La festa. Uno sguardo dalla filosofia

(English version available: Holidays: A Philosophical Gaze [translated by Silvia Benso], pp. 313-318)

Abstract

Through a philosophical reading of holidays that grasps their invariant content, the essay advances an understanding of holidays as of an interruption within time that contains within itself a trait of (originally religious but also subject to a form of secularized) sacredness. Through the interruption, the distinction from everyday time originates. Among the salient features of the holiday time is its shared (always public) but simultaneously delimited character insofar as such a time is characterized by an exceptionality that no one can appropriate as if it were private. By instituting the order of times, holidays sum up within themselves the repetition of the beginning and the anticipation of the fulfillment.