Sport, whatever the practices, institutions, and definitions that it recognizes, is distinguished by an immediate and imperative perception of the body. This is not without raising, no less imperatively, problems such as: “Which body? As announced by the title of a sports critic magazine which, claiming a flexible rationality, proposed suggestive and original interpretations.
Gold, silver, bronze and hymn on flowered podium, and partnership, as they say, voracious planetary monopolies (the athlete turned into advertising crest, polos crunched a crocodile), and obscene political harassment, and contract trafficking of all kinds, including weapons, and paranoia and hysterization of crowds and media (do you hear, in these camps that win, vociferate these ferocious reporters and supporters?), and various other combinations practicing the swinging between culture, economy, ideology, psychology (the “mind,” as they say) — these multiple data and dimensions could be offered as indispensable approaches to a sporting reality erected as a total anthropological phenomenon. Do we remember, for example, that the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset put forward the suggestive hypothesis of “The sport's origin of the state”? The state would be originally, says Gasset, a thuggery: the bands to Romulus and Remus liquidate, during brutal incursions, opponents and rivals, then liquidate them (known air of all revolutions), to seize the territories from which will emerge the illustrious Rome — the “Wolf”, one could not say better. A thesis which could be recognized as a pugnacious offshoot of the libertarian conception of the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich qualifying the power holders, both republican and dictatorial, of Higs (Hoodlums in Government), whose French equivalent would give Vags (Rogue to the Government) ( it suffices to go through the judicial and financial rubrics to honor such a name — “honorable” to which Reich dreams of substituting, on the basis of his self-managing “labor democracy”, the Teds (Workers in Democracy) (the theorist of the function of orgasm pushes us to abbreviations, he who shows, as we know, virtuoso in suitcase forging: Dor, Core, Orop, Oranur, Modju, etc.].
The psychoanalytical reference, as long as it is not reluctant to mobilize, alongside Reich, Freud and Gasset, authors as diverse as Ferenczi, Klein, Marcuse, and Huizinga, Caillois, Elias and a few others, can bring useful lightings on the primitive, largely unconscious, psychic rooting of sports activity as (re) treatment of the body, body work (in the way we say, vaguely enough, “work of mourning”). It will be posited that, in its most elementary aspect, the body is perceived as mass. (It is easy to imagine that the scientific notion of “mass” could have taken root in such gross weight intuition of the body). But this body mass is, first and foremost, a living thing, and therefore invested with libido, sexual energy — by virtue of this fundamental principle of Freudian “pansexualism” according to which the least parcel (“corpuscle”) of the body contains a grain, a seed, a future of sexual “power” — “power” is to be understood in the Aristotelian sense of the term, namely: potential, power-being, possibility of occurrence and actualization, tendency to “acting out” etc. In this perspective, sport has a dual purpose: at the same time that it gives all its weight, it is the case to say it, to the intuition of the body-mass, lived — one complains enough — as a heavy weight, a constraint, a dragging ball, an existential filling turning into a catatonic, it makes it a valuable material, always there, sitting safe, within reach of desire, just waiting to be treated, lifted, lifted, raised ( relayed, Aufhebung). One could, considering this low water, hazard the idea of a libido of stasis (to be compared, without identifying it, with the Freudian notion of “viscosity of the libido” or with the Jungian idea of ”inertia psychic “) — which we compare, playing here with a certain sport lexicon, to the stretched canvas of the trampoline on which the sports body will execute its jumps, to risk its challenges to gravity, and even,” mass “denied, to rise the onslaught of the sky, in a surge of sublimation eyeing the side of transcendence (but, as this 1943 film shows Fred Astaire explode his thin body mass in a dazzling fractal of tap, The Sky is the limit).
