Play’s Republic

As we mentioned in class Tuesday, Friedrich Nietzsche (1843-1900) is at once a forerunner of the postmodern critical sensibility and one of the early contemporary champions of play (the two themes overlap in myriad ways). While play is an idea he revists repeatedly, it is Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (Die Geburt der Tragödie, Oder: Griechentum und Pessimismus) that first sounds this ludic theme. There, he wants to escape Enlightenment Europe’s homogenization of Ancient Greece (as the pinnacle of rationality). So he proposes a Janus-faced model: One face Dionysiac, and the other Apollonian. Dionysus, the god of abandon and orgy, and Apollo, the god of restraint and symmetry. Self-evidently, this model is the foundation of the twinned pairs we mentioned on Tuesday: Archaic/Mediated, Presocratic/Socratic, Prerational/Rational, Becoming/Being.

Both gods play, but the kind of play we find with Apollo is orderly, reasonable (and, if we are to believe Friedrich, ultimately impotent). Think, for example, of Erasmus’ In Praise of Folly. Or even the pointed wit of Pope. The play of Dionysus is frequently thrilling and erotic, but it is also frequently dangerous and (in many senses) even inhuman. Think of de Sade’s Philosophy of the Boudoir, or Bataille’s savage (but extraordinary!) L’Histoire de L’Oeil [Story of the Eye].

Nietzsche argues for a Dionysus/Apollo model of history, a back-and-forth tension between the world of Becoming and the world of being. The European Enlightenment prayed to Apollo, for example, while Romanticism turned to Dionysus. The late 19th century (against which Herr Nietzsche raged), with its faith in the transparency of language and the possibility of Universal Reason, was thoroughly Apollonian, but the late 20th century returned to the temple of Dionysus.

Indeed, there is vital moment in the West of the 20th Century where Apollo’s statue is pulled down, and Dionysus raised in its place. It is sometimes called “the linguistic turn,” because it is the moment where language becomes preeminent in philosophy. But we may call it “the ludic turn,” because it is the moment where Apollonian faith in the simple equation Word = Object dissolved, and we were left with a far trickier bit of algebra: Sign=Signified/Signifier. It is the moment where Saussure convenes his Cours de Linguistique Générale.

In other words, “play” and “semiotics” are intimately related. Is it any wonder that one of the best known semioticians of the last 30 years is Umberto Eco, who writes books with titles like “How to Travel with a Salmon”, and is frequently described as “rollicking” and “ebullient”?

Pushing further, Eco, like Jacques Derrida and Paul Feyerabend (and even Cornel West) are philosophers who believe that only through play are they able to philosophize at all. Is it any surprise that this is a point lost on a lot of Americans, who read Derrida from an Apollonian/Socratic/Humorless point of view, and expect him to Explain Things Clearly? Americans don’t want playful philosophy. But, if people like Derrida are correct, that is the only kind of thought that is possible right now.