Play

Play: Humanity has always loved to play. Children, even before developing what will become their destiny as adults, aesthetic sensibility, or scientific mind, electively project themselves in all kinds of games they play. Even with mammals, as much as representational art or science traces insurmountable boundaries between us, they share with us the instinct of play. In fact, we cannot easily exclude the fact that the animals that play find in play nothing different from what we find in art in general (and of course, in games very particularly, as we will see very soon): a catharsis of predatory cruelty. Animal play is the proto-form of properly aesthetic mimesis; it is the only form of art that seems to be known by several animal species. Animal play has in common with human play and certain arts the miming of death: in other words, acting death [jouer à mourir]. But where animal play seems to take place according to implicit rules, a sort of instinctive consensus on the fact that one plays to fight and to fight for real, man defines his games according to the same criterion that differentiates him in general from the other animals: enacting the rules of nature everywhere, due to science, he also makes explicit the rules of his games. Because he alone (self-)appropriated the perennial rules of Nature and being, man alone can enact new rules: this is called politics (see below), for the worse, but it is also called play, for the better.

Play is one of the most revealing domains of the being [l’être] of man, and, for me, the only philosophical notion that still allows—“exterminations still alive in our memories and planetary asphyxiations already in our throats”1—to go on dreaming of a little bit of political utopia, when the essence of academic leftism fires blanks with its old slogans.

Man (self-)appropriates the laws of nature and this is called science (see below). He immediately reterritorializes his being-there by a set of rules that did not exist before, and this is called politics (see below). We always say, “the rules of the game” and not “the laws of the game.” Just as politics is a parody of natural cruelty, and its laws, a parody which is the proper name of Evil (global “trustization” is not the marking of territory; war is not fighting between tribes; murder and torture are not predation, etc.), play is always a parody of politics, i.e. most often of war, whether latent or declared. As is often the case, a parody that is, as it were, secondary to “originary parodies” turns out to be a “happy solution.” The semblance of semblance is not a new semblance, but often a happy assumption of what was repressed, because of its evident toll of suffering, in the first degree. As much as anthropological libido seems to me to be based on an indubitable originary violence of the link between the sexes, what I call, following Adorno’s idea, “archaic rape” [viol archaïque], violence which is already a parody of the “simple” mammalian reproductive “violence,” and the introduction of Evil itself; secondary parodies, i.e. those forms as diverse, as historically dispersed as the archaic family or pornography, courtly love or sadomasochism, chivalrous or romantic love, are all to originary libidinal violence what play is to war. This is the subject of Being and Sexuation: while Hegel places the originary political link in the violence of the master-slave relationship, I base the originary amorous-libidinal situation on a no less negative envoi, which is a “violating” [violante] relation between man and woman. For a more detailed account, I refer you to the only volume of The Spirit of Nihilism that is as yet unpublished, Being and Sexuation [Être et sexuation]. Meanwhile, the reader can always refer to the Appendix at the end of this book.

Play is the catharsis (see below) of war. We can actually say that sports, with its obscene monetary millions, its stories about doping and oxygenated blood, its stupefying mass effect, etc., all in all, remains “just as violent” as originary war (a sociologist defended this view right in front of me); and that rugby and football, for instance, remain “as violent” as la soule which is considered their origin, in which players literally destroyed each other in order to send the archetype of the ball into the archetype of the goal.

Let us be serious. Play is really a surpassing of war. It is, superlatively, a suppression that is a preservation, a preservation that is a suppression. Jean-Luc Nancy called our attention to the fact that the etymological root of “cruelty” is the Latin word cruor, the color of blood, and that all aesthetic reflection should lean on this notion: play suppresses the atrocious cruelty of the bloodshed of war (or else, when libation is allowed, as in boxing, it is within tight limits set by strict rules), but preserves its affect. All art, even the most “innocent,” is catharsis of cruelty: suspension of the bloodshed and the dying, but sublimation of pleonectic ferocity and the pleasure gained by the murder of the enemy.

Play is otherwise the only form—the only one—that humanity enjoys [jouir] the rule, while everywhere else—from education to taxation, from work to morals, from obligatory hygiene to military service, from religion to bills—the civic rules, all these arbitrary rules are lived painfully, and rightly so, by the overwhelming majority of their subjects. The fact that la soule or circus games have been the “intermediate” forms of the becoming-play of war says nothing against the obvious: play, as such, is one of the superior forms of civilization, in the same way as what is considered “art” in general. Rigorously speaking, play is an art form, sports included. As a matter of fact, the Greeks regarded neither Tragedy nor painting, neither sculpture nor music as the supreme art form: but the Olympics. Hegel had not failed to note this in an entire passage of the Phenomenology of Spirit dedicated to the “Religion of Art” that was the Greek moment. Must we remind ourselves that Pindar, the most underestimated of all great poets of antiquity today, wrote only on the Olympic Games? Why does a contemporary poet write so readily on porn actresses or Kurt Cobain, and never on the plebeian passion he so often shamefully shares with others, namely, football?

We can say what we please on the “corruption” of contemporary mass sports; in advanced capitalism what domain is immune from “corruption” anyway? The left-wing academic philosophy? Unions and parties? Alter-globalist groupuscules? Do not make me laugh. Humanity in its entirety is corrupted by original sin. It is The Spirit of Nihilism’s touch of indivisible “philosophical Lutheranism.” Evil is primary, and profound. All the well-intentioned claims to terminally remedy evil have produced the opposite of what they promised. Classless society, global state of law as promise of the market economy, a Final Solution finally binding the earth and blood: each time a plan aspires to purge humanity of its originary vice once and for all, it provokes aggravated vice in return. The Nazi case is particularly interesting: I will not go into archaeological detail here,2 but in German history, the National Socialist ideology, nourished by more or less well-digested Schellingism, Schopenhauerism, Wagnerism, and Nietzscheanism, marked a radical attempt of caesura with the Lutheran mould of this remarkable country. The Nazis fought everything that reminded them of Protestantism. We know the rest.

To be philosophically Lutheran simply means not giving up original sin. It is easy to cite the fundamental philosophical names in this family, the essential invocations of my work: Rousseau, half of Kant, Hegel. Modernity itself. The Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men is the founding text of every philosophy to date, whether they know it or not (and even more when they do not, such as with Nietzsche and Heidegger, as Lacoue-Labarthe showed relentlessly, and as I demonstrate too in one of the two as yet unpublished books mentioned in the foreword, written in collaboration with Valentin Husson). More recently: Schürmann and Lacoue-Labarthe were our great “metaphysical Protestants”—and the SoN is their continuation.

In terms of politics, it means the following: not to laicize metaphyiscal Catholicism; not to aspire to great purifications, purges nor great final redemptions, in the name of a Virtue so often much worse than what it claims to fight, and devoured by an always more fierce egoism than the one it denounces so readily in others. There is a saying of Christ—anti-Catholic, and therefore anti-Pauline, in advance—I particularly like, and which Luther cited regularly: “How is it that you see the mote in your brother’s eye and not see the beam in your own eye?” And hence: to laicize a political utopia which makes do with the indelible given of what The Spirit of Nihilism laicizes as well: Evil is deep-rooted and co-substantial with the technomimetic animal. To claim to redeem humanity from this Evil once and for all is to always redouble or greatly increase it. I call this tendency “metaphysical Catholicism,” and my finest professional rivals, Badiou and Meillassoux, come under it, but in very different ways. Badiou’s passion is purification. Meillassoux’s passion is redemption.

What more is there to say? One of the most senseless words dear to contemporary academic leftism is the word “equality.” It is the word that has long exasperated me the most; it rings so hollow and never adds up to anything. It puts its upholders to the question on this point, and you will hear the same old stories.

The originary anthropological fact is indeed the radical introduction of exorbitant inequalities on earth. Inequality, first “by a short head,” between the animal closure and the remainder of the being [l’étant]; then, the crushing of the remainder of the planetary being under the tyrannical yoke of just one miserable species, owing to the sole fact that it had the good fortune, the winning formula of “touching” the event of technomimetic appropriation; and finally, gaping inequalities within this same—anthropological—closure. There is absolutely no reason to be thrilled at it. But there is reason to open our eyes once and for all on the failure due to all the blank checks of metaphysics. What hastened the exponentiation of inequalities on earth? Precisely that which the metaphysician would like to “attain,” in all these paradises, each more artificial than the other: technoscientific isomorphism; the principle of equality plated on things, for having (self-)appropriated the laws that governed them; the repetitive decalcomania that metaphysical functionaries often hope to realize, with science and politics. It is true that the latter is a repetition of science, but in the parodic sense (see Politics): therefore, not at all the same thing. And we do not have the slightest chance of seeing one day the arrival of a politics that would be “as harmonious” as a science.

