The Performative Space of Festival: From Bataille to Butler

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.