Published in external, peer-reviewed venues outside Inscriptions.
2025
"A Silent Leap: Sport Beyond Ethics." In Sport and Religion: Antiquity, Modernity and Contemporaneity, pp. 41–51. Edited by Luísa Ávila da Costa and Constantino Pereira Martins. São Paulo, Brazil: Editora Dialética. External Peer-reviewedLinkPhilArchive
It is safe to say that the conjuncture of sport and religion has received scant attention in the mainstream of sports philosophy. In the recent voluminous and authoritative Routledge Handbook of Sports Philosophy (2017), for instance, the conjunct of religion and sport is only briefly mentioned in an article by Kenneth Aggerholm that sets out to describe a "secular reading of Kierkegaard." While his chief purpose is to describe how meaning may appear as revelation in sport, Aggerholm's Kierkegaard also holds the potential to reveal a transcendental reality – a sphere of the infinite – through the secular rituals of sport, and thus to bring the infinite in touch with our finite reality, enabling us to overcome our existential dread, our "sickness unto death," as Kierkegaard termed it. To Kierkegaard faith could never simply be pronounced as an attribute, it had to be experienced and lived-through, and this event of religion was characterised by his image of the "leap of faith," the moment when we suspend our ethical constraints and make a decision to, simply, believe. Cindy White (2004) has suggested that the grip with which sports capture our imagination is such that it can allow us to "forget what is good." Diego Maradona's infamous handball against England in the quarter-finals of the 1986 World Cup comes to mind, a goal that Maradona himself characterised as scored by the "hand of God": condemned on account of its unethical breach of the rules of the game, the goal nonetheless revealed a domain of truth and "poetic" justice to those who cheered for Maradona's side.
"Death is not the end: negative mysticism in Jon Fosse's Morning and Evening." In Philosophy of Final Words, pp. 6–21. Edited by Dr. Valery Vino. Melbourne, Australia: mongrel matter. External Peer-reviewedLinkPhilArchive
We are accustomed to thinking of death as the ultimate finality. Existential philosophy, including that of Martin Heidegger, has held death to be the absolute limit against which it is possible to think life. Even more so, he held, does death serve to define our humanity, since we, as a species, are the only ones able to contemplate our own finitude. In Morning and Evening the author, critic, and recent Nobel laureate Jon Fosse tears open a rift in the hitherto sutured fabric of liminality that distinguished existentialists from other philosophers, and that has divided humans from animals, and the living from the dead. In this essay we examine how this short text connects with and yet critiques Heidegger's view on liminality, and how it points to a perspective we cannot but call theological in its assessment of life, death, and our place between and beyond these worlds.
2023
Review of Philosophy of Sport: Core Readings, 2nd edition, edited by Jason Holt. Teaching Philosophy 46, no. 3: 417–420. External Book ReviewDOI
This essay investigates whether the term national signification may serve better than the more common national identity to describe how sports people variously enrol and reference the nation to position themselves and their practice. Taking the social theory of Pierre Bourdieu as a ground for analysis, this essay investigates four cases involving elite athletes from Norway to situate them within the field of sports culture and the larger fields of power and class relations. For Bourdieu actors' 'practical sense' mediated between their subjective striving for autonomy and the objective weight of structured class relations. This essay shows how these athletes' struggle for relative autonomy is differently expressed by the way they enlist the nation to position themselves within the field of power. An athlete's positions within the larger, structured fields circumscribe their articulatory space, and realising this state of affairs can aid our understanding of how these elite practitioners differently enlist the national sign in their specific quest for cultural autonomy. The analysis shows athletes that are better placed in economic terms can afford to take greater risks when it comes to the national signifier. Conversely, a relative smaller access to economic gain appears to correlate with an increase in the importance granted to the national signifier. Thus, the nation becomes a sign that can be actively enlisted in an ongoing struggle for relative autonomy from the field of class relations, rather than an attribute that is passively endorsed by them. What this suggests is that a term such as national identity is less descriptive for the actual work of these elite players; instead, we propose that an active national signification more aptly describes how these cultural actors enlist a highly coveted sign to achieve their specific aim.
