Part 1: On Cosmic Play, An Endless Textural Differentiation

Consider first the generality of play in perhaps somewhat austere arguments driving debate in the metaphysics of grounding. The Upanishads argue that brahman (ultimate reality) is the pure, simple, original, and unconditioned ground that grounds all grounds, but which the essentially discriminative workings of cognition can consequently only misrecognize. In the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upanishad (specifically 2.4.12; trans. Olivelle Reference Olivelle1998, 69), analogy then becomes the premier vehicle for conveying a non-conceptual realization of this ur-ground.

That is, the task for inquiry mired in the intractable world of stubborn difference is firsthand realization of its ground, whose immanence is likened here to the saltiness pervading a saline solution and the realization of which is likened to the immediacy of gustatory experience. The argument poses at least two problems for motivating a turn to thinking play. First, a realization of that which is ontologically anterior to phenomena demands non-conceptual experience rather than the discriminative workings of discursive knowledge. Parts 3 and 4 of this essay will return to this point. Second, as Buddhist arguments from ontological interdependence charge (see King Reference King1995), in that action is always motivated by need, the argument for a unilateral grounding relation must explain how the ur-ground can ground yet in doing so remain unaffected.

Cosmic play, or lila, offers perhaps the premier solution to this seeming unviability of a unilateral grounding relation. In an elaboration of the Upanishads, the Brahma Sūtras of Bādarāyaṇa (hereafter, Badarayana; or Vedānta Sūtras; 400–500 CE; for an introduction, see Uskokov Reference Uskokov, Long, Sherma, Jain and Khanna2022a, Reference Uskokov2022b; for a translation with commentary by Śaṅkarācārya, see Thibaut [1890–96] Reference Thibaut1988; Gambhirananda Reference Gambhirananda1965; by Rāmānuja, see Thibaut [1904] Reference Thibaut1976) are perhaps the first to argue for the psycho-metaphysical universality of lila (2.1.32–33; below, trans. Coomaraswamy Reference Coomaraswamy1941, 98; on lila generally, see Lipner Reference Lipner2022; Sax Reference Sax1995; on its importance specifically in Śaivite traditions, see Handelman and Shulman Reference Handelman and Shulman1997), or play, here in reference to the ur-ground (brahman) specifically in its creative mode (brahma):

Here, sovereignty from motive secures in the cosmic play that is lila a ground unconditioned by lack that accounts for phenomenal differentiation. The argument is that existence must be play because this specific mode of action is uniquely non-purposive in that it issues from without want, need, or lack (see Coomaraswamy Reference Coomaraswamy1941; Uskokov Reference Uskokov2022b, 89–103), otherwise the sovereign grounding relation would itself require a grounding relation in a vicious infinite regress. This turn to the cosmic play that is lila motivates a number of theoretical elaborations (for an overview, see Hein Reference Hein and Sax1995; for a thorough critical survey, Lipner Reference Lipner2022; on Śaivite elaborations, see Handelman and Shulman Reference Handelman and Shulman1997). For instance, the Vedāntic metaphysician Śaṅkarācārya likens this cosmic play both to the recreational amusement enjoyed by already satiated royalty and to the automaticity of respiration (Thibaut [1890–96] Reference Thibaut1988, 1:356–57), whereas the Chaitanyaite philosopher Baladeva likens this play to the exuberant expenditure of spontaneous dance (Vasu Reference Vasu1912, 266). In each case, whether in free enjoyment, natural inclination, or expressive fullness, the argument is that play is a mode of action that is without motive because without need. Peirce also theorizes the ludic in a motiveless involvement, as will be noticed further below in Part 3.

Notice then that the hallmark non-purposiveness of lila resonates with an argument for free play that remains decisive for pursuing the constitutively aesthetic nature of play in the social sciences generally and contemporary theories of the sign specifically (S. Gill Reference Gill2014). In Critique of the Power of Judgment (Kant [1790] Reference Kant, Guyer, Guyer and Matthews2000, esp. 102–4 [§9]), the turn to free play is meant to reconcile the peculiar character of aesthetic judgments in that matters of taste both seem grounded in the sensations of personal feeling and yet also claim universal assent (see Ginsborg Reference Ginsborg1997). Ordinarily, in a division of labor constitutive of determinate judgments rather than aesthetic ones, the imagination in a personal reception of sensations and the understanding in its normative application of concepts each inform judgment according to their respective contributions. Specifically, the understanding subordinates the imagination, a unilateral imposition of concepts (legi-signs, specifically in their governing replicas, on the unilaterality of which, see Parmentier Reference Parmentier1994, 8–9) onto what is synthesized of otherwise disparate sense data (sin-signs, or percepts, the singular, but, again, specifically in that they are replicas). However, reflective judgments concern the emergence of forms apart from human interest, for instance that of inquiry guided by a science. That is, in free play, forms emerge from a relation between the imagination and understanding that is non-purposive, whereas the determinate judgments of scientific inquiry for instance encounter sensations only insofar as they conform to the coercive demands of discursive interest.