In fact, the Astaire dance, of which our sporty commentators were quick to sublimate the “star” into “asteroid”, “UFO” or “extra-terrestrial” (see remarks at the 2008 Olympics), occurs here at point named (does not it nick to the mother-mace-land?) to allow us to better specify the sport entity in its proximity with two other original treatments of the body-mass: dance and circus. Dance has a close, consubstantial link with music; by the same token, the dancer, in some way, is extricated from his mass, ex-mass, if one can say, functions as agent of a gestural code with aesthetic aim, carrying himself of various ends. social: all known human groups dance, thus contributing to the maintenance and reinforcement of links belonging to the group, to work, to play, to the expression of emotions, to eroticism, etc. These various aspects are identifiable, of course, in sport, but they are transported there as by hook-and-line, supererogatory, temporary, and by a kind of “displacement” psychological and ideological supported by corporations of manipulators and “ fans “or” supporters “aligned on the” hooligans “model. The circus could, for its part, supplant the sport: the circus games, these Latin circenses serving as a complement to the breaded diet, went in this direction; but they have been led to borrow and privilege, beyond the sadistic gratification of a bloody aggressiveness, the libidinal ways of a “polymorphous perversity” (which would account for the tenacious association commonly made between circus and childhood) : oral-anal libido, with the work of the clowns, where a remarkable virtuosity in the uses of the body remains infiltrated by the scatological references and the Bergsonian principle of laughter as “mechanics plated on the living”; “Animal libido”, preserving or reviving, besides the status of domination of the homo sapiens species, a “fraternal” bond, sado-masochistic and complicit with the animals, “adolescent souls”, says Peguy (riding, tamer, “beasts”) circus “, from elephant to chip); daydreams updated of the “material imagination”, long traveled by Bachelard, where air, earth, water, fire intervene to “support” many fantasies that the body-mass produces, in its desire to overcome itself as stasis to challenge, besides the unavoidable weight, emptiness, logic, fear, anxiety, structures of the real, death itself — a whole libidinal spectrum.
It could be said that in these dance or circus performances, claimed as such, the body escapes its own mass, is ex-mass, goes out of itself to go not so much beyond itself as in something other than himself — a performance or outing in art (choreography), a parody or “parade” outing or outing (Tod Browning’s superbly fantastic film, which includes the very real, Freaks, 1932, performed in a circus and with the circus characters, is entitled “The monstrous parade”). Sport, on the other hand, refers the body to itself and its inner power — a paradoxical power pushing beyond itself while remaining close to itself, adhering to body and mass, and focused on these manifestations that we call “tests”, “performances”, “records”. The reference to the power of the own body inevitably refers to the notion of “orgastic power” as elaborated by Wilhelm Reich in many of his texts, including The function of orgasm (“so big that!”, Exclaimed Freud when he received in 1928 from the hands of his fiery disciple the rather modest manuscript of the work), and The Analytical Character, indispensable manual of analytical practice. In the Reichian perspective, the orgasmic power, like the rivers that flow into the sea, runs and too often irresistibly rushes to orgasm, to the peak or orgasmic burst, which would identify with the movement or pulsation even of life: “the formula of orgasm is the very formula of the living” — such is “the thread for all our research,” writes Reich.
Sports practice, on the other hand, does not aim in any way at an orgasmic goal. It directs the subject in a completely different direction, which especially the innumerable and ever-lasting moralities, political regimes and ideologies that advocate the sport as braking and substitute motivations, pressures and sexual aims. (This was the origin, it is said, of the events of May 68: the students of Nanterre who claimed access to girls’ rooms, the university administration advised sportily to go for a swim in the pool). There is little doubt that, in sports activities, interfered with a variety of erotic touches, plucked at the liking of everyone’s inclinations: it will flush the eye to contemplate slender Cuban volleyballs with high molded ass in a naughty shorts, rivaling the beach bikini of their colleagues tanned on the beach; this one will remain fascinated by the “artistic” evolutions of nymphets gymnasts, serious and voltiguous Tanagras — while this or that other will not see without some opaque shudder the phallic cast iron bars torn to the ground by weightlifters women or men with muscular redundancies worthy of being described in the Chebebeme, butcher’s slang.
