Abstract

South Park, as a narration of late capitalist concerns, has much in common with works from earlier carnival historical epochs, most importantly Gargantua and Pantagruel and its depiction of folk traditions of consumptive culture. Madness, hallucination, excrement, homosexuality, cuckoldry, flowering anuses, zombies, monstrosity, gambling, banquets, viral contagion, grotesque consumption all become signs of a historical epoch which exists in a repetitious and catastrophic sacrificial crisis, a period of terrifying recurrence of the same and effacement of the `immense freedom' of ascetic reflexivity. Bataille's, Foucault's and Nietzsche's originally transgressive concerns for theorizing, via genealogy and heterology, the expulsed matter of a disciplinary, segmented metaphysics of the transcendent, regularized subject, become, in the age of late capitalism's appropriation of carnival traditions, the dominant logic, displaying a consumptive concern for a terrain of absences and orifices.