Article

Thesis Eleven
2017, Vol. 143(1) 82–96
On gambling: The ª The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0725513617741166
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Mario Wenning
University of Macau, China

Abstract
The gambler’s probing of luck in games of chance cannot be reduced to rational cal-
culation. The art of gambling flourishes at the margins of societies and undermines the
correlation of effort and entitlement. This paper interprets the peculiar thrill of
gambling in modern times by drawing on social systems theory and critical theory. It
argues that gambling is a specific mode of agency that consists in a playful engagement
with risk and contingency. The gambler reveals a highly aroused and yet passive con-
sciousness. Success in gambling depends on the art of proper timing as well as a
preconscious awareness of fortune.

Keywords
Benjamin, Fortuna, gambling, Luhmann, risk

A gambler engages risk and seeks fortune in situations marked by uncertainty. In a

period that has been analysed in terms of growing risk (Beck, 1986, 2007; Luhmann,
1991), the increase in various forms of gambling has taken on special importance. The
rise and expansion of games of chance, which started during the late 18th century and
intensified during the 19th and 20th centuries, has had a significant cultural impact.
Modernity can be considered an age of chance in which agents are increasingly forced to
be players (Huizinga, 1949; Caillois, 1962; Goffman, 1969; Reith, 1999; Bolz, 2014).
Initially an aristocratic pastime, gambling has become widespread and influential. The
democratization of games of chance, ranging from roulette to lottery, has brought about a
transformation in the social function that gambling fulfils. At the beginning of the 21st
century, gambling has expanded beyond being a subsystem for entertainment purposes.
From a socio-psychological perspective, games of chance have increasingly taken on the

Corresponding author:
Mario Wenning, Philosophy and Religious Studies Programme, Avenida da Universidade, University of Macau,
Taipa, Macau SAR E21–4109, China.
Email: mwenning@umac.mo
Wenning 83

function of offering modern agents opportunities to explore and cope with chance and
contingency (Lübbe, 1998). While gambling is rooted in playing, it is distinguished from
other games – such as sports, computer games or games of skill – in which coping with
contingencies does not require the same degree of risk aversion.
The competences that the gambler draws on and cultivates are particularly relevant in
times of increased uncertainty. These competences include an awareness of chance and
proper timing. Whether merely experienced or rooted in objective transformation pro-
cesses, increasing processes of social and technological acceleration add to a widening
sense of not knowing or being able to predict the future based on past experiences (Rosa
2013a, 2013b). This increase in uncertainty in light of changing expectations or the
expectation of constant change has contributed to a transformation of character. Modern
agents are increasingly drifters or players with a situational rather than an evolving
identity (Sennett, 1998). Given the prediction that tomorrow’s technologies, expecta-
tions and practices will be significantly different from those of today, modern agents are
forced to adopt and cultivate an attitude that is open to surprises.
The gambler is a character type specialized in dealing with an increase in the speed of
transformation, chance and risk. Part of his or her expertise consists in welcoming and
embracing rather than fearing and trying to avoid risk. Cultivating a risk awareness
focused on testing luck while seeking fortune allows the gambler to embrace what is
being endured by those who do not gamble. Rather than being a marginal figure, the
gambler has become a modern mode of existence. Gambling as a form of life thrives in a
time marked by growing uncertainties. The increase in gambling practices suggests a
radical transformation of forms of agency. Gambling replaces the traditional paradigm of
work that was established on the expectation of a reward based on sustained effort.
Throwing the dice or betting on a number in a game of roulette determines significant
gains or losses that cannot be predicted. Placing one’s trust in a card or on a number in a
lottery breaks with ordinary forms of rational agency. The fixation on goals and their
pursuit through long-term strategies has characterized the processes of classical moder-
nization, but becomes less important under conditions of late modernity.
Because it is viewed as an art that engages and embraces chance, gambling provides
late modern agents with the kind of coping skills required for societies in which the
pursuit of long-term goals and accompanying modes of identity formation has become
increasingly scarce in late modernity. An interpretation of the rationality of gambling is
thus not limited to forms of gaming in casinos; instead, it reveals what Marxists once
referred to as social totality. Modern agents gamble more. Furthermore, whatever they
do outside of casinos increasingly takes on the character of gambling. In particular, those
areas of modern societies where long-term planning and control have become difficult
require gambling skills to cope with increasing uncertainties.1
Gambling has been met with suspicion and awe alike. It promises effortless reward
but also threatens to leave the gambler with devastating loss. One moment decides
over one’s fortune. Fortune, traditionally depicted as the goddess Fortuna, is repre-
sented as both copious and dangerous. She who plays with fortune transgresses what
responsible agents are normally expected to do. Since its inception, gambling has thus
refused normalization. It is not just one activity among others. As the paradigmatic
form of a ‘guilty pleasure’, gambling is both desired and frowned upon, permitted and
84 Thesis Eleven 143(1)

