Translation Issues

Axelos expresses this context and its torsions in extremis. Axelos is highly attentive to all the currents that we have enumerated in his own account of the destiny of play, the play of the game of the world.

We should say a few words about Axelos’s words. First and foremost, the word ‘jeu’. It is, although the term is misleading, perhaps the keyword of Axelos’s entire enterprise. Just like the German Spiel, which similarly troubles the translation of Fink,^[34] jeu lacks the separated English interplay of ‘game’ and ‘play’. It signifies both, a circumstance which has incalculable consequences for this text. As Lydia H.

French mathematicians rendered game as jeu and created a heterolinguis- tic supersign jeu/game in the course of introducing John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’s mathematical theory of games applicable to economics and nuclear warfare. When this supersign crossed the Atlantic in the guise of French theory, the English signified of jeu/game fell by the wayside and the word jeu reentered English as a different supersign, play/ jeu, to authorize something like a free play of signifiers to the American literary critic.^[35]

One of the frustrations of this situation is that von Neumann and Morgenstern had already indicated in a footnote that ‘the French terminology is tolerably unambiguous: “game” = “jeu,” “play” = “partie.”’^[36]

For Axelos himself, however - who was very aware, as the reader of this book will soon also be, of the impact and implications of cybernetics, game theory, and their associated technologies - the confounding ambiva­lence of the French jeu is part of the point. This renders the play of play and game in French absolutely impossible to render consistently into English. There is often no way to decide whether ‘play’ or ‘game’ is the better read­ing. To attempt - as we initially considered - something like gameplay or game/play is also misleading, too decisive. And an entire semantic net­work of terms, such as enjeu (stakes, prize), enjoue (cheerful, playful), dejouer (to thwart, to outmanoeuvre, to evade), en joue! (take aim!), mettre en joue (take aim at) and so on, remain both active and lost in translation. The reader should then keep in mind that almost every instance of ‘play’ or ‘game’ that appears in this translation may well also have been rendered by its absent counterpart.

Comparable difficulties go for other keywords.

We need also note, again following Heidegger, the play between ‘L’etre’ and 4^,etant^,, between being and beings.

Given that Heidegger’s thinking of technology is also so important for Axelos, we have had to think very carefully about all the different terms the latter uses that are in this semantic ballpark, including technique, tech- nicisme, technicite, technologique. Axelos plays on little differences - la tech­nique and des techniques, for instance - whose senses are often quite hard to render directly. Although we believe the decisions we have made are defensible in this regard, there is still nevertheless a question mark hanging over their heads and their hearts: we trust the reader will treat our deci­sions with healthy suspicion. Something similar goes for our translation of echaufaudage - literally, scaffold, scaffolding - which also is a kind of trans­position of Heidegger’s Gestell, a ‘set-up’ or, as a standard Englishing puts it, ‘enframing’. It is perhaps also worth mentioning that Gestell has elsewhere been rendered in French as dispositif (‘apparatus’, ‘device’), sometimes as arraisonnement (this latter word is rarely used by Axelos).

Other difficulties perhaps already familiar to the English reader of late twentieth-century French philosophy might include those with such words as pouvoir (‘to be able’, but also ‘power’) as against puissance (potency, force). Here, we have simply translated Axelos’s phrase ‘les grandes puissances et les forces elementaires du monde’ as ‘the great powers and elemental forces of the world’. There is the hoary chestnut of how to translate connaissance (rec­ognition, knowing, familiarity) as opposed to savoir (science, knowledge): we have sometimes marked this explicitly, but at other times, taking the risk that the phrase and its context don’t seem to inflect the term one way or another, we have silently translated it.

There are a number of words less difficult to translate, but which are given singular inflections by their part in the Axelos armature. The adjective planetaire is one of these. While it is directly rendered as ‘planetary’, it also retains a cosmic reference with Heideggerean connotations. The French word is linked to plans, planes, flattenings, platitude and many other terms of import to Axelos. The planets in Greek are literally wanderers, errant superlunary bodies, which has the further bond in Axelos’s thought to what he calls errance (errancy), the levelling errancy of being and thought in the game of the world.

