Game of the World

Kostas Axelos (1924–2010) was a Greek-French philosopher and translator. A specialist in Heraclitus, Karl Marx and Martin Heidegger, as well as in Friedrich Hölderlin and Stéphane Mallarmé, he taught and researched at the Sorbonne, as well as at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. The Game of the World is his magnum opus, and as yet only the third English translation from his vast and important body of work. Justin Clemens is Associate Professor in Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. He has published extensively on psychoanalysis, contemporary European philosophy and Australian art and literature. His recent books include What is Education? edited with A.J. Bartlett and The Afterlives of Georges Perec edited with Rowan Wilken. Hellmut Monz teaches at the School of Communication and Design at RMIT University, Vietnam. He made his literary debut with the hexalogy Hellmut Monz and Philosophia's Scream

• Translator’s IntroductionPreludeOpening. The Great Powers and the Elementary Forces of the WorldI. Logos. The Language and Thought of Man and the WorldII. That. The Play of Being in Becoming of the Fragmentary and Fragmented Totality of the Multidimensional and Open WorldIII. God-ProblemIV. Physis. The Cosmic WorldV. Human in the World VI. World History VII. The World of Poetry and Art VIII. Being-Nothingness, Everything-Nothing, the Unwordly WorldIX. The Game of the WorldNotesAnalytical table

At the heart of Kostas Axelos’s ambitious and pioneering system, this encyclopaedia of fragments has long exercised a powerful influence in French thought on play, game and world. Axelos could not have asked for more sympathetic, attentive and poetic translators in Clemens and Monz. His anglophone readers and interlocutors await.