Figure 1. Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler (1922), directed by Fritz Lang.

prohibited. Casinos, literally ‘little houses’, are oases of luck at the outskirts of
societies and political regimes. They are usually built at the margins of well-ordered
communities, in deserts, on reservations or in special administrative regions. This
spatial confinement corresponds to the stigmatization of gambling as a psychological
as well as moral pathology. Seen from a moral perspective, gambling appears as a
dangerous and potentially ruinous vice that needs to be, at best, tolerated or, if it has
advanced to the point of a compulsion in the form of suffering from gambling
addiction, subjected to forms of therapy.
Popular culture and the arts have turned to gambling to interpret the transformation of
agency in modern societies. In Fritz Lang’s 1922 film Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler, the
protagonist is the impersonation of modern gambling (ir)rationality. Dr. Mabuse plays
the role of ‘der Spieler’ in the triple sense of being a gambler, an actor and a puppeteer.
Mabuse’s gamble involves playing with the people he comes across. Mabuse is adept at
deploying schemes to trick others.
The opening shot shows that Mabuse picks his victims just as he chooses his dis-
guises, his personas, from a hand of cards (Figure 1). He tricks one of his victims, the
millionaire Edgar Hull, during a game of cards into undertaking a complete risk, va
banque, only to lose everything. Mabuse, a psychoanalyst with hypnotic powers, tricks
Edgar Hull through an intense and prolonged stare.
As symbolized by the clock in the opening sequence of the film, gambling is a
temporal art. Time passes quickly during the game; it is being condensed and then it
comes to a seeming standstill in the moment of danger when one’s lot is being decided.
The moment of danger interrupts the temporal continuum and brings the accelerated time
of modernity to a momentary halt. The gambler does not think about the past or the
future. He is only immersed in the present moment. Mabuse uses his hypnotic powers to
exploit his victim’s fatigue. He stares at Hull to lead him to believe that Hull has lost the
Wenning 85

game while, in fact, Hull holds the winning hand, a ten of clubs and the ace of diamonds.
Hull has thus lost not because of chance but because he did not realize that he had what it
takes to win. His deluded consciousness tricked him.
Mabuse, or ‘the great unknown’ as he is also called, stands for everyone and no-one in
particular. He is the friend one has never met but also the friend one is always playing
with and against. At the end of the film, Mabuse becomes mad. He loses his mind and
becomes a victim of the very schemes he sets up, entangled in his own gambling net. As
the title of the first part of the film indicates, the ‘great gambler’ symbolizes ‘the image
of the time’. It does so in the double sense of characterizing the age as well as the change
in temporal dynamics under conditions of racing modernity, in which, paradoxically,
only the moment of decision in gambling provides a momentary escape from having to
rush to an unknown future.
Times of risk, as the proverb has it, are times of danger as well as opportunity.
Gambling is a form of risk-taking that emphasizes the potential for getting lucky and
suspending the altogether more likely outcome of partial or complete loss. This marks
gambling as being distinct from the major forms of confronting uncertainty in modernity.
Usually, modern agents engage risk by guarding themselves against more or less likely
dangers, for example by way of insuring themselves (Luhmann, 1991). Insurances
covering anything from health and material belongings to death are based on the cal-
culations of the likelihood of dangers including accidents, diseases or catastrophes. Yet,
the strategy of meeting risk through the purchase of insurance could itself turn out to be
problematic. It could lead the insured person to create new risks that are triggered
precisely by trying to avoid the originally perceived risks. The systems theorist Elena
Esposito demonstrates the dangers of answering perceived risks with insurance strategies
in the case of the stock market. The invention of derivatives, e.g. in the form of put or call
options, has contributed to stock market crises. It shows that crises are often triggered or
intensified by attempts to curb perceived risk. Esposito contends, ‘the attempt to avoid
risks is itself risky while the search for security is all but secure’ (Esposito, 2007: 79).
The gambler, on the other hand, is uninsured and faces what is not and cannot be fully
controlled by seeing it as an opportunity rather than a loss or danger of loss. The anxiety
that is part of the unique thrill of gambling is the fear of missing the right moment to
seize one’s opportunity. Gambling is a form of risk-taking that, at the same time,
brackets and crucially extends autonomous agency. An immersed gambler chooses to be
determined by chance.2 He puts his fate to the test by way of engaging in a minimal
action such as placing a chip on a number or black or red. She is not free in the abstract
sense of being able to do what she wants to do. However, she is not unfree either, if the
absence of freedom consists in subjecting herself to an unchosen course of events or
someone else’s will. The gambler, in an important sense, chooses to give up control by
undergoing or taking a more or less determinate risk. The thrill of gambling emerges by
being suspended between a loss and a gain that will belong to the player without coming
about by way of her effort. By placing a bet, the gambler enters the mesmerizing
dynamics of letting herself be rewarded or condemned. She is being played with by
subjecting herself to the Greek goddess Tyche or her better known Roman incarnation
Fortuna, equipped with the horn of plenty, the rudder, the globe or the wheel (Patch,
1922; see Figure 2).
86 Thesis Eleven 143(1)

