2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

B ORDERING PHILOSOPHY
inside the building of philosophy something (possibly) external to it. Hegel introduces this
idea, most properly, in the Preface to his first major work. He leads this idea into philoso-
phy, or more precisely into his analysis of the conception of the end of philosophy. The He-
gelian gesture, the glimpse of the realm of play lying beyond philosophy, may be
interpreted, at the most general level, in a number of different ways, depending upon how
we read the logical relationship between the path and its destination. It may be the ship tak-
ing us to the promised land of the beyond, or the outside of philosophy that Hegel tries (un-
successfully, perhaps) to domesticate, or even the outside as what underlies philosophy, the
original opening within which philosophy as metaphysics makes, or rather takes, sense.
This gesture must be considered at two different levels. On the one hand, as I have in-
sisted above, it makes more transparent, or so I hope I have shown, what is needed in order
to perform such a closure of philosophy. In the complex dialectical movement which the
Phenomenology, on its path to absolute knowing, will cover, the final point is represented
by an apparently impossible conflation of the most serious commitment to death with the
most lighthearted universe of play. At the same time, Hegel makes also clear that not only
the two aspects must come together, but that they do come together in play, that they do
represent the two sides of the same coin. More precisely, the one cannot exist without the
other. If the weight is then transferred onto the concept of play, the issue is to find out
whether ‘play’ is up to such a task of transfiguration of philosophy. Whether, in other
words, we can think play, game, and their inner articulation in such a way to make sense of
what Hegel is prescribing in order to accomplish the transfer into the ‘beyond’ of philoso-
phy.
The Hegelian gesture becomes even more interesting, and more difficult to think
through, if we are willing to read the Hegelian text literally, if we are willing play along
with his thought. In which case, we are not allowed to consider play and game as useful
“metaphors” or “images” to illustrate absolute knowing, but have to take it, quite literally,
as what the beyond of philosophy is. We should not say, then, that “absolute knowing is a
play”, which can be interpreted as “we can perhaps imagine,” or “it might be useful as a
didactic exercise” to imagine absolute knowing as a form of play. Rather, “absolute know-
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