La festa: senso e pienezza nell’esperienza del finito

(Festivals: Meaning and Fullness of the Experience of the Finite)

Abstract

Festivals introduce an interruption in the flow of everyday life. Within the limits marked by such an interruption, a form of experience different from the ordinary takes place. The time of festivals evokes and makes present the sacred time in which events that have founded human society have occurred. In festivals, on the one hand, one can grasp and represent the meanings that ground human experience; on the other hand, a form of full life takes place. In the modern period, festivals relinquish their connection with the religious dimension, and such features fade away. Yet one cannot say that they disappear entirely. They are grasped in a fragmentary way, and this is enough to turn them into marks of resistance against the reduction of human experience to a purely utilitarian dimension.