Figure 2. Fortuna, copper engraving by Hans Sebald Beham, 1541, Rijksmuseum.

It is not only the house but also the powers of chance that play with the gambler.
Throughout history, Fortuna has been conjured through the wishes of those depending on
her; she is also feared because of her unpredictability. What distinguishes Fortuna from
the Greek Moirai or the three Roman Fates who control the destinies of humans is that
she stands for the transgression of those expectable laws that cannot be changed. She is
the goddess responsible for the unforeseen and unforeseeable in human existence. She
violates those plans that go according to all too predictable human reason.
Boethius emphasized the ambivalence of Fortuna who, like Janus, is depicted with a
smiling and a frowning face (Boethius, 1991). This sense of the ambivalence of Fortuna
as being responsible for good and bad luck, which dominated antiquity and the middle
ages, has been neglected in modern times. After it turned out to be impossible to
annihilate the worship of the goddess Fortuna, the middle ages, following the guiding
influence of Christianity, settled for a compromise in which fortune would be met by
prudence and made subordinate to the will of God. As Howard Rollin Patch maintains,
‘she [Fortuna] does not award necessarily according to merit, and yet her madness has
method because she is obeying the decrees of a superior will’ (Patch, 1927: 201). During
the Renaissance, Fortuna was increasingly outcast as a vicious and unpredictable force if
not constrained. For example, Machiavelli warned against Lady Fortune. He suggested
Wenning 87

Figure 3. Fortuna, from Francois Antoine Pomey. Pantheum Mythicum, seu Fabulosa Deorum
Historia, Utrecht, 1697.

guarding against her by expanding the reign of effort over that of the whimsical and
potentially destructive powers of chance. By cultivating virtue, restraint and prevention,
Fortuna was to be transformed into a beaten adversary that might be put to some use. To
outsmart fortune’s endless capriciousness, it is necessary to constantly change one’s
strategy in light of new circumstances (Machiavelli, 2008: ch. 25).
Most Christian authors struggled with Fortuna’s lack of discrimination. Like her
counter-goddess or distant cousin, Lady Justice, in some allegorical depictions Fortuna
as well has her eyes veiled to symbolize that she is impartial (see Figure 3). What dis-
tinguishes Fortuna’s impartiality from that of Justicia is that Fortuna does not favour the
good and punish the bad according to desert. She bestows on those who do or do not
deserve her gifts and reminds those who are lucky that their fate will turn worse again.
Fortuna does not rule by way of appropriateness. Instead of the balancing scale with
which Lady Justice strives to weigh different interests and to give to each his or her due,
Fortuna turns a wheel that decides over the cyclically rising and falling destinies of
human beings and governments independent of whether they do or do not deserve their
lot.3 While being indiscriminate to moral judgment or expectable plans of action, For-
tuna does present a universal message. Turning to Lady Fortune demands the cultivation
of a sense of humility when one is benefiting from the gifts of chance. Similar to Lady
Justice, Fortuna also provides a form of consolation and hope in times of misfortune and
hardship. Even the poor wretch might eventually get lucky.
While justice has been the prominent concern of ethics and politics, the ambivalent
goddess Fortuna who blindly bestows and castigates has been increasingly cast aside to
88 Thesis Eleven 143(1)

