THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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of ‘Fidelio’: Hallowed be the day, hallowed be the hour. It is not inconsequential that the Saturnalia of all peoples are based on the memory of a Golden Age, and
hence of the freedom, equality and fraternity of the early communist gentes. The re­functioning of the public festival into a real dopo lavoro therefore revives in its
programmatic newness very old tendencies: on the soil of the carnival, of the St Roch's day, the St John's day, united in the re­presenting of a thoroughly transparent
occasion, of something free from pain. Is not the festival of the storming of the Bastille at home on the old soil? And hence the festival of the October Revolution and the
political spring festival of the first of May? The holiday has certainly refreshed itself here with relics of the parade, the procession, indeed re­functioned church­banners.
There thus remains in the public festival a certain hope for the dopo lavoro that has become fundamental and is becoming ever more fundamental. All the more so as the
ground on to which the festivity was and is applied, alongside the traditional­cheerful content in whose memory the festival is ‘observed’, was and is still unobserved
hope.
That which presses for more cultivated joy does not seem quite so inviting. And which is fed or fobbed off there, with cultural presentation for everyone. With the socalled
cultural treat which the bourgeois world provides on Sundays and holidays. The treat seeks to occur beyond sporting contests and the cinema; thus it ranges
from concerts, in which there is pale ale, to plays and books which are free of all alcohol. Needs, life and forms from older times are also present in the cultural Sunday,
of course. But incomparably more than in the case of the surviving public festival they are crossed by orders from above, by interested diversion. If the sports business
still feigns free competition and if the whole of free time regulated by capitalism is so arranged that the commodity of working power does not become conscious of
itself even during its recuperation, then this endeavour naturally continues in bourgeois presentation, but also in an administering of cultural assets which still occurs in a
bourgeois and especially petit­bourgeois way. Though there is no doubt here about a continuing pre­capitalist existence of these ways of filling free time as well. This
traditional element is far sounder than in sport, where the Greek­democratic pleasure can be redirected to very different toughening up, and ultimately stupefaction.
Beethoven, even if he is packaged into the so­called cultural treat, with reduced price and content, refuses to be mocked. The fire of Prometheus and the milk of the
bourgeois­pious way of thinking remain, even when administered in social­democratic popular education, incompatible with one another. The old places where the
people had no cultural