2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

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A BSOLUTE( S ) SPIELEN
playing rules are not codified in advance: rather, they are rectified every time a group of
children gather together to play and often during playing time as well. But the role of the
rules within the activity is exactly the same.
In fact, play is an activity that seems to require the most extreme seriousness. Play can
happen only when the players adhere totally to the rules of what they play and even submit
their being—by forgetting it and leaving it aside, in most instances—to the being of play
and to its absolute rule. The rules of the game, to put it differently, know no exceptions:
when a player stops following them the “playing” itself is thereby concluded. 3 The serious-
ness derives from the total immersion and unchallenged attention that the participation in
a game, and especially the confrontation with the other, with the antagonist, requires from
the player. The playfulness of play—the element that risks transforming any thinking of
play into an “edifying thought,” as Hegel notes—derives instead from the total self-enclos-
edness of any game. Being totally separate from any other activity, the phenomenon of play
extracts the players from their normal and usually burdensome activities to immerse them
in a different and totally other medium where they can forget themselves to be only what
the game makes them be. But playfulness and lightness so understood are just the opposite
of a lack of seriousness. We might even say that play requires a total seriousness in order
to be playful: only if “playing” is closed upon itself because the devotion to its rules is ab-
solute, can the players renounce their being and be carried away by the game itself.
Therefore, it is impossible to get rid of the complexity or even of the apparently apo-
retic character of Spiel by neatly splitting the concept into the play- and game- components.
In fact, the mutual solidarity shown by “play” and “game” points to on opposition between
playful and serious, productive and wasteful, etc., that lies within the semantic content of
Spiel and that cuts across “play” and “game” respectively. There is little to be gained, if
anything at all, in the effort to clarify Spiel through the apparently neat English distinction
of Play vs. Game since the same basic opposition at work within Spiel represents itself
within each component. In fact, there is some etymological evidence to support the conten-
3. I am relying quite heavily on Gadamer’s analysis of Spiel in this characterization of its play-like component.See
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method…, 90ff.