Document Type
Article
Abstract
This article takes as its point of departure the fact that playing and tarot cards have generally been ignored as a topic for scholarly research, and suggests a number of reasons as to why this might be the case. While on the one hand cards are perceived as a trivial object, their long association with the occult and gambling further exacerbates the lack of serious interest taken in them. Moreover, because playing cards were imported into Europe from the East, they have been both directly and indirectly conceptualized as signifiers of oriental otherness and treated as a threat to the stability of western subjectivity. In this article the author proceeds by providing a brief history of playing and tarot cards beginning with their introduction into Europe from the orient early in the 14th century, which takes into consideration their negative associations. By highlighting factors that have contributed to the neglect of cards in scholarly work, it is argued that the history of playing cards and their representation in cultural production (literature, painting, film) is significant from a number of critical perspectives. It is pointed out, for example, that many aspects of playing cards' history are related to developments in early printing technology and that, at a more fundamental level, cards are also related to writing, economics and subjectivity. Their affiliation with language and writing, as well as cards' role in economics (speculation and gambling) is examined from a Derridian point of view, in connection with concepts such as trace, absence and authorship. The essay closes with an investigation of the relationship between subjectivity and gambling, and addresses this relationship through the notion of "ostentatious expenditure" introduced by Bataille in La part maudite, as well as Richard Klein's concept of the "negative sublime." Issues of transnationalism, historiography, and Orientalism are at the fore of this study, showing how playing cards, and gaming practices, help reify faulty Western concepts of the Oriental "other."
Repository Citation
Goggin, Joyce. "The Playing Card’s Progress: A Brief History of Cards and Card Games." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 6, no. 1, 2006, pp. 1–30. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol6/iss1/2