Equality, before being a political notion at first entirely legitimate, in its native candor itself—I am thinking of the French Revolution—is first and foremost what I later call (see Mathematics) “the transcendental illusion par excellence of human consciousness.” In other words, the utilitarian, technomimetic illusion of equality. It is the very form of appropriation. To sublate food gathering into agriculture is to appropriate the empty, transcendental law of the seed that grows to become a plant. Two plants only “of the same family,” logically brought together by the animal to feed itself (the cow will recognize the grass, but avoid the nettle) become the same plant, in the eyes of architechnological inspection. This is how technical, i.e. metaphysical, isomorphism is set up right at the origin, with only all the time of History to ensure its expense reports are well in order. Mathematics, the belated sublimation of the most archaic techniques—hunting, agriculture, or drawing—wraps this up by what is probably the greatest crime ever committed against the mind, where Schelling saw, with good reason, the sufficient proof of the existence of God: x=x.

From this perspective, this should go without saying, but it goes better saying it: The Spirit of Nihilism does not forget one of the great conceptual conquests of the twentieth century, especially in France, the philosophies of difference. It goes all the better saying that we are currently witnessing a happy obliteration of their legacy, which should be mandatory: difference is an absolute transcendental, perhaps the transcendental of transcendentals.

Even in the prebiological world of inert matter, we can never say that a being [un étant], whether planet or dust particle, is ever perfectly equal to another. It is the same with two roses, etc. It is the opposite of Gertrude Stein’s poem (“A rose is a rose is a rose …”): a rose is not a rose is not a rose is not a rose …3 All things considered, it is at once ontological inequality that reigns in what was a long time called Creation. But one thing is certain: each time an event of appropriation takes place, and there is no event but that of appropriation, vital then animal then technological, inequality evidently becomes exponential. Hence inequality is ontological, it is a given; nothing is equal to anything, no meteor is equal to another, no atom, etc.

But if being [l’être] begins to think itself outside “ontology,” as event, things become even worse. If event vouches for being, it dramatizes each time the inequality revealed in being itself. We are then swimming in troubled waters: and, yes, Heidegger’s collusion with Nazism will disturb all those democratic and leftist beautiful souls. As Nancy bravely remarks in an interview, it must be admitted that it is no doubt for having strayed into the Nazi delusion, and without particularly attenuating circumstances, that Heidegger managed to touch something essential about politics, something that could not have occurred to a communist (alas, we are still there). Heidegger’s Nazi turn had the dreadfully paradoxal “merit” of revealing, behind the inegalitarian “essence” of being he condoned therein (and this is what Lacoue-Labarthe called his “archi-fascism”), the until then unnoticed essence of this essence: the universal ontological play of appropriation-expropriation, growing vertiginously as being is accomplished as event.

A quick glance at the state of the contemporary philosophical scene makes you wonder whether, in this regard, we have progressed an inch. We are still dressing the wounds of our ravaged being-of-the-left, still unlikely to truly call into question all the theoretical presuppositions that are the real causes of the endless hemorrhage, and not the blows of the enemy, which only caused the injuries. A bleeding is cauterized if it is healed correctly. Whereas a hemorrhage that spreads over a period of four decades means we are bending over backwards to apply remedies that perpetuate the Evil, and it is not today’s academic physicians that will put us back on our feet, since they are the ever so clever recyclers of the oldest tricks, which seemed “original” to a generation only because they had been long forgotten, and with good reason. Why did Heidegger understand “pleonexia,” co-originary with being as event, owing to what Lacoue-Labarthe ruthlessly calls his “archi-fascism?” Because at least he could not close his eyes to what terrified the ingenuous leftists: that the pleonectic essence of man is ineradicable. It is constituted in all its historiality by the play of appropriation-expropriation, and cannot be brushed aside by a utopian stroke. That is why the “Badiou affair” is not less serious than the “Heidegger affair”: the famous “passion for equality” had great consequences, in a perfectly constructed and “rational” discourse in Pol Pot (“our Robespierre,” he recently suggested4), Mao, and Lin Biao. It is imperative that the smoke and mirrors metaphysical illusion that rules over this passion be deconstructed, if the politics of emancipation want to rise from their ashes. The assumption of this passion, even in its ultimate criminal consequences, and up to now, by a philosopher of Badiou’s caliber, is a document of prime importance; not to put the person on a pyschological trial, which would be irrelevant, but to begin this deconstruction and understand to which major malfeasance is due “real communism,” which has for the most part become as criminal as fascism or globalized capitalism. Exterminating doctors and teachers on the pretext that they were “petit-bourgeois” is not more forgivable than exterminating Jews on the pretext that they were the historial éminence grise of nihilism, as Badiou defends somewhat more than between the lines. I leave it for later, or to others, the task of showing how the SoN’s dialectical apparatus enables deconstruction of the manner in which Badiou justifies the “communist” mass graves saying that they originate in the “void of the situation,” and hence proceed from “true” events, whereas the fascist mass graves are unjustifiable, because they suppose a phantasmatic “fullness”; in other words, how the SoN pulverizes the speculative core enabling Badiouian reasoning, i.e. the argumentative criteria that allow discriminating an event of truth from a simulacrum of event. I will later on exemplify the complex torsion uniting the event and its presumed parodic “double” (see Catharsis).

Now here we have a fine kettle of fish. But on that point, tired of the depressive platitudes of the small leftist intellectual community, which was my non-disowned “family,” no matter what people say, I preferred to shoulder my responsibilities. Yes to equity, justice, the gradual abolition of private property. But the sincere lovers of emancipation should renounce, and as soon as possible, a word as hollow as “equality,” because if they keep it, it is the chances of their politics that will be mortgaged for a long time.

This is where the thought of play decisively steps in. Politically, it is much less aleatory than drawing blank checks on “equality.” Because play, or sports, are the catharsis of the absolute sinews of humanity we call emulation. In Inesthétique et mimêsis, once again following Lacoue-Labarthe, I remind how Rousseau’s “civic festival,” an unintentional premonition of the French Revolution, was conceived as a gigantic gratuitous civic game of ceaseless and always renewed emulation. This theme has been haunting me for a long time; it is covered here in the section of Irony (see above): how to play at being oneself?

In short, a question of the coming subjectivity [subjectivité à venir]. Even more than in the French Revolution, is it forbidden to read in May ’68 a premonition of such a Society5 which would no longer be anything but play? The entire ethical stake, the “positivity” proposed—nevertheless and in the end—by the SoN’s profoundly negative philosophy, lies therein.

And what if we surpassed the involute, deflationary surpassing of the ideology of incessant surpassing that would be the “postmodern?” And what if we discovered that the basis of this turning point was exactly what it was the de facto diagnosis of? And what if we realized that the parodic did not just happen here or there, unmasking and devaluing forever the grand ideals and grand narratives, condemning us to the sarcastic parodies of ideals and the “bonsai” versions of the narratives, but that it had always been our condition? And what if we took the man of compulsory derision somewhat more at his word than he himself takes himself? And what if, after all, this ironic categorical imperative remained complicit with what it fought, still taking it somewhat too seriously? And what if we showed him that he had more reason for this than he thinks, in other words, that in fact the metaphysical animal has for a long time taken himself too seriously? Meaning: he converted the imitations through which he appropriated things to pass them off as archetypes, the “second natures” he self-imposed in everyday life, as innate reflexes, the language by which he haunted things, as the things themselves, etc. And, on the other hand, he converted the singular originals subsumed by the technomimetic impulse, to pass them off as pale copies. And what if we learned, against secular metaphysical grandiloquence, as well as against the “last man” of compulsory derision, to take seriously the one thing that deserves to be, and for this reason has never been, taken seriously, that is to say, precisely parody? And what if, realizing that parody is our most surely originary condition, we therefore finally lived? In a word: and what if we played the game?

