The Implications of Play: Resilience, Everyday Life, and Ethics

This chapter begins by considering a thoughtful paper by Jan Strassheim who warns against Schutz’s view of typifications as inclining toward rigid problem-solving and “tunnel vision.” When one keeps in mind the wide significance of imposed relevances and our continual resilience in coming to terms with them, including our use of typifications, one offsets such rigidity as one can also do through participation in play. A final section shows how Derrida’s reduction of theory to free play is—and here we are being playful—itself a work of theory. The chapter challenges accounts of play that stress existential defiance alone, such as those of Sutton-Smith and Fink, by emphasizing the responsive intersubjectivity that play fosters. In this account, play sets one en route toward ethics and avoids conceiving play as opposed to the supposed “seriousness” of ethics.