Graham St John

“I 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).”
― Graham St. John, Rave Culture and Religion