16 results
II - That. The Play of the Being in Becoming of the Fragmentary and Fragmented Totality of the Multidimensional and Open World
- Kostas Axelos
- Edited by Justin Clemens, University of Melbourne, Hellmut Munz, RMIT University, Vietnam
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- The Game of the World
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 17 November 2023
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- 30 April 2023, pp 163-228
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Summary
That ‘is’: being of all that is, and nothingness, becoming, movement, positivity and negativity, space-time, unity, multiplicity and totality, world open or closed, finite or infinite or indefinite.
That ‘is’: the being in becoming of the fragmentary and fragmented totality of the multidimensional and open world – to name it in a not too dissociative language – as it constitutes itself in and through its encounter with the human being; it is rather inside this encounter that the Same says and makes itself. For we can neither depart from the being of the human to reach being in becoming, nor do the inverse. We are always on the way to the heart of the Same – always problematic – always in the interlude.
That ‘is’: the play of all its unveilings and all its occultations, all the readings and interpretations it arouses and troubles, all the machinations it provokes and breaks. This play is the One-All, the One-Multiple, Being-Nothingness, the All-Nothing.
That ‘is’: the horizon of horizons that withdraws; one could call it simply World. You call that a world? The human is not without the world and the world is not – that is to say, is not said and done, is not a problem – without the human. None of them is the other and none of them goes without the other. They make neither one nor two. How, then, do they institute the Same? Behold the game.
That ‘is’: logos as language and thought of the world said by the human, spirit, idea, start and end of all that is, God, measure of creation, and physis as cosmic totality, universe of universes, energetic matter in mechanical and/or dialectical movement, historical humanity, producer and transformer of what it is and what it is not, technical scaffolding of reasons, actions, networks and passions that assemble and combine beings and things.
Each of the great designations of That, being, nothingness and becoming, space-time, unity, totality and world, God, nature, human and play, is not what it is and is what it is not.
That has been said and named, called and invoked, by remaining unthought and unprecedented in terms of enigma, of secrecy, of mystery, to become like a question and a problem, without escaping the unspeakable and the unnameable.
IX - The Game of the World
- Kostas Axelos
- Edited by Justin Clemens, University of Melbourne, Hellmut Munz, RMIT University, Vietnam
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- Book:
- The Game of the World
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 17 November 2023
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- 30 April 2023, pp 401-425
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Summary
The ‘game of the world’ is not a metaphor forged from human games and the game in the world. It is – empirically or ontologically, transcendently or transcendentally, anthropologically or existentially – neither a signifier nor a signified; it, however, implicates all the major senses that were given to the world and which constitute the dominant constellations (of the game). It inscribes itself in the perspective of productive annihilation, of the surpassing of every unique and total signifier, ‘being’ the fleeing horizon in which signifiers are put into play and torn to pieces. ‘It’ accomplishes itself fragmentarily, through its errancy, our errings and constructions, in our words and actions.
The world of play seems to be only a moment of the play of the world and the activities of the human. It is indefinitely more, because everything rises from it, without however identifying itself with it, since it rises from the play in the world which rises from the play of the world.
Between the play of the world and the plays in the world lies difference, implicating and abolishing unity, identity, duality, alterity and dialectic relation, difference emerging through and in separation and junction.
The secret of the game of the world cannot be entirely sought in the secrets of inner-worldly games, although these are quite revealing.
Our comprehension of the game of the world is in every part linked with the games in the world; and inversely.
The game of the world takes away every definitive character from the inner-worldly powers.
The game of the world is not a Figure – even if dominant – of the Being of the world, that is to say of all that, in its ensemble, is, as such; even less is it a Figure of the existent. Being itself, at once in its ontico-ontological difference from the being, and in this indifference, was and is a mode, if not the mode, of the appearance of the game.
The play of the world and the play in the world are different and mingled. Being (ontological) appears as one of the figures of the Game, which, itself, appears equally through the games of (ontic) beings.
IV - Physis. The Cosmic World
- Kostas Axelos
- Edited by Justin Clemens, University of Melbourne, Hellmut Munz, RMIT University, Vietnam
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- The Game of the World
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 17 November 2023
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- 30 April 2023, pp 249-266
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Summary
Can nature be founded?
The secret of physis is precisely what appears as birth, growth, blossoming, decline – natural.
