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Alexander Riley has written an erudite, scholarly and engaging book on play. Impure Play defines its subject as serious play that inhabits the sacred to the extent
that it transgresses and therefore limits the experience of the sacred. He writes that, “In the West … impure sacrality and transgression are in danger of total disappearance …. Though impurity has been largely excised from the realm of religious practice and belief, this surgical removal has not yet successfully removed all its traces” (p. 14). Riley sees in disparate cultural manifestations of play, remnants or vestiges of the sacred surviving within the secular. The cultural activities under analysis are chosen for their transgressive aspects, onto which Riley systematically projects notions of the sacred and the tragic in an effort to dignify and situate these disturbances in the cultural field as inhabiting the realms of serious play. His subject matter is wide ranging and includes the novels of Michel Houellebecq, a French Writer and Filmmaker; gangsta gap and death/black metal; sports heroism and scandal; interactive video games and the online desequestration of suicide and death. Riley's project of resurrecting notions of the sacred in these pop-cultural forms can seem both desperate and desperately belated, but provocative and intriguing at the same time. While he draws from an array of theorists, including Durkheim, Caillois, Baudrillard and Derrida, Riley makes only tangential allusions to psychoanalytic theory and nowhere uses it to engage seriously with his own theoretical project. I will offer to intervene and insert psychoanalysis into what I feel are the gaps, or inviting spaces in Riley's text.
The first such invitation comes when Riley makes the observation that the ludic is not taken seriously in Western culture shaped by the ethic of a Calvinist Protestantism and the materialistic culture of late capitalism. He notes the lack of studies of play in the social sciences generally and in