Finite and Infinite Games Quotes

“George Eliot's villainous character, Grandcourt, "did not care a languid curse for anyone's admiration; but this state of non-caring, just as much as desire, required its related object-namely, a world of admiring and envying spectators: for if you are fond of looking stonily at smiling persons, the persons must be there and they must smile”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Finite players need the world to provide an absolute reference for understanding themselves; simultaneously, the world needs the theater of finite play to remain a world.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“World exists in the form of audience. A world is not all that is the case, but that which determines all that is the case.

An audience consists of persons observing a contest without participating in it.

No one determines who an audience will be. No exercise of power can make a world. A world must be its own spontaneous source. "A world worlds" (Heidegger). Who must be a world cannot be a world.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“We cannot have a precise understanding of what it means to be the winner of a contest until we can place the game in the absolute dimensions of a world.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Infinite lovers conform to the sexual expectations of others in a way that does not expose something hidden, but unveils something in plain sight: that sexual engagement is a poiesis of free persons. In this exposure they emerge as the persons they are. They meet others with their limitations, and not within their limitations. In doing so they expect to be transformed-and are transformed.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“The triumph of finite sexuality is to be liberated from play into the body. The essence of infinite sexuality is to be liberated into play with the body. In finite sexuality I expect to relate to you as a body; in infinite sexuality I expect to relate to you in your body.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“The paradox of infinite sexuality is that by regarding sexuality as an expression of the person and not the body, it becomes fully embodied play. It becomes a drama of touching.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Infinite sexuality does not focus its attention on certain parts or regions of the body. Infinite lovers have no "private parts." They do not regard their bodies as having secret zones that can be exposed or made accesible to others for special favors. It is not their bodies but their persons they make accesible to others.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Fathering and mothering are roles freely assumed but always with the design of showing them to be theatrical. It is the intention of parents in such families to make it plain to their children that they all play cultural and societal roles, that they are only roles, and that they are all truly concrete persons behind them. Therefore, children also learn that they have a family only by choosing to have it, by a collective act to be a family with each other.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Moving therefore from an original center, the sexual engagements of infinite players have no standards, no ideals, no marks of success or failure. Neither orgasm nor conception is a goal in their play, although either may be part of the play.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“In their sexual play they suffer others, allow them to be as they are. Suffering others, they open themselves. Open, they learn both about others and about themselves. Learning, they grow. What they learn is not about sexuality, but how to be more concretely and originally themselves, to be the geniuses of their own actions, to be whole.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Sexuality is not a bounded phenomenon but a horizonal phenomenon for infinite players. One can never say, therefore, that an infinite player is homosexual, or heterosexual, or celibate, or adulterous, or faithful-because each of these definitions has to do with boundaries, with circumscribed areas and styles of play. Infinite players do not play within sexual boundaries, but with sexual boundaries. They are concerned not with power but with vision.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“By contrast, infinite players have no interest in seduction or in restricting the freedom of another to one's own boundaries of play. Infinite players recognize choice in all aspects of sexuality. They may see in themselves and in others, for example, the infant's desire to compete for the mother, but they also see that there is neither physiological nor societal destiny in sexual patterns. Who chooses to compete with another can also choose to play with another.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Seductions are designed to come to an end. Time runs out. The play is finished. All that remains is recollection, the memory of a moment, and perhaps a longing for its repetition. Seductions cannot be repeated. Once one has won or lost in a particular finite game, the game cannot be played over. Moments once reached cannot be reached again. Lovers often sustain vivid reminders of extraordinary moments, but they are reminded at the same time of their impotence in recreating them. The appetite for novelty in lovemaking-new positions, the use of drugs, exotic surroundings, additional partners-is only a search for new moments that can live on only in recollection.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Sexual desires are usually not directly announced but concealed under a series of feints, gestures, styles of dress, and showy behavior. Seductions are staged, scripted, costumed. Certain responses are sought, plots are developed. In skillful seductions delays are employed, special circumstances and settings are arranged.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“It is by no means an accident that the only successful attempt of the American citizenry to force the ending of a foreign war occurred simultaneously with a wide revision in sexual attitudes. The civilization quickly recovered from this threat, however, by tempting these revolutionaries into a new sexual politics, one of societal standoff, where sexual genius is confused with such struggles as the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment and the election of women to national office.