The mythologies of nature and the mythological figures of the tamers of nature seem situated firmly behind us and in some way also: before us. It’s for us to decipher them – at the worn-out threshold of an age that claims to be ecumenical. For if what one designates under the name of the philosophy of history has become, little by little, relatively and very approximately, problematic and transparent – not thanks to relativism (in relation to what? to what absolute?), but thanks to the possibility of a multidimensional and polyscopic approach, and although we do not know how to pose the problem of the ‘sense’ of history – what was called the philosophy of nature remains enclosed in rigid representations or routes itself through non-figurative configurations towards an almost mute and acosmic approach, where all orientation is lacking.
How did nature manifest itself before the Greeks? If it was named, what name did it bear and how did it bear beings and things? For it is on the basis of the Greeks that it is physis, unveiling – and veiling – in and through the logos, logos as unveiling of physis. As foundation and horizon, physis however remains unelucidated, and the relationships between chaos and cosmos, being and non-being, everything and nothing, remain enigmatic. In the Hebraic Christian representation, nature is the creation against which we must struggle, opposing it and coming to terms with it, until the final end, apocalyptic (signifying the definitive catastrophe of the created sinner, when the seventh angel will empty its cup and a voice will cry: ‘It is done’) and redemptive (signifying the transfiguration of all, the appearance of the new heavens and the new earth). This representation is entangled in its difficulties and ambiguities. God pre-exists – cosmic and historical and human – time, but only appears with Creation. Creator and creation are created in what time? Does God create the matter and abysses from which everything has emerged? And what of the nihil, from which everything was drawn? Is creation the fall of God? Are we not in a ‘false’ or ‘falsified’ creation? With Modernity, nature becomes the alterity of thought, the problem to be solved, the x to be deciphered and transformed, the object of theoretical and practical activity, techno-scientific, of the industrious and collective human subject.
Contents
- Kostas Axelos
- Edited by Justin Clemens, University of Melbourne, Hellmut Munz, RMIT University, Vietnam
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- The Game of the World
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 17 November 2023
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- 30 April 2023, pp v-vi
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III - God-Problem
- Kostas Axelos
- Edited by Justin Clemens, University of Melbourne, Hellmut Munz, RMIT University, Vietnam
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- The Game of the World
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 17 November 2023
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- 30 April 2023, pp 229-248
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Summary
How could a meditation articulate itself with a loud or a quiet voice, a thinking or praying voice, an accepting or challenging voice, an extremely fragile and hardly convincing meditation on the God-problem? Speaking on already denotes a certain relationship of externality, which, far from facilitating our access to the problematic, makes it even more difficult for us, especially if one does not fall for one of the convenient solutions – in fact, dissolutions of the problem – that are named theism and deism, pantheism and atheism. Is it about God? Which? That of ‘always’, that of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, that of prayer, that of ontotheology, that of the Church, that of the philosophers, the living God or the dead, hidden or unknown God revealed or grasped by reason or the heart? Is it the same God who manifests and withdraws, imposes and denies himself, animates tradition and disappears? His different aspects and different approaches rely on him and each on the other, betraying themselves mutually, each contradicting itself and all ‘betraying’ God. How to find an orientation, not towards the problem of God, but towards the God-problem, a problem that proposes itself and that distances itself problematically?
In the beginning, the gods and God existed without being comprehended. God was first comprehended as the beginning of the world, the prince and principle governing all that is, the arche of the pan, the sacred, the honest and the salutary, the holon, the Heil, without being founded on anything, not even on itself. Then he was comprehended as the creator of the world, the producer and the cause of all that is, himself being self-created, self-produced, as causa sui, ens a se. Finally, he was comprehended as a creature, a production of the representation of the human – what the human was not, but desired to be – of the human who self-produces itself and wants to grasp through their thought and their science the true and the plausible, the causal and probabilistic laws both in nature, which pre-exists them, as well as in their own history. It remains for us to begin to think, neither departing from the God-human split, nor departing from the humanitas alone of the human.
VI - World History
- Kostas Axelos
- Edited by Justin Clemens, University of Melbourne, Hellmut Munz, RMIT University, Vietnam
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- Book:
- The Game of the World
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 17 November 2023
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- 30 April 2023, pp 321-360
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Summary
The human is in history and not history in the human.
