Hub Zwart

In de Inleiding van zijn studie schrijft Paul Cobben dat hij ruim veertig jaar nodig had om de Fenomenologie van de Geest van G.W.F. Hegel te doorgronden (p. 1), en dat is even herkenbaar als opmerkelijk, gelet op het feit dat Hegel zelf ongeveer vier jaar (tussen 1802 en 1806) aan de Fenomenologie (gepubliceerd in 1807) werkte, zodat het boek kennelijk met een factor tien langzamer wordt begrepen dan dat het werd geschreven. Zoals de titel aangeeft, herleest Hegelkenner Paul Cobben in deze lijvige studie (meer dan vijfhonderd pagina’s in degelijk Duits) de Fenomenologie als geboorteplaats van de ‘kleine logica’, waarmee het eerste deel van Hegels driedelige Encyclopedie van de Filosofische Wetenschappen (Logica, Natuurfilosofie, Filosofie van de Geest) wordt aangeduid. In zijn Fenomenologie reconstrueert Hegel de ontwikkelingsgeschiedenis van het denken als een dialectisch proces. Kant had een onoverbrugbare kloof geïntroduceerd tussen de wijze waarop de dingen voor het bewustzijn verschijnen en de werkelijke zijnswijze van de dingen (van de dingen an sich), maar voor Hegel is dat onacceptabel (p. 14). De filosofie als wetenschap beoogt, het werkelijke zijn te denken, en de Fenomenologie reconstrueert de opeenvolgende pogingen om deze kloof tussen denken en zijn te overbruggen en de werkelijkheid te doorgronden zoals zij in zichzelf in waarheid is. Dat kan niet gerealiseerd worden via een geniale “intellektuelle Anschauung”, maar kan slechts het resultaat zijn van een moeizaam en langdurig proces van intellectuele arbeid, een collectief proces van Bildung, gericht op, en uiteindelijk resulterend in wat Hegel aanduidt als het absolute weten.

Friedrich Engels’ dialectical assessment of modern science resulted from his fascination with the natural sciences (cell physiology, thermodynamics, theory of evolution) in combination with his resurging interest in the work of “old Hegel.” Engels became especially interested in what he saw as the molecular essence of life, namely proteins or, more specifically, albumin (Eiweiß), seeing life as the mode of existence of these enigmatic substances. Hegelian dialectics is crucial for a dialectical materialist understanding of contemporary technoscience. The dialectical materialist understanding of technoscience as a research practice builds on Engels, but also on later (scientific) authors who were inspired by his writings, e.g., life scientists such as Haldane and Bernal. Considering the criticism raised against Engels’ dialectics by 20th-century Marxists, a dialectical diagnostic of contemporary technoscience can be achieved, which shifts the focus from artificial albumin as “living matter” (as discussed by Engels) to contemporary research on synthetic cells (as anticipated by Engels)

In the Netherlands, the poet Herman Gorter (1864–1927) is mostly known as the author of the neo-romantic poem _May_ and the “sensitivistic” _Poems_, but internationally he became famous as a propagandist of radical Marxism: the author of influential brochures and of an “open letter” to comrade W.I. Lenin in 1920. During the 1890s, Gorter became increasingly dissatisfied with his poetry, considering it as ego-centric, disinterested and “bourgeois”, unconnected with what was happening in the real (material-political) world. He wanted to put his poetry on a scientific footing, notably by endorsing a dialectical materialist worldview. In the communist society he envisioned, science would become poetry and poetry would become science. In his opus magnum _Pan_ (11,000 lines of verse, published in 1916), two terms are rather prominent, namely _heelal_ (“universe”) and _kristal_ (“crystal”). These signifiers not only reflect important themes, but also two friendships which began around 1900, namely with prominent astronomer and marxist Anton Pannekoek (who studied the universe) and with Ada Prins, the first woman in the Netherlands who acquired a PhD in chemistry, specialised in liquid crystal research. Whereas Ada Prins is mostly remembered as one of Gorter’s secret lovers, she was first and foremost his educated guide into the complex and enigmatic world of twentieth-century chemistry research. Liquid crystal chemistry became an important source of inspiration for Gorter’s work and the main objective of this paper is to demonstrate her influence on Gorter’s _Pan_ as a scientific poem After presenting the two heroes of this paper, and their work in poetry and chemistry respectively, I will analyse the role of liquid crystals in Herman Gorter’s _Pan_, highlighting important connections with Ada Prins’ research into liquid crystal chemistry.

