In the Beginning Was the Symbol

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Notes

1. Ernst Cassirer, Philosophie der Symbolischen Formen (Berlin: B. Cassirer, 1923–29); The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, trans. Ralph Manheim, intro. Charles W. Hendel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953–96).

2. Marcel Mauss, Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l'échange dans les sociétés archaïques, in Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris: P.U.F., 1995); The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchanges in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison, intro. E. E. Evans-Pritchard (New York: Norton & Co., 1967).

3. Emile Durkheim, Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse: Le système totémique en Australie (Paris, 1912); The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (New York: Free Press, 1915, 1965).

4. Emile Durkheim, Le Suicide (Paris, 1897); Suicide: A Study in Sociology, trans. John A. Spaulding and George Simpson, ed. George Simpson (New York: Free Press, 1951, 1966).

5. Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifice (1899); Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function, trans. W. D. Halls (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

6. Marcel Mauss, “Esquisse d’une théorie générale de la magie,” in Sociologie et anthropologie; A General Theory of Magic, trans. Robert Brain (New York: Norton, 1975).

7. Marcel Mauss, Essai sur le don, 154; The Gift, 6.

8. Mauss’s anti-utilitarian approach has inspired the Parisian intellectual movement M.A.U.S.S., an acronym for Mouvement Anti-Utilitariste dans les Sciences Sociales, launched in 1981, to which Tarot himself has contributed. Other recent works that elaborate on the Maussian gift as a symbolic process with aesthetic and ethical implications are Lewis Hyde, The Gift (New York: Vintage, 1983); Jacques Derrida, Donner Ie temps (Paris: Galilée, 1991); Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Vincent Pecora, Households of the Soul (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Nicoletta Pireddu, Antropologi alla corte della bellezza. Decadenza ed economia simbolica nell’Europa fin de siècle (Verona: Fiorini, 2002), and the forthcoming volume Il dono dell’arte: soggetti di benessere, ed. Ugo Olivieri and Marco Castagna (Diogene, 2015), synthesizing the results of the international research group “A piene mani. Dono, benessere e beni comuni,” based at the Università “Federico II” in Naples, Italy.