the Destorification of the negative, De Martino + Signorinelli

THE DESTORIFICATION OF THE NEGATIVE, DE MARTINO / SIGNORINELLI

Destorification connected, from a philosophical and anthropological point of view, to the ethos of transcendence and the crisis of presence, applied to subaltern cultures (cultural exclusivism, and hegemonic cultures) a concept that can also be re-actualised by associating it with alienation in Marx and in Feuerbach.

How can destorification be extended to contemporary social phenomena? How to interpret the present ritual and its symbolic language?

Destorification is a protective occultation of the historicity of existence, where destorification means mystification/alienation from the present, from time and thus from History. Man 'makes history', constructs it, chooses what he wants to valorise, but when this capacity threatens the ethos, man, in order to protect himself, destorifies his 'making history' and institutes the mythical-ritual medium, thus dissociation from the present takes place. Through the mystification of history by the mythical-ritual symbol, man can escape the protruding situations, the unpredictable, the becoming. Man stands in history as if he were not there, finding refuge in a metahistorical plane, placed above it.

The destorification of the negative allows the universalisation of one's condition in a mythical-symbolic dimension, mediated by religion and ritual. Myth is narration, ritual is behaviour repeated with words and gestures of symbolic meaning. The whole then becomes a circuit aimed at resolving the crisis. When the negative prevails, there is a crisis, of existential misery simply called, in which the ethos of transcendence can no longer resolve the inner evil and pain transcends its own position, causing the individual to lose his conception of reality and the deconstruction of his own being.

The symbolic universes, which human groups have produced to date, have mostly had magical-religious cultural content. Magic and religion already rest on the idea of the existence of a transcendent world, which nourishes itself. Religion is a 'protective technique mediating values', capable of creating regimes of protected existence, above chaos, to counter the risk of passing with what passes (Károly Kerényi). Kosmoi that are isolated from the larger kosmos that is history. Religion with its symbolic stratagems contrasts the unrelated destorification (clinical madness) with the institutional destorification of becoming, the creation of a unitary, limited and limiting cosmos, a beautiful enclosure full of flowers.

In contemporary societies that pretend to be secularised, the destorification of the negative through magical-religious symbolism has not disappeared, on the contrary, it is reinforced by the development of symbolic languages that invest the spheres of economics (symbolic, conspicuous consumption) of politics (apocalyptic-millenarian projects, but also the figure of the leader and his charisma), of recreation and leisure (popularity and its allure, group membership and conflict, narcissistic exhibitionism and the 'symbolic' achievement of success, protagonism, individual affirmation).