1. Difference is prior to identity
In everything you do, recall that names, persons, and characters are mere ripples emerging from the ocean of Difference.
2. Reject the world
Kant is dead. The concept of world was only ever an illusion to preserve the coherence of a thinking subject, of a world which is thought as a guarantor God.
3. Affirm chance
To think is to throw dice. The question is not of whether or when. “It is rather a question of the throw of the dice, of the whole sky as open space of throwing as the only rule.” Chance is no longer arbitrary to the extent that it is affirmed. When affirming chance, there is no such thing as losing.
4. Questions are imperatives
“It is the bad players who repeat only by fragmenting chance and dividing it among several throws. By contrast, the good throw of the dice affirms all of chance in one throw, and it is here that we find the essence of what is called a question.” Ask not what is, but how or who. The fundamental questions are those which have no solution, which exhaust and live beyond their solutions, and it is these questions from which games are lived, born, and die.
5. Resist opposition
“For opposition teaches us nothing about the nature of that which is thought to be opposed.” Seek instead the difference that opposes nothing and which serves no purpose.
6. The Referee is not an author, but an actor-dancer
“It is a question of making movement itself a work, without interposition; of substituting direct signs for mediate representations; of inventing vibrations, rotations, whirlings, gravitations, dances or leaps which directly touch the mind.” As dancer, she extracts the pure event from which all others communicate.
7. Resist common sense and good sense
“Everybody knows, no one can deny, is the form of representation and the discourse of the representative.” Good sense is defined as the demand for order: past to future, most differentiated to least differentiated. Common sense is defined as that which subsumes diversity and relates it to the unity of a particular form: I hold this torch, I strike with my axe, it is the same character I play, the same world I breathe. Games oppose both good and common sense through the deployment of paradox.
8. Art does not imitate
“Art does not imitate, above all because it repeats; it repeats all the repetitions, by virtue of an internal power (an imitation is a copy, but art is simulation, it reverses copies into simulacra).”
9. The ideal game is indistinguishable from nonsense
“It is not enough to oppose a ‘major’ game to the minor game of man, nor a divine game to the human game; it is necessary to imagine other principles, even those which appear inapplicable, by means of which the game would become pure. I) There are no preexisting rules, each move invents its own rules; it bears upon its own rule. 2) Far from dividing and apportioning chance in a really distinct number of throws, all throws affirm chance and endlessly ramify it with each throw. 3) The throws therefore are not really or numerically distinct. They are qualitatively distinct, but are the qualitative forms of a Single cast which is onto logically one. Each throw is itself a series, but in a time much smaller than the minimum of continuous, thinkable time; and, to this serial minimum, a distribution of singularities corresponds. Each throw emits singular points-the points on the dice, for example. But the set of throws is included in the aleatory point, a unique cast which is endlessly displaced throughout all series, in a time Greater than the maximum of continuous, thinkable time. These throws are successive in relation to one another, yet simultaneous in relation to this point which always change’s the rule, or coordinates and ramifies the corresponding series as it insinuates chance over the entire length of each series. The unique cast is a chaos, each throw of which is a fragment. Each throw operates a distribution of singularities, a constellation. But instead of dividing a closed space between fixed results which correspond to hypotheses, the mobile results are distributed in the open space of the unique and undivided cast. This is a nomadic and non-sedentary distribution, wherein each system of singularities communicates and resonates with the others, being at once implicated by the others and implicating them in the most important cast. It is the game of problems and of the question, no longer the game of the categorical and the hypothetical…
The ideal game of which we speak cannot be played by either man or God. It can only be thought as nonsense. But precisely for this reason, it is the reality of thought itself and the unconscious of pure thought. Each thought forms a series in a time which is smaller than the minimum of consciously thinkable continuous time. Each thought emits a distribution of singularities. All of these thoughts communicate in one long thought, causing all the forms or figures of the nomadic distribution to correspond to its own displacement, everywhere insinuating chance and ramifying each thought, linking the ‘once and for all’ to ‘each time’ for the sake of ‘all time.’ For only thought finds it possible to affirm all chance and to make chance into an object of affirmation.”
10. Play without players
In all senses, the people you play with are merely subsidiary to the table. However, do not misunderstand this. For there is not one table but two. When considering your players, the question you should ask is as follows: ‘How could there not be a fracture at the limit or along the hinge between the two tables? And how can we recognize on the first a substantial I identical to itself, on the second a continuous self similar to itself?’ The identity of the player has disappeared, as has the resemblance of the one who pays the price or profits from the consequences.” Let the identity of the player disappear.
11. A void is never fruitful
“The event is the identity of form and void.” Its purpose is to proliferate madness.
12. The purpose of games is to sadden
A game that saddens no one, that annoys no one, is not a game but an exercise in imitation.
Sources
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