the margins of society. While she has been cast out of most domains of action, she does
make her appearance in gambling and can be considered the goddess of gambling. By
betting on a certain number or card, the gambler lets Fortuna determine success or
failure. Gambling presupposes a context in which fortune and misfortune take on a
central and explicit role that they otherwise lack. The promise of winning sustains the act
of gambling while the danger of loss adds to its thrill. The nature of that promise and
thrill – as well as the way by which these are being pursued – call for further clarification.
While directors from Fritz Lang to Martin Scorsese and writers from Fyodor Dos-
toyevsky to Stefan Zweig have focused on gambling as a paradigmatic form of modern
agency, this topic has been marginalized by most philosophers.4 If considered at all,
gambling is interpreted, starting from Girolamo Cardano’s De ludo aleae (1663), from
the perspective of rational choice theory and probability calculations. If it is not being
dismissed as pathological or immoral, the modern philosophical discourse on gambling
has aimed at taming, domesticating, and rationalizing chance by developing calculations
and translating them into strategies that promise success (Hacking, 2002; Enzensberger,
2009). Yet, as any gambler will confirm, counting cards is at odds with playing games of
chance. Calculation interrupts the thrill of letting oneself be determined by chance.
Starting in the Renaissance, philosophers attempted to discover the laws of prob-
ability to make risk-taking not only rational but also morally legitimate. Gambling was to
be distinguished from unjustified foolish pursuits. Giovanni Botero was the first to link
risk-taking to achievement when he coined the phrase ‘Chi non risica non guadagna’,
that is, ‘he who does not risk does not win’ (cited in Luhmann, 1991: 18). If it is true, as
the neo-Luhmannian Norbert Bolz suggests, that ‘he who does not gamble is sick’
(2014), the refusal or incapability to gamble amounts to a pathology.
With the invention of probability calculus, Pascal attempted to find laws governing
what, by definition, defies prediction. However, Pascal emphasized that his wager is not
based on measuring the odds by means of secure reasoning. The existence of God cannot
be proven. The gamble whether God exists turns calculation on its head by providing
rational grounds for taking a leap of faith. Pascal realized that infinitely more is at stake
in gambling than weighing one’s options and calculating the possible gains against the
likely losses (Pascal, 1995).
Gambling, as opposed to strategic action based on calculation, is a pursuit in which
the attempt of finding sufficient reason and determining a likely outcome comes to an
end. The simple reason for this is that in a game of chance no law of probability helps the
gambler know what will or should happen next in a particular game, at a particular place,
and during a particular moment of time. As Aristotle observed, ‘It is probable that many
things should happen contrary to probability’ (cited in Enzensberger, 2009: 44).5 It is this
unique game and this unprecedented moment in the game, a game which has neither
determining past nor calculable future, which matters most to her and not the abstraction
of probability calculation. In the act of gambling within games of chance, the gambler
does not only, and often not even primarily, aim to increase her investment by way of
devising success strategies. She puts her fate to the test and thereby experiences the
peculiar thrill of gambling.
The gambler asks what destiny has in store for her by showing whether she can
successfully predict the future, which is, at the same time, known to be uncertain.
Wenning 89

