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The pragmatic object — the discursive, social, and artistic productivity of man — has no meaning unless it is understood as a web of reasons of a reasonable subject. Reasonableness must be distinguished from the rationality manifest in the practices of logic and science. Nevertheless, in what follows the term rationality will be employed instead, in order to avoid the use of the archaism "reasonableness." The connotations that reasonableness ought to evoke are: reason, in opposition to understanding (the faculty of theoretical reconstruction); the reasons for reason, in opposition to causes explaining natural phenomena; the reasons of a reasoning reason, in opposition to a reason that does not function by way of argumentation, or to put it more simply, a reason that would proceed without argumentative inferences. In this chapter it will be maintained that a reasoning reason only has reason within a community (as opposed to society), whose life is clearly composed of concord and discord, consensus and conflict, philia and eris. It is from a reflection concerning the pair philialeris, forming the first part of this chapter, that two conceptions of strategy will be presented in the second part. The first is that of the linguists: strategy in terms of calculation. The second is primarily that of the semioticians: strategy in terms of manipulation or manoeuvre. It will then be demonstrated that this distinction corresponds to two types of polemology, the Confucian Sun Tzu's and General von Clausewitz's, or two different ways of formulating the art of war or Kriegskunst. Since Kriegskunst is also Kriegsspiel, the third section of the chapter will return to the notion of the game. The economic theory of games — omnipresent as methodology in the social sciences — will be criticized, and it will also be maintained that the polemological conception of the strategical game is only concerned with being-together in society. Community, however, is not reducible to society. It is in this way that the idea of the infinite game is to be evoked: the infinite game is that of culture — this being a choreographic conception of the game -, which is opposed to the finite game of society. Consequently, this reflection closes with a eulogy for the dance and the strategies of the dancer.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-011-1773-9_2

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