Interpassivity is a widespread, but mostly unacknowledged form of cultural behavior. It consists in letting others (other people, or animals, machines etc.) not work, but consume in one’s place. When certain people, for example, take care that others drink their beer for them, fotocopy or print texts out instead of reading them, let recording devices watch TV programmes in their place, use ritual machines that pray or believe for them vicariously, or are happy that certain TV-comedies already laugh about themselves, we have to speak of interpassivity. These actions are based on certain subjects’ preference to delegate their enjoyment instead of having it themselves. This, obviously, raises a number of quite uncanny, fundamental questions: Why do certain people do not want to have their enjoyment? And why do they, if the do not want to enjoy, go to such great pains in order to ensure that somebody else enjoys in their place? The theory of interpassivity has had considerable impacts on several disciplines such as philosophy, art theory, psychoanalysis, media theory, political theory, anthropology, theory of religion etc. This volume assembles essays that reach from the fundamental philosophical questions, concerning the paradoxical pleasure gained from delegated enjoyment, to their most current consequences: for example concerning interactivity and participation in the arts and in politics, generosity in culture, the status of belief, ritual and magic, cultural capitalism, civilized urban role-play etc.
