Verso. - Barbaric sport: a global plague

This book is supported by the Institut franais as part of the Burgess Programme.

(www.frenchbooknews.com).

This edition first published by Verso 2012
Verso 2012
Translation John Howe
First published as Le sport barbare. Critique dun flau mondial
Editions Michalon, Paris 2011
The Twenty Theses on Sport (Vingt thses sur le sport) were published in the first issue of the review Quel corps? (April 1975). They have been republished twice: in Jean-Marie Brohms Critiques du sport (1976); then, in an altered form, in an anthology entitled LOpium sportif, edited by Jean-Pierre Escriva and Henri Vaugrand (1996); the theses first appeared in English in Jean-Marie Brohm, Sport: A Prison of Measured Time, London: Pluto Press, 1987

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ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-859-4
eISBN (US): 978-1-84467-913-3
eISBN (UK): 978-1-78168-966-0

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Perelman, Marc.
[Sport barbare. English]
Barbaric sport : a global plague / Marc Perelman;
translated by John Howe.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
Translated from French.
ISBN 978-1-84467-859-4 ISBN 978-1-84467-913-3
1. Sports and state. 2. SportsSociological aspects. 3. SportsCorrupt practices. 4. Sports and globalization. I. Title.
GV706.35.P47513 2012
306.483dc23

2012003763

v3.1

We know that modern education makes great use of sports to distract the young from sexual activity: it would be more accurate to say that it replaces specifically sexual pleasure with that provided by movement, and that it relegates sexual activity to one of the auto-erotic components.
Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality

In a period henceforth marked by sport, men know at last what they have to do. Everywhere balls can be seen whizzing through the air For the sake of the masses, they have built stadiums Sport makes the masses stupid.
Siegfried Kracauer, Le Voyage et la danse

The Olympic Games are reactionary.
Walter Benjamin, crits franais

There is no apolitical sport.
Ernst Bloch, The Hope Principle

Sporting events were the models for totalitarian mass rallies
Sport corresponds to the predatory, aggressive and practical spirit
Sport implies not only the desire to do violence, but also to undergo it oneself, to suffer.
Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms

The more leisure activities diversify, museum, football or Adriatic cruise, the more standardized the participants become.
Max Horkheimer, Critical Notes (19491969)

In the yelling at sports events there is already a murderous resonance.
Gnther Anders, Human Obsolescence

This essay aims to show that the powerful globalization process now under way, driven by a plundering financial capitalism which also controls all the trade on the planet and is starting to dismember it as a planet has been put to use, indeed taken over and given direction, by a deep-rooted social phenomenon whose main lines of force and extensive sphere of influence we would like to expose. This extraordinary phenomenon weighs heavily, exercising an ever-increasing negative pressure, on the very possibility of making sense of a society that has become opaque to itself while shaping reality in its own image. But that is not the essential point. The phenomenon we are going to describe in terms of its most salient (but often also most invisible) characteristics pertains more importantly to a colonization of the body in many of those who devote themselves to it relentlessly, and a mutilation of awareness in all those mesmerized by it as a spectacle.

To put it another way, this global phenomenon plays a leading part in a new form of barbarism into which whole swathes of Western, Asian and Middle Eastern societies have collapsed This recent form of barbarism (in the sense of strangeness, rudeness, vulgarity, ignorance and cruelty) threatens in our view the literal destruction of most of the values and ideals inherent to post-Enlightenment society but overturned by todays lethal modernity (whether or not we slap a postmodern label on it). The state of ruin and gloomy disorder that blights the whole of society affects individuals first of all, encroaching on their actual existence, modifying their very essence as living beings possessing a body and a consciousness. The phenomenon in question is largely responsible for the barbaric society to which we are subjected, unable as we are to devise any real form of resistance to its violence.

An unequalled social, political and ideological power has thus developed with extraordinary speed, spreading across the planet like a pandemic, sweeping away all that still remained in modern societies of opportunities for play, bodily freedom, simple pleasure in movement, and more broadly the idea of an open, living culture with a flourishing vernacular aspect. Ideals and projects of emancipation, of solidarity, of creation, have been turned into their opposites, almost cancelled out, by that phenomenon that arose in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century and spread across the world in the short century that followed.

The everyday lives of billions of individuals are thus contaminated, consumed, infected by its constant assaults, its capacity for insidious infiltration, its innocent-seeming mischief. More worryingly, people have become accustomed to it, so that its existence has become part of our daily lives; and this almost invisibly, because the degree and scale of its invasion (of all space) and its occupation (of all time) are such that we can no longer see it, because we see nothing else.

We have just described, in the broadest of strokes, what is usually designated by the term sport.

We were warned a long time ago by the philosopher Vladimir Janklvitch, whose experience of Nazi Germany taught him that

it is advisable to be reserved on the youth myth when it is linked with exaltation of strength. The Jugendbewegung was born in Germany along with its pseudo-metaphysics; it developed in the Hitler Youth and has invisibly contaminated democratic youth movements, socialist sport and the Olympic spirit, all of which have unguardedly aped the Nuremberg style with its monstrous liturgies. Nazi juvenilism rests entirely on the sacralization of brute strength and intoxicating pagan vitality Make no mistake: exaltation of the youthful body is in many cases a suspect myth fabricated by the triumphant males prestige. Beware of beautiful athletes.

At the end of the Berlin Olympics, in Le Journal of 27 August 1936, the founder of the IOC, Baron Pierre de Coubertin defended the event in these terms: