The Game of the World

Kostas Axelos' The Game of the World is a philosophical treatise on play and games that appeals to a broad audience, including those interested in thinking through globalization today. It approaches philosophy in a systematic and fragmentary manner, anticipating the key term of contemporary Heideggerian scholarship and confronting it through play. The book offers a unique vision of our contemporary world, where technological transformations coincide with a world at play and in play, fragmentary and totalized, disordered and hyper-organized. Axelos offers profound meditations on play and playing, games and gaming, directing us towards new means of thinking and action that may enable us to face the world-historical challenges of our present.

Format: Hardback
Length: 438 pages
Publication date: 30 April 2023
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

A profound philosophical treatise on the nature of play and games, this work appeals to a potentially broad audience, including those interested in thinking through the complexities of globalization today. The magnum opus of an influential French-Greek intellectual, whose contemporaries and influences include Derrida, Deleuze, and Lefebvre, this text approaches philosophy in a systematic as well as fragmentary manner. Anticipating the key term of contemporary Heideggerian scholarship (German Irre, French errance), it confronts it through the lens of play. A French reprint of Le Jeu du Monde was published by Les Belles Lettres in January 2018. Drawing on philosophies of gaming and play from Heraclitus and Plato through to Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, Kostas Axelos outlines an extraordinary and unique vision of our contemporary world. Originally published in 1969, The Game of the World brilliantly anticipates a 21st century in which ever-accelerating technological transformations coincide with a world that is simultaneously fragmentary and totalized, disordered and hyper-organized. In the midst of this paradoxical and deranging becoming-planetary of the world, Axelos offers a sequence of profound meditations on play and playing, games and gaming, directing us towards new means of thinking and action that may enable us to face the world-historical challenges of our own present.

Weight: 814g
Dimension: 162 x 242 x 30 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781474449069