Due to a mental, and not only mental, habit, due to a historical behaviour with its provenance and roots, we almost naturally distinguish two domains in the totality of what is and is done: nature and history. In other terms: the order and cosmic rhythm that exist without us, and the order and the historical becoming that we constitute. This cut, well rooted, does not take account of the fact that nature and history are each the horizon of the other. Neither is the other, but each is inseparable from the other, both deployments of the Same. It is in and from the cosmic nature that human history develops itself, and it is in and from it that nature reveals itself and is transformed by us humans. Human history seems almost to want to suppress all naturalness, to abolish, so to speak, nature. But nature can also engulf human history: the errant course of uninhabited stars can continue. In whose eyes?
Everything has not only its history, but also its prehistory.
What exactly does the stationary state of what we designate as belonging to prehistory or remaining outside history indicate? How far does the mutation produced by writing go?
There is no first catastrophe that one can grasp.
It is in a horizon of apparent scarcity that human history is inscribed.
The common origin of humanity is no more problematic than its common aim. At the antipodes of the same planet, diverse types are searching for their past and future archetype.
What does Hölderlin hear and see when he writes: ‘So the word came from the East to us.’ Calling: is it an oriental word?
Orientalism is an occidental product.
The Greeks remain apart in all universal history.
The Graeco-Roman, the Judaeo-Christian, the European-modern, the global-planetary, each of these paths (and ways) remains dominated by Latin, the Roman.
History is history of the dead, the living and the surviving.
Every told history contains a great deal of fiction.
Would history – as ‘science’ – let us recognise the ‘human’, more than the past and the present?
Doesn’t history teach you, at least, that it doesn’t teach you very much?
Insofar as it is the work of memory, history is forgetting, conquests are made on the basis of losses, continuity is crossed in dotted lines by discontinuity.
Frontmatter
- Kostas Axelos
- Edited by Justin Clemens, University of Melbourne, Hellmut Munz, RMIT University, Vietnam
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- Book:
- The Game of the World
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
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- 17 November 2023
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- 30 April 2023, pp i-iv
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Prelude
- Kostas Axelos
- Edited by Justin Clemens, University of Melbourne, Hellmut Munz, RMIT University, Vietnam
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- The Game of the World
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 17 November 2023
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- 30 April 2023, pp 27-30
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Summary
There is no impassable abyss separating the thought of the great systematic thinkers – Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Marx, who each determine an epoch in the history of thought and, altogether, the course of the world thought – from the thought of the great fragmentary thinkers – Heraclitus, Pascal, Novalis, Nietzsche, who, with their aphorisms, pass like meteors between heaven and earth. Today we take the former as ‘classical’, logical and more settled, and envisage the latter as intuitive and more tortured, even ‘accursed’. The former is considered more discursive, even scientific, the other more elliptical and poetic. What however escapes this classification are the intimate bonds that always unite, in an open and fragmentary system, continuity and discontinuity, all the thoughts delimiting the horizon with boundaries and limits, marching and jumping on the path they follow because it imposes itself on them. Open to the blows of death, all the thinkers, guided by and guiding words, tend to approach a language that would englobe all languages, yet do not arrive at noting, lifting, recording, classifying, cataloguing, coordinating and elucidating everything in their words and in their writings. Partial-total moments of thought, they give themselves to the word, to thought and to writing, and appeal to past, present and future interlocutors and readers. The question for whom does one write? remains suspended, and, although governed by and obsessed by the here and now, we envision a future. Which does not mean that we write for the pleasure of a restoration which would be happy to discover you in x years. In this work of the discursive and accomplished and the aphoristic and elliptical, the two streams join again and compose a unique course, the perceptible [sensible] finding itself passably sacrificed, only managing to emerge with great pain.
The discursive – the continuous – is nonetheless also fragmentary, and the aphoristic – the discontinuous – is equally total, provided that we do not confuse aphorisms and sentences. The illusions of the systematic and the aphoristic – separated from one another – prevent us from comprehending the secret of the aphoristic systematic, always exploded, neither systematic nor aphoristic, and both systematic and aphoristic.
Notes
- Kostas Axelos
- Edited by Justin Clemens, University of Melbourne, Hellmut Munz, RMIT University, Vietnam
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- Book:
- The Game of the World
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
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- 17 November 2023
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- 30 April 2023, pp 426-428
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The Game of the World
- Kostas Axelos
- Edited by Justin Clemens, Hellmut Munz
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- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 17 November 2023
- Print publication:
- 30 April 2023
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Drawing on philosophies of gaming and play from Heraclitus and Plato through to Marx, Nietzsche and Heidegger, Kostas Axelos outlines an extraordinary, unique vision of our contemporary world. Originally published in 1969, The Game of the World brilliantly anticipates a twenty-first century in which ever-accelerating technological transformations coincide with a world at play and in play, at once fragmentary and totalised, disordered and hyper-organised. In the midst of this paradoxical and deranging becoming-planetary of the world, Axelos offers a sequence of profound meditations on play and playing, games and gaming, directing us towards new means of thinking and action that may enable us to face the world-historical challenges of our own present.
