A report of the Evening of… Ludic Society by Omar Muñoz-Cremers

Friedrich Nietzsche can be remembered for a host of revolutionary insights but the idea encapsulated in the title of his book Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science) remains to this day the most necessary inspiration. Not surprisingly the art, games, theory and political collective known as The Ludic Society prominently displays a quote from this book on their website. It’s the quote from which all other quotes flow, because The Ludic Society are quite brainy, they know their citations, they have a way with books as they have with games. Theirs is a joyful intelligence, therefore they are such a necessary proposition. Criticism, theory and philosophy have these past few years been caught in a vice-like grip of seriousness – certainly this was not without reason, as on the geopolitical level things look rather glum. But even so, those politics of seriousness, however real they are, and in whatever way they touch our lives, are essentially back-mirror politics. This repudiation of the politics of seriousness may appear to be the effect of a futurist haughty impatience with 20th century nationalistic militarism, turned even worse when it is liberally doused with the rhetoric of medieval religious wars – but somewhere an alternative must exist. Something alive with futurity, something resembling a small utopianism. Continue reading →