This article addresses the political dimensions of Johan Huizinga’s seminal work Homo Ludens: A study of the play element in culture (1938). More than just a foundational text in academic ludology, this text positioned itself as a polemic against the right-wing political discourse going on in contemporaneous Nazi Germany, represented chiefly by Carl Schmitt. Through his concept of play, Huizinga hoped to resolve what he perceived to be the confusion of play and seriousness among a group of reactionary theorists narrowly focused on the Schmittian Ernstfall, the “serious case” of inimical violence. This article analyzes the usage of the concepts of “play” and “seriousness” in Huizinga’s and Schmitt’s respective corpuses and, finally, places their work in dialogue in order to understand the difficulties involved in defining play as unserious and unpolitical.

本文探讨了约翰·霍伊辛加（Johan Huizinga）的开创性著作《同性恋者鲁登斯：对文化中的游戏元素的研究》（1938年）的政治意义。这本书不仅是学术语言学的基础性著作，而且还把自己定位为对同时代纳粹德国所进行的右翼政治话语的辩论，主要由卡尔·史密特（Carl Schmitt）代表。通过他的游戏概念，Huizinga希望解决他认为是游戏和严肃性的混乱，这是一群反动理论家狭ly地关注施密特恩·恩斯特法特，这是极度暴力的“严重案例”。本文分析了Huizinga和Schmitt各自的语料库中“游戏”和“严肃”概念的用法，最后将他们的工作进行了对话，以了解将游戏定义为严肃和不政治的困难。