Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

H e n r i L e F e b v r e
bourgeois cant and born-again bullshit. Popular laughter existed
outside the official sphere: it expressed idiom and a shadier, unofficial
world, a reality more lawless and more free.
One of the most stirring instances of this was the Fête des
Fous (“Feast of Fools”), celebrated across medieval France on New
Year’s Day. Festivities here were quasi-legal parodies of “official”
ideology: masquerades and risqué dances, grotesque degradations
of church rituals, unbridled gluttony and drunken orgies on
the altar table, foolishness and folly run amok, laughter aimed at
Christian dogma—at any dogma. These feasts were double-edged.
On one hand, their roots were historical and steeped in past tradition,
wore an ecclesiastical face, and got sanctioned by authorities.
On the other hand, they looked toward the future, laughed and
played, killed and gave birth at the same time, and recast the old
into the new; they allowed nothing to perpetuate itself and reconnected
people with both nature and human nature. As Lefebvre
suggests (p. 57), “the celebration of order (terrestrial, thus social
and cosmic) is equally the occasion of frenetic disorder.” The fête
situated itself at the decisive moment in the work cycle: planting,
sowing, harvesting. Prudence and planning set the tone in the
months preceding festival day, until all was unleashed: abundance
and squandering underwrote several hours of total pleasure.
Laughter evoked—can still evoke—an interior kind of truth. It
liberated not only from external censorship but also from all internal
censorship. People became deeper, reclaimed their true selves,
by lightening up. Laughter warded off fear: fear of the holy, fear of
prohibitions, fear of the past and fear of the future, fear of power. It
liberated—can still liberate—people from fear itself. Seriousness
had an official tone, oppressed, frightened, bound, lied, and wore
the mask of hypocrisy. It still does: we know this world all too
well. (Or else the laughter of presidents exhibits real buffoonery,
a little like the moronic Ubu Roi of Alfred Jarry, Rabelais’s more
modern successor. “Shittr,” said Jarry’s fictional cretin king, “by
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