Translators’ Introduction
Justin Clemens and Hellmut Monz
With the present publication, Kostas Axelos’s masterpiece The Game of the World is finally - belatedly - available in English translation, over fifty years since its first appearance in France in 1969.1
This belatedness is at once understandable and puzzling.
It is understandable, at least in the usual ways in which the market understands what is understandable.
The book is gargantuan, a grand tome of scholarship, intelligence and vision; it is extraordinarily ambitious in its conceptual and linguistic scope; it presents many difficulties for interpretation and translation, even for cognoscenti of late twentieth-century French language philosophy. Its commercial potential is not necessarily perspicuous.Yet this delay is also puzzling. After all, hasn’t anglophone literary theory and philosophy - which has put figures such as Henri Lefebvre, Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze onto university reading lists around the globe, and even at times permitted such terms as ‘deconstruction’ into mainstream political and journalistic discourse - been entirely transformed by postWorld War II ‘French Thought’, its contexts, its conditions, its terms of reference and ambitions? Moreover, do not the very same luminaries expressly name Axelos as a critical figure in this context? For Lefebvre, Axelos is ‘the first or one of the first of a species that supersedes the derisory human’ and ‘extends philosophy through Heidegger, but does so by turning his back on New Roman",serif;color:black'>[1] him’.[2] Derrida, too, credits Axelos’s theses regarding the play of the world.[3] For his part, Deleuze not just acknowledges Axelos[4] but recognises in him the ‘salvation of philosophy’, proclaiming that ‘Axelos is to Heidegger what a kind of Zen is to the Buddha’.[5] Examples could be multiplied.
As these encomia also attest, a crucial part of Axelos’s achievement has been his development of a unique and radical thinking of the notion/s of the ‘game’ and of ‘play’. Play is not only central to Axelos’s work, but one of his major contributions has been to show how pivotal it is to the history of philosophy, extending from Presocratic to contemporary thought.
Indeed, Axelos maintained this standpoint throughout his life. As he states in an interview from 2004:The world deploys itself as a game. That means that it refuses any sense, any rule that is exterior to itself. The play of the world itself is different from all the particular games that are played in the world. Almost two- and-a-half thousand years after Heraclitus, [Friedrich] Nietzsche, [Martin] Heidegger, [Eugen] Fink and I have insisted on this approach to the world as game.[6]
With the world as game, Axelos is alluding to an influential statement by the ancient Greek thinker Heraclitus: ‘Time is a child playing a game; the child’s kingdom.’[7] Saying that Heraclitus plays a key role for Axelos would therefore be an understatement.8 Moreover, Axelos is part of a heterodox tradition for which the Heraclitean pronouncement proves determining, and his work self-consciously draws on as well as extends this tradition in a number of ways. For example, as part of his book series Arguments, it was Axelos himself who published the French translation of Spiel als Weltsymbol,9 the first lengthy study of the world as play by the German phe- nomenologist Eugen Fink, in 1966, only six years after its original release.10 Echoing the anglophone delay of Axelos’s masterpiece on play, Fink’s book had to wait fifty years to be translated into English as Play as Symbol of the World.11 Axelos, who was himself a key contributor to the development of many of the key trends of what is often denominated ‘post-structuralism’ in the anglophone world, has somehow slipped the net of this global academic enthusiasm - the fish that got away.