Torgeir Fjeld

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.

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.

The Norwegian-Australian artist Bjarne Melgaard has become known for his lavish, hedonistic displays that defy all norms associated with sexuality, substance abuse and art. Claiming that his art does not need to be compelling, since a Melgaard painting is “not about what we observe, but a painting that observes us,” Melgaard radically reformulates the surrealist posture in a way that obliterates the artist as subject. When Melgaard admits to terrible pangs of paranoia we should not be surprised that his projected new home carries the title “A house to die in,” echoing both the artist’s creative vision and his self-perception as a mortal subject. Originally situated on the ground where the progenitor of Norwegian plastic arts, Edvard Munch, lived and drew his famous oak trees, it generated lively debate about the respective artists’ place in Norwegian cultural history and the way they relate to their natural and social contexts. This paper sets out to understand Melgaard’s art in light of three relations between art and its creative subject. While to Jacques Lacan we relocate ourselves as whole subjects when we reaffirm the father as law-giving instance, Martin Heidegger’s suggestion was that the subject can truly only encounter itself in so far as it is ecstatically outside itself. Ultimately, Melgaard’s destiny turns out to be analogous to that of a dominant trend in contemporary art as such. As Slavoj Žižek points out, his kind of opportunistic, permanent transgressivity can only lead to dullness and deadlock. Can the end of Melgaard’s personal housing project usher into a new era beyond this deadlock?

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.

Filmmaker, poet and visual artist Stefan Chazbijewicz seeks to establish a mystic space in his artwork, a domain of salvaged reality, or, as he puts it, a semiotic representation of what we are after salvation. Here we present three of Chazbijewicz' recent visual artworks together with a text that introduces his approach. The three images, “apres-nous,” “Greece, Athens,” and “The Question of Acropolis” are all recent works, employing a variety of techniques and references to collectively suggest a path, a series of perspectives, and an aesthetic programme.

Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter's Organization After Social Media interrogate what our relation to the Internet in general, social media platforms, and organised networks in particular should be after botched Twitter revolutions, NSA counter-insurgencies and a rising disillusionment with "platform capitalism." Seeking to find a way for activists to operate in secret networks the authors suggest a future between what they see as the double pitfalls of crises-ridden conventional organisations and offline romanticism.

Preface v 1. Introduction: making meaning of sports 1 I Cultural theory as martial arts: a toolbox for cultural analysis 19 2. Signification: mediation and sites of meaning 25 3. Bourdieu, discourse, sport: concepts and methods 41 4. Nationalisms: theory and actuality 83 II The body of sport: producing nature, practicing nations 109 5. Nations at sport: the epic body 113 6. Case: South Africa in the 1998 Football World Cup 137 7. National, authentic, excessive: toward a globalised body of sports 153 III Beyond the couch: truth and silence 169 8. Dressage and illusio: desire and spectacular sport 173 9. The limits of Bourdieu: a passive subject? 185 Conclusion: The national sports imaginary 199

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.

This essay presents two models of sports research, one characterized by a didactic and normative relation to its object, while wedded to a view of language characterized 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 democratize 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 installment 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.

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, that 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 length 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 globalization 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.

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.”

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.

Ingmar Bergman’s middle years – from the late 1950s to the ear-ly 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 thema-tises 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.

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.

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.

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 livingphilosophyis conceived as explicable both through scholarly essaysas 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 philosophythere 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 upand bringing forthas much as the more traditional transmissionof knowledges. Subsequently,this philosophy programme can be seen as a precise and logical outcome of Schirmacher’s thought.

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 finitude. In so far as this became the rallying cry for modernist philosophy it also became a sign of its limit. If human beings are superior in their thinking ability, the pessimists asked, how come we have put ourselves on the brink of extinction, polluting our waters, creating ever more powerful weapons, now with the capacity to eliminate all life on this planet many times over, heating our small rock in space to the extent that life crumbles and withers? 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. This essay discusses Fosse’s *negative mysticism* and the way it serves to offer a highly complex response to the notion of facticity. What is at stake is how what Milan Kundera called “God’s laughter” manifests itself in the polyphonic complexity of Fosse’s text, providing a paradoxical and surprising inversion of the realist doxa on singularity and difference.

