ABSTRACT
Two crucial gaps or divisions operate as generative principles in treatments of festival and spectacle which have come to be regarded as influential. First, the Collège de Sociologie, based loosely on Durkheim’s school, posits a gap between everyday life which is lived in dispersed, mainly individualistic pursuits, and the periodic excitement of coming together for ritual purposes. The aspect of festival which interests Bataille et al. is the release from ordinary constraint and excessive indulgence of sexual and other appetites during festival. In his lecture on ‘Festival,’ May 2, 1939, Roger Caillois remarks:
In contrast with life that is regular, busy with everyday work, peaceful, caught inside a system of prohibitions, taken up by precautions, where the maxim quieta non movere keeps order in the world, is the ferment of the festival…. It implies a noisy and excited throng of people. These huge gatherings are eminently favorable to the birth and contagion of an intense excitement spent in cries and gestures, inciting an unchecked abandonment to the most reckless impulses. Even today,…even the carousing at the end of the Nüremburg Congress in national-socialist Germany, [is] evidence of the same social necessity and its continuation. There is no festival…that does not consist of at least the beginnings of excess and revelry.
