Fun on The Bridge: notes on parable, play and politics

The article proposes a reading of Franz Kafka’s parable The Bridge, in which the narrator’s transformations into a bridge and his conflict with a stranger are treated as descriptions of play interactions. Based on the works of Walter Benjamin, Roger Caillois, Johan Huizinga, Eugen Fink, Donald Winnicott, Giorgio Agamben and other theorists, the main properties of play and its relationship with operations belonging to the sphere of ritual that organize and regulate reality are demonstrated through the examples from the short story. Play as a spontaneous activity (paidia) is configured through separation from everyday routine and creation of independent time and space where gratuitous freedom of the participants is affirmed. In the course of its unfolding, the impulse of spontaneous gaiety is transformed, producing the rules and conditions for the continuation of play, but at the same time also being confronted with external regulation.

Particular emphasis in the article is placed on the specifics of the mimicry play and its connection with the mimetic faculty — the creation of connections between things, the establishment of similarities and relationships. Mimicry, like the one that allows the narrator of Kafka’s novella to appear as a bridge, implies the transformation of the player herself, of becoming the other, while the role chosen by the player is not determined and not regulated from outside. As an eventful and localized practice, play inevitably ends and the world of fun and spontaneous action collapses. However, this defeat implies the hope of a renewal of play and the knowledge that in our experience there is a possibility for something fundamentally different. At the end of the article the author suggests to compare the philosophical descriptions of play with the concept of democratic politics by Jacques Rancière. Play and politics of the powerless can be seen as structurally similar, though not identical, phenomena in which the mimetic faculty is directed towards transforming the order of things.