I - Logos. The Language and Thought of Man and the World
- Kostas Axelos
- Edited by Justin Clemens, University of Melbourne, Hellmut Munz, RMIT University, Vietnam
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- Book:
- The Game of the World
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 17 November 2023
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- 30 April 2023, pp 111-162
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Summary
We have made logos the beginning, the supreme principle and power, the arche leading to cosmic nature and, through it, to human and world history, which develops the discourse that grasps the logos and expresses it. Thus, everything begins and ends with it. It exists, so to speak, before being and knowing, and we find it afterwards. No one has dared to lean over the abyss of this logos pre-existing all and then dominating all.
What precedes language and thought remains the crucial problem.
Every genealogy of the logos leaves vague its own genealogical origin. To be brutal: where to situate the origin of the logos?
If the logos is there from the start of the game, how does it develop and become logos properly speaking?
The relation human-and-world, ‘preceding’ each of its two terms, only finding the terms of their language in this co-presence, is this ‘dialogue’ that confuses its partners. There is neither primacy of language and the thought of the human, nor of language and the thought of the world; language and thought start, so to speak, from the outset at the second power, detach themselves from the first unity and the first cut, raise their voices and emit signs, made and unmade from a ground that escapes – what one can call the play that provokes all plays.
There is not thought and world, but the thought of the world.
From the start of the play, it is at the broken heart of the human and world and world and human dialogue that thought arises, since it has fallen like a catastrophe upon a particular species of beings, human beings, who think, think themselves and think the being of the world. Thought, that is to say from the outset, language speaking, thinking and acting, opens itself to silence, to obnubilation, to what activates and outplays it.
The broadest binary relationship, which involves all the others, binds human and world.
The logos – speech and thought of the world and of the human in a ‘dialogue’ that surpasses any dialectic – appears as the very first moment and – chrono-logical – and topological – place, where and from which is said and thought what gives and withdraws itself from language and thought.
VII - The World of Poetry and Art
- Kostas Axelos
- Edited by Justin Clemens, University of Melbourne, Hellmut Munz, RMIT University, Vietnam
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- Book:
- The Game of the World
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
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- 17 November 2023
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- 30 April 2023, pp 361-380
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Summary
When speaking of art, we – all of us, producers and consumers of art – think of poetry and prose (what we call literature), of theatre, of music and dance, of painting, of sculpture and architecture, and finally of the graphing of movement, that is to say, of cinematography. All these forms and works of art possess a ‘common’ focus, and specific problematics, although surrounded, can be multiply interpreted, emerge – creations (artificial and artistic) – through poetic saying and doing, constitute a world in the World, namely a mode of being of the totality, and constitutively form at the same time the world. What however is their ‘unitary’ root, and what is art?
All the particular configurations of poetry and art imply a specific and quasi-autonomous problematic.
Poetically and artistically, the how is at least as important as the what.
This history of the distinction, of the unity or the identity between form and content is troubling, since they are neither identical nor different.
As long as the original bonds which unite physis (nature) and techné (art-and-technique) remain completely hidden, we will only speak and write intelligent or stupid things about poetry and art.
A word already pronounced says: ‘Art and technique are much weaker than necessity.’
The work – mobile – creates and makes its listeners, spectators, readers, destroyers, and is created and made by them. Because works of art are also made by the waves and vogues, the currents and counter-currents, simultaneous and successive, of listeners, spectators, readers, in short, of consumers.
We make the question concerning art – a question that nonetheless concerns us – easy by following art into its history, from prehistoric times up to now, by grasping also the becoming of every art historically, and by going so far as to envisage the fabrication of a museum of future art. Thus the reign of art history is constituted, a history unfolding itself in the four-dimensional space-time continuum that we strive to explore through archaeology, philology, in short, the history of art as science and technique. Caves, temples, palaces, churches, castles – all fitted out – and especially museums and exhibition halls become the ‘places’ of domesticated and catalogued art, which are visited and studied by tourists and amateurs, investigators and researchers.