Although there are many other noteworthy aspects of Axelos’s vocabu­lary and style that might be mentioned, there are two further issues of crucial importance. The first is our translation of ‘Gela’, which titles and orients a significant section of this book. Cela is a pronoun that could be rendered either as ‘this’ or as ‘that’. We considered, as the German translation of the book gives it, turning cela into It (Es). However, in French Qa is the stand­ard translation for Freud’s It (Id in English), and so is misleading here.^[38] So should cela be this rather than that? The standard French translation of the term das Diese (‘the this’) in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit provides: le ceci. If these considerations may seem otiose to the common reader (if such indeed exists), the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has dedicated an important study to the role of the demonstrative pronoun in German phenomenology. He writes:

Da and diese (like ci and questo in Italian, like hic the adverb of place and hic the demonstrative pronoun in Latin, and also like there and this in English) are morphologically and etymologically connected. Both stem from the Greek root to, which has the form pa in Gothic. From a gram­matical point of view, these particles belong to the sphere of the pronoun (more precisely the demonstrative pronoun) - that is, to a grammatical category whose definition is always a point of controversy for theorists of language.^[39]

Agamben points to these particles as critical to the Western philosophical attempts to articulate the negativity of the taking-place of language itself: an incontrovertibly central concern for the thinking of the relation of language and being. In the present context, then, this word cela should be understood as referring to Hegel, Heidegger and Freud’s uses of Diese (this), Da (there) and Es (it), but is irreducible to them. Hence we have decided on the ‘That’.

Another translation issue stems from an encyclopaedic encryption: despite at times directly quoting other world-historic thinkers, Axelos tends not to disclose his sources. What presents for us translators a ‘merciful absence of references’, as our amicable advisor Dr Robert Boncardo put it, is for the reader almost a rite of passage: those who ask do not need to know. Some passages appear to speak to an initiated circle of those who know the key texts for the themes discussed without the need to spell it out. Although we started to uncover the hidden references by adding footnotes, we choose to side with Axelos to let the reader play this game. However, when we found Axelos disclosing the source and citing lengthier passages, we chose existing English translations.^[40] Like the original text, our translation has only one footnote, linked to the very last sentence of the book.

Adding to the enigma, Axelos, who acted as Heidegger’s translator and himself published in German, scatters isolated German sentences across the chapters. For the English reader’s ease we have provided our own transla­tions of German phrases in parentheses immediately following.

One final but very delicate point concerns our decision to render Axelos’s French in as gender-neutral a fashion as we could. In French, all nouns are gendered male or female, and at the time at which Axelos was writing ‘l’homme’, man, could still function as a quasi-synonym for the human being per se. Should we simply and directly translate homme as man - with abso­lute fidelity to the existing text - and be done with it? This would probably be the most straightforward and justifiable route. Yet it is necessary to affirm that the English language of the early twenty-first century has fundamen­tally shifted in its relationship to gender. ‘Man’ can no longer masquerade or impose itself as an abstract universal, and cannot under any reasonable description today be given such a function - even if in this case we pleaded the priority of grammar or textual fidelity. We felt that we could no longer take the historical markers of the politics of grammar and grammatical gender as secondary or marginal. We did not take this decision lightly; on the contrary, it has proven to be an ongoing anxiety for the entirety of our work on this translation.

It is not as if Axelos was not already considering the import and conse­quences of the sexual revolution under way - his writings expressly seek to affirm the necessity of the transformation of ‘man’, of humanity - although he was still in a world in which the grammar could be deployed without the current urgent intense planetary questioning of the status and stability of gender. Yet Axelos was in his own way already very attentive to the sexua- tion of language too. We have therefore made the decision to translate ‘man’ throughout in such terms as ‘human’, ‘people’ or otherwise as far as that was possible without undue falsification, given Axelos at these moments him­self tends to use humain and homme in free variation. As a result, we have also opted mostly for an accompanying ‘their’ and ‘they’, ‘them’ and ‘it’ - barbarisms from the point of traditional English grammar, but a solution which hopefully still functions adequately enough here. This is of course far from an ideal situation and solution. It raised (and raises) many further questions. What about the monotheistic patriarchal God, for example, not least because God is grammatically masculine in French? As the reader will see, we have kept the gendered language when the context requires it.^[41]

Caillois has made the critical point that: ‘a game which one would be forced to play would at once cease being play. It would become constraint, drudgery from which one would strive to be freed.’^[42] This is certainly one of the features of play that sets Axelos at once inside and against the cyber­netic closure, for which not only is there a stringent distinction between ‘game’ and ‘play’, but gaming is mandatory - there are everywhere only games - and such games are all ultimately organised according to the prin­ciples of economic warfare. In our own time - the plague-times of late capitalism - the managerialism of the multinational capitalist corpora­tion has, merging techniques drawn from the history of slavery and of extermination with those drawn from the history of play, forged what is essentially a new paradigm in the control of labour-relations: what is now widely called ‘gamification’. Norbert Wiener’s fever dream of ‘the human use of human beings’ has become nightmarish in its coupling of capital surplus-extraction with new forms of technical expropriation under the heading of play itself.