Festival, vacation, war: Roger Caillois and the politics of paroxysm

I trace the evolution of Roger Caillois' theories of paroxysm and festival and his early sense of the political somatic structure of the social organism. I attempt to systematise his category of the paroxysmic, a mutation of Durkheimian effervescence, and examine it in relationship to his theory of the sacred as a vertiginous space of order/disorder. I then carefully explore Caillois' phenomenological anthropology that narrates the decline of the social and the sacred from the primitive to the modern and also critically explore his dialectic of festival, vacation and war. I demonstrate that Caillois' propositions, while grounded in the history of religions, reveal a political ontological hermeneutic that remains a vital critique of the modern nation‐state.