Contemporary debates on nationalism are caught in a recurring impasse: sociologists in the tradition of Elias treat national attachment as a matter of individual choice — an identity that can, in principle, be supersede…

From Plato’s famous dualism of body and soul we are today confronted with a plethora of perspectives promising to overcome historical dichotomies, and putting in their place a promise of social unity and reconciliation.…

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 t…

This paper 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 a…

Wolfgang Schirmacher’s formulation of *Homo Generator* relies on a sense of the human subject that can be traced back to Martin Heidegger’s that we are at our most authentic when we are not identical to ourselves, or, i…

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 betwee…

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. S…

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…