VIII - Being-Nothingness, Everything-Nothing, the Unworldly World
- Kostas Axelos
- Edited by Justin Clemens, University of Melbourne, Hellmut Munz, RMIT University, Vietnam
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- Book:
- The Game of the World
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
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- 17 November 2023
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- 30 April 2023, pp 381-400
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Summary
We live in a world of ruined concepts, used-up words, emptied conceptions of the world. We live in – and we build – agitated necropolises, we populate and mobilise deserts. All horizons seem blocked, and the very question of the horizon becomes enigmatic. We nevertheless continue to live and work in this world, much more solid than it seems, since it supports its shocks, digests its crises, assimilates negativities, marches towards its future. The movements which we see deployed before our eyes and in which we participate drag us along their errant course. In our heroic moments, we pretend to revise everything. Before any revision, however, before any foundation of a new ‘vision’ of things and the world, we must manage to grasp what prevents us from seeing the conquering surge of nihilism, revising all that blocks our view. The revision of what is, that does not take into consideration the process of annihilation ceaselessly unfolding, fails its mission. We can no longer speak innocently or cunningly of things which ‘are’ no longer, which have entered another phase. We do it anyway. Nihilism constitutes the problem of the planetary world, which knows neither on what it is founded, nor where it is going. Nihilism is not an error, an aberration, a fault, an illness; it is no point of view, no theory, no psychological disposition; it does not characterise this or that particular state of things. Nihilism begins to englobe all that is and is done. To speak about it, in the world of the fragmented totality, is extremely difficult. Whether one deplores or rejoices in it: it seems that only fragmentary and aphoristic systematics could dare the adventure.
We live in a world where all mystical impulses are consolidated in Churches, all revolutionary movements in bureaucratic States, all researches of thought in sclerotic Universities, all the adventures of human existence in an autarchic and hypocritical Family. Petrified and putrefied, Churches and States, Universities and Families continue to be the institutions that administer human lives, force them to conform, lead the renegades and the excluded to their loss.
Analytical Table
- Kostas Axelos
- Edited by Justin Clemens, University of Melbourne, Hellmut Munz, RMIT University, Vietnam
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- Book:
- The Game of the World
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 17 November 2023
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- 30 April 2023, pp 429-432
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Opening. The Great Powers and the Elementary Forces of the World
- Kostas Axelos
- Edited by Justin Clemens, University of Melbourne, Hellmut Munz, RMIT University, Vietnam
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- The Game of the World
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
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- 17 November 2023
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- 30 April 2023, pp 31-110
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V - The Human in the World
- Kostas Axelos
- Edited by Justin Clemens, University of Melbourne, Hellmut Munz, RMIT University, Vietnam
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- The Game of the World
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
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- 17 November 2023
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- 30 April 2023, pp 267-320
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Summary
The human has been defined – which apparently defines everything – as extremely fragile being and as a terrible existent, as the measure of all things and as rational animal, as imago Dei and as (subjective-objective) foundation of objectivity, as body-soul-spirit (by emphasising sometimes one side, sometimes the other, by synthesising or seeking unity), as subject, as social and political animal, as generic worker and socialising being, as person and existence and as being where goes the being of the world, as distant being and almost as human-problem. Will all these definitions make the human speak and act – at the same time making speaking and acting the encompassing that the human both is and is not – the passing existent, this being to be surpassed, without altogether finishing it, and leave the question in suspense: until when will subjectivity, even objectified and collectivised, be the last word?
We are obliged to track and follow the traces – traces that mix themselves and lose themselves – that link – with continuity and solution of continuity – the human to the non-human.
How does the human manage to enter in any case into the dimension of the logos, to ‘dialogue’ with what it is not?
By becoming anthropology, metaphysical philosophy becomes not only an interpretation of the human being: all the interpretations and all the beings find themselves reduced, by this reflexive philosophy – anthropology – to the human, who is supposed to be the secret of the essence or the existence of the being as such and in its entirety.
At the moment when philosophy becomes the philosophy of subjectivity to begin to finalise itself in anthropology, the human appears as the last figure of the absolute.
If the absolute is the ensemble of human relations, it is then precisely not ab-solute. It still remains to comprehend relations: they link humans with each other and with what else?
Plaything of dust, emerging from earth and becoming dust again, the human plays for some time with it.
Although without models, the human ‘imitates’. What? It aims to get as close as possible – to what?
Different from animals, does the human have a – near or distant – relation with itself and the – near and distant – world?