This article proposes a new, Camusian approach to analyzing and navigating ethical dilemmas in relation to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and, by extension, to other disruptive technoscience. The article takes as its point of departure the Unified Framework of Five Principles for AI in Society, as advanced by Floridi and Cowls (2021), which offers a comprehensive and cohesive framework of the many abstract values and principles brought up in AI ethics discourse. Using a case-study approach, which focuses on the principle of accountability in AI, we demonstrate that, even following an exhaustive systematization of abstract principles, ethical dilemmas still arise whenever we consider applications of the technology in concrete situations. Furthermore, because of the way technology mediates our ethical judgement, a deeper ethical dilemma arises; we can either judge technologies like AI prematurely, without knowing their impact, or after they have been able to bias our norms and intuitions for ethical deliberation. This article then argues that the vulnerability of our ethical judgement to continuous doubt, which is exposed by AI as a landmark case of disruptive technology, can be addressed by integrating Albert Camus’ philosophy of absurdity, rebellion and dignity. Through Camus, we can contextualize our experience of ethical doubt in relation to AI as existentially absurd, while also navigating normative change more confidently with meta-level principles for ethical deliberation itself. The article concludes that, while ethical dilemmas and doubts will persist, this Camusian approach will make us more responsible in undertaking the continuous adaptation and concretizing of our ethical frameworks.

In The Birth of the Clinic, Michel Foucault (1963) practiced historical epistemology, combining two scholarly crafts, history of medicine and philosophy of science. With his philosophical hammer and stethoscope, he assessed epistemic configurations: landscapes of discourse and practice. Philosophical readers are intrigued by the epistemological ruptures he discerned, the sudden upheavals in the ways in which physicians observed, treated, looked at, listened to, and wrote about their patients. Foucault was an “archaeologist”, signalling the sudden emergence and disappearance of “discursive formations”, pointing to abrupt and remarkable changes in the ways in which phenomena are described, analysed, and categorised. (Foucault 1969). For an archaeologist, all (anonymous) potsherds and coins stemming from a particular formation (or discursive layer) share a number of basic similarities: they were all produced in a similar vein. Likewise, within a particular discursive formation, all texts are basically similar. And although author names are mentioned by Foucault, the author’s identity does not really count. Foucault is interested in the basic logic at work, anonymously almost. Notwithstanding the countless discussions and debates between authors, a spontaneous unanimity can be discerned, concerning basic presuppositions that remain unquestioned. At the same time, there are striking differences between discursive formations (between layers within libraries). Historians tend to be critical about this approach. Add more detail, and the epistemic fault lines become increasingly diffuse,—the theorem of epistemic discontinuity becomes difficult to uphold.

The previous chapters explored how four (interacting and overlapping) continental approaches (dialectics, dialectical materialism, psychoanalysis and phenomenology) offer hints and guidance for coming to terms with the revolutionary dynamics and disruptive impact of contemporary technoscience. Hegelian dialectics provides a conceptual scaffold for developing a comprehensive view of the terrestrial system and even for addressing the Cambrian explosion currently unfolding in laboratories around the globe, as a result of technoscientific developments such as synthetic biology and CRISP-Cas9. Dialectical materialism likewise offers a conceptual framework for addressing the rapidly aggravating disruption of the metabolism between nature and global civilisation, and the ongoing convergence of biosphere and technosphere, exemplified by the synthetic cell. Francophone psychoanalysis, closely aligned with dialectical thinking, adds to our understanding of the specificity of technoscience, both as a practice and as a discourse, where technoscientific research emerges as a questionable vocation driven by a desire to control, but at the same time ostensibly out of control. The dialectical methodology of psychoanalysis was exemplified with the help of case histories, moreover, involving Majorana particles, gene drives, malaria mosquitoes and nude mice. The latter represent technoscientific commodities, exemplifying the assembly-line production of human-made organisms (the commodification of life as such). Subsequently, we demonstrated how Heideggerian phenomenology entails important methodological hints for understanding technoscientific artefacts against the backdrop of technoscience as a mobilising force and as a global enterprise. And finally, we outlined how Teilhard’s views on the genesis of consciousness, self-consciousness and hyperconsciousness retrieve the historical (dialectical) dimension of phenomenology, thus allowing us to assess the present as a global unfolding of the noosphere.

