Stakes

Stakes

Games: zones of safety where the stakes are set, the rules are knowable--defined sectors.


"The stake is money,--in other words immediate, infinite possibilities of pleasure. Perhaps the next card turned, the ball now rolling, will give the player parks and gardens, fields (13) and forests, castles and manors lifting heavenward their pointed turrets and fretted roofs. Yes, that little dancing ball holds within it acres of good land and roofs of slate with sculptured chimneys reflected in teh broad bosom of hte Loire; it contains treasures of art, marvels of taste, jewels of price, the most exquisit bodies in all the world, nay! even souls,--souls none ever dreamt were venal, all the decorations, all the distinctions, all the elegance, and all the puissance of the world. What do I say? It contains better than that; it embraces the dream and vision of it all. And you would have me give up play? Nay; if play only availed to give endless hopes, if our only vision of it were the smile of its green eyes, it would be loved less fanatically. But it has nails of adamant, it is cruel and terrible, at its caprice it gives poverty and wretchedness and shame; that is why its votaries adore it ..." (Anatole France, The Garden of Epicurus, pp. 12-13)


"To seduce implies that the other will pay for the fact of being seduced, that is, for having been torn from him/herself and made into an object of sorcery." (Baudrillard Seduction 124).

"Death rmains the ultimate risk in every symbolic pact, be it that supposed by a challenge, a secret, a seduction or a perversion." (Baudrillard Seduction 124).