Abstract: 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.

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 is 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.

In what arrived belatedly as an announced, but delayed, preface to Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom, Jacques Lacan interrogates the relations Sade could be said to have had with, on the one hand, Sigmund Freud, and, on the other, Immanuel Kant.1 Despite the presuppositions at the time of its writing, the text was first published as “Kant avec Sade” in the journal Critique in 1963 and only later reappeared as the preface it had been conceived as: announcing the dogma of de Sade as an introduction to one of his key works. What had happened in the meantime, Lacan cryptically suggests, is that his – Lacan’s – collection of lectures and essays, Écrits, had arrived with a certain acclaim on the French cultural scene, and what had at first appeared to the publisher as inconsequential ravings had morphed into a profound and potentially significant enframing of de Sade’s “philosophy.” What is it we find here? It is stupid, says Lacan, to pronounce – as too many “literary types” do – that de Sade’s perversions prefigured Freud’s interrogation of sexual mores. True, they both have the appearance of schooling, and so serve to prepare, Lacan informs us, the way for a new science. To understand the difference between them we need to arrive at some conception of Freud’s ethics of pleasure. With what is known as the pleasure principle – announced in 1911 – Freud ordained a mechanism whereby pleasure is maintained at the lowest possible level.2 Lacan elsewhere referred to this principle as a homeostatic device, since it seeks to secure the functioning of the organism with as little excitement as possible. Freud’s principle is different from traditional ethics in that it doesn’t disallow some sexual practices that had hitherto been condemned as wrong. However, such a realization doesn’t relieve us from approaching the principle as ethical. To Lacan, Freud’s homeostatic device is what “preordains the creature to its good.” In other words, it is by indulging in just enough pleasure to avoid unpleasure, either by becoming abstinent or consumptive, that we maintain our experience of goodwill. What is remarkable, Lacan notes in his foreword to de Sade, is that Freud did not find it necessary to explicitly refer to this principle as an ethical prerogative. The only reason we can find for this, Lacan claims, is the 19th century obsession with the theme of “happiness in evil.” The “happiness in evil” – or, as we should say, happiness in the will – has its precursor in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, which was published eight years prior to de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom.3 To Lacan, de Sade subverts the Enlightenment directive inaugurated by Kant, and it is as such that it is possible to say that de Sade offers the truth of Kant’s Critique. This “happiness in evil” becomes de Sade’s Being-Supreme-in-Wickedness. Recall that this is quite a different notion of perversion – of which the Marquis figures as the first and predominant example in Lacan – from that which reigned in the “literary” epoch, i.e., prior to Freud, as well as from Freud’s own inflection of the term. Perversion is no longer reducible to a catalogue of abominations – whipping, homosexuality, you name it – such as was the case prior to Freud, nor to a more select line of such – Freud famously excluded homosexual love from the list, while retaining sadomasochism. Lacan would draw the conclusion of Freud’s tentative first step by positing that perversion is a position, and specifically a location in relation to the phallus. The novelty and force of this perspective should become clear to those who study the present volume. It is not a clinical attempt, nor the final word on a philosophy of mind without psychoanalysis. Rather, it should be regarded as situated in between these two domains, and with eyes to both.

Is the creative act like a volcano: an outburst that lights up the universe? This volume connects reason with desire and the arts in ways that enable us to imagine how creativity can bring us closer to the truth. The artistic quest for freedom stands in stark contrast to philosophy's call to subordinate art to reason and tradition. The struggle between them has culminated in artistic attempts to subsume philosophical matters within the domain of art. One central question in this study is what the consequences will be of a final dissolution of the boundary between the two domains: will all that remains of the artwork be an abstract howl of the rock – our rock, the planet – itself?

Philosophy of Sport: Core Readings is a competent attempt at providing college instructors and students with a comprehensive set of key texts in a wide variety of topics in sports philosophy. This second edition is both a testament to the success of the first edition and an elaboration and refinement of the former. Before we investigate further the differences between the two editions and assess whether this is a convincing revision, let us consider more generally the state of the field that Jason Holt, the editor, is seeking to address.