Although Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels strictly speaking never used the term, “dialectical materialism” refers to the philosophy of science and nature developed in (and on the basis of) their writings, emphasising the pivotal role of real-world socio-economic conditions (e.g. labour, class struggle, technological developments). As indicated by their correspondence (Marx & Engels, 1983), their collaboration represented a unique intellectual partnership which began in Paris in 1844 and continued after Marx’s death, when Engels took care of Marx’s legacy, notably the sprawling mass of manuscripts which he managed to transform into Volume II and III of Capital. While their joint effort (resulting in no less than 44 volumes of collected writings known as the Marx Engels Werke, published by Dietz Verlag Berlin) began as co-authorship, they eventually decided on a division of labour (with Marx focussing on Capital), although reading, reviewing, commenting on and contributing to each other’s writings remained an important part of their research practice. As a result of this division of labour, while Marx focussed on political economy, Engels dedicated himself to elaborating a dialectical materialist philosophy of nature and the natural sciences, resulting in works such as the Anti-Dühring and his unfinished Dialectics of Nature (published posthumously), although Engels (a voracious intellectual) wrote and published on may other topics as well, so that his output can be regarded as a dialectical materialist encyclopaedia in fragments. Again, although I will start with an exposition of dialectical materialism, my aim is not to contribute to scholarly discussions on dialectical materialism. My focus is on the how and now, and my aim is to explore how to practice dialectical materialism of technoscience today (cf. Žižek, 2014/2015, p. 1; Hamza, 2016, p. 163).

Dialectics is a philosophical method developed by Hegel (1770–1831), but building on an intellectual tradition whose origins can be traced back to ancient Greece. Dialectics was initially practiced as an educational technique for conducting philosophical discussions. For Hegel, however, dialectical processes can be discerned in the dramatic unfolding of nature, history and human thinking as such. The first dialectical thinker, in the genuine sense of the term, according to Hegel (1971), was Heraclitus (535 – c. 475 BC), in whose “obscure” aphorisms Hegel recognises the awareness that dialectics is more than merely a technique to foster critical reflection. Heraclitus already refers to a basic logic guiding the dynamics of nature as such, to a λόγος at work in actual processes of becoming and change, giving rise to contrasting and contradictory developments (“objective dialectics”, as Hegel phrases it). For dialectical thinkers, the dialectical method is fundamentally in tune with nature, because nature as such is inherently dialectical. Hegel considered Aristotle as ancient philosophy’s most thoroughly dialectical thinker, as we have seen, while Hegel himself is regarded as a modern Aristotle (Beiser, 2005, p. 57; Pippin, 2019, p. 301).

Although Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) was thoroughly trained in philosophy and theology, he was first and foremost a paleoanthropologist, directly involved in the discovery of Homo erectus pekinensis (“Sinanthropus”) in China in the 1920s and 1930s. He came from a Catholic aristocratic background, was ordained a priest in 1911, survived World War I (as a stretcher-bearer, distinguished with the Legion of Honour), joined the Jesuit Order, conducted paleoanthropological field work during the interbellum, and became entangled in a conflict with his Jesuit superiors (over pantheism and the concept of original sin) until his death in New York (in exile more or less). When his writings were published (shortly after his death, as his superiors forbade publication during his lifetime), he quickly became an intellectual celebrity. Currently, he is credited with having anticipated Gaia theory (King, 2006), the global village concept (McLuhan, 1962), the Internet (Barlow, 1992; Cobb, 1998), the WWW (Garreau, 2005, p. 256; Greenfield, 2014, p. 9), transhumanism (Delio, 2014; Steinhart, 2008), the “global brain” (Stock, 1993), and the Anthropocene (e.g. Crutzen, 2002; Steffen et al., 2011).

Imagine a group of philosophy students, about to complete a Master’s program in continental philosophy, who are invited to visit a life sciences research laboratory, somewhere on a university campus. Having studied some of Heidegger’s quintessential works, such as Being and Time and The Question of Technology, they suddenly find themselves exposed to racks of test-tubes and automated sequencing machines. Suppose that, thrown into such an “unworldly” lab environment, they ask themselves how to interpret their experiences in a Heideggerian manner.