The so-called ludic turn of the mid-twentieth century elaborates this non-purposiveness by finding in play a spatio-temporally bounded social universal. Huizinga ([1938] Reference Huizinga1980) first finds in play (contra laughter, folly, wit, jest, joking, and comedy) a candidate social universal more entrenched in the pre-historical evolution of human sociality than even Durkheimian ritual, consisting in (a) a fundamental disinterestedness, or enjoyment for its own sake; (b) internal-organization, or its functional differentiation; (c) spatio-temporal locality, or boundedness from the ordinary; and sometimes (d) group-formation, or a cloaking in secrecy. Caillois ([1958] Reference Caillois and Barash2001) further adds that play is (e) uncertain, with latitude in its course; (f) unproductive, creating no goods; and (g) either rule-governed by codified conventions or make-believe in a new reality, all of which can be typologized into (h) agon, or competition; (i) ilinx, or whirlpool or vertigo; and (j) mimicry, or role-playing; however, in the case of (k) alea, or chance, profit-motivated gambling would seem to falsify the non-purposiveness of play. Here, Caillois distinguishes between exchange and production, explaining that the exchange that is gambling remains non-purposive because producing no goods, whereas professional market-makers merely work. The non-purposiveness of play consists in an expenditure that is, then, gradable across the cline of (l) paidia, the free improvisation, carefree gaiety, and impulsive exuberance of uncontrolled fantasy and (m) ludus, which binds its anarchism with arbitrary, imperative, and tedious conventions.

These resonant philosophical and social scientific considerations of play instruct a non-purposiveness anterior to the becoming of forms across analytic and empirical scales. The excellence of thinking lila owes to, amongst other things, its generality (or nonreserve; see Derrida [1968] Reference Derrida1982, 7, 19–20), that even seeming stasis is but one of its moments, its regularities only ever emerging locally (as per (b) and (g)). Social scientific theorizations of the ludic have often happened upon the cosmic play of existence itself, but recurrently hesitate from thinking the implications of this play in its profound generality (e.g., Huizinga [1938] Reference Huizinga1980, 15–16; Sutton-Smith [1997] Reference Sutton-Smith2001, 58–60; by contrast, see Handelman [1992] Reference Handelman2020, 158–64; on the anthropological abandonment of play in favor of sport and ritual, owing specifically to a Christianity-informed monotheistic prejudice, see Hamayon [2012] Reference Hamayon2016), but in doing so also acknowledge its generality by finding in the play of children that even seriousness is not its opposite (e.g., Huizinga [1938] Reference Huizinga1980, 5–6; on rhetorics of play with respect to frivolity and seriousness, see Sutton-Smith [1997] Reference Sutton-Smith2001, 148, 201–13). The performance theorist Richard Schechner (Reference Schechner, Caines and Heble2014, 390–92) glosses this cosmic play by explicit reference to lila, finding in its immense expanse a cosmic playground of contingent beings and experiences.

That is, for the study of signs, play intimates endless textural differentiation, or non-purposive becoming that exceeds its own patterning. Here, deconstruction’s own turn to play (on the translation from jeu to “freeplay,” see Derrida Reference Derrida1988, 115–16) finds in it a trope for thinking sign-processes in its vigilant interrogation of value hierarchies that have sedimented, that is, as if they were no longer in play. In the free play of the faculties considered above, objects become available for cognition apart from interests which would otherwise delimit any encounter with them according to the purposes of discursivity. The deconstructive turn to play considers the non-purposiveness of sign-processes in its anteriority by stipulating in différance a becoming that is anterior to any determinate meaning, a “playing movement,” “production of differences,” and “moving discord of different forces” (Derrida [1968] Reference Derrida1982, 11). Here, the anteriority of this play, or différance, or “play of differences”, or “the process of scission and division which would produce or constitute different things or differences” (Derrida [1968] Reference Derrida1982, 11, 9), makes possible any meaning in that it concerns a non-conceptual operating necessary for any meaning, concept, or interpretation. This resort to the anteriority of play is also strategic (Derrida [1968] Reference Derrida1982, 7; see also Taylor Reference Taylor1987), because it offers a device for thinking difference that brooks no side of a binary, not even of presence and absence, not that of active and passive, which themselves are in play. That is, this endless textural differentiation makes possible and exceeds the normative involvement of interest, purpose, and intention, insofar as they would stipulate the arrest of this play (as will be further considered below in the “conc-lusion”).

A semiotic anthropological entrée into this play of semiosis here suggests the mutual implication of several seemingly disparate semiotic dynamics that implicate one another. That is, the cosmic play that is lila might be considered (0̸) non-purposive, and therefore also relatedly (i) latitudinous, (ii) excessive, (iii) indetermining, (iv) generative, and (v) expendious.

(i) Latitude. Consider, here, that the generality of this play might be gleaned in the latitude of sign-processes. Above, the play of signs, or différance, concerns a becoming anterior to, yet simultaneously operative in, the working of signs. Derrida (Reference Derrida1988, 64) also elaborates the anteriority of this play in the latitude, degrees of freedom, leeway, slack, tolerance, or “degree of independence” of sign-processes, noticing that even theories of making meaning modeled after its unilateral imposition, i.e., as in the above determinate judgment, imply their anterior determin-ability. That is, signs are always already becoming-otherwise despite their seeming stasis, which is only ever a provisional moment in their more general play. The formalism of Peircean semiotics here suggests the many dimensions of articulation according to which sign-processes exhibit latitude (see Peirce [1934] Reference Peirce, Hartshorne and Weiss1960, 300–302 [5.448n]; for a study of play considering both the semiotic and deconstructive together, see Colapietro Reference Colapietro2018), for instance in the upshifting/downshifting of interpretants according to the third trichotomy, e.g., in rhematization (Irvine Reference Irvine2022), dicentization (Ball Reference Ball2014), and conventionalization (Parmentier Reference Parmentier1994, 185–91; or what might also be called “argumentization”). That is, consequent to a stipulation of identity that assumes a form (type) that endures across “its” iterations (tokens), the actual working of signs also falsifies this very stipulation because the becoming of a sign implies necessarily that it is that which it seemingly is not. The performative enactment of signs reveals then the latitude between token and type, or an absence of fit between signs and their determinate meaning in context and vice versa (Nakassis Reference Nakassis2013, 67, 76).

