The terms “politics” and “political” have become so overdetermined that it is difficult to use them in any effective manner. We argue that this has dangerous political consequences, and that this could be addressed by providing a new, sounder, notion of politics. This paper argues that defining politics in relation to the notion of play can provide a notion both intuitively appealing and able to withstand the problematic overdeterminations. We argue that politics is the set of practices through which the (...) indeterminate of Spielraum is made more determinate. This suggests that politics is always partly a matter of play: it is about instituting values without making any claims about the legitimacy of this instituting act. With reference to Huizinga and Nietzsche’s analyses of play, we define play as the living unity of seriousness and frivolity, and non-play as either seriousness without frivolity or frivolity without seriousness. In order to illustrate this, we comparatively analyse the attitudes of Barack Obama and Donald Trump in the single context of the well-known yearly White House Correspondent’s Dinner. There, we see two opposed attitudes to playfulness. Our analysis allows us to apply our _Spielraum_ model of politics to show that the thrust of Obama’s attitude involves an embrace of the non-foundational nature of politics as play, whereas Trump’s attitude is politicidal: it is animated by a refusal to acknowledge its own lack of foundation, leading to an oscillation between over-seriousness and over-frivolity. (shrink)

Gaston Franssen’s essay touches on important medical and literary topics: the experience of patients with unexplained somatic complaints, the importance of giving their symptoms a name or diagnosis, the verbal representation of what bothers them, or the uncertainty all parties have to live with when an underlying cause of the symptoms is missing. A diagnosis or name such as chronic fatigue syndrome can be a relief for its sufferers, as is expressed by one of the patients in the article: “I (...) wept with relief at having a name for it.” Yet CFS is but a name for something that, medically speaking, has no substance except for the patients” complaints. CFS shares this lack of objective physical signs with other... (shrink)