The festival confirms existence as an end rather than a means to future transcendence

Evidence

Existence must be asserted in the present if one does not want all life to be defined as an escape toward nothingness. That is the reason societies institute festivals whose role is to stop the movement of transcendence, to set up the end as an end. … That is why, as Bataille has shown, it is characterized by destruction; the ethics of being is the ethics of saving: by storing up, one aims at the stationary plenitude of the in-itself, existence, on the contrary, is consumption; it makes itself only by destroying; the festival carries out this negative movement in order to indicate clearly its independence in relationship to the thing: one eats, drinks, lights fires, breaks things, and spends time and money; one spends them for nothing. … The spending is also a matter of establishing a communication of the existants, for it is by the movement of recognition which goes from one to the other that existence is confirmed; in songs, laughter, dances, eroticism, and drunkenness one seeks both an exaltation of the moment and a complicity with other men. … One of art’s roles is to fix this passionate assertion of existence in a more durable way: the festival is at the origin of the theatre, music, the dance, and poetry. … In the past people cried out, “The king is dead, long live the king;” thus the present must die so that it may live; existence must not deny this death which it carries in its heart; it must assert itself as an absolute in its very finiteness; man fulfills himself within the transitory or not at all. He must regard his undertakings as finite and will them absolutely. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 120

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Beauvoir’s festival as anti-economics — consumption for nothing, destruction as confirmation — connects to ‘On Sacrifice: The Real Kind, with Corpses’ where ritual destruction/spending is central.
• XREF: Bataille’s notion of expenditure appears here; connects to potlatch literature and Georges Bataille’s The Accursed Share.