Relire Jacques Henriot à l'ère de la société ludique et des jeux vidéo

Abstract

Jacques Henriot conceives the essence of game and play as an attitude, a posture of the subject in his relationship to others and to things. This conception allows to set the gaming attitude in opposition with the relationship we maintain with our most “serious” business: work, war, religion. The antagonism with this last term is particularly underlined by Henriot in his essay of 1969 on play. Yet, if every society leans on a specific conception of what is sacred, we have to deduct from it that the extension of the gaming attitude in the contemporary societies involves a radical transformation of the relationship to the sacred, and thus an identically radical transformation of the social as a whole. The article examines how the gaming attitude tries to re-enchant a modern world which lost its signification, paradoxically reintroducing and deconstructing at the same time a sacred dimension.

Keywords

• Henriot
• society of game
• video game
• sacred
• disenchantment