(ii) Excess. That is, in that the constitutive iterability (or becoming-other-ability) of sign-processes exceeds any identities stipulated of them, any individuated sign emerges only amidst a more general play that exceeds it. That is, the individuation of signs, torn asunder from semiosis, purified into icons, indices, and symbols for instance, or for that matter formalized into any trichotomy, leaves a remainder, a residue, an excess. This non-purposive working of semiosis might then be considered in its exceeding the patterning that is texture itself. Consider Michael Silverstein’s (Reference Silverstein and John A.1993, 36) remark that, in principle, one can say almost nothing about the indefinite number of actual relations amidst which any text emerges, that “each occurrent signal form indexes its own context-of-occurrence, and that is all that we know by purely indexical (pragmatic) semiosis,” or, as Keane (Reference Keane2018, 73–74) elaborates in social realist terms, “everyday life is replete with a hypothetically infinite quantity of phenomena that remain imperceptible as indexical signs to the naive eye.” From a standpoint invested primarily in texture, the indexical surfeit is here a limit, stipulated, but, by principle, foreclosed. This anterior non-purposiveness of pragmatics nevertheless makes possible any poetics, though the seemingly immediate raw givenness of texture in its sensuousness characteristically presents itself as if it were the real itself (Harkness Reference Harkness2022; of course, texts themselves can stipulate figurations of excess, as shown by Reyes Reference Reyes2017; Carruthers Reference Carruthers2023; for instance, in an indexical iconicity whereby the excesses of speech motivate inferences to the excesses of personae, see Reyes Reference Reyes2021, as well as Wingrove Reference Wingrove2012).

(iii) Indeterminacy. By implication of the pragmatic excess amidst which individuated sign-processes exhibit latitude, sign-types underdetermine necessarily both the pragmatic richness of their token instantiation and the complexity of their shape. Sign-processes are therefore constitutively relatively in/determinate, because any identity assigned to them underdetermines necessarily the extent of their iterability, which evinces itself only in their working, which itself in principle cannot be determined in advance (Wirth Reference Wirth2003). That is, in that sign-processes always work in excess of their extant itineraries, their being remains always relatively indeterminate. Social semiotic studies focusing on the manipulability of this indeterminacy have consequently considered the play as a matter of instability, incoherence, underdetermination, and ambiguity (Gershon Reference Gershon2025a; see also Gershon Reference Gershon2025b).

(iv) Generativity. A consequence of pattern-generative indexical excess is the un-fore-seen (im-pro-visus), because the actual iteration of sign-processes in their constant becoming-otherwise makes for inexhaustible novelty. Derrida ([1968] Reference Derrida1982, 7) glosses this non-purposive working of signs both as “strategic,” or ungoverned, because excessive of their regularization, patterning, and tendency, which is only ever local, and as “adventurous” or “a strategy without end,” because without teleological destination. That is, the non-purposive becoming-otherwise of sign-processes can be metapragmatically re-signified again and again. In principle, the expanse of a sign in its becoming is limitless (Agha Reference Agha and Asif2006, 1), the non-normative, or tropic, workings of sign-processes themselves so often becoming conventionalized. Even “errors” in the upshifting/downshifting of the third trichotomy mentioned above are “fascinating precisely because they suggest the possibility for creativity built into semiotic processes” (Parmentier Reference Parmentier1994, 14). That is, the non-purposiveness of sign-processes affords potential novelty in their repurposings, generating in their endless itinerary the unforeseen.

(v) Expenditure. This focus on the pragmatic work of non-purposive sign-processes then implicates their energetics, because concrete existential becoming makes-happen including any poetic patterning. In that the open-ended working of semiosis throws off individuable sign-processes without end, the unmanageable generation of relatively unforeseen sign-relations might yield economies but itself cannot be economized as if without remainder. This sense of non-purposiveness consists in an endlessness that is without teleology, but which includes local representational economies in the dynamic organization of sign-processes across socio-historically situated seemingly quite different domains, institutions, and actors, how for instance self-conscious investments in modernity can motivate other investments in otherwise bygone tradition in other domains (Keane Reference Keane2003). It is excessive because it expends itself without return.

This non-exhaustive list of mutually implicated dimensions of play constellates around non-purposiveness, recurrent considerations of which in social scientific and philosophical findings offer here conceptual space for considering play in its cosmic generality.

It is now that we must turn to a more vexed logic, because the play of signs that stages presence and absence itself never becomes fully present to experience. Note that the radical play of signs implies the impossibility of any ur-ground itself precisely because it too would be in play, whereas the Brahma Sutras attempt to preserve its sovereignty by insisting on its power to affect and yet remain unaffected. A realization of the general play of signs amidst which inquiry occurs is then paradoxical, because it too must be discovered amidst a world that is seemingly saturated with identities, beings, and self-standing things. Its realization then appears to demand the intimacies of abduction, because the cosmic play of signs in its profound generality exceeds any individuated sign. Consequently, we now turn to the happenings of human involvement, amidst which the cosmic play of signs might intimate itself, and so might be realized in the inseparability of the one and the multiple.

