The Fortuitous Celebration 

According to the latest reports close to a billion people are going ­hungry, global warming is threatening to accelerate irreversibly, and the rate of extinction for living species has led scientists to speak of a “sixth ­extinction.”1 1  - Richard E. Leakey and Roger Lewin, The Sixth Extinction: Biodiversity and Its Survival (London: Orion Books, 1995). With this in mind, is it still possible to celebrate? Faced with this anticipated disaster the joyous exuberance of celebration has ­something almost inappropriate about it. Is it time to put the ­confetti away? Nevertheless, despite the gravity of the situation, it would be absurd to consider all festivities as suspect or to pronounce a merciless indictment of celebration, and this for at least two reasons. 

First, the question associates celebration with a frivolous leisure activity, which is by nature guilty in the face of reasoned and responsible conduct. “To party” suggests a particular manifestation—to enjoy ­oneself, or in colloquial terms to “have a blast”—something to which ­celebration cannot, however, be reduced. For to party also means to ­celebrate, notably to commemorate. There are thus two types of ­celebration: if ­commemoration is part of celebration, then the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks partially includes “celebration” though there is evidently nothing festive about it. If, on the one hand, festivities allow one to have fun, to get drunk, or even forget, on the other, the commemoration exists above all to make us remember. To sum up, there are celebrations where one amuses oneself, and others where one fulfils a duty to remember. But a ­celebration can also be improvised outside of any public or civic framework: the feast, a dinner party washed down with plenty of wine, a night of bar hopping. This celebration has no fixed place in the calendar and can have no other meaning than that of a break based on leisure rather than ­worship. Contrary to celebration as a social institution, as a civic or religious event, there are also open and “free” festivities—in other words, there is celebration and there is the festive. Celebration includes ­merrymaking, but the more vague festive is in no way limited to official celebrations: it designates a behaviour, mood or atmosphere, it is the intransitive celebration that can erupt under any circumstances without need or justification.