Er(r)go. Theory – Literature – Culture
Next Issue – 55 (2/2027) – game/play/idleness
submission deadline: 15 September 2026
Thinking about game, play, and idleness seems as light a task as it is suspicious. Contemporary Western humanities—shaped by the ethics of productivity, useful knowledge, and constant activity—have long looked with unease at whatever serves no purpose, slips through the logic of efficiency, or may be dismissed as a waste of time. Yet it is precisely in what appears unnecessary that an anthropological key to modernity may be found: the playing human, the playful human, the resting human might well embody what defines the lifestyle of the early twenty-first century. From Friedrich Schiller’s philosophy of play, through Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics of play, to contemporary diagnoses of late-capitalist culture, play and idleness appear less as the margins of social acceptability than as attempts to preserve meaning.
In this sense, play is a way of being-in-the-world that suspends the compulsion of seriousness while revealing the mechanisms that govern reality—economic, political, social, and mediatized. We toy with ideology, and at times we play by its rules. Digital spaces have become arenas of performative rivalry, while the language of play permeates the discourses of work, love, science, education, and even war. Wherever play appears, the question of rules emerges—and of who defines them. The culture of play is, at once, a culture of power and of resistance.
Idleness, in turn, may today be one of the last available forms of rebellion. When practiced consciously, it manifests itself as a refusal of the “performance society,” as an affirmation of inaction, as a micro-politics of opting out of the logic of profit. From medieval apologies for sleep and rest, through Romantic melancholy, to contemporary slow life movements and “digital detox” practices—idleness becomes not only an ethical stance but also an aesthetics of non-doing. Perhaps it carries within it the potential to reclaim time, the body, community, and even thought itself.
Are game, play, and idleness distinct phenomena, or do they constitute a shared field of tension between movement and stillness, rule and suspension, effort and rest? Could idleness be understood as the most radical form of play—one played against the system itself? Or are game and play merely forms of rationalizing inactivity, subtle ways of legitimizing idleness in a world terrified of doing nothing?
Within this framework of reflection on game/play/idleness, we invite contributions engaging, among others, with the following themes:
• philosophies of play, amusement, and rest
• play as a hermeneutic, artistic, or political structure
• play in late-capitalist culture: gamification, spectacle, performance
• idleness as resistance, disobedience, or a strategy of refusal
• work and rest: the biopolitics of exhaustion and the economy of pauses
• play as community: ritual, rule, improvisation
• play and childhood in media culture
• the aesthetics of inaction: from dolce far niente to burnout
• posthuman and interspecies dimensions of play
• unproductivity as a source of creativity
Manuscripts, together with all required metadata, should be submitted via the OJS system by 15 September 2026, in accordance with the procedures described under the “About” and “For Authors” sections of the journal’s website.