The banquet of nature: the role of play in Law

Abstract

Historians and sociologists are looking at feast nowadays and ask what men are searching in it. Play is a cultural phenomenon, not biologic but simultaneous, parallel, conmivent and antagonisitc regarding the institutional structures. Uu now the different social formations have always preserved the coexistence of the serious and joyous, of the institution and play, of the profane and the sacred. The new historical reality is, nevertheless, substantially different: the «mercantile cannibalism» (Ziegler) of the capitalist relations of production smashes, tames, recuperates and manipulates any amusing and joyous effervescence. Playing, a mere expense, causes the most terrible «dyspepsia» to Law, the code of which is, as Arnaud put it, the «catechism of the bourgeois juridical relations». The undertaker is the only one that does not play or whose play is preserved from chance by the law of the large numbers or by the law of the four characteristics: abstraction, generality, formalism and regulation.