JACQUELINE DE JONG heritage

Toward the Apogee of Homo Ludens

Thrausma ejournal board

“I don’t want to be remembered. I want to be reenacted in cities without maps, in love without laws, in games without ends.”
Jacqueline de Jong, Letter to no one, 2007[1]

One year has passed since Jacqueline de Jong left this world, not quietly, but as a final détournement. Her death, like her life, was not a conclusion. It was an interruption. And what it interrupts,still is our submission to the present order of things.Where others analyzed the decay of meaning, Jacelyn was already playing in its ruins. More than a theorist, she was a provocateur of perception, one of the few radical spirits who never abandoned the promise of the Situationist International, not the dogmatic, falsified shell it became, but its early, most dangerous current: the idea that everyday life is the real site of revolution.That art, love, space, and time can and must be reinvented, playfully, completely. Her orientation was not historical. It was unapologetically utopian. At its core was a single animating principle: the liberation of Homo Ludens, not of “man who plays” as a hobby, but of the playful species as a destiny. Play not as an activity, but as an ontology.

“To play is not to escape. It is to interrupt the logic of work, family, war, and identity. It is to act as if another world is already here and sometimes, it is.”
JdJ, marginalia in a copy of Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, 1981[2]

I. From Spectacle to Situation

J.de Jong understood the society of the spectacle not merely as a media phenomenon but as a psychic condition , the colonization of spontaneity by roles. She hated roles. Even the role of “radical artist” disgusted her. She rejected being labeled as a Situationist, even as her acts bore the unmistakable trace of its detourned lineage. She once walked out of a panel at the Stedelijk Museum mid-sentence, saying:

“If I stay here another minute I’ll turn to stone. This isn’t discourse. This is self-taxidermy.”[3]

To her, situation meant not theory, not urban play as design, but a break , a living, transient explosion of the ordinary. Not organized play but disorganizing play. The crack in the concrete.

“Every real situation is a collapse. Something expected fails, and inside that failure, possibility leaks in.”[4]

Her interventions from transforming alleys into dream corridors, to orchestrating silent midnight games across abandoned city squares were not “artworks.” They were rehearsals for a life no one dared live yet.

II. Toward the Apogee of Homo Ludens

Jacqueline de Jong was not the first to invoke Homo Ludens, but she may have been its most serious advocate. She read Huizinga and then turned him on his head. To her, Homo Ludens was not a scholarly model, it was a revolutionary subjectivity.

“There are only two kinds of people: those who play, and those who punish play. Which side are you on?”[5]

She saw play not as frivolity, but as the only truly political act left under late capitalism because it cannot be accounted for, monetized, or predicted without ceasing to be what it is. Her critique of work, not unlike the post-Situationists, went beyond anti-capitalism. It was a rejection of work as form, even in the “liberated” or “creative” sense.

“Work is what we do when we’re afraid to be free. Play is what we do when we stop fearing each other.”[6]

Jacqueline de Jong demanded a ludic society not in aesthetics alone, but in structure: non-hierarchical, anti-teleological, erotic, improvisational, childlike without being childish. Not the neoliberal Disneyland of “experience culture,” but the dangerous, unpredictable terrain of play as insurrection.

III. The Refusal to Perform

She refused commodification at every turn. Publishers gave up on her after she rejected every contract that included marketing obligations. She declined retrospectives. She refused to appear in documentaries unless they allowed her to blur her own face. She even rejected the idea of legacy.

“To have a legacy is to become dead in advance. I want to haunt, not be honored.”[7]

She lived largely outside the institutions that co-opt radical energies but not in retreat. She was everywhere: organizing invisible festivals, re-wiring public signs, sending unsolicited manifestos to municipal councils, initiating temporary communes in rural barns and city rooftops. Always ephemeral. Always untraceable.

IV. The Unwritten Manifesto

What Jacqueline de Jong left behind was not a corpus but a current. Her writings exist mostly in fragments: in notebooks, in scattered mail, in the memories of friends and strangers. She resisted finality. Her work remains uncollected by design.Still, the outlines of her unwritten manifesto can be traced in her scattered words:

Destroy routine.Make space for useless joy. Let play override function.Trust the dérive more than the program. Create without audience, without proof, without fear.

“A playground with rules isn’t a playground. It’s a training ground for obedience. Smash the swings if you must, but let chaos back in.”[8]

V. Living Her Now

One year after her death, we ask not what Jacqueline de Jong achieved but what remains unfinished. In the face of growing authoritarianism, ecological collapse, and digital control, her insistence on ludic being feels less like idealism and more like the only dignified refusal.To live like her is not to imitate her. It is to take risk seriously again. To break from the passive spectatorship of late postindustrial society. To turn one’s back on the administered life. Not mourning but mimicking her disobedience. Her laughter. Her wild invitations to the impossible.She is not gone. She is waiting. In the next skipped meeting, the next unexpected kiss, the next game that starts with no instructions.