Part 2: An Unassailable Theophany, The Cosmic Play of Mêlée

Consider, now, the implication of cosmic play for ethical encounter. Navdeep Mandair (Reference Mandair2009) finds in Sikh philosophy a vexed ontology that forgoes any ultimate identity in the distinction between form (saguna) and formlessness (nirguna), thinking here with Dasam Granth, a heterogeneous assemblage of texts attributed to the tenth and final human master Guru Gobind Singh, specifically both Jaap Sahib, 199 stanzas of rhymed couplets hailing the divine other in their form and formlessness, and Candi Caritra, a panegyric praising the goddess whose excessive violence restores moral order (dharma). Conventional historiography contrasts the martial tenor of this play with the seeming quietism of the early tradition (e.g., McLeod Reference McLeod1976). However, Mandair (Reference Mandair2009, 89) finds this vexed ontology in profound continuity with writings by the first master Guru Nanak, whose nightly recited Kīrtan Sōhilā voices an encounter with the excessive other in their form/lessness that is both paradoxical and rapturous, “You have thousands of eyes and no eyes at all, You have thousands of bodies and no body at all.”

The argument is that a general agonism generates any sense of who is who, but in its workings also conceals itself. Mandair theorizes this play of forms with explicit reference to lila (on the theodicean challenges of, and the paucity of textual references explicitly referring to, lila in goddess-centered Śākta traditions, see McDermott Reference McDermott and Soars2025) elaborated in the theoretical register of semiology, wherein an ethical pursuit of the non-identical other (nirguna) is to be traced amidst the endless substitution of phenomenal existence (saguna). Real wisdom (giān) realizes this play by embracing a world populated by others whose seeming individuation is only ever provisional, including the ephemera that is self. Ethical pursuit is here alive to the other who remains indeterminate amidst the play of agonism, here considered in the intimacy of a second-person stance (Keane Reference Keane2015). In that play unravels the conceit of any essential distinction between self and other, the pursuit of violence might slay the adversary but only succeeds upon making the self itself the chance target in the gift of true violence.

In the itinerary of battle, the ineluctable domain for ethical inquiry is here a realization of the otherwise imperceptible play of agonism. Mandair finds in the recitation of Jaap Sahib a mode of address that is a babbling before the (m)other, emphasizing here the raw corporeality of utterance rather than denotational projection alone, in keeping with deconstructive emphases on the sensuousness of the sign and semiotic emphases on its materiality. Specifically, the alternation across fricatives, labials, and rhotics, prosodically anchored by the recurrence of onset nasals and long open vowels, contributes to what might be called a phonoaesthetic clamor (not reproduced here). Exegetical discourses sometimes liken this clamor to the clanging of weapons, gallop of horses, footwork of martial practice, and here a babbling. Written in Braj Bhasha, verse 52 is addressed to the divine mother who, in sublime splendour, is bejewelled in armaments:

In that the recitation of this and related verses hails the preceptor who both girds for war and eludes the senses, the general context of life becomes the play of battle amidst which the imperceptible (m)other might be encountered. The turbulent presence of the (m)other must be encountered amidst the play of agonism, that is, “the intimacy of human contact” (N. Mandair Reference Mandair2009, 90). Only in the onslaught of embodied experience is an encounter with (m)other intimated, the domain for ethical inquiry being the play of sensuous forms.

The mêlée, then, promises the chance transformation of self in the always evolving contours of agonism. Mandair appears to understand this mêlée in an anterior violence. That is, relational difference makes possible the network of signifying elements, as if the play of différance makes for a clamoring because the signs that it produces are always rattling around. In that differential relations generate the seeming identity of individuated signs, here the play of agonism is generative of its multitudinous differentially positioned yet relatively substitutable actants. The anthropological touchpoint here is the dissipative tendencies of violence amongst non-state societies (Clastres [1974] Reference Clastres2020), whose bouts of war disperse forces rather than achieve an already known purpose, for instance for the sake of securing power, state centralization, or overcoming scarcity.

The adversary is therefore gift who always holds latent the possibility of an encounter that would transform by putting into play the co-implicated identities of self and other. The mêlée is the fundamental scene for this encounter between self and other, whereby each is in dynamic relation in the violence of play itself. The play of elements clamors beyond the dictates of any purpose, whereas an instrumental stance invested in merely slaying the enemy refuses the mêlée as if self and other were determinate identities.

That the mêlée is its own delight is then an occasion for the severe intimacy of the other to bestow the unforeseen gift that slays the self. In Candi Caritra (marvels [caritra; cf. calat] of Candi, the fierce one), praise of the fearsome goddess Durga (the unassailable) announces her entering the field of battle, her slaying a multitude of demons, and her occasioning a chorus of cries blazing the ensuing massacre. The mêlée is here (Chandi Caritra II, vv. 14–15, [Toṭak Chand], 16–17; trans. N. Mandair Reference Mandair2009, 94) figured by the goddess fully immersed in the fray, armed and lion-mounted:

Mandair notices a signature delight in the descent into battle, revealed here specifically in the smile of a goddess whose play is carnage. The argument is that this smile reveals the non-purposive pleasure of discord itself, an ethical excess, a lavish register of violence, which enjoys, while occasioning, but without instrumentalizing itself in the service of, restoring moral order (dharma). This mêlée is discordant agonism without telos (on the “moving discord of different forces” that is the play of différance contra the above-mentioned harmony of play, see Derrida [1968] Reference Derrida1982, 18). The cosmic play of lila amidst which emerges the fleeting individuation of forms is nothing less than enjoyment of the (m)other, who, as the recurrence of her incarnation implies, slays but without ultimate finality or resolution. Ethico-political practice amidst this play of existence only ever occurs with the other, who here in her sovereign enjoyment revels in illusion and sees its provisional nature.