In terms of design and key objectives, this volume entails a triadic syllogism. Continental thinking constitutes its source material, and first of all I offer a concise exposition of the way in which Hegel, Marx, Engels, Bachelard, Lacan and Heidegger allow us to come to terms with technoscience. As indicated, notwithstanding multiple differences and interventions, I see their oeuvres as building on a common ground. I also acknowledge the second moment (the negation), however, consisting of claims (brought forward by various authors) that this corpus of literature, or parts of it, are invalid or outdated, for instance because the future belongs to neo-liberalism (as Francis Fukuyama argued), or because continental thinking is flawed by Eurocentric and androcentric biases. Rather than countering or criticising this type of criticism directly and extensively (which would result in more or less “theoretical” debates), I have adopted a more “cataphatic” course. By outlining its basic logic (its methodology) and by extrapolating it to a number of case studies, my aim is to demonstrate the viability, urgency and contemporary relevance of a continental approach (“via positiva”).

In contemporary philosophy of science, continental approaches such as dialectics, phenomenology and psychoanalysis tend to be underrepresented compared to analytical and sociological ones, but the reverse is also true. Whereas continental philosophical discourse tends to focus on author studies, the urgency of coming to terms with contemporary technoscience often remains unrecognised. This volume builds on the conviction that a mutual exposure and confrontation between continental philosophy and contemporary technoscience is urgent and beneficial for both.

While the previous chapter discussed the shift from Hegelian dialectics to dialectical materialism, this chapter addresses the shift from dialectics to psychoanalysis, notably in France, paying due attention to the productive tensions between both approaches. After a concise exposition of Freudian psychoanalysis, focussing on Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the text in which Freud explicitly “plunged into the thickets” of modern biology (Gay, 1988, p. 401), I will extensively discuss the views of Gaston Bachelard and Jacques Lacan on technoscience. Building on a previous publication (Zwart, 2019a), where I already presented a psychoanalytic understanding of technoscience, which I don’t want to duplicate here (focussing on the oeuvres of Sigmund Freud, Carl Gustav Jung, Gaston Bachelard and Jacques Lacan), I will now emphasise the continuity between dialectic and psychoanalysis, indicating how dialectics remains an important moment in Bachelard’s and Lacan’s efforts to develop a psychoanalysis of technoscience, both as a discourse and as a practice. In addition, I will elucidate the added value of this convergence by extrapolating it to three concrete case studies, one borrowed from particle physics and two from life sciences research: the Majorana particle, the malaria mosquito and the nude mouse.

Solar tells the story of Nobel laureate Michael Beard, a science celebrity who, as a young theoretical quantum physicist, building on the photovoltaic work of Albert Einstein and others, made his name with the so-called Beard-Einstein Conflation: a quantum explanation for the emission of electrons, suggesting new ways of harvesting energy from sunlight. But all that is long ago and Beard has now entered the emerging field of big applied solar energy research, attracting large amounts of funding as the Scientific Director of the newly established National Centre for Renewable Energy. The idea is to use chaos theory and quantum photovoltaics for optimising the production of wind and solar energy, as a key contribution to mitigating the emerging global impact of climate change. But from the very beginning of the novel it is clear that Beard no longer is the devoted young researcher he once was. Rather, he has evolved into a spoiled, egocentric and obese opportunist who spends his time on public lectures, hedonism and invitational travels to privileged places (ranging from Italian lakes to Spitsbergen), realising that, due to laziness, boredom and ageing, he has utterly lost track of the physics and mathematics on which the advanced research activities (which he is supposed to lead) ultimately depend.

Arrowsmith (published in 1925) is an intriguing novel for various reasons, but first of all because this 500–page romance is often regarded as the first real science novel, devoted to experimental laboratory research as a practice, a profession, an ideology, a worldview, a “prominent strand in modern culture” (Schorer 1961, p. 414), a way of life. Named after its key protagonist Martin Arrowsmith, it records an important event in the history of biomedicine: the discovery of the “bacterium–eating” virus: the bacteriophage. But it also addresses a moral ambivalence that runs through biomedicine as a research field, namely the tension between the exacting demands of “pure” research on the one hand and its various (more or less benevolent) applications in medical practice on the other. The novel stages a series of dramatic moral conflicts between the duties of Martin Arrowsmith as a physician (working for the benefit of his patients) and as a researcher (working for the benefit of future generations, of “humankind”), thereby practicing not one but two “impossible professions”. Lewis’s lively descriptions of science communication, priority conflicts, funding strategies, research ethics and laboratory rivalries are still relevant today. First and foremost, however, the novel allows us to discern how, beneath biomedicine’s manifest aspiration to promote human well–being, there is a “deeper” impulse, a disconcerting obsession at work that may prove highly disruptive, not only for test animals, research subjects and patients, but also for scientists themselves. Biomedicine’s fuelling desire, its cupido sciendi (its will to know) is not predominantly to safe, but rather to control life, and the aim of my Lacanian rereading reading is to bring this subliminal dimension to the surface. Lacan’s quadruped will guide our reading.