2022
"The silence of the educated." Journal of Silence Studies in Education 2, no. 1: 43–55. External Peer-reviewedDOIPhilArchive
This essay presents Wolfgang Schirmacher's philosophy of education. As a "living philosopher" Schirmacher's thought should be regarded as standing at a critical and engaged distance to official, consecrated philosophy. Thus, Schirmacher's living philosophy is conceived as explicable both through scholarly essays as well as other kinds of academic praxis. Particularly relevant is his founding and then directing the programme in Media Philosophy at the European Graduate School (EGS). At the core of philosophy there is a lacuna, a certain silence: the present text contextualises elements of Schirmacher's relation to the thought of Martin Heidegger as a necessary, productive silence and regards it as constitutive of any relation between master and student. Crucially, this essay seeks to ascertain how the philosophy programme at EGS can be perceived as a product of Schirmacher's philosophy. Analogous to the way the truths of a living philosophy can never be separated from the life – the form – of the philosopher, so the philosophy programme at EGS sought to integrate the form of each course with its critical content: Schirmacher's philosophy programme emphasised bringing up and bringing forth as much as the more traditional transmission of knowledge. Subsequently, this philosophy programme can be seen as a precise and logical outcome of Schirmacher's thought.
2021
"The interpassive roar: the canned spectators of lock-down." Chapter 7 in Do Desporto / On Sports: theoria vs praxis, pp. 113–119. Edited by Constantino Pereira Martins. Coimbra, Portugal: Universidade de Coimbra. External Peer-reviewedLinkPhilArchive
This paper introduces the concept of the interpassive spectator into the field of sports philosophy. It examines the phenomenon of "canned spectators" – pre-recorded audience sounds edited to respond to live, televised sports – which emerged following the stringent health measures that forced elite sporting events to be held behind closed doors. Drawing on the cultural theories of Robert Pfaller and Slavoj Žižek, the author contrasts the logic of interpassivity with that of interactivity. While interactive works require the active participation of an audience to be complete, interpassive works allow an external medium to perform the act of "enjoyment" or "attention" on behalf of the observer. Using examples from elite football in Germany and England, the paper describes how broadcasters utilised sound technology derived from computer games to simulate a "warmly familiar ambience" during matches in the Bundesliga and Premier League. The paper rejects both purely critical and purely affirmative interpretations of this technology. Instead, it argues that the primary "danger" of canned spectators is not that they render the viewer passive, but that they deprive the viewer of their ability to passively enjoy. By allowing the television to "enjoy" for them, the spectator is potentially alienated from their own embodied memory, becoming prepared instead for a form of mindless, frenetic activity.
2020
"Holding your tongue: the new language of Silence." Paedagogia Christiana 45, no. 2: 93–103. External Peer-reviewedDOIPhilArchive
Ingmar Bergman's middle years – from the late 1950s to the early 1970s – were a period of great creativity, but also of irreparable destruction on a private and artistic level. This paper takes stock of a film immediately preceding his great international breakthrough (with Persona in 1966), namely The Silence (1962). Rendering, in Bergman's own words, "God's silence," the film also thematises absence, wordlessness, and the void in at least three additional senses: showing a child's entry into the Symbolic Order, The Silence demonstrates the absence that is constitutive of this passage; giving an account of a specific relation between a master and his apprentice, the film shows a concrete example of the wordlessness at the core of their communication. Moreover, as an attempt to seek out the paternal figure, the film demonstrates the necessary void at the core of the new order – a community governed by silent praise.
2018
"Presencing the writer: immanence and ecstatic communion in A Clockwork Orange and Naked." In Looking at the Sun: new writings in modern Personalism, pp. 141–156. Edited by Anna Castriota and Simon Smith. Wilmington, Delaware: Vernon Press. External Peer-reviewedLink
The present article reconnects two of Ingmar Bergman's films from the mid '60s to notions of anxiety, alienation and creativity. Shame, a film set in a village ravaged by war, provides the viewer with three senses of transversality: (1) as a crossing of the ego's boundaries; (2) as a sexual and political transgression; and (3) as an intervention of an abstract power. To Søren Kierkegaard, despair and anguish are key emotions to eclipse the sense of powerlessness brought about by depression and alienation. In Hour of the Wolf, the main character follows his calling to pursue his art at the expense of his romantic relationship. This summoning has an ambiguous character, since we cannot fully decide if it functions as a liberating or demonic force.
2016
"Out of time, or Anderson's national temporality revisited." Networking Knowledges 9, no. 1. External Peer-reviewedDOIPhilArchive
In his influential study Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson makes the claim that a novel conception of time is inaugurated by the introduction of nations: in contrast to the agrarian sense of time as cyclical and characterised by recurrence, the time of the nation is linear, homogeneous and empty. This notion of temporality is drawn from an earlier work by Walter Benjamin, who posits the linearity of traditional historiography with what he refers to as Messianic time, which is to be understood as a temporality where the moment of redemption is an ever-present potentiality. This essay sets out to delineate these three notions of time, and then goes on to discuss this third temporality in greater detail. First, it can be considered as a psychological time, or a mind time, governed by traumatic encounters. This sense is shown as a strictly logical time in the work of Jacques Lacan. Second, it is a time of grace, in the sense that it is governed by necessity. Blaise Pascal and the Jansenists went to great lengths to refute the dominant notion of grace as sufficient. If there is an instance that determines events, then the means by which this instance governs can only be a necessary cause. Finally, the work of Benedict Anderson, and particularly a later article in his corpus, is reconsidered. Here, Anderson argues that the effects of globalisation have to some extent rendered the temporal linearity of nationalism obsolete. It is therefore apt to consider what a time after nationalism will be like.
