2 - Beware of gift-bearing tales: reading ‘Baltazar's Prodigious Afternoon’ according to Marcel Mauss

Summary

Jésus se f^t obstinément refusé à faire des prodiges que la foule en eût créé pour lui; le plus grand miracle eût été qu'il n'en fît pas; jamais les lois de l'histoire et de la psychologie populaire n'eussent subi une plus forte dérogation. Les miracles de Jésus furent une violence que lui fit son siècle, une concession que lui arracha la nécessité passagère. Aussi l'exorciste et le thaumaturge sont tombés; mais le réformateur religieux vivra éternellement.

(Ernest Renan, Vie de Jésus)

Speaking of the main task of his Essai sur le don (1925), Marcel Mauss says that he intends ‘to catch the fleeting moment when a society and its members take emotional stock of themselves and their situation as regards others’. In the wake of recent structuralist complexities Mauss's words appear forthright and endowed with a kind of naive authority. Of particular interest is his emphasis on emotions and feelings as pre-eminent objects of analysis. In The Gift, Mauss rebuilt an instance of social being which was significant in that it seemed to be total and, in spite of its aberrant display of excess and waste, practical. He saw the act of gift-exchange, or total presentation, as that juncture in time and space where structure and event intercept each other. As an object of story-telling, the group becomes, it begins at such a moment: social reality originates as kairos, as an occasion overruled by its own disclosures.