Profanations by Giorgio Agamben is a đź“ťcompendium of essays by the provocative Italian philosopher on memory and oblivion, on what is lost and what remains.
The excerpt below was shared with me, and translated by, đź“ťFelix Grisebach who added:
I couldn’t sleep and rummaged through my library and found a passage in Giorgio Agamben’s PROFANAZIONI which, I’m pretty sure, you’ll immediately fall in love with because it beautifully encapsulates an underlying current of 📝Mythos One. Emphasis and commentary are mine.
Excerpt
The transition from the holy to the profane can occur by means of a totally inappropriate usage (or rather a renewed usage). And that’s because of play. It is known that the sphere of the holy is intimately connected to the sphere of play. The majority of various forms of play known to us come from ancient holy ceremonies, from rituals and practices of prophecy that, in a wider sense, once belonged to the sphere of the religious. The ring-a-ring-o’roses was originally a wedding rite; ballgames have their origin in the battles among the gods for possession of the sun; gambling developed out of oracle practices; spinning top and game of chess were instruments of fortune telling. Émilie Benvéniste shows in an analysis of the relationship between play and ritual that play not only originates in the sphere of the holy, but that play in a certain sense represents its inversion. The power of the holy act, he writes, lies in the connection between the mythos that tells the story and the ritual that reproduces and enacts it. Play destroys that unity: as ludus [Latin for play or enacted play] it drops the mythos and preserves the ritual; as iocus [pun/play with words, compare the English “joke”] it obliterates the ritual and allows the mythos to survive. “If the holy can only be defined by the consubstantual unity of mythos and ritual, then play can be defined as that in which only one half of the holy enactment is executed, whether it’s the myhos that is transferred into words or the ritual that is transferred into actions.”
That means that human play liberates and deviates from the sphere of the holy, yet without abolishing it [Michel Foucault used to say: to this day, we still haven’t decapitated the king/quoted from memory]. The usage in which the holy is being reintroduced is a special usage that doesn’t coincide with utalitarian consumerism. The reason for this is that the “profanation” of play not only affects the sphere of religion. While rummaging through rumble, children transform whatever they get into their hands into toys [the German word for toy, Spielzeug, means literally play-thing] even though these items may belong to the spheres of economics, war, law and other activities that we’ve come to consider as serious affairs. A car, a firearm, a legal contract are thus all at once transformed into a toy. This, then, is the common feature of these instances and the profanation of the holy: the transition from a religio that is already perceived as false and oppressive, into negligance as a true religio. And that doesn’t mean a lack of care (no form of attention can compete with that of a playing child) but a new dimension of use that children and philosophers offer humanity.
Play as a function of profanation is everywhere in decline. The fact of modern man’s inability to play is evident in the vertiginous multiplication of old and new games. Modern man desperately and persistently attempts to find in play, dance and parties the contrary of what he’s able to find: the possibility to regain access to original play, a return to the holy and its rites, and be it in the form of fatuous ceremonies of new religions like media spectacles or a sad tango course in a provincial town. In that sense, the televised games for the masses belong to a new liturgy and unknowingly secularize a religious yearning. So it’s a political effort to return play to its purely profane calling.
It’s therefore necessary to differentiate between secularization and profanation. Secularization is a form of suppression that allows original forces to persist, confining itself to transferring them from one realm to another. Thus, political secularization of theological concepts (the transcendence of God as sovereign power) is nothing but transferring heavenly monarchy to Earth without constraining its power.
Profanation, on the other hand, allows for a neutralization of what’s being profaned. If that what was once unavailable and separated is suddenly profaned, it loses its aura and is returned to usage. Both examples are political operations: yet the first is tied to a wielding of power that is self-constituting by referring to a holy example; the second destabilizes the systems of power and returns to common use those spheres which power has confiscated.
Ledger
- 🏷️#letl+🏷️#felix_grisebach for sharing, and translating, Giorgio Agamben's Profanations