What I am saying here, and which I develop/argue at length in the entire Spirit of Nihilism, should be taken very seriously. For more than thirty years, what we call the “politics of emancipation” has been stuck in absolute stagnation, and will never rise from its ashes as long as its supporting intellectuals do not radically call into question the very notion of “equality.” The brightest academic Stalinism is at least coherent: in Cambodia or North Korea, but already in the USSR and Romania, emulation was (and in Korea still is), de facto, rather looked down upon.

Who would want a society where the Lutheran motor of humanity, the pleonectic asymptote of being as event, appropriative emulation, is forbidden? Where the not-so-bright is put on an equal footing with the intelligent, the bad with the good, the incompetent with the gifted, etc.? Nobody. And here we touch upon one of the crucial aspects of the concept of play as an entirely singular process of truth, which no other domain is capable of, and especially not the other arts. In the latter, it happens most often that the most mediocre becomes well-established and that the best dies of hunger or madness. It is in the kingdoms of love and politics that the most excruciating and irremediable injustices triumph. Science is at the root of all the most poignant inequalities, in the very name of subsuming equality, even though there is no injustice in its own area of “professional competition” (a scientist, unlike an artist or a lover or a political rebel, is always “rewarded” in exact proportion to what he does), but it is precisely the only known anthropological domain where a great creator or actor is always recognized, more or less, at his true value.

The only oneexcept for play. This is why, in a Pindaresque accent, I consider play as the supreme art form. In play, there is no fraud possible, unlike in the market of plastic arts and literature, music and “philosophers,” etc. I remember a long interview given by one of our greatest artists, Jean-Luc Godard, to the august French daily sports newspaper, L’équipe. One of the things he said will be our guiding line: “Cinema lies, but not sports.” In a game or sport, it is impossible to pass the bad off as good, and the good as bad. In the other arts, very bad filmmakers are passed off as great, while the great filmmakers are for the most part pushing up daisies. In philosophy, the media is only after the counterfeit, whereas the great creators, at best, wallow in the academic ghetto, and if they do not have this professional lifesaver, they die precociously, become madmen, incognito, and live on in misery—only posterity redeems them from their abnegation.6

Therefore play, literally and in every sense, is perhaps the human production with the most likeliness of truth, with the exception, of course, of the somewhat too blatant paradigm of science. And this singular capability which play and all games possess should be—if the coming humanity hopes to make the least improvement—squared: the more play invades the City, the more we will be in truth. We can then say, paraphrasing Beckett: in any case we have our being in truth I have never heard anything to the contrary. Unbearable paradox: if we exclude the implacability of the scientific legimitation processes, it is only in play … that we cannot cheat. What is supposed to be the exclusive domain of cheating, paradoxically, turns out to be where there is much less cheating than in other arts, politics, love, etc.

We must return to the very grounds of all revolutionary thought, which is Rousseau. And he, as usual, had the following incipient, as well as decisive, intuition: we must leave the illusion of an “egalitarian” society to Condorcet; the true solution to the interference of radical inegalitarianism on earth, technomimetic appropriation, resides in the indivisible pleonectic essence itself, owing to which the being [l’étant] becomes the involuntary “agent” [l’agent] of being as event. We should make do with original sin, and not promise a truncated redemption, with all sorts of allowances and exemptions, invented only to satisfy the insatiable greed of the Roman Church: the pleonectic hypocrisy found in every “metaphysical Catholicism.” There must be a catharsis of the ontological inegalitarianism of man, and as I show throughout my entire work that corrects Hegel and fights Badiou, the aufhebung which is catharsis is never a “simple” suppression of what it surpasses, but preservation in the form of waste.

If you claim that the event of appropriation, which always obeys the formal complex of mimesis-catharsis-aufhebung, merely suppresses what it surpasses without preserving anything of it, then waste will be exponential: the radical suppression of all inequality under Stalin, Mau, Ceausescu, and Pol Pot have spawned nothing but mass graves. By “eating” inequality in order to “produce” nothing but equality, they literally messed themselves with the latter. The industrial triumph of technomimetic isomorphism, in the post-production phase, produces megatons of non-recylable waste. “Egalitarian” societies have equalized nothing but the horror. And this does not boil down to supporting inegalitarian societies; we will see later how and why.

If, on the other hand, you no longer lose sight of the ineluctable price of decline, literally and in every sense, arising from every event of appropriation, you give yourself the chance to finally avoid the fatal trap par excellence of the oldest metaphysical reflex. Rousseau’s “civic festival” suppresses inequality while preserving it in the form of incessant and organized emulation.

In short, the buried prototype of every revolutionary ideal, the Rousseauist civic festival, is nothing other than what I call play. All the history of revolutionary thought after Hegel consists of a huge “leftist deviation”: aufhebung was squared: only suppression was preserved of this dialectical schema of surpassing. Therefore we need to learn again not only the essentially “conservative” dimension of all surpassing, in the non-reactionary sense, but very precisely the “chemical” dimension, which the SoN brings up to date: in every surpassing, what is surpassed is preserved in the form of waste. In order not to have to treat this waste shamefully, or even clandestinely, well this waste must appear in broad daylight: this is the civic festival, it is play. It is competition, but, like in the descriptions given by Rousseau, it is entirely made visible: it is both mimicked and assumed.

Ludic emulation is hence the catharsis of pleonectic ferocity. It is odd that the following remark is never made: games, and sports in particular, are the purest examples that can be found of aesthetic catharsis, much purer than in the other arts. I find it hard to believe that Aristotle did not devote one of his treatises to the subject; I prefer to believe it disappeared, along with so many others. Nothing purges the City to such an extent from its “atrocigenous” pleonectic passions as mass sports. However we are envisaging yet another type of play: by play, we understand a form of art which has effectively attained what the avant-garde’s “surpassings” aimed at: the suppression of the merely spectator attitude, an art in which everyone takes part.

Thus generalized play is the civic festival as dreamed aloud by Rousseau. Everyone wants to be the best; the point is to give form to this ineradicable propensity of the human animal to trans-appropriation. To formalize the pleonectic. We saw it with “democratic nihilism,” and the man of compulsory irony: in parallel with the tremendous disasters of “egalitarian” societies, which said the last word of the illusion, which is death, in our societies we know that “the spirit of nihilisim” consists of a perverted game, a parodic egalitarianism of the following sort: “the nullest is the best; the best is the nullest.” According to the complicated apagogical structure we examined above (see Irony), such a society, in actual fact, rewards the worse, and punishes the better. This society model is not livable in the long term; it is a society that survives the disillusions of the past, and does not count much on its future. Nonetheless, it goes without saying for everybody that such a society is, all in all, preferable to societies of literalized egalitarianism, that is to say, literally deadly societies: “democratic nihilism,” at least, realizes its egalitarianism aesthetically, i.e. through the formal catharsis of a distorted representation of equality—but representation nevertheless. However, its illusion remains the same as the illusion of “actually existing communisms,” and which is the most complicated path in which the SoN engages its brave readers: for our best ideals of the left to regain strength, we must radically give up the metaphysical illusion par excellence, which has overdetermined the History of the left for centuries, and which is precisely egalitarian abstraction. It is in this way that the so-called politics of emancipation made itself complicit with what it fought.

The society we seek must be a catharsis of the fundamental inequality introduced by the technomimetic animal on earth, of the “pleonexia” that is co-originary with our condition, which would not be, as in the case of American style democratic capitalism, a “sincere”7 representation of this inegalitarianism and its injustice as the “law of Nature,” in the ideologically assumed way. The American ideology is a self-assured assumption of inequality, accompanied by its representation in the first degree. We, Europeans, represent equality ideologically, but in the second degree. This is, ultimately, the “principle of irony” (see above). And this is why, in my work, irony is not a psychological but a political category; and absolutely full-fledged. It is an absolute historical singularity of the western set-up, after the Second World War, and definitive of democracies: it goes hand in hand, and increasingly blatantly for three decades, with an entirely novel representation of the political, and of course different from the old aristocracies, royalisms, tyrannies, that is to say, those which still exist in most majority of the globe. Subjective self-derision accompanies, as its implicit cost, the constant right of ridiculing the representatives of power: a genuine mediatic liturgy is organized around this new representational economy, which has not been analyzed to date, not even by Debord or Baudrillard.

