ALEXEI IZMAYLOV, ANDREA FERRERO, DAMARIS ATHENE, DAVIDE LA MONTAGNA, FEDERICA DI PIETRANTONIO, NICO CRISANTI, SALVATORE PIONE.
In The Tablet of Destinies, Roberto Calasso reimagines Mesopotamian mythology to reflect on the intertwined origins of writing, language, and power. Retelling the myth of Enmerkar and Aratta, he proposes that the first act of writing emerged from a political conflict between two kings. Seeking access to the riches of Aratta, King Enmerkar sets out to reach the distant kingdom, but rather than waging war, he realizes that its ruler can be challenged through riddles. Because such a complex exchange cannot be entrusted to a messenger, Enmerkar invents a new form of communication, etching signs onto clay tablets. Hidden from one another, the two kings exchange riddles and answers, creating what Calasso describes as the first writing. Their intellectual contest ultimately leads not to conquest but to trade, transforming political rivalry into diplomatic exchange.
In ancient mythology, the riddle is never merely a puzzle to be solved, but a performative act embedded in structures of power. It tests intelligence, authority, and legitimacy, transforming language into a site of negotiation rather than declaration. Calasso analyse this version of the myth to uncover its foundational role in shaping cultural identity: writing is thus born not from the need to record information, but from a struggle over meaning itself, where military confrontation is displaced into symbolic exchange.
The English verb to play further expands this field of inquiry through its remarkable semantic range. To play encompasses gaming, performance, acting, rehearsal, experimentation, and the act of playing with language itself. The same word designates both the ludic act and theatrical performance, collapsing distinctions between fiction and reality, rehearsal and action.
In Homo Ludens (1938), Johan Huizinga argues that play is not a by-product of culture but one of its founding conditions. Far from opposing seriousness, play structures the production of meaning itself: law, ritual, poetry, theatre, diplomacy, and even warfare unfold through shared rules, symbolic exchange, performance, and interpretation. Play thus emerges as a cultural technology—a space in which language, power, and imagination are continuously negotiated, where identities are performed, narratives rewritten, and social realities reconfigured.
In her 2024 Warburg Institute lecture, Galileo's Laughter: Knowledge and Play in the Renaissance, Professor Paula Findlen revisits Johan Huizinga's conception of play, arguing that laughter, jokes, play, and paradox were not peripheral to Renaissance culture but fundamental epistemological tools through which knowledge was produced and transmitted. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's philosophy of laughter, Findlen understands laughter not merely as a comic gesture but as a mode of knowledge. In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin presents laughter as a way of knowing and a philosophical condition through which official truths lose their claim to permanence and the world becomes available for reinterpretation. By suspending hierarchy and certainty, laughter opens language to plurality, allowing narratives to be continually retold, rewritten, and reimagined.
From this perspective, Findlen turns to the figure of the "laughing philosopher," a significant intellectual model that emerged throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, embodied above all by Democritus. As Giordano Bruno writes:
“ The world is such that we play Democritus at the expense of the pedants and grammarians, and diligent courtiers play at being Democritus at ours, while unthinking monks and priests democratize at everybody's expense.”