From the dead to the living. Jon Fosse’s Nobel Prize in literature can on the heels of a lifelong investigation of the possibility we have for communicating with the dead. His texts and the characters that inhabit them often exist on or beyond the boundary of the living. In \*Morning and Evening\* Johannes steps across the boundary that separates the living from the dead, but in Fosse’s text he continues to communicate, as if uninterrupted in his presence. In last year’s \*A Shining\* Fosse again pits a character against the most devastating conditions of life. Set in a white wintry landscape it is as if we are thrown into Kjell Askildsen’s (1929-1921) \*Great Deserted Landscape\* (1991), a place where loneliness, solitude, and desolation threaten to overcome life’s last spark. However, our question in this paper is whether there is a secret message to be uncovered from beneath the snow in Fosse’s deserted winter landscape, and that is whether the very materiality of snow is becoming increasingly fictional in our current carbon-dependent climate. Elite athletes already know of this paradox – the more they travel to compete and spread word about their sport, the more damage they do to the very climate on which they depend to perform. Man-made, global warming undermines the very snow on which they depend. Thus we can read the blindness and solitude demonstrated by Fosse in \*A Shining\* as an effect of an inability to come to terms with our contemporary fix, an inoperativity at the heart of art and our engagement with out environment. The paper will discuss how, in an analogous way, contemporary environmental sports philosophy finds itself in a logical rut due to its attachment to the early work of Arne Naess, the ecophilosopher. To find a way out of this impasse we must first clear away the snow and populate the landscape with novel ideas.
“Deep ecological sport? Notes toward a critique of Næss”
European Association for the Philosophy of Sport (EAPS) 2025, Istanbul University-Cerrahpaşa, Istanbul, Turkey (April 2025)
Gunnar Breivik has proposed a set of guidelines for outdoor activities that are similar in certain respects to sports, and that satisfy what Breivik refers to as ‘criteria for ecological awareness’ (2020). He takes the ground for this awareness to be the so-called Deep Ecology of Arne Naess (1973). While Breivik’s aim – to integrate sport into a broader ecological awareness – is both timely and commendable, his reliance on Naess’s ecosophy raises philosophical concerns. We revisit the reception of Deep Ecology, focusing in particular on an early and substantial critique by Richard Sylvan (1985), who challenged the coherence and applicability of Naess’s principles. Three central components of Naess’s ecosophy – holism, biocentrism, and biospherical egalitarianism – are examined in light of Sylvan’s objections. While each seeks to distribute value through the ecological order, Sylvan argued that they do so at the cost of philosophical clarity and practical relevance. Holism can potentially collapse distinctions that are required for meaningful ecological interventions; biocentrism equates value with life in a way that excludes many significant non-living elements of the natural world; and biospherical egalitarianism, which holds that all life has equal value, ultimately fails to guide ethical decision-making in real ecological contexts. This paper seeks to enourage a further rethinking of outdoor activity in light of an ongoing ecological crisis, suggesting that such efforts would benefit from a more robust foundation – one that preserves ecological urgency without sacrificing analytical precision.
2024
“Concluding words: silence and meaning”Recording ↗
4th Ereignis Conference (hybrid), Ereignis Center for Philosophy and the Arts, Norway/Poland (August 2024)
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, 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 captures 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
“The national object: accounting for subjectivity after anthropocentrism”
The 4th Helsinki Conference on Emotions, Populism, and Polarised Politics (HEPP), University of Helsinki, Finland (December 2023)
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 superseded by supranational alternatives — while the persistence of popular nationalism confounds this expectation. This paper argues that the source of the impasse is not popular irrationality but a foundational error in the sociological framework itself, namely its reliance on a voluntarist ontology of the individual subject. Drawing on Bourdieu's concept of habitus and Kant's epistemological distinction between phenomenon and noumenon, the paper proposes an alternative in which nations are understood as objects that circulate and interact in a space partially independent of subjective perception. Rather than entities to which subjects choose to attach, nations are irreducibly opaque objects — comparable to classes, genders, or mathematical equations — whose persistence is a function precisely of their unknowability. This object-oriented reframing, developed in dialogue with Laclau, Mouffe, and Harman, does not rehabilitate nationalism but reframes the philosophical task: rather than engineering its obsolescence, we are called to account for the specific ways in which national objects interact with the plurality of subjectivities in contemporary social life.
“Beyond dualism: Homo Generator, antagonism, agonism”With Gorica Orsholits.
3rd Ereignis Conference (online), Ereignis Center for Philosophy and the Arts, Norway/Poland (June 2023)
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 paper takes a critical stance to the technological utopianism and it’s dystopian twin, so prevalent in today’s discussion on media and technology. What we suggest to bring to the table is a renewed attention to Wolfgang Schirmacher’s concept of Homo Generator, founded on a distinction between an instrumental, craft-oriented definition of technology, underpinning the dominant mode of conemporary approaches to technology, and what he calls life technologies. Nevertheless, what typifies his notion of life technologies to the greatest extent is this concept’s ability to overcome the sort of dualist thought characteristic of 19th century European modernism. In Schirmacher’s Homo Generator, the artist of life technologies, what we have is a vigorous, compelling attempt to ground a novel notion of a post-utopian order. Conversely, in Alain Badiou and Chantal Mouffe’s call for the return of the political there is an emphasis on the importance of antagonism/agonism which must not and cannot be eradicated or suppressed by any social order. The second aim of this paper is therefore to question whether Badiou’s call for political antagonism is in fact a call to overcome the historical principle of dualism. How does Badiou’s post-utopian subject employ the idea of antagonism in the in-between space of the virtual–real and the symbolic–actual? Chantal Mouffe posits that social antagonism transforms into agonism and that societal conflict is accepted as an inevitable constituent of society. However, is Mouffe’s agonistic model of public space an attempt to go beyond the dualistic configurations of the past century? And can the notions of antagonism/agonism give to technology the ontological importance necessary for the creation of a new world?
2022
“Bourdieu's field theory revisited: a case for 'national signification'”
British Philosophy of Sport Association, 20th Anniversary Conference, 7–8 April 2022 (April 2022)
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 and their practice. Taking the social theory of Pierre Bourdieu as a ground for analysis, this paper takes brief vignettes of recent public events featuring four high-profile sports practitioners 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 paper shows how these players’ struggle for relative autonomy is differently expressed by the way they enlist the nation to position themselves within the field of power. Players’ 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 will show that 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 describe how these cultural actors enlist a highly coveted sign to achieve their specific aim.
“A silent trace: introducing Wolfgang Schirmacher's philosophy of the future”
Alone Together: 3rd International Pandisciplinary Symposium on Solitude in Community, University of Szczecin, Poland (March 2022)
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, in Heidegger’s terminology, our essence is determined by what is ek-static about our existence. While this approach to the subject more famously became the cornerstone of Jacques Lacan’s clarification of the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud, in Schirmacher the insight from Heidegger takes a distinctly different turn: what we have is a subject split between acting and observing, and this subject, Schirmacher’s *Homo Generator*, relies on this division in order for it to fulfil it’s ethical destiny. It is in this particular sense that we find in Schirmacher’s philosophy a trace of a future condition, a post-technological age, and this trace is by its very nature *silent*. What resounds as the founding “voice of authority” in this novel age can only be characterised as an absence, or a void: a silent clearing that precedes and conditions human openness. What typifies this “new man” is a capacity for heightened awareness, what Schirmacher refers to as “hyper-perception”, an artificial, or artful, approach to living, and a distinct and profound *clandestine* form of ethics. This paper seeks to outline Schirmacher’s philosophy of the future by reference to his shared philosophical heritage, his singular sketch of the human situated in this future, as well as the ethical character of this prospective form of life.
2021
“Introduction to Event and Becoming, the inaugural Ereignis conference”
Inaugural Ereignis Conference (online), Ereignis Center for Philosophy and the Arts, Norway/Poland (June 2021)
This paper explores the tension between the perceived “wholeness” of Bruce Lee as a cultural icon and the inherent trauma and fragmentation of the human experience. While sociological readings often frame Lee as a symbol of colonial resistance or a “sutured totality” for identity formation, this study employs a psychoanalytic, philosophical, and aesthetic lens to uncover the fractured nature of his image. Drawing on Lacanian theory, the author argues that Lee’s persona serves as an “ideal ego,” an orthopaedic totality that masks a constitutive fragmentation. Furthermore, by tracing the evolution of Lee‘s writings — from the “organic unity” of fighting styles to a Spinozan “Absolute” — the paper investigates whether his philosophy represents a liberating “art of the self” or a deterministic self-effacement. Ultimately, Lee’s legacy is presented as an artistic event that does not heal the rupture of the self, but rather incorporates divisions into a complex, global totality.
2020
“The editorial roar: the sounds of spectators at elite football events under lockdown”
Sports: theory vs. praxis?, Coimbra University, Portugal (November 2020)
The work of the Baroque masters, such as the vanitas of Danish poet Thomas Kingo, serves to remind us of our post-modern fix. They signify our in-ability to realize the potentialities of our social circumstances. May negations such as those we find in the work of Kingo and Blaise Pascal contribute to establish what Giorgio Agamben refers to as a doxiological anapausis – a non-active release, so that we through the gaze of these early modern writers can make a Kierkegaardian leap out our im-potentialities?
2008
“From games to play: sports as art forms”
Association of Cultural Studies (ACS) Crossroads Conference, Kingston, Jamaica (July 2008)