain North-West American masks on display on which totems are carved. Some have a double shutter. Open the first and behind the public totem of the ‘shaman-chief’ appears another smaller mask which represents his private totem, and then the last shutter shows highest-ranking initiates his true nature, his face, the human and divine and totemic spirit, the spirit that he incarnates. For, let us be clear, in that moment it is supposed that the chief is in a state of possession, of ékstasis , of ecstasy, and not just of homoíōsis. There is rapture and confusion at the same time.”

Mauss does not stop to indicate the implications of his argument through imagery. But those repercussions go a very long way. First, because they point to a knowledge arranged by strata, on various levels, as if passing from one face concealed in the mask to the next. And each of these levels is firmly connected to the other, since they are the faces of the same shaman: an eloquent example of the firmest correspondences. But there is another point: in referring to the use of the shamanic mask, worn at ceremonies marked by possession, Mauss suggests that the homoíōsis , the process of “assimilation” through which the mind relates like with like, would not be the first act of thought, but almost the consequence of a state : a state of possession. Thus the rapture, the fusion of like with like, find their driving force in an upheaval of the psyche. On the other hand, the notion that possession is the origin of knowledge was the very foundation of Delphi. And Mauss, though telegraphic in style, goes further. If Lévy-Bruhl’s “participation” goes back in the end to possession, it is not just because this is a rudimentary (Lévy-Bruhl himself would have said “prelogical”) form of knowledge. But also the saintly Reason of Kantian and Comtian instituteurs (well represented by Durkheim) would come from the same origins. And here Mauss dealt the hardest blow to his readers, to his discipline, and to his illustrious uncle, while maintaining an impeccably neutral formulation: “‘Participation’ thus implies not only a confusion of categories, but it is, from the beginning, as it is for us, an effort to identify ourselves with things and to identify things among themselves. The reason has the same deliberate and collective origin in the most ancient societies and in the most incisive forms of philosophy and science.”