Suchergebnisse

In this article, I attend to several theories of festival, laughter, and performativity in which the suspension of customary norms is analyzed mainly by way of cultural and political strategies (as with Judith Butler and Richard N. Lancaster), or in reference to a performative space that exceeds such tactical and strategic projects. Georges Bataille has been especially influential to the second group, as we have seen in the recent scholarship of Tiina Arppe, Kevin E. McHugh, and Ann M. Fletchall. These writers tend to read the transgressive moments of festival in terms of excess rather than their goals or consequences. In my final observations, I do not reject this concept of overflowing excess, but I do contend that it cannot serve as a way of distinguishing moments of transgression from their containment, precisely because it cannot be measured according to the typical parameters of space and time.

Georges Bataille is known for being complex and multifaceted: influenced by Christian mystics as well as Hegelians and Marxists, his work is also linked with that of the surrealists and existentialists of his own mid-20th century France as well as the post-structuralists - in particular the Tel Quel collaboraters - who followed in his wake. It would be astonishing, then, if Bataille's thinking were not conflated with precisely those movements and those ideas with which he has so much in common, despite the fact that we should refuse to expect this. Much of Bataille's work was devoted to the ambivalent overlapping of transgression and its reified containment, and this in part explains why such a large number of his interpreters fall prey to reducing the former category to the latter. This article is therefore an attempt to disentangle, to whatever extent possible, the transgressive from the contained. I will do this on four accounts: postmodern economics, mystical union, sexual degradation, and historical dialectics.