Play On: Isobel Armstrong's <i>The Radical Aesthetic</i>

Abstract Isobel Armstrong contends that the aesthetic has been robbed of radical potential both by its leftist detractors, who denounce it as bourgeois mystification, and by its right-wing defenders, who insist on its transcendence of politics. Against both these positions she proposes a radical aesthetic centered in the concept of play, defined as “the primal experience of culture, the beginnings of representation and its phantasmic mobility and resourcefulness.” Occupying what D. W. Winnicott describes as a “transitional” space between individual and environment, play provides a paradigm for an aesthetic that transfigures reality without evading ethical responsibility. While Armstrong's concept of play derives mainly from psychoanalysis, her argument anticipates recent work on the politics of play in the burgeoning field of game theory. What does it mean to play like a feminist? The present essay considers this question in relation to Armstrong's “taxonomy” of contemporary feminisms and her own creative play with the conventions of academic writing.