Let us be ethically straightforward: if the United States has dominated, politically as well as culturally, the twentieth century, it is time for us to look—without affectation—at the reasons why it happened this way. To put it in very broad terms: the Stalinist ideal was the ideal of an equality without freedom; the capitalist ideal, a freedom without equality.8 Are we going to carry on with the psychotic hypocrisy of the leftist, always ready to sacrifice freedom for equality? In reality, we do not even have the choice. Inegalitarian freedom has prevailed over carceral or genocidal egalitarianism, quite simply because freedom is essential to the technomimetic animal; it is an “ontological” trait that differentiates him unfathomably from the other species, whereas equality is a perfect transcendental illusion, produced precisely by those who incite inequality: technomimetic appropriation, scientific isomorphism.

Capitalism represents (see above) inequality while assuming it obscenely. Even so, this obscenity prevails over the virtuous obscenity of abstract egalitarianism (pleonasm) which, in the eyes of everyone except for a few willingly blind Platonists, has certainly recovered badly from the suntrap outside-the-cave, proved to be even more monstrous than what it fought, and we know this is quite something. What we need is a political representation of the pleonectic motor that is fundamental for us, which would actually be a catharsis of the following: a preservation which is a suppression, and not a suppression which is a shameful preservation.

In order to illustrate this point as concretely as possible, I will give an even more provocative example: poker. Here it is, a game-sport rapidly expanding today! What will the Pavlovian leftist simpleton dimwit say? That it is a game “in the image” of capitalism, born in the United States among the cowboy brutes (this is wrong, the origin of poker is … French), that it is a money game and therefore repugnant, etc. Not that he would be wrong! Yes, like all art and all games, poker is an imitation, of capitalism in this case, invented by the semi-outcasts of the said capitalism, where and when capitalism was in full expansion: at its set-up. We could put our Pavlovian leftist in his place, by making him see that the percentage of “leftists” in the French poker circles is by far higher than … probably all the other layers of the population! In the presidential elections, 20 percent have voted for Mélenchon, 35 percent for Hollande, only 25 percent for Sarkozy, and finally 10 percent for Marine Le Pen, which is the exact opposite of the other layers of the French population. In the United States, whose political criteria are obviously rather different from ours, a significant majority of the players voted Democrat. But we will leave it there with the in-itself insignificant statistics. We will add, however, a crucial consideration: all the great poker champions happen to come from modest or extremely modest social backgrounds. I mean all of them. I am not talking about the good or the very good, but about the indisputable geniuses of the game, the Mozarts of the discipline: Ungar, Brunson, Negreanu, Ivey, Chan … Scotty Nguyen, of Vietnamese origin, one of the most splendid and unpredictable players, lived literally in poverty before he came to the United States. On the Internet you can watch games where he is telling the other players how he crossed the Pacific as a boat person,9 dying of thirst, eating from a bowl. There is something poignant and wonderful about seeing him handle the chips that represent tens of thousands of dollars, talking about the hell he came from.

Of course the Pavlovian leftist simpleton is right. Poker is a parody of capitalism. But the reader now knows that, when you see the word “parody” in my text, you must look at it twice. The leftist will say, for instance, that he prefers chess, the more “rational” and, guess what, “Soviet” game. Yes indeed! But a great number of chess Grandmasters have taken up poker, while to my knowledge, top poker players have never become grandmasters. Why? The leftist Pavlovian simpleton will say it is no doubt for the money. Should we disagree? Yes and no. Almira Skripchenko, about whom everyone who met her says stands for the most splendid conjunction of the highest intelligence and physical beauty, encyclopedic erudition and “Slavic” nobility of soul, one could ever come across, sums up the stakes when she explains what led her to leave the “Soviet” paradise of chess for the “capitalist” purgatory of poker: “I’m originally a chess player, and in this game, you evolve in a perfect world: therein, everything is justifiable, you can entirely master every action. When I started to play poker, I said to myself, this is ridiculous: how can you set yourself up to be a potential victim of chance? It really is something I had trouble digesting and incorporating. At first, it made me crazy to lose because of a bad card, but then I got used to this imperfect world of poker. After all, it’s like the one we live in every day.”

Aristotle rather than Platon…

The truth is quite simply that poker has become a game as sophisticated as chess or bridge; and which requires skills, although different, still as complete as the other great games or great sports; like chess, poker is considered a sport. The cliché of a game exclusive to Texan outlaws bathing in whisky is a thing of the past. Its practice requires an impeccable hygiene of life, and an iron mental discipline. We often have the impression, even more than with chess, that in poker you have to do constant mental bodybuilding: the least strategic relaxation can prove fatal. It does not require fewer skills than chess, maybe even much more, because it is impure. In any case, the skills have to be much more diversified. Daney and Godard showed it: if cinema was the dominant art of the twentieth century, it is precisely because it was the impurest of all. Poker is to chess what cinema is to hermetic poetry or music:10 a plebeian art, and yet as “superior” as the other elitist arts. I have a phenomenal admiration for Boulez, but after all, if the coming art has to be only “Boulezian” or “Mallarmean,” the horizon is distressing and hopeless. The democratization of the world is irreversible and, whatever “nihilistic” collateral effects we have to endure, it is a good, and not a bad thing; and aristocratic postures have no chance of taking the wind out of its sails.

Poker requires more skills than chess, because the latter is, precisely, an aristocratic and self-contained game, requiring only two or three types of skills made exponential, which produces fewer geniuses than gifted players. Poker requires neither excellent logico-mathematical nor strategical-tactical skills, like chess; it requires a psychology worthy of Proust, the statistical memory of an elephant, a Don Juanesque sociability, an absolutely tremendous instinct (an affectual force), courage and many other qualities, all perfectly dispensable for a great chess player. It is not only in this regard that poker is much more “democratic,” and therefore aesthetically egalitarian, than “egalitarian” chess. In chess, if you are not an international Grandmaster by the age of twelve (as Skripchenko was, among others), you will never have any chance of being classified among the world’s top hundred. In poker, some of the greatest contemporary players started their career at the age of fifty!

Of course, Petrosian, Fischer, or Kasparov cannot be reduced to machines; they are not just gifted, they really are geniuses. But Stu Ungar, Johnny Chan, or Phil Ivey as well—and we must add that they are, on average, much more sociable than the great chess champions … The course of a Stu Ungar’s career is similar to a Mozart’s or a Rimbaud’s; had he received the right education, he could have become a first-rank mathematician, or a great artist. The poker theories of Sklansky, Caro, or Negreanu are as lucid and complicated to read as a great philosophical or logico-mathematical theory. And the greatest of these theorists, Lee Nelson, precisely one of those players to have started their career in their forties, is as difficult to read, and as sophisticated to grasp as Brunschvig, Desanti, or Vuillemin.

A text which has always meant a lot to me, and which I never commented on in my books, is the digression that opens The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe and also the addenda included in a short story that takes up the same characters, The Purloined Letter. This is the ideal place to talk about it, and quite at length. For a very long time, since my adolescence, I have so much considered this inceptive digression not only as a great text by one of my favorite poets, but also, as it were, an implicit component, written in invisible ink, of what the SoN’s negative philosophy nevertheless positively lets loom on the horizon, that I can give myself the right to copy it almost at full length, for the necessity to give a comprehensive account of the present text. These sentences count among the very rare I would have liked to write myself, in my hours of madness or intoxication; and reading them again, I am thinking I could have written them myself. So much so that I will not specify the passages emphasized by Poe, and those I emphasized myself.

The mental features as regarded the analytical, are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis. We appreciate them only in their effects. (…) The faculty of re-solution is possibly much invigorated by mathematical study, and especially by that highest branch of it which, unjustly, and merely on account of its retrograde operations, has been called, as if par excellence, analysis. Yet to calculate is not in itself to analyze. A chess-player, for example, does the one, without effort at the other. It follows that the game of chess, in its effects upon mental character, is greatly misunderstood. (…)

I will, therefore, take occasion to assert that the higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by all the elaborate frivolity of chess. In the latter, where the pieces have different and bizarre movements, with various and variable values, what is only complex, is mistaken (a not unusual error) for what is profound. The attention is here called powerfully into play. If it flags for an instant, an oversight is committed, resulting in injury or defeat. The possible moves being not only manifold, but involute,11 the chances of such oversights are multiplied; and in nine cases out of ten, it is the more concentrative rather than the sharper player who conquers. In draughts, on the contrary, where the moves are unique and have but little variation, the probabilities of inadvertence are diminished, and the mere attention being left comparatively unemployed, advantages are obtained by either party are obtained by superior acumen.

To be less abstract, let us imagine a game of draughts where the pieces are reduced to four kings, and where, of course, no oversight is to be expected. It is obvious that here the victory can be decided (the players all being equal) only by some recherché movement, the result of some strong exertion of the intellect. Deprived of ordinary resources, the analyst throws himself into the spirit of his opponent, identifies himself therewith, and not unfrequently sees thus, at a glance, the sole methods (sometimes indeed absurdly simple ones) by which he may seduce into error or hurry into miscalculation.

Whist has long been known for its influence upon what is termed the calculating power; and men of the highest order of intellect have been known to take an apparently unaccountable delight in it, while eschewing chess as frivolous. Beyond doubt, there is nothing of a similar nature so greatly tasking the faculty of analysis. The best chess-player in Christendom may be little more than the best player of chess; but proficiency in whist implies capacity for success in all these more important undertakings where mind struggles with mind.

When I say proficiency, I mean that perfection in the game which includes a comprehension of all the sources whence legitimate advantage may be derived. These are not only manifold, but multiform, and lie frequently among recesses of thought altogether inaccessible to the ordinary understanding.

To observe attentively is to remember distinctly; and, so far, the concentrative chess-player will do very well at whist; while the rules of Hoyle (themselves based upon the mere mechanism of the game) are sufficiently and generally comprehensible.

Thus to have a retentive memory, and proceed by “the book” are points commonly regarded as the sum total of good playing. But it is in matters beyond the limits of mere rule that the skill of the analyst is evinced. He makes, in silence, a host of observations and inferences. So, perhaps, do his companions; and the difference in the extent of the information obtained, lies not so much in the validity of the inference as in the quality of the observation. The necessary knowledge is that of what to observe. Our player confines himself not at all; nor, because the game is the object, does he reject deductions from things external to the game. He examines the countenance of his partner, comparing it carefully with that of each of his opponents. He considers the mode of assorting the cards in each hand; often counting trump by trump, and honor by honor, through the glances bestowed by their holders upon each. He notes every variation of face as the play progresses, gathering a fund of thought from the differences in the expression of certainty, of surprise, of triumph, or chagrin. From the manner of gathering up a trick he judges whether the person taking it can make another in the suit. He recognizes what is played through feint, by the manner with which it is thrown upon the table. A casual or inadvertent word; the accidental dropping or turning of a card, with the accompanying anxiety or carelessness in regard to its concealment; the counting of the tricks, with the order of their arrangement; embarassment, hesitation, eagerness, or trepidation—all afford, to his apparently intuitive perception, indications of the true state of affairs. The first two or three rounds having been played, he is in full possession of the contents of each hand, and thenceforth puts down his cards with as absolute a precision of purpose as if the rest of the party had turned outward the faces of their own cards.

The analytical power should not be confounded with simple ingenuity; for while the analyst is necessarily ingenious, the ingenious man is often remarkably incapable of analysis. The constructive or combining power, by which ingenuity is usually manifested, and to which the phrenologists (I believe erroneously) have assigned a separate organ, supposing it a primitive faculty, has been so frequently seen in those whose intellect bordered otherwise upon idiocy, as to have attracted general observation among writers on morals. Between ingenuity and the analytic ability there exists a difference far greater, indeed, than that between the fancy and the imagination, but of a character very strictly analogous. It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.12

In The Purloined Letter, Dupin will complement his friend’s considerations by forcing a digression on a child’s game that always serves as a propaedeutic paradigm for the great poker theory books:

I knew one about eight years of age, whose success at guessing in the game of “even and odd” attracted universal admiration. This game is simple, and is played with marbles. One player holds in his hand a number of these toys, and demands of another whether that number is even or odd. If the guess is right, the guesser wins one; if wrong, he loses one. The boy to whom I allude won all the marbles of the school. Of course he had some principle of guessing; and this lay in mere observation and admeasurement of the astuteness of his opponents. For example, an arrant simpleton is his opponent, and, holding up his closed hand, asks, “Are they even or odd?” Our school-boy replies, “Odd,” and loses; but upon the second trial he wins, for he then says to himself: “The simpleton had them even upon the first trial, and his amount of cunning is just sufficient to make him have them odd upon the second; I will therefore guess odd”;—he guesses odd, and wins.

Now, with a simpleton a degree above the first, he would have reasoned thus: “This fellow finds that in the first instance I guessed odd, and, in the second, he will propose to himself, upon the first impulse, a simple variation from even to odd, as did the first simpleton; but then a second thought will suggest that this is too simple a variation, and finally he will decide upon putting it even as before. I will therefore guess even”;—he guesses even, and wins. Now, what in its last analysis is the mode of reasoning of the schoolboy deemed “lucky” by his fellows?

“It is merely,” I said, “an identification of the reasoner’s intellect with that of his opponent.”

“It is,” said Dupin; “and, upon inquiring of the boy by what means he effected the thorough identification in which his success consisted, I received an answer as follows: ‘When I wish to find out how wise, or how stupid, or how good, or how wicked is any one, or what are his thoughts at the moment, I fashion the expression of my face, as accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the expression.’

This response of the school-boy lies at the bottom of all the spurious profundity which has been attributed to Rochefoucault, to La Bougive, to Machiavelli, and to Campanella.”

“And the identification,” I said, “of the reasoner’s intellect with that of his opponent, depends, if I understand you aright, upon the accuracy with which the opponent’s intellect is admeasured.”13

These few pages that open the two most amazing short stories of the whole history of crime fiction, are worth entire theses, and constitute an advantageous substitute for massive volumes of academic philosophy. For me, this would have been enough reason to cite them.

Let us simply say that it goes without saying, for those who know, that the description of the great whist player, given by the narrator as a prelude to the appearance of the criminal investigation genius called Dupin, is almost exactly the same as the description of the very great poker player. Type “Phil Ivey” into an Internet browser, observe for minutes on end his behavior at the table, and come back to this book. You will be astounded.

Poe is absolutely right. Three rounds are enough to learn whist. If you are a good player of the game, you will be so right from the start: the art of whist depends on the sole psychological faculty of putting yourself in the mind of your opponent. This is a “telepathic” faculty fundamental for poker and completely useless in chess, because of the “mathematical” transparency of the game. This is probably why great chess players, great mathematicians (or logicians), as well as great philosopher mathematicians, so often and so easily become paranoid. When nothing is hidden—and nothing should be—when this mode of thinking is transferred to politics, then one feels the need to reinvent the dimension of veiling, inchoative, for a Heideggerian, with respect to the originary (“natural”) envoi of being, and “purged” by scientific transparency. Paranoia is the psychosis of the one who, having wanted to make everything transparent, quite logically, no longer sees anything but dissimulation everywhere: Cantor, Gödel, Fischer, the high-brow misanthropy of Plato or Badiou … in these modes of thought, paranoid psychosis shows that the mania for complete transparency ends in the mania for generalized false semblance. Absolutized unveiling becomes equally absolutized veiling: the scientific transparency of the non-human makes the human fully opaque (see Ontological Differend; and Science).

Just as paranoia is common currency with the chess player (see Nabokov’s amazing The Luzhin Defense, where this defensive paranoia, metaphorically absolutized in the strategic style of the chess genius, for wanting to fill in all the rear bases of existence itself, ends in suicide, which is revealed as the true meaning of the said “defense”), to the same extent, you can have a hard time finding just one paranoid poker player: I bet with my eyes closed that it will take you months to find one for me. A game which primarily metaphorizes the dimension of dissimulation and bluffing, is an insurance not only against the mania for complete transparency, but, for this very reason, against the equally delirious (and therefore symmetrical) presumption of a universal dissimulation.