In 1935, philosopher Edmund Husserl argued that the European Sciences (notably physics) were facing a crisis, not in terms of scientific achievements, but in terms of their meaning for culture and society, for human existence. Science had always been a moral factor, Husserl argued, had decisively contributed to the humanisation and enlightenment of human culture, to the realisation of the idea of human beings as reasonable citizens of a humane society. But now, scientific research, precisely because (in the era of quantum physics) it had become so astonishingly successful, represented a threat to civilisation. It was increasingly questionable whether human ethics and politics would be able to master the technological power unleashed by science. The ethical profile of science had become ambivalent. Science and technology had become neutral forces employable for multiple purposes, good and bad. From a benefactor of humanity and culture, science had turned into a substantial risk. Husserl also claimed that, in 1935, only a small number of individuals (true philosophers, acting as “functionaries of humanity”, p. 17) were aware of the critical nature of the situation, although the broader public (Stockmann’s “majority” as it were) would discover sooner or later what was at stake. In August 1945, when two nuclear bombs were dropped on Japanese cities, Husserl’s gloomy predictions seemed to be confirmed. The atomic bomb became a kind of historical end-point or dead-end. As Peter Sloterdijk, in his reply to Husserl’s pupil Martin Heidegger, later formulated it, the history of science is like the burning away of a conceptual fuse winding from Athens to Hiroshima.

Allegra Goodman’s novel Intuition (2006/2010) is set in the fictitious Philpott Institute in Boston, more precisely in a laboratory for biomedical research (run by Marion Mendelssohn and Sandy Glass) where a post-doc (Cliff Banneker) suddenly produces promising results, using a cancer-fighting virus named R-7. Preliminary outcomes lead to a publication in Nature, generating a lot of media attention and opening up new options for funding. The entire laboratory will from now on focus on follow-up research, but one of the other post-docs (Robin Decker, Cliff’s former girlfriend) is unable to replicate the results and soon develops the “intuition” that the data may have been manipulated, although she does not have sufficient evidence to prove that she is right. The only evidence are some sloppy lab notes made by Cliff containing figures which seem to back up her suspicion that something is wrong. She opts for (or is manoeuvred into) the role of whistle-blower, however, and the Office for Research Integrity in Science (ORIS, an acronym/signifier which adds an S to ORI, the Office of Research Integrity) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) concludes that there is indeed evidence of scientific misconduct, although this verdict is later annulled on procedural grounds. Meanwhile, a U.S. Senator uses the case to further his crusade against science, resulting in a media circus and a formal hearing. To make matters worse, the tumour recurs in some of the mice, while other labs also have problems replicating Cliff’s results. As Lex Bouter (2015, p. 149) phrases it: “even on the last page, the reader is still not able to get to the bottom of what really happened”, so that the novel “shows that there are many shades of grey along the spectrum that runs from complete integrity to research misconduct”. On the individual level, the result is a struggle for survival, but most of the people involved seem able to find a way out, while manager Sandy Glass even manages to significantly improve his position.