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“To use Freud's famous phrase, the civilized are, therefore, the discontent. We do not become losers in civilization but become civilized losers. The collective result of this ineradicable sense of failure is that civilizations take on the spirit of resentment. Acutely sensitive to an imagined audience, they are easily offended by other civilizations. Indeed, even the most powerful societies can be embarrassed by the weakest: the Soviet Union by Afghanistan, Great Britain by Argentina, the United States by Grenada.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Sexuality is the only finite game in which the winner's prize is the defeated opponent.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Sexual plotting on the part of one player is in fact stimulated by disinterest or fear or loathing on the part of the other. A Master Player of finite sexuality chooses not to take these attitudes as a way of refusing the sexual game, but takes them to be part of the game. Thus my indifference or revulsion to your sexuality becomes in your masterful play a sexual indifference, a sexual revulsion. Suddenly I am no longer indifferent to your game, but indifferent to you within your game, and have ipso facto made myself your opponent. This is the plot of the classic pulp novel and of Hollywood romance: indifferent girl won by ardent boy.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Because sexuality is so rich in the mystery of origin, it becomes a region of human action deeply shaped by resentment, where participants play out a manifold strategy of hostile encounters. The players in finite sexuality not only require the offended resistance of those who refuse to join them in their play, they require the resistance of those who do join them.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Pornography is exciting only so far as it reveals something forbidden, something otherwise unseeable. Thus the mandatory hostility in it, the quality of shock and violence.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“It is convenient to think that sexual misfits violate rules. The matter is subtler by far. They are not concerned to oppose the rules themselves but to engage in competitive struggle by way of those rules. Sexual attractiveness, or sexiness, is effective only to the degree that someone is offended by it.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“No one conceives a child; a child is conceived in the conjunction of sperm and ovum. The mother does not give birth to a child; the mother is where the birth occurs.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“One is never ill in general. One is always ill with relation to some bounded activity. It is not cancer that makes me ill. It is because I cannot work, or run, or swallow that I am ill with cancer. The loss of function, the obstruction of an activity, cannot in itself destroy my health. I am too heavy to fly by flapping my arms, but I do not for that reason complain of being sick with weight. However, if I desired to be a fashion model, a dancer, or a jockey, I would consider excessive weight to be a kind of disease and would be likely to consult a doctor, a nutritionist, or another specialist to be cured of it.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“We can be moved only by way of our veils. We are touched through our veils.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“When I am touched, I am touched only as the person I am behind all the theatrical masks, but at the same time I am changed from within-and whoever touches me is touched as well. We do not touch by design. Indeed, all designs are shattered by touching. Whoever touches and whoever is touched cannot but be surprised. (The unpredictability of this phenomenon is reflected in our reference to the insane as "touched.")”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“The more we are recognized as winners, the more we know ourselves to be losers. That is why it is rare for the winners of highly coveted and publicized prizes to settle for their titles and retire. Winners, expecially celebrated winners, must prove repeatedly they are winners. The script must be played over and over again. Titles must be defended by new contests. No one is ever wealthy enough, honored enough, applauded enough. On the contrary, the visibility of our victories only tightens the grip of the failures in our invisible past.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“When we pass from looking to seeing, we do not therefore lose our sight of the objects observed. Seeing, in fact, does not disturb our looking at all. It rather places us in that territory as its genius, aware that our imagination does not create within its outlines but creates the outlines themselves. The physicist who sees speaks physics with us, inviting us to see that the things we thought were there are not things at all. By learning new limitations from such a a person, we learn not only what to look for with them but also how to see the way we use limitations. A physics so taught becomes poiesis.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“To look is a territorial activity. It is to observe one thing after another within a bounded space-as though in time it can all be seen. Academic fields are such territories. Sometimes everything in a field finally does get looked at and defined-that is, placed in its proper location. Mechanics and rhetoric are such fields. Physics may prove to be. Biological mysteries fall away at an astonishing rate. It becomes increasingly difficult to find something new to look at.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“If to look is to look at what is contained within its limitations, to see is to see the limitations themselves. Each new school of painting is new not because ti now contains subject matter ignored in earlier work, but because it sees the limitations previous artists imposed on their subject matter but could not see themselves. The earlier artists worked within the outlines they imagined; the later reworked their imaginations.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility