Kostas Axelos, The Game of the World, trans. Justin Clemens and Hellmut Munz – Edinburgh University Press, April 2023, paperback February 2025

Now in paperback

A philosophical treatment of play in the twentieth century

• Appeals to a potentially broad audience including those interested in thinking through globalisation today
• The magnum opus of an influential French-Greek intellectual whose contemporaries and influences include Derrida, Deleuze and Lefebvre
• Approaches philosophy in a systematic as well as fragmentary manner
• Anticipates the key term of contemporary Heideggerian scholarship (German Irre, French errance) and confronts it through play
• A French reprint of Le Jeu du Monde was published by Les Belles Lettres in January 2018

Kostas Axelos traces his thinking on the world deployed as play from Heraclitus through to the culmination of metaphysical philosophy with Nietzsche, Marx and Heidegger.

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 interlocuters await.– Stuart Elden, University of Warwick

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.