Prof. Isidore Cantor is a biochemist who became a cell biologist and works at a small university on tumorigenesis research. During a nightly visit to the toilet, he has a eureka-experience. His idea is that, because of some mutation affecting the production of arginine (an amino acid named after its bright, silvery-white colouring) certain proteins are suddenly able to move freely in and out of cells (cell membranes normally permit translocation only in one direction). To test the validity of his brain wave, he designs an innovative experiment with tagged proteins as radioactive labels and orders his post-doc Jeremiah (Jerry) Stafford to perform it. Cantor insists on Jerry’s complete availability for this research, for he believes it may bring them the Nobel Prize, but this commanding assignment puts substantial pressures on the latter’s relationship with girl-friend Celestine Price, a promising biologist, but also a muscular campus athlete who shares an apartment with Leah, a humanities scholar specialised in Bakhtin and dialogism. According to Cantor, to unravel the enigma of tumorigenesis would certainly be a Nobel-prize winning achievement, comparable to climbing Mount Everest or K-2 (p. 37). The analogy between scientific research and mountain climbing occurs several times in the novel and is a well-known trope (Collins 2011; Zwart 2011). Cantor sees his research field as a scientific Himalaya (83) and his project as a scientific Everest (p. 82), while Stafford is referred to as Cantor’s Sherpa (p. 37, p. 83). The Himalaya metaphor (with the Nobel Prize as the summit) reflects the dimension of verticality in academic research (Zwart 2014c).

Our article aims to analyse the significance of dialectics for philosophical reflection on technology. Drawing on the philosophy of Hegel, this article first of all reconstructs the progressive artefactualisation of thought and action, by indicating the transition from labour through tool use to the emergence of intelligent machines in the field of practice, secondly, by indicating the importance of dialectical thinking for the media theory, and thirdly, by pointing out that dialectics delivers both a conceptual and a practical understanding of the possibilities of emergence for cognitive technologies we encounter today (AI and the noosphere). Dialectics captures these dynamics in a non-linear manner, offering a conceptual grounding for addressing developments that are both universal and concrete, offering Hegelian dialectics as a dynamical method of thinking about technological progress without falling into schematism and simplifications.

Traditional conceptions of academic authorship, e.g., the seemingly self-evident assumption that an author is someone who actually writes a text, is challenged by the complexity, scale, and collaborative nature of scientific research. Authors are expected to make a substantial contribution and to assume accountability for all aspects of the work, but in practice, many individuals listed as authors fail to meet all these criteria, notably in biomedical fields. In view of this tension between norm and practice, new conceptions of authorship have emerged, reflecting the growing importance of team science. This paper assesses whether consortium authorship as an emerging practice (also known as ‘group authorship’ or ‘team authorship’) offers a viable approach. Besides practical benefits, there is a normative dimension behind this concept, as it aims to acknowledge the importance of collaboration (seeing it as more than the sum of contributions attributable to individuals), but it also raises ethical questions concerning the responsibilities of consortium authors for the text as a whole. We opt for a case study approach, zooming in on experiences within a research consortium. Besides a literature review, we analyse the results of a deliberative workshop on consortium authorship and analyse how consortium authorship is currently handled in academic journals, notably in the biomedical field. We argue that consortium authorship works best when used in combination with individual authorship, but also notice that it challenges us to rethink the concept of academic authorship as such, for which we use Donna Haraway’s concept of sympoiesis as a starting point.

Ten years after introducing the RRI concept, a reflection on its key ambitions seems called for, now that RRI enters the global arena. This paper focues on the key challenge that RRI is currently facing: epistemic inclusion. From the beginning, there has been the awareness that RRI must be open to multiple voices and perspectives, coming from academia, and also from society at large. Besides representing impressive bodies of knowledge, academic disciplines face knowledge gaps as well and must reach out to other knowledge forms, e.g. practical, experiential, and indigenous knowledge. This paper analyses the challenges involved in epistemic inclusion while outlining viable pathways towards addressing them, based on experiences in European projects as our ‘laboratory'. After discussing interdisciplinarity, participatory research, and epistemic pluralism, while also addressing the academic reward system. Special attention is given to indigenous knowledge as a case study for epistemic pluralism.

In this paper, we present a Lacanian perspective on football, while notably fathoming its normative dimension. Starting with a defining imperative, the prohibition against ‘handling’ or touching the ball with your hands, diverging football historically from rugby, we will subsequently focus our attention on the role of the foot, the eye (notably the eyes of the audience) and the ‘object a’ (in the context of gender). Against this backdrop, we will address pressing issues such as the troubled position of the referee (as an ‘impossible profession’), the commercialisation of football, and the rising tides of violence, match—fixing and other instances of systemic deviance. As we will argue, football exemplifies modern sport as an arena defined by prohibitions and desire, by inclusion and exclusion, by purity and abuse, culminating in recent challenges involved in gender trouble. Symbolical practices, like modern football, are based on in- and exclusion. Instead of more regulations and dichotomies, we advocate careful attention to the delicate art of handling desire in practice.