There can be no a community without rites. There has never existed. Amid apelike howls, our ancestors performed already funerary offerings. Before worrying about building houses for the living, they already buried their dead. Shared symbolic thinking gives meaning to life, aiming to unite the people, to frighten the fear of emptiness by inventing a social order within natural chaos. It is an order that does not come from the law but from magic, it does not […]
Month: December 2018
When paintings left their frames
“A horrible and immense hole”, exclaimed a journalist from Le Figaro seeing the desolate aspect of the Louvre wall where weeks before had hung The Mona Lisa. After the robbery, the visits to the museum increased in such a way that the newspapers satirized about it: “some people like works of art by themselves, others by the place they occupy”, said a headline. The Italian carpenter who, one summer morning in 1911, removed La Gioconda […]