In that any emancipation amidst this relation of self and other cannot be known in advance, improvisation attends to the chance encounter that might glean the indeterminate other amidst whom love and violence are gifts in which the self itself always finds itself but a moment amidst an unending agonism. That is, in the divine bloodlust of the mêlée, devotional love for the other anticipates the un-fore-seen. The condition for ethico-political encounter is then a risking of what one might seem to know of oneself, beyond want, anticipation, and hope. In seeking signs of the (m)other who relishes this cosmic play that is lila, the love of play is supreme. It is to this we now (re)turn.

Part 3: On Cosmic Equipoise, An Unforeseen Becoming-With

Consider now the play that is semiosis in its implications for ethical encounter. The speculative philosophical anthropology above considers the context for ethico-political encounter a general play that is the mêlée, the endless agonism generative of forms. This essay now examines action, that it might reveal glimpses of practical involvement alive to this universal play amidst which forms provisionally individuate. That is, the concern here is a pursuit of action that might be alive to its constitutive non-purposiveness. The phenomenological tradition sometimes glimpses this non-purposiveness specifically in know-how that is non-conceptual, e.g., in skillful coping (Dreyfus Reference Dreyfus2002), but tends to ground the enactment of non-conceptual know-how in a determinate embodiment (e.g., as do explanations that turn to phronesis, or practical wisdom, and hexis, or acquired disposition); though Heidegger ([1976] Reference Heidegger and Sheehan1981, 57), at the end, ultimately finds that “only a god can save us.” Of course, Sikh sociality also instructs the embodied performance of practical know-how appropriate to context-sensitive standards, for instance in specific practices of musical expression (kīrtan), meditative absorption (dhiān), repetition of the name (simran), and contemplation of key texts (vicār); however, key textual sources also instruct both the futility of even virtuosic moral practice and the singular importance of the radically un-fore-seen (im-pro-visus) gift (kirpā) that might authorize true action.

The anteriority of non-purposiveness in even seemingly purposive pursuit here suggests action that coerces not even the self nor itself. The Sikh philosopher Dewan Singh (Reference Singh1995, 98) offers a provisional gloss of the subtle notion that is sahaj (saha-ja, “with life”), “a sort of indwelling mystical principle of divine perception given to man as his birthright and, therefore, a natural and effortless heritage of divinity ingrained in humanity” (emphasis added). This equipoise of action is easy, natural, effortless, true, and also latent in action itself. Consider these dimensions of equipoise in two traditions whose obscure itineraries can be found in key sources for Sikh philosophy—Vajrayāna, or Tantric Buddhism, which had once prevailed around Gangetic plains, and that of the sants (realized beings; see Prill Reference Prill and Mandair2017), a heterogeneous network of renowned antinomian devotional poets.

Equipoise directs practical involvement in accord with “something” which remains pragmatically immanent in action yet which also thwarts any entextualization that would attempt to figure it. That is, a realization of equipoise is elusive because its potential is immanent in action itself, and so tends to vex attempts to determine it. Vajrayāna ritual practice suggests that enlightenment must be innate (sahaj), glossed as “coemergent wisdom” or “intrinsic wakefulness”. The argument is that emancipation must be found in the corporeal body itself, because gnosis resides in precisely that which moors the self in ceaseless rebirth (Davidson Reference Davidson2002; Kværne Reference Kværne1975). That is, the locus of enlightenment is innate precisely because suffering itself is congenital, however, this immanence to the self also makes it pragmatically obscure. Consequently, the instructions of a masterful preceptor (guru), whose skillful teachings can direct the proper conduct of bodily technique, are taken to be necessary for the climactic experience of enlightenment (ānand).

However, the site of authority is more vexed still, because it too might only ever be intimated owing to its indeterminacy. The sants insist that only devotional love (bhakti) can make way for the mysterious workings of sahaj, because achieving intuitive absorption in this wondrous play of existence demands the self-surrender of love that would release practical involvement from any egoic interest or desire for mastery. True action might become easy, whereas an investment in effort can be all the more treacherous insofar as it credits and therein consolidates a mastery arrogated by the self whether to itself or a determinate other (for instance, see a reading of the sant Namdev by Bhogal Reference Bhogal, Newcombe and O’Brien-Kop2020, 230). Consequently, first, the authority of a guru too must be found immanent in life, rather than located primarily in any biographically determinate individual that would anchor gnosis in social authority or for that matter the fickle itinerary of any fixed form. Second, true action must abandon itself, the pursuit of emancipation being itself especially treacherous, since righteous aspiration can feed the attachment to determinate form all the more insidiously. This love-laden signature of equipoise gives itself to the other, surrenders without want, including even of any emancipatory reward or integrity of a self and for that matter even its dissolution.

Semiotics offers a study of sahaj that insists on pragmatic non-purposiveness, relaying between cosmic love and pre-subjective self-evacuation. Peircean semiotics develops an aesthetic program wherein play becomes constitutive of the human itself, drawing specifically from Schiller ([1795] Reference Schiller2016) more than from a well-documented Kantianism that in the first critique focuses specifically on the determinate judgments mentioned earlier (for a problematization of which, see Hull Reference Hull2013, 445). In Schiller, the play-instinct (Spieltrieb) comes to deliver man into his own by bringing into accord and therein overcoming both the sensuous impulse for successive experience and the formal impulse for identity over time, a harmonization of the reciprocal tendencies of immanence and transcendence, becoming and being, reality and form, alteration and persistence, and imagination and understanding (for a deconstructive reading putting into play these chiasmi themselves, see de Man [1983] Reference de Man1996). Here, Peirce argues for a creative involvement that imposes no will onto existence, yet which is presupposed in even the most procedural of pursuits, a non-coercive harmonization that exceeds the foreseeable (or, for a deconstructive treatment, a non-coercive relation that is strictly speaking impossible insofar as it forgoes even a minimum of force that would be inherent in any contact likened to a “touch without touching”; see Derrida [2000] Reference Derrida2005, 67; Nancy [1992] Reference Nancy2008). This study of sahaj teaches us to pay attention to something irreducibly inhuman in action, practical involvement alive to cosmic play that might thwart resolution into either side of the distinction between activity and passivity.

