2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

T HE ANACLASTIC ILLUSION OF A TRANSCENDENTAL UNITY
to encompass those characteristics that we have seen best associated, in current English lan-
guage, with the semantic area of play.
Indeed, the very usage of the word jeu by Derrida, in the texts cited as well as else-
where, exhibits precisely this slippage from the game-like to the play-like semantic com-
ponents of jeu, and represent a good indication of the trajectory that the structuralist
paradigm seems bound to follow within the space of Spiel. In Derrida’s words,
cette thématique structuraliste de l’immédiateté rompue est donc la face
triste, négative, nostalgique, coupable, rousseauiste, de la pensée du jeu
dont l’affirmation nietzschéenne, l’affirmation joyeuse du jeu du monde et
de l’innocence du devenir, l’affirmation d’un monde de signes sans faute,
sans vérité, sans origine, offert à une interprétation active serait l’autre face.
Cette affirmation determine alors le non-centre autrement que comme perte
du centre. Car il ya un jeu sûr: celui qui se limite à la substitution des pièces
données et existantes, présentes. Dans le hasard absolu, l’affirmation se
livre aussi à l’indétermination génétique.” 56… The present endpoint of his trajectory, whose path is often marked in Derrida’s work
by the opposition between jeux and jeu, or between the jeu sûr and the jeu that is submitted
to a game of absolute chance, marks also the end of our investigation into Artificial Intel-
ligence and Structuralism. We set out to determine whether these two programs could suc-
cessfully articulate an “end of philosophy” based upon the reduction of the complexity of
Spiel onto the game-like component and we have seen that both, in a very particular sense
of the word, miss the target. Artificial Intelligence because, in spite of providing a very rich
articulation of the concept of game—in fact, in spite of having indeed created such a con-
cept as a theoretical entity—it is unable to provide a satisfactory treatment of the relation-
ship tying together the rules and their content. AI remains caught into the formalist, and
fallacious, opposition between form and content. Structuralism, on the other hand, solves
satisfactory the latter problem through a much richer articulation of substance and structure
that ends up in a the project of an “anaclastics science” representing a direct challenge to
the most basic philosophical concepts. Structuralism itself, however, proves unable to bring
56. Jacques Derrida, “La structure, Le signe et le jeu…” 428.
307