If this book begins with the beginnings of the social mistake as a figure of strange social and formal importance, it ends with a meditation on the waning of the mistake’s centrality to social and narrative form. While reading Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game as a late theorization of the conditions that had made the classic realist novel possible, it argues that as a certain form of life has faded, so has the centrality of the mistakes that once nourished that life. There will always be mistakes, slips, moments of embarrassment. What The Rules of the Game shows is that as the world becomes less novelistic, so does the social mistake lose its at once constitutive and destabilizing force.
Keywords: Jean Renoir, games, rules, the novelisitic, cinema, war,