In the realm of pragmatics, this non-purposive pursuit of action yields, tending to a becoming with and of the other. The cosmic love of agape allows the other to come into their own (Peirce [1893] Reference Peirce, Hartshorne and Weiss1960; see also Anderson Reference Anderson1995; [1987] Reference Anderson2013, 110, 134). Agape is open-ended. It cherishes, nurtures, and learns, as one would in fostering a garden (Peirce [1893] Reference Peirce, Hartshorne and Weiss1960, 192 [6.289]), whereas eros is desire interested in achieving an already known purpose, and so is no love at all, since its will is meant to remain unaffected. On some readings, divine love has form come into its own in an always ongoing co-evolution of the absolute and the contingent, becoming, rather than knowing, what it will create, since nothing is to be known because nothing is truly lacking (Anderson [1987] Reference Anderson2013, 97). This dimension of action exceeds any textual figuration that would diagrammatize it.

That is, the non-purposive pursuit of action yields a self that is alive to the open-endedness of semiosis. In a pre-subjective register, “the play of musement” (Peirce [1935] Reference Peirce, Hartshorne and Weiss1960, 313–16 [6.458–6.462]; Peirce [1908] Reference Peirce2022) is the free, meditative, and contemplative mode of thought that is simultaneously purposive because effortful and yet also non-purposive because deferential, the neologism implying both inspiration that cannot be willed and an open-ended thinking that is pleasurable (thus, “a-muse-ment”). This non-coercive creativity yields to a noticing of signs otherwise occluded by habituated inferential practices. In formal semiotic terms, the play of musement progresses through (i) an “opening up,” in the firstness of spontaneous feeling; (ii) noticing the strange, or the reactivity of secondness; and (iii) the creation of an abductive hypothesis, or the generality of thirdness (Cooke Reference Cooke2018). Intending openness of course misses the point insofar as it attempts to predetermine that which cannot be figured in advance (the un-fore-seen), though Peirce likens the play of musement to allowing the breath of heaven to swell the sails of thought in a life of experimentation (Peirce [1935] Reference Peirce, Hartshorne and Weiss1960, 315 [6.461]).

Here, both cosmic love and musement are concerned with the primacy of the possible. Both imply a play anterior to the individuation of signs, involving abductive inference to the plausible. Practical involvement demands abduction insofar as action depends on stipulating the cohesive structure that is text from the excess that is the play of signs, since, as noted above, “everyday life is replete with a hypothetically infinite quantity of phenomena that remain imperceptible as indexical signs to the naive eye” (Keane Reference Keane2018, 73–74). Consequently, practical involvement requires tending to the latent potential immanent in the play amidst which it finds itself, as “the good player — the doxic player — does not think, she works her body energetically until she anticipates — her body anticipates — the immanent tendencies of the game” (Povinelli Reference Povinelli2012, 382; emphasis added). Note that key Sikh sources, including the writings of Kabir and other sants for instance, sometimes liken life to the throw of dice (e.g., see Dass Reference Dass1991, 141, 173; Shackle and Mandair Reference Shackle and Mandair2005, 40). Here, a consideration of sahaj insists on action that risks the self itself, something irreducibly unforeseen in tending to that which eludes presence and absence. At stake in the improvisational un-fore-seen is therefore a practical lark that throws action into the imperceptible exceeding the felt raw immediacy of the sensuous, or the “rhematic text” (Harkness Reference Harkness2022), yet is also informed by it. True action comes into its own, foregoing and convening both engrossment and withdrawal. It is to this we turn.

Part 4: The Lovelark, A Tryst in Sensuous Ascesis

If a realization of the endless coming and going of forms might further an emancipation from the bonds of illusion, including especially from vicious attachment to any identity that might be professed by the self of itself, what might then the practical pursuit of this realization look like? In the above discussion emphasizing the discord that is the mêlée, existence is unbridled agonism in the endless conflict of forces amidst which self and other emerge, and might be encountered. The inquiry below now considers cosmic love and musement in the unbearable yearning for union, a tenor of intimacy seemingly more soothing than severe though no less intense. The valences of this play too are perhaps endless.

I here turn specifically to the War Ballads of Bhai Gurdas (for an introduction, see R. S. Gill Reference Gill2016), an early textual authority sometimes called the “key” to unlocking Sikh teachings, here glorifying triumph in the realm of ethical discovery by contemplating the realization of cosmic play by an exemplar. My focus here is four rhyming couplets and one concluding line (10.10.1–9; for a modern exegesis, see V. Singh [1911] Reference Singh2012, 162–63) written in Punjabi praising the obscure poet-playwright Jaidev (also Jayadeva; about whom, see Chatterji Reference Chatterji1973; Prema Ambodha [1693] 1989; Siegel Reference Siegel1978), whose biographical journey from ascesis to ecstasy exemplifies the perfection of ethical play. Famously, Jaidev strives to ward off any risk of attachment in an austere peripateticism across the wilderness to the point of refusing to ever settle beneath the same tree twice, though eventually comes to assume the role of royal laureate upon chance marriage to the temple-dancer Padmavati in the court of Orissa, a change of course that itself perhaps intimates the sometimes unforeseen itinerary of equipoise. Here, Jaidev’s devotional practice comes to take the form of composing the Gītā Govindā (the Song of the Divine Cowherd Krishna; hereafter, Gita Govinda; for a full translation, see Miller Reference Miller1977), a theatrical masterpiece rendering the vernal love-laden play (lila) of the beloved divine cowherd Krishna and his devoted consort Radha. But, whereas conventional narrations consider the moment of Jaidev’s poetic production a miraculous intervention of lord Krishna (e.g., Siegel Reference Siegel2009, xxxiii–xxxiv), The War Ballads of Bhai Gurdas here suggest instead transformation in the play of self and other.