2014
"Moving the posts: two models of sports research." Cultural and Religious Studies 2, no. 3: 194–198. External Peer-reviewedLinkPhilArchive
This essay presents two models of sports research, one characterised by a didactic and normative relation to its object, while wedded to a view of language characterised by a transparent and non-mediated relation between signifier and signified, and another result of the linguistic turn and an interest in reception studies and audiences. The latter has failed to deliver on its promise to democratise sports studies, as it has become centrally engaged in mapping audiences as consumers. Through a narrative analysis of three stories by Kafka, the essay shows how these models can be seen as employing specific narrative forms, and how Kafka's last instalment in The Hunger Artist sequel offered a different perspective of the relation between art and society. This latter form of narrative may take sports studies beyond the hold of what psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan referred to as the specular phase of subject formation and into an imaginary servitude characteristic of the social "I," formed in the closing phase of the Mirror Stage.
"National, authentic, excessive: toward a globalized body of sports." Altitude. External Peer-reviewed
This essay discusses how spectacular sports are framed in a national, epic world of fathers, firsts and bests, and put to use in regulating desire by narrating the fundamental fantasies that hold the subject together. Spectacular sports provide allegories of the excessive body, and these embodied narratives are meticulously produced through an individualising training machine designed to deliver moments of excess. Sports produce phantasms of peak moments and phallic dominance, and symbolise a conquest of youth, women and the working population. We ask if the subject may experience a kind of subjective destitution by the loss of a fundamental fantasy from watching sports and what the effects of such an experience may be. Can televised football induce in the viewer a sense that these images are mistaken as objects of desire, and give rise to the truth effects of "full speech"?
2001
"Soccer rites." In Senses of Culture: South African Culture Studies, pp. 393–403. Edited by Sarah Nuttall and Cheryl Ann Michael. Cape Town: Oxford University Press. External Peer-reviewedLink
Ethics after Marxism? Review of Discourse Theory and Political Analysis: identities, hegemonies and social change, edited by David Howarth, Aletta J. Norval and Yannis Stavrakakis. Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory 47, no. 96: 131–138. External Book ReviewDOI
Review of Duane Rousselle, Real Love (Dresden and New York: Atropos, 2021). 146pp. Softbound. ISBN: 978-1-77763-020-1
2021
After religion: the commitment and love of This Life. Review of This Life: secular faith and spiritual freedom, by Martin Hägglund. Inscriptions 4, no. 1. Inscriptions Book ReviewDOI
Review of Hägglund, Martin (2019), This Life: secular faith and spiritual freedom, Anchor Books: New York.
2019
Secretive organisations: anarchism after platform capitalism. Review of Organization After Social Media, by Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter. Inscriptions 2, no. 1. Inscriptions Book ReviewDOI
With Wolfgang Schirmacher. "Heidegger's radical critique of technology as an outline of social acts." Translation from the German. Translated by Torgeir Fjeld. Inscriptions 1, no. 1. Inscriptions TranslationDOI
The present text shows that the prevailing view of Martin Heidegger's approach to society and technology is not only based on prejudice, but more importantly works to obscure a more relevant perception of reality. Heidegger's "phenomenological hermeneutic" sought to uncover technology's hidden truth, beyond the appearance of technology as framing our existence (Gestell). Even if we acknowledge that technology has now reached a planetary and all-encompassing dissemination – becoming, in effect, the leading figure of our time – we still need to remain vigilant to the metaphysical notions embedded in such a characteristic. We should seek other ways of living with and within technology. A radical critique should seek topologies and "orders" that are universal and preliminary, so that by potentially exceeding every demarcation we can be liberated to a way of listening – a "hearing" (Hören) – to a "constellation" of a different "essence of technology."
