2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

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A BSOLUTE( S ) SPIELEN
of the term “played”: moved around, entertained, tricked, operated upon, etc. etc.
The emphasis here is on play being prior to the players, on the played game taking pri-
ority over the players: to play means to submit oneself to the rules of the game and the best
player is the one who, by being closest to the rules of the game, is at the same time the far-
thest from himself. The maximum participation to the game being played requires the max-
imum self-forgetfulness, this is what Zarathustra stresses: the player is never as
participating on the game as when he negates himself in order to be ecstatically carried out-
side himself and within the playspace.
The mode of being of play—which, as self-spinning wheel expresses the eternal be-
coming that does not need any justification since it eternally re-presents itself—contains an
essential moment of negation because the player must annihilate itself into the game being
played. The epochal event wished by Zarathustra—the instauration of the world of play—
comports the end of the player(s) or, at least, the end of the separation between the players
and the play. The advent of play, it seems, is the death of the player. This is what Nietzsche
seems to say in the second part of the previous quotation when he states that “play is a sa-
cred yes-saying”, that is, play is the purest of the affirmations. The subject of this affirming
is the spirit (Geist) transformed into a playing/playful child and therefore into a player who
affirms the play of the world and who wills his own will.
If interpreted in this sense, however, the figure of play recedes from form the age of
the Overman and of the overcoming of nihilism and gets closer and closer to this present
age, to the age of nihilism. Play becomes closer and closer to the final stage of the asceti-
cism, the stage when the ascetic ideal will reach its “triumph in the ultimate agony.” 23 Such
a triumph represent the victory of the end that will have been finally reached, the triumph
of death that is, at the same time, the extreme ecstasy. The spirit willing the advent of play
wills, then, its own death or, to say it better, it wills its own self-annihilation. We witness
here the extreme paradox of play, that brings together the affirmation and negation in a sin-
gle act comporting the affirmation of the negation of the players. Is this consequence con-
23. Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), III, 11.