In other words, games such as whist or poker obey the Heideggerian, i.e. aletheiological, principle of truth: the ceaseless economy of veiling-unveiling. They are somewhat far removed from the Badiouian doctrine of truth as “indiscernible,” which is the (beautiful! I am not ungrateful either) concept of a kind of uniquely intelligible transparency of truth, which we can quite safely say is perfectly applicable to chess. For “my” own doctrine of truth, the Ontological Differend, I would say this Heideggerian concept of aletheiology, not to mention Badiou’s, remains still too “nice,” always ready to positivize any transcendental truths which, when you study their immanence, are almost always revealed to be abominable, and not only in the area of politics. All this not to spread my cultural jam, but to say something very specific: if “my” concept of truth (see Ontological Differend), in Schürmann’s wake, aggravates the most worrying thing about Heidegger’s concept of truth, while expelling its too “nice” dimension of veiling-unveiling, this general regime of truth, as tragic disruption of knowledge and truth, applied to the quasi-entirety of the anthropological closure, becomes inapplicable in the sole sphere of play, in the sense I understand it. Only in play does the tragic truth of Schürmann-MBK become (again?) a kind of “nice” Heideggerianism. Aletheia remains a luxury of the philosopher, who has the good fortune of being able to contemplate “from afar” the play of veiling-unveiling to which being surrenders, even in atrocity. Most human beings live their lives, mutilated alive by the ontological differend. The flaw of aletheia is precisely what makes it valuable for the academic trends of the time: it remains too “ontological” in being applied to the entirety of being, without particular consideration for the human, whereas the differend is the singular regime of truth introduced to the world by anthropological eventalness, in respect of all collateral damages of Science. As we have seen, play is, in a unique degree of intensity, the catharsis of truth, originarily tragic and bloodthirsty. Perhaps all my efforts are aimed at a complete change of paradigm for truth in philosophy: when the whole tradition follows the scientific paradigm, it is perhaps high time to change it. Let us hope that Schelling, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Bataille and a few others have not leveled the terrain into pure loss. In short: only in play does the ordinary mortal gain access to the aletheiological economy of truth in an “egalitarian” fashion, and takes pleasure in it, even when he loses. As to all the paradigms of scientistic inspiration that fill up the history of philosophy, I never stop saying why the contemporary task of the concept is to demolish its facilities.

Let us reconsider, in this philosophical light, what Poe said about the gifted boy playing the guessing game with marbles: well, in poker, the very superior level consists precisely of this type of psychological speculation: “He thinks I think that I think he thinks that I think …” And the winner has to be as gifted as the boy praised by Poe. Unlike what the ignorant (therefore) thinks, bluffing is not a primal dimension of poker; it is part of it, moreover only mastered by excellent players. And the level of supreme mastery is not so much “bluffing in the first degree,” identified by the ordinary person in the very essence of poker, which makes the opponent believe, by making intimidating bets (in the game’s jargon this is called “to tell a story”), that his hand is very strong even though he has nothing, for instance making an offsuit 7–2 pass off as a pair of aces. No! In fact, the supreme bluff consists in a bluff of a bluff. Meaning: when some genius player deliberately makes crazy, even wild bets, to make his opponent believe he is bluffing even though he has … “the nuts.” To pass the traces off as false, when they are actually the true, Lacan would say: this is the archi-ludic essence of man, i.e. the horrible technomimetic animal, all of a sudden sublimated by ludic catharsis. And a brilliant opponent will realize in time that the degree of the bluff does not lie where the “crazy reraiser” wants him to believe it does; that he actually plays the “maniac” even though his game is reasonably relentless. Nietzsche spoke of the “sage passing himself off as a fool”… Basically, the most sagacious will have anticipated it: poker is, par excellence, the game in which one should maximize the art of pretending to pretend. Which is perhaps art par excellence …

Let us return to whist, in what it says about poker, to that very moment when poker saw the light of day in American working-class saloons, while whist was the game of high society. All nineteenth-century literary documents (I have in mind Poe of course, Balzac, Conan Doyle, Jules Verne …) attest that whist was the most popular game at that time. Hegel played it every day (and, in the last decade of his life, every evening, in the public house, in front of a good tankard of beer…). As for bridge, it is a game where you have to know hundreds of preliminary conventions just to become only a decent player. Bridge is a Baroque version of the classical whist, probably invented by those who got tired of whist’s “democratic” simplicity, and therefore introduces all these Gongoresque conventions in order to “initiatorily” limit access to it. Whist is to bridge exactly what—Poe said—draughts is to chess. In these latter as well, and even much more than in bridge, you must learn an unbelievable number of conventions to perform even slightly well. And it is “paradoxically” for this very reason that whist, like draughts, reveals the player’s IQ much more immediately and infallibly than bridge or chess.14 It is forever more impossible for me to move away from Poe’s demonstration: the most complex games, which are therefore the most revealing of profound truths, are always those with initially simple rules. The concern to bring complexity to the game must be left to the players. Contrary to idée reçue, the play must not be bigger than the player.

Poker sticks to the exact middle, and this is why it became the most popular card game, if not the most popular game in general, of our time. Its rules are very simple to learn. If you have talent, you will know it right away. If you do not, you will not want to know it, and you will go on playing. And poker has as much, if not more, need of bad players as of very good ones. A champion wins a tournament one out of three times. A good player, one out of ten times. A bad player can win one out of twenty times. And this is not the least of its beauties: everybody wins in poker sooner or later, even the very bad ones. This is not the least “democratic” aspect of the game. But poker demands also the learning of very sophisticated techniques, which are not exactly permanent conventions, as in chess or bridge, which makes these games more annoying than they should be: they refer back to this wound consisting of all those “second natures” we, as technomimetic animals, have self-inflicted. Poker certainly is an emulatory catharsis of the bloody “pleonexia” consubstantial with our conditions. In it, everybody has their place. Everybody has their chance, the best, as well as the worst. Justice is equitably rendered to everyone, to the artist of cards, as well as to the unsubtle simpleton.

Are they talking to us about “egalitarianism?” But which one? The one of the “scientific” complicity, depriving each and every one from whatever personal initiative they may have, imitating the frozen logico-mathematical isomorphism? Or is it an aesthetic formatting of the fundamental inequality between men, which leaves each and every one absolutely free in their acts, their successes as well as their mistakes, and which can make each and every one happy according to their capabilities, even when they are very bad?

Two of the best poker theorists, Sklansky and Schoonmaker (a prominent psychoanalyst as well!), who are also great players, recently wrote the following which eloquently says it all: “Poker provides an extremely ‘level playing field.’ In no other popular competition is everyone treated so equally. You can’t play golf against Tiger Woods, but you can sit down at any poker table. You can play against anyone from a novice to a world class player, and you will all be treated as equals.”15

The first passage I have ever read, where the word “equality”—which is redundant in fact—does not sound hollow! Why on earth does it come from poker theorists, and not from a left-wing academic? This is no doubt due to this game’s so profoundly democratic dimension, which will most probably make the good mind of the Stalinist conclude that, since it is democratic, it can only be capitalist.

After all, poker is devilishly Lutheran, in that it is the only great “emulatory” discipline; in other words: the only profession where there is not the slightest hypocrisy concerning the reality of capitalism. Nobody or almost nobody inquires after the amount of money a Hollywood star makes, or a left-wing academic celebrity, a politician, etc. In poker, it goes without saying, it is “cards on the table”: a player is classified exactly according to what he wins. Lacoue-Labarthe said, with his usual prowess, that we probably had to consider money as something as originary to our human condition as language. And perhaps, in this wake, we need to go even further, because the Neolithic documents make quite credible the hypothesis that money constitutes a language even more originary, remote, than what we understand by language: that money has, and by far, preceded language, and as such ensured it as its immanent-transcendental condition of possibility. Which staggeringly means that language, and therefore the derived “pure” sciences, are nothing but sublimations of the techno-economical age of proto-humanity—food for thought for the sensitive beautiful souls of all kinds of leftism. These sublimations alone made man enter the historical age itself, ours; and from then on this period is, perhaps, only the brackets on the way to an yet other language. In other words, science sublimates language, which sublimates money, which sublimates the archaic technai of the flint and hunting … none of these have really suppressed what they pretended to “surpass.” Thus there must be a surpassing of science—and of the inveterate philosophical scientism clustered therein—which is a preservation, i.e. a preservation by strata of all the anthropological “ages of the world,” archaic technai and money included. Where the historical age itself, that is to say, the properly scientific age—the age which discovered the ages preceding it—would in its turn be put into brackets … but we are getting carried away, far beyond the limits of the present book. Let us get back to a more immanent matter …

To put it by way of the oxymoron of a specific metaphor, the phantasm of chess has in common with mathematics—and their penetrating critiques by Poe—the fact of being concerned with truth only when the chips are down: when the truth is constituted for good, eternalized, and chance is entirely abolished. Whoever is interested only in the post festum victorious truth will constantly display a somewhat ridiculous triumphalism, which in return gives evidence, and universally, against this paradigmatic type of truth, which has cost humanity only too dearly. In poker, victory never ceases to be constituent; chance is never abolished. It is eternally recast, and this is why there is something in it for everyone, including chess players, who eventually become weary of their game’s mechanical teleology, just as we have become weary of all those metaphysical teleologies, blank and regular as clockwork. And since it is victory that is constantly constituent—and you can lose in a second the rush16 which made you win for hours on end if you happen to lower your guard—truth, itself, is constantly constituted. Each new hand unveils something new about the players, which was not revealed by the previous hand.

