Profanation returns sacred things to common, playful use.
Evidence
‘Profanation’ means taking things that belonged to the gods – and were therefore removed from mortal use – and returning them to human beings to do with as they will. The Greek children were profaning money by handing it over to an entirely other use: games and play. In a single stroke, profanation transformed what is so fetishized today – money – into a common toy. — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics, 120
Categorization
- DEFINE: Defines Agamben’s profanation as restoring separated things to free human use.
- XREF: connects to: Amusement becomes an ideal that displaces the higher things it mimics; Phantasmagoria is aesthetic appearance turned into commodity function. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 386; Situationist playfulness got co-opted into harmless bourgeois amusements — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 340 (+2 more)
Broader Connections
- Rulers administer enjoyment to subjects until it is extinguished in fixed entertainments
#qualifies(0.80) - Situationist playfulness got co-opted into harmless bourgeois amusements
#exemplifies(0.78) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 340 - Amusement becomes an ideal that displaces the higher things it mimics
#expands(0.75) - Allegory interweaves the sacred and the profane as an instructive form of expression.
#qualifies(0.75) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 320 - Phantasmagoria is aesthetic appearance turned into commodity function.
#expands(0.72) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 386