Phenomenological Aspects
Perhaps the first and most decisive reference for Axelos himself is that of phenomenology, above all the work of Martin Heidegger and his disciples, notably Eugen Fink.
In this, Axelos is also a part of the French radicalisa- tion of phenomenology in thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, Derrida and others. Simply put, this tradition attempts to think the internal dispersion and consistency of the concepts and practices of play as simultaneously utterly historical and essentially ontological - and which therefore entails thinking play as ahistorical and non-ontological too. Heidegger, for example, in the course of his own notorious reconstruction of the historicity of the forgetting of (the meaning, and then the truth of) being, engages with Presocratic thinkers, above all Heraclitus, for whom ‘play’ is a fundamental cosmic modality, while offering, in his own vocabulary, a way of thinking games and play which attempts to evade the metaphysical closure. At various key places in his writing, Heidegger poses being and play in proximity. For example, he contemplates a play that ‘plays because it plays’,[16] without rhyme or reason, without foundation, thereby constructing ‘being-in-the-world as archaic play of transcendence’.[17] For Heidegger, this is a kind of attestation that ‘the whatness of being is the Game itself’.[18] Or, as he further phrases it in an important post-World War II essay, which speaks of the interrelation of ‘earth and sky, divinities and mortals’:The gathered presence of the mirror-play of the world, joining in this way, is the ringing. In the ringing of the mirror-playing ring, the four nestle into their unifying presence, in which each one retains its own nature...
Out of the ringing mirror-play the thinging of the thing takes place.[19]Such philologico-poetic reconstructions at once seek to locate the thinker in a situation of thinking beyond the closures of metaphysics, amongst the presencing or eventing of being, affirming the primacy of language as unveiling in, through and against the historicity of this very language.
‘Play’ in such accounts therefore tends towards naming something so fundamental it cannot any longer be considered a region of existence, but indicates the difficulty and destiny of thinking the event of being itself. Time itself needs to be considered, a la the Heraclitean image, like a child playing chess. In taking up and further radicalising this phenomenological sequence, Axelos thinks the game and play as ‘modelling’ the becoming of being and beings themselves. We will return to this quasi-ontological claim below, as its consequences are self-evidently extraordinary. For the moment, however, let us simply underline the centrality for Axelos of the motif of an existential ur-game which plays and is played in and as the fragmentation of every inherited anthropological project.