So I say it again: only play, in general (including chess, it must be well understood), is the catharsis of the archi-negative connotation underlined by “my” concept of truth. In this sense, can we not recast the timeless debate on Plato’s “betrayal” of the Socratic attitude with the poker player/chess player paradigm? Plato considers as entirely constituted, sedimented, that which was, in all likelihood, constantly constituent in Socrates. Socrates, because he was the Prince of ironists, and therefore the Prince of philosophers, could he not have been as well the first poker player? Just as in poker, everything, at any moment, is put back into play. The highest of conquered knowledge is swept by the next dialogical patch: the movement of truth, well before Hegel, consisting in considering at each stage of dialectical progress the previously conquered knowledge as null and void (suppressed, in order to be “preserved” in an unrecognizable form). With Platonic transcription, the incessant, as it were pre-Franciscan, putting back into play the Socratic method, becomes a frozen, planning strategy, bureaucratic sorting and compilation of annoying conventions, favorably disposed to every Academy, where Philosophy becomes the essentially capitalizing recitation of acquired knowledge, and ceases to be the adventuorus navigation on sight, which meant somewhat “as far as the eye can see.”

A skill less known by those who know poker only in its clichés is, precisely, the ability to know how to lose. There is in here the promise of a mental preventative for all metaphysical triumphalism, to say nothing of psychology. What is there to say? Not that the poker player is a high roller: this too is a cliché that has had its day. There are very few real high-rollers, only a majority of players who lose a little money and a minority who win a lot, by concentrating the losses in their own winnings. The great poker player is a calculated high roller. He mathematically and strategically takes his risks in the long term, never in the short or middle term, whereas the bad player generally does not see further than his present hand. All great players will tell you that the first thing to learn in order to go far in the game is to know how to throw away your cards, fold. No known discipline, no other game, sets up this pedagogy of failure, this long propaedeutic to the calculated assumption of partial tactical defeats called poker; no long-term strategic victory is achieved without this wisdom, this self-lucidity, of the countless hands—sometimes as tempting as sin—you have to sacrifice in order to win in the long run. We should not be afraid of the cliché: poker, as the paradigmatic ideal of generalized social play, is the best possible school of life.

We evoked catharsis. As we know, its function in the Greek City was eminently political: Tragedy, but the Olympics as well, formalized the community as œuvre, and œuvre as the way of binding the community together. It is pointless to insist on the function fulfilled by mass sports in our societies, which silently extend, here as everywhere else, the Greek creations. But let us see how all this takes place in poker.

It is enough, first of all, to observe the audience of the final tables in the grand tournaments in order to realize that poker equals, in fervor, the exaltation of the mass sports, perhaps even already surpasses them—no doubt owing to the much more egalitarian accessibility of this game, more than any other game or sport. Poker requires a discipline at least equal to any other professional sportive or ludic practice, but it is a discipline accessible to everyone. And this is still not the decisive point. The decisive point is that poker both unites and separates all its players: thus the “cathartic” effect in the strict sense rediscovers the lost secret of Greek Tragedy, which was “not yet Theatre,” that is to say, demanded active participation on the part of an audience which had not yet waned into a flowerbed of passive spectators. According to a profound remark by Lacoue-Labarthe, if the function of tragic aesthetics was, as always, essentially political, Aristotle lucidly isolated its two primordial affects, Terror and Pity, as the two affects of the supreme political danger, at the two extremes of the passions of the City. Pity is the disastrous affect of communitarian fusion; Terror is the no less disastrous affect of absolute separation. All politics, and all political destination of art, aims at finding the balance between the two. Now, we can say that poker achieves this superlatively: it is a game both extremely socializing, if not generator of philia, and at the same time, a notoriously “individualistic” game, maintaining in the reunion an essential principle of separation of the proto-citizens called the players. Catharsis in its pure state is always this “happy medium” between reunion, community as oeuvre, and separation, right to inviolable individuation: dés-oeuvrement, or un-working.

In all these respects, the year 2013 was preparing for one of the most significant events of this beginning of millennium: the biggest poker tournament ever to be organized in the huge London Wembley Stadium. On the pitch, thousands of professional players will have to pay a big amount to play at real tables, with real cards, real croupiers and physiognomically visible opponents. Yet, in the stands, for a much smaller amount, almost a hundred thousand players will be equipped with computers allowing them to take part in the tournament, like on the Internet. The best of them will be able to take their turn on the pitch; the winner will take almost seven million euros … We should realize what profound historical novelty is emerging there: It is probably the very first time in History, since the Olympics and circus games, including the jamboree of contemporary mass sports or rock dinosaurs’ concerts, that people gathered together in a stadium in order to all take part in the event. What the most demanding twentieth century aesthetic avant-garde will have failed to realize in the end, a game achieves. In my own “avant-gardist” adventure, with the collective that was called evidenz,17 I had always dreamt of a “life-size game” in which everybody would take part. I must note that, at this time, it was an already existing game, the only one capable of realizing this aesthetico-political utopia of our time.

We then notice several delightul as well as promising facts. First of all, there are not any, or very few, milieus where you find as much solidarity between the top level players, and even between all the others. On the website Winamax, a big fraternity of average players have gathered together under the banner of “team Winarien.” As we saw with parody, when it is pushed to its limit, even in the self-derisory mode, it allows playing at being oneself, and to benefit from it, even when one is bad. One is just happy to join the club. Mutual aid, accommodation, flat sharing, loaning, emulatory prop bets, etc., are absolutely commonplace in this milieu. But as soon as the two best friends in the world meet at the baize, they turn into ferocious beasts, and they give no quarter. When the game is over, even if one of them has stripped the other of a million dollars or euros, they go have a drink and eat together in the evening. Even a couple as glamorous as Phil Laak and Jennifer Tilly, Laak being a charismatic and drolly eccentric super champion, and Tilly, an excellent Hollywood actress as well as a player capable of playing at the top tables, will make no favors to each other when they are at the same table.18 Finally a couple which completely puts into action the irrefutable principle according to which love is the continuation of war by other means. The rest is simply speculation. Just as there is so to speak no poker genius coming from a well off family, just as the meta-cannibalism that takes place at the baize, between people who are otherwise friends (poker is the yum-yum), the carnivorous ferocity, makes it so that the great players like to use the animal metaphor of the jackal (or hyena) in referring to themselves, well, likewise, we obtain an extremely surprising ethical outcome, which is doubtless the effect of the catharsis proper to this game: most of the greatest current players are militant vegetarians. Who would have expected that Elisabeth de Fontenay and Derrida would find their best followers in such a milieu?

In sum: catharsis in its as it were pure state, where play purges the community from its founding pleonectic impulses, and binds them after the fact by the famous “purging, purification of [its] passions.” Because the mental violence of poker surpasses the violence of every other game listed today; because this violence is not the passivity of the post-Debordian spectator swamped with sadism, psychopaths and gore;19 because anyone interested in poker ipso facto plays it, and so it is an art which knows no passive spectators; poker, even more than the other arts, other games and other sports, is, in respect of catharsis only, but in respect of catharsis entirely, the king of the arts.

And it is extremely striking that all enthusiasts of this game talk about the “poker community.” We do not talk of a cinema community; neither do we talk of a plastic arts community, nor even of a theatre community. The philosophers’ community—to paraphrase a nice metaphor by Baudrillard—is composed of nothing but thousands of venomous snakes, intertwined in connecting vessels. The literature community is even worse; the “literary community,” considered so much in depth by Blanchot (and his admirers), designates but an extreme minority of writers and thinkers within the sinister society of literary men and women. The community of lovers, again considered by Blanchot following Duras, is never composed of more than two people, regardless of the efforts made by some of my friends in order to increase the telepathic number a little bit—resulting only in human disasters. So far, arts have all failed to achieve their highest original vocation; the “Wagner case” should always be held up as a counterexample, in order to understand how such a failure can be squared, and with what consequences, which are always political. Of all arts, only games have all in all succeeded, without really putting on airs, in binding a community by the catharsis of pleonectic tendencies, without which we would still be grazing on carrots. But even with games, there is never talk of a “chess community,” a “football community,” or a “canasta community.” To tell the truth, the only domain where a homologous expression is used, is when we say “the scientific community.” It should make us think on the philosophical paradigm of politics: scientific or artistic? And if the latter, is it passive-contemplative, or ludic-active?

