Not that many philosophers have had enough interest in board games to make it a subject of their reflection. And that's obviously even more so the case for wargames. So when I discovered that French avant-garde philosopher and filmmaker Guy Debord didn't only work on board games but actually had made a war game, I was instantly fascinated.
Debord made a name for himself in the late 50s when he launched his very own left-wing philosophical and artistic movement: situationism. In 1967, he published the book and, subsequently, the film that would grant him worldwide fame: La société du spectacle.
What is not well known is that for a significant part of his life, he has been working on a complex chess variant in which he wanted to distil what was, for him, the spirit of warfare, as he was fascinated by military theory. This game was simply called: "le jeu de la guerre", in English, the game of war.
And it wasn't just a side project. In his book Panegyric, he writes: "I fear it could be the only one of my works that anyone will dare to recognise as having some value."
So to learn more about this unique object, I invited Alexander Galloway, a philosophy teacher at NYU and the developer of a digital adaptation of Guy Debord's game. Alexander dedicated an article in Zones of control to Debord's "jeu de la guerre" and a whole section in his book Uncomputable. Making him probably one of the few experts of this weird part of Guy Debord's body of work.
This will be in at least two parts in this series on "le jeu de la guerre", first a discussion with Alex where we'll talk about the game's history and meaning, and then a playthrough of "le jeu de la guerre".
Link to Alex's book: www.versobooks...
Link to digital version of the game developed by Alex: r-s-g.org/krieg...
Link to my Ko-fi to support the channel: ko-fi.com/homo...
6 сен 2024
