2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

S PIELEN, THE ABYSS, AND THE CHILD
mode of being of the child at play, his acting, is governed absolutely by the rules of the
game that delimits the playspace: no transgression is possible, lest the game itself is dis-
solved. But the “foundation” of the rules, their “ground” in the proper metaphysical sense
of Grund is totally absent because the rules have been created by the player itself who is
free to change them at will and anytime. Therefore, we must affirm that Spiel is constituted
by rules whose value is absolute within the real of play (within the spatiotemporal leeway,
the Zeit-Spielraum), but whose Grund is arbitrary. However, such a characterization is still
insufficient insofar as it suggest a clear-cut division between the institution and the execu-
tion of the rules. What is worse, such a characterization suggests a bipartite and essential
static process in which an initial “legislative” phase is followed by successive and properly
ludic executive stage. What is most essential in the ludic process—and I believe, in the on-
tological context within which Heidegger talks— is precisely the absence of such a division
which can be retraced only a posteriori. We might say that such a clear-cut division is valid
only in abstracto and more precisely if we abstract from the time of play. Time exists, with-
in the game, as the changing of the rule, as a creation of new rules that replace the old ones.
The intrinsic compenetration of arbitrariness and rigor that is typical of play comports
necessarily that the being of the player is always, and at the same time, inside and outside
play, because it has to be inside the game being played as long as it is following the rules
and outside of the played game and inside the playing game, as it were, insofar as it finds
itself creating the rules that define a new playspace. The being of the player is the being at
the limit, or, better, the being living on the limit, the being living on the ever renewing limit
that divides the time of play when the player is totally absorbed within the Spielraum from
the time when the Spielraum itself is defined. “It plays since it plays,” says Heidegger, and
in the clause we should hear the intrinsic and essential duplicity of play that finds in itself
its rigorous, and therefore arbitrary, law.
It is this double movement, I believe, that thinking must appropriate in order to become
a thinking of play. Or rather, it is the double movement that play must give to thinking so
that the latter may become play’s thinking. Play’s thinking can only be the thinking of the
limit, the thinking that positions itself on the limit of the articulation constituted by the des-
115