Letter from the Editor: The Name (of the) Game

Lugubrious games: to game, to gamble, or put into play that which is doleful, mournful, or sorrowful.

The title for this general issue, a play on Georges Bataille's 1929 essay "Le 'Jeu Lugubre,'" itself inspired by a Dalí painting of the same title, is not intended to assign a theoretical legacy or to impose false correspondences or a sense of unity across this distinct and indeed heterogeneous set of essays. Yet the title's allusion willfully risks an association with Bataille's insistence that poetry—and expressive culture—not be considered as a refuge from the responsibility of critical and even political engagement. This is a task each essay readily responds to in its own distinctive idiom (polemical, philosophical, historical, and speculative). Their interventions address discourses on new media, art, cinema, trauma, memory, psychoanalysis, surveillance, community, singularity, ethics, exposure, eros, intimacy, and the impossible. They examine and deploy the corpuses of Kathryn Bigelow, Norman O. Brown, and David Cronenberg, and interrogate a wide range of contexts, including the real and projected locales of Sarajevo, Tehran, Los Angeles, and London. They attempt to unsettle orthodox readings and habits of thought, and put into play that which might otherwise be doleful, mournful, and sorrowful, breathing a sense of joyousness into the serious, and frequently gravely so, endeavor of critique.