Myth, Tragedy & the Aesthetics of Liberation: Nietzsche, Marx & Bataille on the Political Economy of Play

Taught by Devin Gouré (Acid Horizon Research Commons)

Who, or what, is Dionysus? This course will focus less on a set of topics or thinkers than on the myth of a divinity that has inspired ecstatic visions of liberating madness and superabundant life throughout the history of human thought and culture: the Ancient Greek god of wine and madness, Dionysus. Taking Dionysus as our mythic and symbolic guide through an exploration of philosophy, tragedy, political economy, and anthropology, we will ask whether the figure of Dionysus still offers inspiration for a revolutionary "aesthetic of existence" centered on sacred play as the animating principle of human culture and a counterforce to the ubiquitous rule of instrumental reason and the logic of the commodity form.

This four-week seminar will therefore present an exploration, immanent critique, and defense of those much-maligned "irrationalist" strands of 19th and 20th century revolutionary thought that locate the possibility of liberation from capitalism in art, culture, myth, or ecstatic religion. We will pose the question of whether a new Dionysian myth can break the stranglehold of capitalist realism on the human imagination and the horizon of emancipatory political possibilities. To this end, the seminar will trace the concept of the Dionysian from Nietzsche back to Ancient Greek tragedy and the Festival of Dionysus, and beyond into the ritualized play, games, rivalries, and practices of gift-giving through which the Dionysian elements of culture took on the character of what Marcel Mauss called a "total social phenomenon."

In (re)fashioning this myth, we will begin by investigating efforts by Nietzsche, the Frankfurt School, Bataille, and Gadamer to retrieve the political meaning of art, aesthetics, and myth from the modern subjectivization of aesthetic experience. With this conceptual armature in hand, we will consider the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides and the Dionysian festival as an expression of both the unity and tensions of social and political life in the Ancient Greek polis. Through Deleuze & Guattari, Mauss, Kerényi, Godelier, and others we will trace the tragic festival back through the Dionysian mystery cults centered on the figure of Orpheus and all the way to the fundamental question of human culture and its origins in order to grasp the role of the ecstatic rite in the mode of production of early human societies.

After retrieving the meaning of the Dionysus myth from its deepest origins, we will return to the present and set a renewed Dionysian myth against the myth that is now beginning to unify the capitalist ruling class: the myth of the intelligent machine. Against the triumph of tekhne over life, the Dionysian myth reasserts the primacy of superabundant life and its excess as a principle of chance and necessity that escapes all technical mastery. But this does not mean that the Dionysian myth escapes all forms of reason and collapses into sheer irrationalism. Instead, the course will conclude by elaborating a theory of games as artistic artifacts that instantiate an organizing principle of absorptive play and its structure of spontaneous call and response that we will set in opposition to the quantitative axiomatic of the commodity form. By examining the philosophy of games through theorists such as Huizinga, Caillois, Nguyen, and Carse, we will develop an account of games as open-ended artistic artifacts that inscribe, preserve, and transmit forms of human freedom and agency. Dionysus is reborn as the Universal Game that marshals the forces of human culture, imagination, and creativity against the Machine God that looms over the horizon of our dystopian future.

Instructor Bio

Devin Gouré is a philosopher, writer, and podcaster whose work sits at the intersection of critical theory, aesthetics, and radical politics. He is the co-host of the Moral Minority podcast and a recurring contributor to the Acid Horizon podcast, where he has engaged in wide-ranging conversations across continental philosophy and political thought. He is also the author of Methods of Madness, a Substack blog and newsletter exploring the theme of madness in the life and work of Friedrich Nietzsche, reading philosophy through the lens of mad experiences to break open new horizons of theory and practice.

Course Schedule

All sessions meet from 7:00–9:00 PM EDT via Zoom.

Session 1: July 7

Session 2: July 14

Session 3: July 21

Session 4: July 28

Students will receive permanent access to all recorded lectures, supplementary readings, and discussion materials. Upon enrollment, download the welcome package and use the materials to navigate to your classroom.