Gambling is thus a late heir of practices of magic and in particular divination in the midst
of highly rationalized risk societies. Niklas Luhmann characterizes divination, the pre-
cursor of modern forms of risk-taking, as follows: ‘while it could not provide a reliable
certainty, at least it guaranteed that one’s own decision did not arouse the anger of the
gods or other numinous forces, but that it was secured by way of having contact with
mysterious determinations of fate’ (1991: 16). Mystery and determination, aspects of our
action that are usually opposed, join forces in gambling.
While it has been largely ignored, gambling is a highly relevant topic for critical
theorists and systems theorists alike. It is a paradigmatic activity in which agents both
subject themselves to and react against the increase of chance in modern societies,
that is, in societies that have witnessed an increasing awareness of the limits of
control over the consequences of decisions and actions with unforeseeable conse-
quences. Gambling has a dual nature. It is both symptomatic of the modern social
order and bears a transgressive potential that could, even if only for a moment,
disrupt that very order. A focus on gambling reveals the ambivalence of the modern
semantics of risk-taking. While human beings have always been subjected to dangers,
risk, as Luhmann and Beck have argued, is genuine to modernity and highly complex
social orders. The semantics of risk combine the possibility of danger and chance.
Risk consciousness consists of an increase in the knowledge and awareness of the
essential limits of one’s knowledge and practical control. Risk emerges in modernity
because both imagined and real dangers – which are, at least in significant part,
produced by modern reason and technology – cannot be controlled by modern means.
Dangers such as the environmental crisis, transmission of sexual diseases and col-
lapse of currencies and the financial market are different from previous dangers in
that they are at least partially created or influenced by human agents. Their conse-
quences exceed human control and are yet in part brought about by processes and
technologies that did not exist prior to modernity.
Surprisingly, Niklas Luhmann, who is perhaps the last theoretician with the intention
of developing a comprehensive theory of society, did not analyse gambling despite its
increasing importance in modern risk societies. This omission is even more surprising,
because Luhmann did have a remarkable sense of how agents are forced to cope with the
uncertainties and dangers created by modern means. It does seem paradoxical that agents
with an increasing awareness of dangers that cannot be domesticated, but can at best be
insured against, spend their time – and savings – voluntarily engaging in practices of
gambling. The question arises: why are societies that are marked by a heightened
awareness of risk as well as a sophisticated system of insurances witnessing an increase
in gambling? Assuming that the ‘house always wins’, the gambler must appear as either
irrational or he must employ a different form of rationality that is at odds with the
mentality of countering risk with insurance strategies.
What is this specific rationality, and what motivation lies behind this seemingly
irrational activity? From the perspective of rational choice theory, in some contexts, it is
rational to accept likely losses if the possibilities exist for disproportional gain. The
semantics of risk includes not only the possibility of danger but also the promise of
disproportional reward.6 In spite of its appeal, the model of explaining gambling as a
calculation of weighing the potential of significant gains against potential losses misses
90 Thesis Eleven 143(1)

the nature of gambling. In particular, rational choice theory when applied to gambling
misses the promise and the unique thrill that lures the gambler to the gaming table.
As I have argued, the appeal or thrill of gambling consists, at least partially, in making
the risk explicit as something that one chooses and subjects oneself to willingly. The
gambler seeks to confirm whether he or she is connected to, knows and is able to predict
what appears as mere chance. In contrast to the typical risks encountered in risk societies,
the gambler engages in accepted or chosen risks. He makes a choice that is neither the
conclusion of a chain of developments nor a choice that is to be expected by other agents
in the same game. In systems-theoretical parlance, gambling is second-order risk-taking.
The risk-taker chooses to be determined by his bet on chance. He undergoes more or less
calculated risks with the motivation of taming or at any rate bracketing or forgetting, for
a moment at least, the first-order risks and consequences of these risks faced in society,
including the risks that force him to gamble. Most of the risks that modern agents
encounter are not chosen and their significance exceeds confined contexts of action.
Gambling, by contrast, takes place in a closely delimited context in which the subject
willingly submits himself to a chosen risk. The risk that lures the gambler is redefined as
an opportunity to prove himself without acting, however small the chance of success may
be. The thrill of gambling is constituted by the specific combination of the activity, on
the one hand, of placing a bet, with the passivity, on the other hand, of letting oneself be
determined by the decisive turn in the game.
While he did not develop a theory of gambling and gambling can be considered a
blind spot of systems theory, Niklas Luhmann interpreted gambling in passing as a
paradoxical form of praxis. In one of his infamous notes, number 7-73 to be precise, he
wrote: ‘games of chance, in psychological terms, coexistence of the highest passivity and
the highest excitement within one mind’ (cited by Kaube, 2007). Luhmann further
specifies this account in Sociological Enlightenment by distinguishing games of chance,
luck or fortune (Glücksspiele) from games of skill (Geschicklichkeitsspiele). The spe-
cific form of ‘Glück’ provided in engaging in Glücksspiele consists in a peculiar coin-
cidence of otherwise juxtaposed states of mind:

In contrast to games of skill, games of fortune (Glücksspiele) enable the putting to rest of
activities, the waiting for chance and thereby the combination of motionless calmness and
the highest excitement within one mind – but just for the moment. Games of fortune provide
‘happiness’ (Glück) in the double sense of bonheur and fortune, but only as momentary
happiness without past and without future. They lack, speaking with the concepts of the
tradition, the fullness of being; they lack [ . . . ] the action, which would wrest the agent free
from the transience of the moment. (Luhmann, 1981: 105–6)

And yet, as we have argued above, gambling is a form of agency, namely one of
letting oneself be determined by chance. According to Luhmann, the specific thrill of
gambling consists in a heightened state of attentiveness in which the agent, without
acting as usual, experiences intensified excitement – what we have called thrill. The
inactive activity of gambling breaks with other actions in that it is not durable and
does not actively translate a plan of action into reality. The gambler places her bet.
She awaits, anxiously filled with expectation about whether the bet will turn out to be
Wenning 91

Figure 4. Run Lola Run (1998), directed by Tom Tykwer.

well-placed. In the moment of truth, she is exposed to Fortuna, with her diverse
manifestations of luck and happiness as much as destiny and fatefulness. Most impor-
tantly, the gambler, while waiting to see where the roulette ball will find its destina-
tion and come to rest, enters into a different relationship with time. This changed
sense of time is characterized, on Luhmann’s account, in terms of a lack. It comes
from a moment of ‘Glück’ that is specific to gambling, as Luhmann argues, in that it
lacks or is detached from past and future.
This sense of the intensification and ultimately suspension of time for the gambler in
the moment of luck is depicted in Tom Tykwer’s 1998 film Run Lola Run. The prota-
gonist, Lola, chances her luck at the gambling table. She represents modern time in that
she is a haunted runner. Lola is forced to acquire 100,000 Marks within 20 minutes to
rescue her boyfriend from being killed by gangsters. After two failed ‘runs’ to get the
money by asking her negligent father and attempting to rob a supermarket, she tries her
luck with the minimal investment she has available in a casino. She puts the all-too-
short-time given to her to the test by interrupting her run and placing her fate in the
roulette ball instead (see Figure 4).
Lola is in a state of both passivity and arousal. The clock above the heads of the
gamblers indicates that it is five minutes to 12:00. She has selected number 20, corre-
sponding to the 20 minutes that were given to her to try to save her boyfriend. Her
gamble will decide over life and death. Lola’s initial gambler’s luck is met by the
suspicion of the croupier and the casino administrator who asks her, the untimely
intruder, to leave. She insists that she will only stay for one more game. Lola, the red-
haired rogue played by Franka Potente, is the anomaly in the casino in which the
bourgeois spend their pastime and pocket money. Lola’s excited screaming might or
might not be efficacious in determining the course of the roulette ball. It is both act and
response, ultimate excitement and painful thrill. It is not clear whether it was Fortuna or
92 Thesis Eleven 143(1)

