Jeux et Joutes

I have been given gifts. Twice.

A little piece I wrote about Huizinga's Homo Ludens caught the attention of Dr. Herbert Wender who has kindly kept me abreast of the developments in the reception of a forward by Umberto Eco:

Umberto Eco, another important critic of Huizinga's thesis, elaborated his view in a forward to the 1973 Italian edition of Homo Ludens, a very intriguing text that, however, has not received any attention in the Huizinga literature for a long time. According to Eco, Huizinga was unable to distinguish between game and play, because the Dutch language has just one word for both: "een spel spelen," whereas the English say "let's play a game." A game consists of a matrix of combinations and is constituted by a certain amount of rules. Basically, it offers the players a number of options to act, so the eventually one player can win the game. A play, on the other hand, is the role one plays to express the situation at a certain stage of the match. Huizinga showed interest only in the performance, as linguists say, and not in the competence, that is, the game as regulating system, in which a certain matrix of combinations is produced. According to Eco, the crux of the matter is the fact that for Huizinga the element of "play" remained, in the final analysis, an "aesthetic" category. From his aestheticizing perspective, Huizinga was unable to admit that the "decay," the wars and the "crisis," were, in fact, also moments of play in a played culture.

This is from Léon Hanssen "Games of Late Modernity: Discussing Huizinga's Legacy" in Halina Mielicka-Pawłowska (editor) Contemporary Homo Ludens.

And so for day 2304
04.04.2013