“Magic and the Play of Power”

In his Making Magic: Religion, Magic, and Science in the Modern World (2004), Randall Styers turns the modern scholarly discourses on “magic” itself into the object of study. In addition to pointing to numerous theoretical contradictions, inconsistencies and tensions in the treatment of “magic”, Styers reads these discourses as functional tools (or foils) of self-fashioning and exploring the limits of modernity and the modern subject – for example, by drawing boundaries around legitimate religion, desire, reason and science. Definitions of “magic” can never be true, but instead serve as symptoms for something else. “Magic has held great appeal to scholars because of its capacity both to re-inscribe and to subvert the self-representations of the modern world” (Styers 2004: 226). The theoreticians of “magic” are unmasked as the “magicians” of modernity. In his contribution to the present volume, Styers follows up on this agenda. He explains the recurrent attempt to define “magic” in spite of the grandiose failures of all earlier attempts as motivated by “something more than a desire for conceptual clarity”. Styers holds that “the term is too amorphous and shape-shifting – and its deployment too polemical” to allow for “a definition of magic as some type of stable object of study”. Yet, he goes on to highlight “a few of magic's most illuminating features” as sites or occasions of study. In the end, paradoxically, the modern denial of “magic” cannot hide that “potent forms of enchantment” surround us in modernity.