With Wolfgang Schirmacher. "Hope will die at last: an interview with Wolfgang Schirmacher." Inscriptions 1, no. 1. Inscriptions InterviewDOI
To Wolfgang Schirmacher philosophy is about reading in the spirit of, so that we may follow the logic of the phenomenon that shows itself to us. It is in this spirit of phenomenology Schirmacher asks whether Martin Heidegger's diagnosis of our age – that we live under a Gestell, or fix, of technology – is sufficient. Should we not consider the supplementary notion of technology as an event (Ereignis) of becoming into our own existence? We have an inborn character that is unassailable and yet unknown to us until the day we perish, and from such an ethical perspective – and in distinction to deontological views – Schirmacher rejects science's promise never to clone humans. He regards such a declaration as "only valid until it's possible." Rather, he regards our future as one in which humans will be allowed to procreate for as long as it doesn't interfere unambiguously with the functioning of the machines, "and during that interim the poor humans living there will still have hope."
Answering to the claim that our contemporary era has lost a connection to the domain of the sacred René Girard held that, contra Sigmund Freud, the myth of Oedipus was not primarily a story of patricide, but a hidden narrative of victimisation and expulsion. As an arch-example of mob logic the myth and Sophocles' play serve to gloss over a brutal and ritualistic sacrifice by claiming that it was the victim who acted in violation of the law; according to Girard the charges against king Oedipus were retroactively invented to justify the initial act of expulsion. In the street-art of AFK we encounter images that activate feelings of persecution and exile, uncovering a possible path to regain our connection to the holy.
In murals depicting prominent figures as martyrs AFK has reconnected the emerging form of street-art to art's ability to maintain our relation to the sacred. Cannily drawing on ambiguities concerning victimhood, pleasure, and mob logic AFK has made headlines, and have reignited debates concerning the place of street-art in the public domain and in the space of arts. Inscriptions is happy to present a series of public artworks by AFK in this issue.
Since October last year Lebanon has seen nation-wide protests against deteriorating standards of living, dubious governance, and a collapsing economy. Sharif Abdunnur, Professor of Media Studies at the University of Balamand in Beirut and Editor of Inscriptions has experienced the tumultuous events first hand, and in some cases ended up in the middle of an escalating conflict between armed sectarian forces and revolting civilians. In this interview, conducted on New Years Eve last year, Abdunnur gives his version of the events, explains their social and political context, and connects them to historical and international forces at work in Lebanon's volatile present.
"Hamsun's betrayals." In CSS Conference 2019: Scandinavian Languages and Literatures World Wide. Lund: Lund University. DOIPhilArchive
Knut Hamsun's late life was characterised by a sequence of betrayals, most notably his support for the Nazi occupation of Norway. This paper investigates how Hamsun utilised these acts of treachery to mount a unique defence against forensic psychiatrist Gabriel Langfeldt. Langfeldt's diagnosis of "permanently impaired mental faculties" served as a provocation that spurred Hamsun to write his final work, On Overgrown Paths. The paper argues that this book represents a "final betrayal" – an act where Hamsun disobeyed the conventions of autobiography to remain committed to his artistic calling. Utilising Kierkegaardian ethics, the author frames Hamsun's defiance as a form of resistance that ultimately led to personal reconciliation through art and love.
The present study is an interrogation of theories of culture and nation in the context of spectacular sports. It proposes a view of nationalism as discourses that articulate and produce nations through narrative acts. A wide array of concepts and tools are drawn from the work of Pierre Bourdieu and contrasted with methods and notions from discursive and semiotic analysis to interrogate a national-sports nexus in which sports are vehicles to embody nations, their matrices of thought and perception, and their dominant order of masculinity and heteronormativity in the national subject, so that this order appears natural and commonsensical. Particular attention is given to the case of South Africa's participation in the 1998 World Cup, and the way the epic genre was employed to frame the event and produce a particular kind of national body. Spectacular sports events provide nations with opportunities to disseminate narratives that regulate desire and conjure a particular kind of national fantasy – what Bourdieu referred to as illusio – in subjects. This work makes a distinction between an epic body of nationalism, a body enmeshed in ``the natural and authentic,'' and an excessive body. However, mediations of sports are never merely reflections of social events but themselves participate in producing these events as meaningful and anchor them as national. Furthermore, an actively interpreting subject is required for the production of meaning, and in this regard the thesis offers a critique of Bourdieu's limited view on what it entails for a recipient of nationalist discourse to be active. The questions addressed by this study are twofold: how and what kind of national order of the body and desire is manufactured through spectacular sports events, and how are mediations of such events made meaningful in subjects? The open-ended character of signification means that beneath the level of nationalist anchorage of spectacular sports events other articulations are possible. Drawing on Bourdieu's view of sports as forms of silent dressage, the thesis suggests that there is a potential excess of meaning that enables such events to become potential sites of subjective truth: as viewers realise the fantasmatic character of such mediations they may come to question the notion that spectacular sports are something more than just a game.