Let us be clear on this: we obviously do not think that humanity will be joined back together again in the best of all possible worlds when this world is turned into a giant poker table. We are simply assessing, as phenomenologists, the universal traits of the promise of a society placed entirely under the aesthetico-political sign of play. Poker is obviously nothing compared to the “life-size” games that civilization—if it occurred to it to save its skin and ours—could develop here and now, conceiving it with all forms of art that exist so far, in order to make each member of the community take part in it, even if he or she should be the least talented or gifted of all, and even, in a sense, all the more so because of that. Ducasse had announced something similar when he said that poetry must henceforth be made by all, and not by one: the best of twentieth century avant-gardes, I am thinking particularly of the Situationists and Debord, would hear it. May ’68 would be the revolutionary game of an art made by all. Even IRCAM should be made by all, and not by one.

Debord would say: the avant-gardes have had their day. They perished because of the fundamental contradiction within them: preparing a social age and area where art becomes the production of all, and on the other hand, not being able to renounce the status of individuated-artist-demiurge. What is left of Debord is neither the community of the other Situationists, nor an even more unlikely “community of May ’68,” but only Debord, fantastic Creator, but fallen and melancholic, inhumanly alone, in all this adventure.

The future games should preserve all that was great about ancient arts, from poetry to painting, from music to architecture. The only thing they must suppress is what the twentieth century avant-gardes wanted to suppress as well: the passive position of the spectator, which is ultimately nothing but its position as consumer. Here as elsewhere, it was the Situationists who realized the essence of all avant-gardes. I am using poker here just as a matrix skeleton for the functioning of the coming games, i.e. arts. We must, for instance, preserve everything of an art as great as opera; but we should create, so to speak, “life-size” operas, in which everyone takes part. We should make use of architecture, painting, design, environmental arts (Kant rightly considered gardening as a branch of fine arts) … Without the slightest melancholia or passéism, we can preserve all that was great in the arts of the past; we only need to make them “interactive,” suppress their figurative destination (in painting), representational destination (in narration), passively auditory destination (in music), etc. And not only every art, but basically every profession. Because the asymptotic appropriation of infinity by man results in an always more pathetic crushing of the singular finitude, which is ever revealed only in this way, it is probable that the division of labor will always exist. Rather than overbidding on the literally theological daydream of the incarnation of every competence in the total and polyvalent (over)man, does not play represent the form of social bond par excellence? Every citizen—just like in the Rousseauist conception—contributes to the constitution of play by his very own laborious competence; otherwise, he plays his part, just like everybody else, and with the same basic chances. Whatever his profession may be, no one, as such, would put any citizen above another. The great musician, only as the player that he is, would be treated on exactly equal terms as a mechanic. But we would call this process of concrete utopia not by the order-word “equality,” but by a keyword of the poker vocabulary, and which is the one we need ethico-politically: equity.

In short: the leftist simpleton is quite right. Poker is a parody of capitalism. It has been so since its birth, because it has always been its waste as well: the game of the outcasts of the American dream, who hoped to reproduce at the table, to replay, the chance that fate had taken away from them.

We talked about the spirit of the now-defunct avant-garde, and their living fate for the dawning century. The leftist simpleton, theologically condemning poker as the obscene substitute of capitalism, would still need to explain by what unfortunate coincidence Debord, at the end of the day, made a very good living, at a given period of his life, by excelling in this game of ill-repute. That it parodies capitalism, illustrated eloquently by the fact that you sometimes play with tremendous amounts in the transferential form of plastic chips, means it is its catharsis. The great poker champions are never afraid of money; and this is why they are practically never sought and recruited among the very rich people, but on the contrary, among those of a poor, if not wretched, background. They all say their goal is a good game and victory; money comes as a bonus in the end, the cherry on top. The chips are an illustration of the great poker players’ childlike relationship with money;20 they are, all in all, relatively indifferent. Scotty Nguyen became champion only to feed his wretched family in Vietnam, not to get rich personally. His brother died on the same day as Scotty became world champion; he called his brother on the phone to give him the news, so that he would go and tell it to the rest of the plethoric family, and on his way there, his brother was hit by a car. What should have been the best day of Scotty’s life turned out to be the worst, he who had had more than his share of misfortune in life. All this to say that, as long as we are talking of catharsis, the spectacle of poker is not, as is commonly thought, the spectacle of a victory of the rich against the poor, but in fact, most often, of the poor against the rich. “Bang in the center!”,21 as Beckett said.

Let us talk about the even more unlikely virtues poker would require of the players, such as … discipline! But no! It does require discipline, and not only at the table, but existentially as well. Las Vegas, along with Amsterdam, is universally known as “sin city.” There, a great player learns very quickly to beware of all sorts of temptation. He does not need the hollow prescriptions of the metaphysical functionary to do that. For him, what matters is to have fun; to take pleasure in his existence, which should be the case with every living being on earth. As the artist John Cale said: “Work is more fun than fun.”22 Whether some will like it or not, poker is a profession in its own right. And it is the only redeeming profession of this new global proletariat, more miserable than that of Marxism-Leninism, and which is the proletariat of the idle, the désœuvrés. This is not the least prophetic of its signs. I would not mention it in this book that is supposed to be a general summary, but I always supported the obvious: désœuvrement is the one and only unprognostic political problem that poses itself to a contemporary philosophy. All the analytical tools inherited from the common metaphysical archive are useless to it. It must create its own from scratch.

Which would mean, in general, and for the reasons we put forward, that only play has a chance of being the successful catharsis of politics, i.e. the great art, the total and communitarian art we all dream of, without it leading to fascism, neither on the left nor on the right: art democratized for good. A world where all of humanity will do nothing but play, where play and work become indiscernible, where perpetual emulation is not synonymous with crime, where the disastrous fiction of equality is every bit as short-circuited as expropriatory atrocity and injustice, will be a world which will have suppressed the political malediction which we owe to Science.

This is therefore an obviously Kantian reflection. The only artist who understood at his time what Kant meant in his third critique, linking it with what he said in his second, was Schiller: humanity is only fully humanity when it plays. It is for this reason that play, certainly even more than any other form of art, is catharsis par excellence. As in Kantian moral law, or almost, and it is in this “almost” that all this differs from a chasm, man stifles his sensible inclinations as well (his pleonectic ferocity): those which lead to the pure and simple annihilation of the other. This is what differentiates, just as well, play from the other arts, so that play is called to become their ultimate fulfillment, provided that art’s communitarian function is always, in the last instance, political, for touching much more closely than other arts the negative essence of politics, which is the annihilation of the other. In play and in play only, and already in a great number of singularly mammalian animals, the annihilation of the other is just feigned: this is the good old catharsis. Only play is fully the katharein of the pleonectic: all other arts are deferred/differed, mediated catharses. Kantian moral law—meaning politics—demands a painful submission. Play is a just an unconditioned submission to the force of rule, only this time, happy and consentient. Politics is the mimetic perversion of Science; but play is the positive mimetic perversion of political negativity.

For me, then, poker is emblematic of what should be a successful surpassing of capitalism; that is to say, a surpassing that is no longer taken in by the illusion of a suppression without remainder of what is surpassed, which will then return inevitably in the form of monstrous waste. That is to say, not the “scientific,” but the aesthetical surpassing of the originary political malediction, in the elite form of all arts, that is play. A society which will be, as in the Land of Toys in Pinocchio, a site of perpetual play, a democratic and realistically egalitarian formatting of emulation and the second pleonectic instinct of the technomimetic animal: its ultimate, ontological impulse.23 A society where the best are rewarded according to their worth, but where even the worst, the most stupid and the most wicked, have the right to win from time to time; to exist, in their full singularity.

If “equality” truly means that the political sun must shine for everyone, anarchist realism will find the means to prevail over the “communist” idealism, of the republican breeding—whip at hand—of “mathematizable societies”: it is through the extremely upwards re-estimation of the aesthetical eminence of play. Meaning: political. “Aesthethic,” wrote Lacoue. Ludic emulation is the pleonectic that has politically become, no longer “equality,” but equity.