At stake is sahaj, the notoriously subtle mode of practical involvement that is pursuit guided by an immanent alterity, glossed sometimes as equipoise, ease, and balance. Sahaj thwarts the promises of mastery, because true action adequate to the demand of the moment is at the limit unforeseeable for the meager ambit of self-consciousness. Instead, the condition that is sahaj guides true action in excess of prescription, agenda, or deluded attributions of unilateral power by the self of the self. In these verses praising Jaidev found in the War Ballads, the initial couplet first elaborates that, in loving devotion, Jaidev sings the Gita Govinda in equipoise, and second that, in his elaborating the marvels of cosmic play, the lord residing within is pleased.

Here, in writing the divine tryst in the drama of a theatrical play, the throes of creative articulation are centered around the beloved other. Jaidev finds himself amidst the other who animates creation, in both the existential involvement of self that is sahaj and the cosmic evolution of existence that is lila, and is pleased by it. The consequence of this intimacy is that action will come to bypass common sense, both directed by and drawn into self-emptying devotion.

This non-coercive creation hewing close to the pull of intimacy risks necessarily the transgression of law, here the contravention of moral convention. According to standard narrations, Jaidev finds himself faced with a moral crisis. His creative practice in its poetic absorption arrives at devising an unforeseen verse that inverts the relation between godhead and devotee. In the verse that arrives, it is Krishna who asks Radha to place her feet on his head so that it might quell the pangs of his desire. That is, it is the deity who here comes to supplicate to the devotee (“Place your foot on my head— / A sublime flower destroying poison of love! / Let your foot quell the harsh sun / Burning its fiery form in me to torment Love. / Radha, cherished love, / Abandon your baseless pride! / Love’s fire burns my heart— / Bring wine in your lotus mouth!”; Gita Govinda 10.8; trans. Miller Reference Miller1977, 113). Jaidev must decide whether to follow the troubling itinerary of love in the flow of its issuance or instead refuse committing to writing this troubling verse for betraying his own loyal love for his beloved or at least for its transgressing the morality of properly recognizing the supreme standing of a god. Conventional narrations resolve the moral impasse by explaining that Krishna himself comes to commit the seemingly irreverent verse into writing, incarnating himself in the form of Jaidev, who, arrested by indecision, had retired from writing. The lord himself authorizes these verses, leaving Jaidev and Padmavati finding themselves struck in awe upon discovering them already written. The War Ballads of Bhai Gurdas also elaborate the biography of Jaidev; however, they locate the remarkable transformation in a desubjectification, playing on the polysemy of ghar (house), which in Sikh thought also signifies the heart, or an intimacy immanent to the self. That is, in the second couplet, it is the beloved other, who, seated in the heart and exceeding self-knowledge, mysteriously commits the text to writing:

In that the endless substitution (lila) of phenomenal existence (saguna) is the occasion for tracing the paradoxical presence of the non-identical other (nirguna), the beloved residing in the heart is encountered as excessive in forms (as above, the repository of qualities, or guṇa nidhānu). In sahaj, the other drives the creative lark in the arrival of the un-fore-seen, an abandonment of ego born of a hewing closely to the mysterious intimacy of self and other. The beloved who drives action moves the self in its intimacy with itself.

The lesson for the study of signs is their provisional character, at least according to this mysterious sahaj that tends to their indeterminacy. Practical involvement holds the potential for its own perfection, which exceeds textual mediation. In the earlier consideration of the cosmic play that is the general agonism of the mêlée, the gift of encountering the other occurs amidst a realization that identities are only ever provisional. The War Ballads also turn to the rapturous realization of a more general play, invoking Jaidev’s earlier refusal to ever settle beneath the same tree twice so as not to risk attachment.

That is, whereas Jaidev had once sought refuge from trees in that they might make for an attachment and therein detract from his love of the other, the rapturous realization of play in its unicity now finds the beloved in every leaf. Each leaf exhibits play without end or culmination. That is, the rapturous beloved is intimated in the endless mutability of form itself, here in a profound wonder at the play of lila, which is unfathomable, excessive, and endless (antu na pāvai). That is, each form points to its own provisional nature, that the play of forms is endless, as if each sign arrives with an insistence that “I am (an/the) other.”

The play of identity and difference here implies a self that is but one provisional element implicated in its workings. In the final couplet, the War Ballads find Jaidev coming to realize continuity amidst the play of difference.

Love of the other transforms Jaidev, putting him into play in a realization of non-duality that is the simultaneous discontinuity and continuity of things. In this case, self-emptying yields un-fore-seen creation in devotion to an indeterminate other whose elusive workings put into play both presence and absence. The devotee yields to the beloved in a moment of hesitation and the beloved yields to their love-laden transgression in a cosmic love that creates. In this non-coercive intimacy, practical involvement is necessarily the risk of the self itself (for contemporary ethico-political implications, see Hothi Reference Hothi2024, Reference Hothi2025). Excess anoints this realization of play, amidst which encountering the beloved guides action in furtherance of the other coming into their own.

