The Game of the World

by Kostas Axelos, Justin Clemens (Translator), Hellmut Monz (Translator)

Overview

Kostas Axelos traces his thinking on the world deployed as play from Heraclitus through to the culmination of metaphysical philosophy with Nietzsche, Marx and Heidegger.
Originally published in 1969, Le Jeu du Monde, conceives of the dawn of the 21st-century in which technological transformations coincide with an increased world at play. Are we continually falling when we are continually scrolling? Are we homeless on our homepages and playless at our PlayStations? Axelos demands a future thinking of fragmentary wholeness where humans – global players and worldwide gamers of planetary and wordless worlds – have yet to learn to play the play of the world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781474449069
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	04/28/2023
Pages:	440
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x (d)

About the Author

Kostas Axelos (1924–2010) was a Greek-French philosopher and translator. A specialist in Heraclitus, Karl Marx and Martin Heidegger, as well as in Friedrich Hölderlin and Stéphane Mallarmé, he taught and researched at the Sorbonne, as well as at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. The Game of the World is his magnum opus, and as yet only the third English translation from his vast and important body of work.

Justin Clemens is Associate Professor in Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. He has published extensively on psychoanalysis, contemporary European philosophy and Australian art and literature. His recent books include What is Education? edited with A.J. Bartlett and The Afterlives of Georges Perec edited with Rowan Wilken.

Hellmut Monz teaches at the School of Communication and Design at RMIT University, Vietnam. He made his literary debut with the hexalogy Hellmut Monz and Philosophia's Scream

Table of Contents

Translator’s Introduction

Prelude

Opening. The Great Powers and the Elementary Forces of the World

I. Logos. The Language and Thought of Man and the World

II. That. The Play of Being in Becoming of the Fragmentary and Fragmented Totality of the Multidimensional and Open World

III. God-Problem

IV. Physis. The Cosmic World

V. Human in the World

VI. World History

VII. The World of Poetry and Art

VIII. Being-Nothingness, Everything-Nothing, the Unwordly World

IX. The Game of the World

Notes

Analytical table

Editorial Reviews

At the heart of Kostas Axelos’s ambitious and pioneering system, this encyclopaedia of fragments has long exercised a powerful influence in French thought on play, game and world. Axelos could not have asked for more sympathetic, attentive and poetic translators in Clemens and Monz. His anglophone readers and interlocutors await.

University of Warwick Stuart Elden