1. The image is inspired by the epigraph to Gillian Rose’s autobiographical record of living and dying, Love’s Work: A Reckoning with Life (Schocken Books, New York, 1995): “Keep your mind in hell, and despair not”.
2. In the structuralist context, Derrida uses free play in a positive sense as a game or the field of finite language: “a field of infinite substitutions or the closure of a finite ensemble”. From ‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’, in Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (eds.), The Structuralist Controversy: The Language of Criticism and the Science of Man, (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1970), p. 260.
3. Thus Derrida writes of “... Nietzschean affirmation-the joyous affirmation of the free play of the world and without truth, without origin, offered to an active interpretation...” as an affirmation which “determines the non-center otherwise than as loss of the center. And it plays the game without security”, Eugenio Donato (eds.), The Structuralist Controversy: The Language of Criticism and the Science of Man, (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1970) op. cit., p. 264. For a comprehensive articulation of the modern German idealist understanding of “play” as an aesthetic category, expressed from a critical Derridean literary perspective, see M. Spariosu, Dionysus Reborn: Play and the Aesthetic Dimension in Modern Philosophical and Scientific Discourse (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1989). While claiming a more-than-phenomenological perspective, Spariosu relies extensively on Ingeborg Heidemann’s Der Begriff des Spiels und das aesthetische Weltbild in der Philosophie der Gegenwart (De Gruyter, Berlin, 1968), from which last Spariosu nonetheless distances himself by criticizing it as “onto-phenomenological”. By employing the term “historical description”, Spariosu is able to suggest that his reading exceeds phenomenological provinciality while temporarily forgetting the meaning (contamination?) of hermeneutics.
4. Steve Fuller, Philosophy of Science and Its Discontents (Westview Press, Boulder, Co., 1989), p. 7. [The ‘chassis’ appears in Sean O’Casey’s play Juno and the Paycock (1924: “The whole worl’s in a state o’ chassis”.-RSC, ed.]
5. Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983) p. 1. Hacking mentions both Duhem and Hanson. This does not stop him from giving the ballpark dating of this crisis as happening “around 1960”. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1970; 1962) is the ‘paradigm’ temporal locus in all taxonomies and histories of the crisis in the philosophy of science. As will be further emphasized below, there is some justification for moving this date back a few years: to 1958, the date of N. R. Hanson’s Patterns of Discovery (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1958; reprinted, 1961).