In the equipoise that is sahaj, practical involvement cedes self-mastery in becoming-with the other, realizing the anteriority of play that never exhausts itself in the local patterning of texture. However, the realization of this play is abducted in practical involvement, never itself becoming fully present to experience. Any realization of this play then implies the provisional identity of the self itself, one element in this play of existence whose devotion to an alterity that is immanent in the indexical excess that is action might also occasion its release from any purpose it might assign itself.

In( )conclusion

This essay has considered the open-endedness of sign-processes by thinking with Sikh philosophy, semiotics, and deconstruction. In doing so, its considerations of play and equipoise offer a heightened sensitivity to the workings of sign-processes beyond any ultimate goal or finality. The engagement with Sikh philosophical sources specifically finds that the cosmic play that is lila and the equipoise that is sahaj each intimate the non-purposiveness of semiosis, pressing semiotics and deconstruction in their shared commitments to, respectively, a play anterior to the determination of signs and, in the mode of practical involvement, a non-coercive becoming-with the other. The cosmic play of signs and equipoise suggest that any seeming self-standing self too is one provisional element of an endless textural differentiation.

The meta-ethico-political implication of this meditation is that ‘play’ too is in play, that it not assume the role of explaining the expanse of semiosis once and for all, thereby arresting this very play and foreclosing the risks of ethical encounter. Any figuration of cosmic play invites then its own substitution by the plenum of seeming others, the surfeit of cosmologies, laws, myths, gods, and so forth. Indeed, as elaborated above, Sikh philosophical sources put into play seemingly incompatible differences, for instance drawing into encounter the cosmic play that is lila and the equipoise that is sahaj, the unassailable goddess Durga and divine cowherd Krishna, as well as the love-laden sants and an esoteric Vajrayāna. Equipoise is then perhaps necessary for a realization of this cosmic play that extends both truth and illusion, including the lure of its becoming a self-standing model. In that this play already threatens to undermine itself (Hans Reference Hans1979), its realization might then also entail its own erasure.

That is, the anteriority of play suggests that its fact can itself become illusion, not only that illusion occurs within its workings. Modern Sikh thought has often forgone a consideration of cosmic play, prioritizing instead an orientation to reality that problematizes the illusory (māyā) character of the sensuous. Huizinga ([1938] Reference Huizinga1980, 11) finds in “illusion—a pregnant word which means literally ‘in-play’ (from inlusio, illudere or inludere).” Caillois ([1958] Reference Caillois and Barash2001, 19) further notices in play the potential for uncontrolled fantasy, that “all play presupposes the temporary acceptance, if not of an illusion (indeed this last word means nothing less than beginning a game: in-lusio), then at least of a closed, conventional, and, in certain respects, imaginary universe.” The Brahma Sutras here seem to suppress its radical implications in that their defense of the self-sufficiency of the Absolute (brahman) consigns play to illusion (Bäumer Reference Bäumer and Sax1995; Hein Reference Hein and Sax1995, 14). Here, phenomenal existence lacks reality, because the transient play of forms essentially occludes the necessarily immediate knowledge of the Absolute. At stake is partly the captivating lure of the sensuous (see Harkness Reference Harkness2022), semiotic processes that in their seemingly raw givenness present themselves as if they were not in play. In the above reading of The War Ballads of Bhai Gurdas, the paradoxical becoming of the ethical exemplar suggests a sensuous ascesis, whereas the moral psychological typologizing of these seemingly contrasting orientations to existence specifically in the illusion of māyā and the play of lila might otherwise suggest, inter alia, either ascetic denial or sensuous affirmation, respectively (Goodwin Reference Goodwin1995).

This meditation on love-laden play might instead then suggest something of a cosmic hospitality. The insistence on the pursuit of action that can become alive to its own un-fore-seen potential is precisely to insist on the practical implication of this play. The crucial importance of sahaj is perhaps one reason that Sikh thought thwarts the foundations of caste. As elaborated in the War Ballads, practical involvement that is in sahaj is alive to that whose contours cannot be prefigured textually in, for instance, care for the other. Note here that Badarayana and Kant each pursue the non-purposive dynamism of existence, yet preserve the integrity of self including notably the institutions of caste and race, respectively (“there is a clear correlation between the religion of sportiveness and the closed world of caste”; Hein Reference Hein and Sax1995, 19). The paradoxical workings of sahaj find cosmic play in the realm of creative ethical involvement rather than prescribed moral duty alone.

But, as for conclusions, ultimately there are no conclusions. If, indeed, “to conc-lude is to bring the ludic dimension of the text into a state of collusion with itself so that the differences within it, the contradictions, errors, and absurdities are made to make a certain sense” (Peters Reference Peters2009, 145), then conclusion instantiates more generally the stipulative character of social semiosis as such. That is, in that practical involvement becomes invested, drawn into, and concerned with the texture of life in its sensuous draw, it instantiates both the general play of signs as well as its seeming arrest into a relatively determined text. In a prefiguration of the metapragmatic analytic, Bateson’s ([1955] Reference Bateson2000) study of play elaborates the communicative coordination that establishes a socially shared frame informing interactants that they are indeed playing, but which in doing so both instantiates the working of a more general play of signs as well as its seeming arrest into a relatively determined interactional text. In this way, the endless differentiation of texture is also the extension of seeming conclusions, but, as consideration of sahaj might intimate, also perpetual prelusion, or endless beginning.