Vile sovereignty: the carnival of power

Abstract

In this paper we seek to extend Bakhtin’s reading of the folk carnival and apply it to help understand the carnivalesque, performative aspects of state power. Drawing on the work of Agamben, Foucault, Lacan and Žižek and recent scholarship on the role of laughter in the Stalinist totalitarian culture, we argue that the state can also laugh and that it can have its own carnival tradition as well. To explore what we propose to call the carnival of power, we examine three iterations of this tradition: the festive exercise of state violence, state carnivalisers, and the carnivalesque style in governance