Lola’s scream that steered the ball to the lucky number; what is certain is that the scream
burst the champagne glasses and the ear drums of the bystanders. Lola wins a second
time against all odds, thereby acquiring the necessary resource to rescue her lover’s life.
Winning twice by betting on the same fated number increases the improbability of her
success exponentially. Accelerated racing time, which dominates the entire movie like a
basso continuo, is interrupted for a seemingly endless moment. Time comes to a
rhythmic halt when the roulette ball finds its unlikely destination by hitting and resting
on the lucky number.
What does this episode of gambler’s luck suggest about the role of gambling for a
critical conception of praxis? Luhmann, as we have seen in the quote above, denies that
gambling could be considered to be an action since it is restricted to a moment and lacks
the connection to past and future that could provide it with durability. It is at this point
where a turn to critical theory could prove suggestive. There is no doubt that many
authors associated with critical theory have had an uneasy relationship with luck and
gambling as well. Adorno considers games of chance to be part of the culture industry.
He argues that ‘games of chance are the opposite of art’ because ‘the playdrive has
always been fused with the primacy of blind collectivity’ (Adorno, 1997: 317). A reason
for the suspicion of gambling concerns the nature of luck and chance. Luck, by defi-
nition, is not distributed fairly or evenly. The acts of Fortuna display a capriciousness
that can and often are opposed to reason. In contrast to the rationalist tradition, it is not so
much the problem of unpredictability that stands in the way of acknowledging gambling
as it is a transgressive and potentially emancipatory practice; the normative ambivalence
of gambling derives from the fact that gambler’s luck does not – or at least does not
typically – befall those who most need it. While Fortuna might be impartial, she does not
always rule according to the principle of equality. The worst off are structurally pre-
vented from even entering a casino. Indeed, Lola was almost not admitted because she
lacked the money necessary for the minimum bet. Even when the needy and dis-
advantaged occasionally do enter the casino, it is rarely on equal terms. On the other
hand, the casino can also serve as a great leveller, because luck is blind to status and
power (Rescher, 1995: 150). While those who are lucky often continue to benefit from
their status, they too can lose it all. Conversely, at least occasionally, a poor wretch in
existential need such as Lola does get lucky.
In contrast to most normative theorists, Walter Benjamin considers gambling to be
essential to the project of critical theory.7 For Benjamin, gambling provides a model –
even if this does not amount to a theory – of what revolutionary action could be. Ben-
jamin experimented with gambling, and he conceived of his work, especially that of the
Arcades Project, as a game of hazard (Weidemann, 1992). In Benjamin’s remarks on
play, gambling surfaces as a distinctive kind of agency and the gambler as a specifically
modern form of life.8 It is a special form of the pursuit of happiness, one that breaks with
ordinary conceptions of time and action. Games of chance promise fortune, which cannot
be directly aimed at through action – as much as it can be desired and claimed by
gamblers. Gambling goes beyond mere chance in that the gamble transforms chance into
the destiny one lets oneself be determined by. A gambling personality is one that refuses
to only determine and only be determined by what can be predicted or brought about
directly by courses of action. The gambler thus appears as an anomaly or even an insult
Wenning 93

to those who refuse to be drawn to gamble freely. Benjamin claims in his typically
cryptic manner that someone ‘who has never heard the language of fortune [ . . . ] for
whom everything is mere chance (Zufall)’ misses that ‘what he calls thus [chance] is in
the grammar of happiness like what in our grammar is the irregular verb, namely the
trace of original force (Kraft) which has not been blurred’ (Benjamin, 1991a: 351).
Although Benjamin emphasizes that he is not developing a theory of gambling, his
conversation on ‘the hand of fortune’ presents a critique of prominent attitudes toward
gambling. He objects to both the demonization as well as the rationalization of gambling.
The gambling hand, for Benjamin, symbolically mediates between the head and the
heart. The head, which stands for the capacity to use reason to pursue strategies, always
comes too late. The gambler, if he follows his head instead of his hand, ‘might “think”
what is right, but he will act in a “false” way. He will stand there just like many losers
who tear their hair and scream “I knew it!”.’ While the head comes too late in under-
standing, the heart, which stands for morality and emotional commitment, when taken by
itself, is incapable of intervening. It lacks the motivation or the courage necessary for
timely action. One of Benjamin’s imaginary gamblers further refines the function of
gambling as a playful engagement in a self-induced moment of danger:

Gambling [ . . . ] is in reality an artificially created danger. And gambling is in a way a

blasphemous probing of our presence of spirit (Geistesgegenwart). For in danger the
body communicates with things by way of bypassing the head. It is only once we,
already rescued, take a breath that we become aware of what we have really done. In
acting we are ahead of our knowledge. And play is a discredited affair, because it is
unscrupulous in provoking the finest and most precise of what our organism achieves.
(Benjamin, 1991b: 776)

We have suggested that gambling is a testing ground for coping with the inevitable
dangers encountered in risk societies. It is a transgression or ‘blasphemy’ because it
ventures beyond ‘responsible’ behaviours that would be conducted either exclusively by
the head or the heart. Gambling does not consist in a responsible ethics of risk (Nida-
Rümelin et al., 2012); neither does it succumb to a mere strategy in which the end would
be known. For Benjamin, it follows that gambler’s luck is not a matter of getting it right
by chance or decree, but is revealed, rather, by being sensitive to the hints presented by
the game at hand. Gambling well depends on the cultivation of a heightened state of
awareness, a somatic intuition, a presence of mind (Geistesgegenwart) that puts the
gambler into contact with the forces of fate. This somatic intuition allows one to cor-
rectly read the hints as signs of fortune and bet on this fortune. This skill entails that the
gambler can read the signs suggesting when she should stop or continue. She knows or
intuits when she is or is not riding on a streak of luck. The gambler is afraid not so much
of losing but of missing the moment of opportunity to place the right bet by stretching her
luck too far:

