transgression had been emptied of their substance and anaesthetized, channelled
into leisure activities or entertainment commodities.
The brazenness with which techno-rave fired up so many local subcultures could
have been caused in part by a certain longing, otherwise unfulfilled, for expense and
communion (Epstein 2001a). Incidentally techno-rave could be defined as a
hedonistic encounter of the technological and the archaic in which transient
communities give voice to this accursed share. On a more general level, through
excess and transgression raves participate in a cultural resurgence of the festive,
providing new avenues for experiences of the sacred in an atomized society
(Fontaine and Fontana 1996; Gaillot 1999, 2001).
Rave as festive ritualI regard this radical experience of rave as a manifestation of the religious ‘fête’,^13 or
‘celebration’. The ‘festive’, a religious category different from that of ritual, is, for
Georges Bataille specifically a human fusion in which this accursed share is given
expression. Fuelled by desire, an instinct, a call for destruction, exhilaration, dis-
order, a motivation often understood as animalistic, the fête, in which the paradoxes
of human and social life collide, is simultaneously harnessed and subordinated by a
wisdom which enables the participants to come back from this confusional state with
a feeling of replenishment, as if having received some kind of impetus from the
‘outside’ (Bataille 1989:54).
Set in Bataille’s economy, the festive amounts to the sacrificial consumption of
order, usefulness and productivity. Its constitution and effectiveness are reliant on
its ability to set up a contrast with the profane order. Through its instinct of
preservation, the festive is necessarily ritual, as it must provide return from the
uncertainty of the margin; but it also differs from ritual as it allows for an unrivalled
degree of spontaneity, play and creativity.
What also distinguishes the festive from the ritual is that the latter is disengaged
from a telos: the celebration is not a re-enactment of an original myth, reporting
meaning outside itself. Neither is it held to take after some sort of commemoration.
The aim is in fact to escape time and duration and to elude all memory If an
occasion is given for celebrating, the celebration is only fully festive if what is
celebrated is forgotten and recognized for what it really is—a pretext. The festive
implicitly seeks forgetfulness, selflessness and oblivion. What this implies is that the
prompted effervescence is sought after for itself and in itself. In other words, it is its
own purpose and reason. By opening up to creativity, by staging an otherly,
unlicensed temporary world, the festive need only contain itself. Disengaging from
temporality, the festive bursts into an ‘eternal’—or, to be more precise, ‘indefinite’—
present, and opens on to an instituant factuality.
This scenario is consistent with some of the characteristics of the rave-borne
techno experience. Many interpreters, from within or on the edge of the rave scene,
have likened rave to the festive (see Fontaine and Fontana 1996; Ben Saâdoune et
al. 1997; Hampartzoumian 1999; Epstein 2001a; and Petiau 2001, for example),
66 FRANÇOIS GAUTHIER