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.

“政治”和“政治的”这两个词已经变得如此过度确定，以至于很难以任何有效的方式使用它们。我们认为这会产生危险的政治后果，并且可以通过提供新的、更健全的政治概念来解决这个问题。本文认为，定义与游戏概念相关的政治可以提供一个既具有直观吸引力又能够承受有问题的过度决定的概念。我们认为，政治是一系列实践，通过这些实践，Spielraum 的不确定性变得更加确定。这表明政治在一定程度上始终是一个游戏问题：它是关于建立价值观而不对这种建立行为的合法性提出任何主张。参照惠津加和尼采对游戏的分析，我们将游戏定义为严肃与轻浮的活生生的统一，将非游戏定义为严肃而无轻浮，或轻浮而无严肃。为了说明这一点，我们在著名的一年一度的白宫记者晚宴这一单一背景下对巴拉克·奥巴马和唐纳德·特朗普的态度进行了比较分析。在那里，我们看到了两种对玩乐的相反态度。我们的分析使我们能够应用我们的斯皮尔劳姆政治模型来表明，奥巴马态度的主旨涉及到接受政治作为游戏的非基础性质，而特朗普的态度是政治性的：它因拒绝承认自己的缺乏而变得活跃。的基础，导致过度严肃和过度轻浮之间的摇摆。