The particular danger that threatens the gambler lies in the fateful category of arriving ‘too
late,’ of having ‘missed the opportunity.’ We could learn something from this about the
character of the gambler as a type. Last, the best that has thus far been written about
gambling focuses on the factor of acceleration, acceleration and danger. [ . . . ] gambling
94 Thesis Eleven 143(1)

generates by way of experiment the lightning-quick process of stimulation at the moment of

danger, the marginal case in which presence of mind becomes divination – that is to say, one
of the highest, rarest moments in life. (Benjamin, 2005: 298)

There is no guarantee or likelihood that gambling, taken as a model of exemplary

action, will lead to success. The gambler’s presence of mind fails to directly translate
into transformative action and is bound to the present gamble. At best, gambling pre-
figures a different kind of praxis and, for Benjamin, a different kind of politics as well,
one that requires a different attitude to uninsured risk-taking. At the very least, gambling
continues to be a blasphemy and provocation.

Acknowledgements
This paper has greatly benefited from instructive comments from Nahum Brown, Agnes Heller and
Alexei Procyshyn. The author would like to express his gratitude to them.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article: The article is part of the research project “Logics of Achievement”,
which has been supported by a Multi-Year Research Grant from the University of Macau.

Notes
1. To take an example, the metaphor of gambling has been widely extended. Among other areas, it
has been common to interpret political decision-making processes by drawing on the analogy of
gambling. See, for example, Habermas (2015, 2016).
2. Seel (2002) develops a revised conception of autonomy understood as the capacity of letting
oneself be determined.
3. In Seneca’s tragedy Agamemnon, the chorus expresses that, for Fortuna, rise and decline
succeed each other in cycles: ‘Whatever Fortune has raised on high, she lifts but to bring low’
[Quidquid in altum Fortuna tulit, ruitura levat] (Seneca, 1968: 11).
4. A noteworthy exception to the common omission or rationalization of gambling is Rescher
(1995: 119–39).
5. See also Aristotle’s related discussion of the sea battle paradox, i.e. the problem of future
contingents, in On Interpretation, 18 b 23 (1963).
6. Luhmann distinguishes the semantics of risk from the semantics of danger (Luhmann, 1991).
For the purpose of this paper, I presuppose that risk and danger are closely connected in
gambling (see also the discussion following of Benjamin and risk). The risk that is encountered
in games of chance consists in exposing oneself to a moment of danger – even if only in the
mode of play – in which a binary decision or set of decisions is confirmed (in the case of
success) or disconfirmed (in the case of loss) by a mechanism of chance. Depending on the
nature and extent of the investment, as well as the process and outcome of a particular game, the
gambler can claim to have good or bad luck, fortune or misfortune.
Wenning 95

7. Benjamin’s reflections on games of chance are developed in Chapter IX of ‘On Some Motifs in
Baudelaire’ (I: 632–637), ‘Notes on a Theory of Play’ (VI: 188–190), ‘The Way to Success in
Thirteen Theses’ (IV: 349–352) and ‘Play’ (IV: 426), as well as ‘The Hand of Fortune: A
Conversation about Play’ (IV: 771–777).
8. Benjamin’s reflections on the modern gambler are influenced by Georg Simmel. Simmel
interpreted the gambler as a character type who seeks adventure by exposing herself to a form
of chance that is endowed with meaning (Simmel 2010).

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Author biography
Mario Wenning is Associate Professor in the Philosophy and Religious Studies Pro-
gramme at the University of Macau. His work focuses on social and political philosophy
as well as aesthetics in an intercultural context. He has published in, among others,
Journal of Chinese Philosophy, Philosophy East and West, Confluence and Studies in
Philosophy and Education and edited special journal issues on intercultural conceptions
of nature (Comparative Philosophy) and the philosophy of film (Contemporary Aes-
thetics). Currently he is working on a book on natural action East and West.