ABSTRACT
With the found object, Winnicott expanded the dyadic in psychoanalysis in favour of a tripartite structure (inner and outer realities as well as the transitional in-between). Finding thus becomes the ground for the elaboration of a similar expansion of one of the most problematic of analytic polarities—Eros/Thanatos. This expansion highlights Ludens (Huizinga) as yet a third drive that animates the psyche. Rather than a frontier or abyss, Ludens operates in the space separating Eros from Thanatos as it draws on both for energy and directions. Ludens is play once play has been recognized as pleasurable and hurtful, to the point of being cruel, enlivening and deadening, and sometimes even deadly, innocent and guilty, to the extent where its guilt may be unfathomable. Ludens exposes cruelty as a constitutive component to play, all play, rather than its occasional by-product. In the spirit of analyzing the extreme in order to shed light on the everyday, the pictures of Abu Ghraib detainees from the early noughts illustrate the extent to which Ludens endures, how it operates in a space where means and ends collide, where an action does not suffer the lack of justification since it is forever its own justification and, by extension, consequence.
