2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

S PIELEN, THE ABYSS, AND THE CHILD
The Geschick of Being, a child that plays, shifting the pawns: ´the royalty
of a child—that means, the αρχε, that which governs by instituting grounds,
the being of beings. The Geschick of being: a child that plays. (113/187)
This brief remark is far from being an exhaustive reflection on the nature of play and espe-
cially on the nature of the play of thinking, but at least points in the proper direction. The
issue lying ahead, fact, could be summed up by saying that in order to determine the nature
of play one has to determine “what the play plays, who plays it and how the playing is to
be thought here” [111 (186)]. What I have been saying so far about the interconnection be-
tween play and Geschick answers, at least partially, the first two questions—the what and
the who parts of the problem: the game is played by being in its Geschick. But what is being
played in this game? Nothing less that the possibility of beings’ disclosure and appearing.
Beings as such are at stake in the play of Geschick: their being depends on the institution
of a playspace provided by the Geschick of being because beings can appear only within
such a space and according to the modality provided and prescribed by the game being
played. It is for this reason, I believe, that Heidegger, when referring to one being in par-
ticular, e.g. the mortals, affirms that “one here deals with a game where they are in play and
at stake.” (ib.).
This very preliminary answer to the “who” part of the interrogation about play indi-
cates where we can find out “how” the play takes place: we must inquire about the Geschick
of being as the operation of instituting a game, as the creation of the Zeit-Spielraum, the
spacetime of the game and the space/time play). A further step is possible if we keep in
mind an additional component of the meaning of Spiel: play as the leeway, as the infinites-
imal space that makes movement possible. Play, in short, in the sense of the possibility of
articulation of joints. It follows that the subject of the interrogation becomes the Geschick
of being insofar as it constitutes the successive articulations of the spacetime within where-
in beings can appear. What can we discover along this path? Let us go back to the text quot-
ed above.
It should be noticed that Heidegger/Heraclitus do not say “Aion/Geschick: a Spiel,” be-
cause otherwise the meaning of play as concrete event would be privileged and, as a con-
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