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.
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.
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.
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
"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
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.