One can not doubt it: as soon as the body is there, stretches like a comet’s tail a long trail of “ivremes” — our term for the smallest units or molecules of sexual intoxication. Our whole body is studded with ivremes, thanks to which our organs maintain and sign their presence in the organic concert; the libido is thus subtracted from the enclosure, inertia or aphanisis (extinction of desire), and stands in suspense in the erotic murmur of the body (in order to “persevere in one’s being” of pleasure, as one Freudian Spinoza). The sporting body is rich in ivories, a little more assuredly than in the usual uses of a body too often abused and defeated; but it can not reach the bodily splendors of the body — if one is willing to admit that “there is drunkenness that sexual”, according to the title of a short article that I had published in the journal Corps written (PUF, no. 13, March 1985, “The Drunkenness”), reprinted in De la Raison ironique (Des Femmes / Antoinette Fouque, 1988). But, whatever the diversions, drifts and parasitages, the sports body, with its compulsive decomposition of the overtaking (altus, citius, fortius), remains to our eyes fundamentally anorgastic — that could be there its specific position in the libidinal economy.
It could be said as well anobjective (“a dream”, they say), with regard to the economy of reality itself. Certainly, the sporting body uses and exploits a whole variety of external elements, with implacable realism: objects (tackle, disc, hammer, weight, cycles, boats, nets, weapons, balloons), materials (water, air, earth, metal , wood), clothing, shoes, protections — not to mention discrete pharmaceuticals, sometimes enough to cause sexual mutations. But this is the tooling of which the body in power, or the power of the body, needs to assert itself, to experience itself, to prove itself and to come back to itself. It is experienced as mechanical, mechanical power and precision mechanics, to a hundredth of a second or a centimeter — where the orgastic body seeks to assert itself, to experience and prove itself as radical expression and expansion of the living, Without any measure possible (some sexologists have undertaken to describe, of their Olympus, the sexual act as a sporting event, with chronos, measures and adequate gestures — but they especially contributed to squander the irreducible personal quality of any orgasm). The athletic body remains dominated by quantity — the orgasmic body, on the other hand, is, at its peak, all organs combined, plenitude of quality, “quality of life”, the living as primordial quality, in the full sense of the expression. It follows that the power of the orgastic body (“orgastic power” in Reich’s “sexual economy”) is the best resistance to external, political, economic, religious, cultural hostilities, allows to appear as potential or revolutionary ferment (innervating for example, among others, the utopian thought of a Fourier, a Peguy or a Masson).
On the other hand, the power of the sports body, in the kind of narcissism and generalized onanism that it cultivates (it admires itself, enjoys itself, so that one could see in all the more sophisticated or sophisticated instrumentation that it uses the equivalent of a gigantic olisbos), lends itself easily to the strikes of the political and social bodies which, violence in underhand, cajole it in the sense of the hair. One can only be struck by the connivance existing between sports fervor and totalitarian political systems. Sport comes to be consecrated as a state apparatus — an ideal organ of training and social, patriotic and national regulation — Pro Patria and banners. Hitler could take over the Olympic motto, completing it in his own way: “Higher, faster, stronger” (“Me, you die!”) — a motto that he executed by exterminating all the less “Strong” than him. He had at heart, as we know, after expelling all the Jews from German sports organizations, to organize in Berlin the Olympic Games of 1936, which staged, to the glory of Nazism, Leni Riefenstahl, in his film The Gods stadium.
we have just seen what is happening with the Olympics, ostensibly under the sign of a tussle between the world’s political powers (each day was the counting of medals, high flags hoisted) — while iron fist , gambling and the golden calf to the hormones of the mercantile communist dictatorship reinforced their deadly grip (execution of delinquents, imposed abortions, organ harvesting, food poisoning, pollution, ethnocide in Tibet, persecution of dissidents, and the huge spiderweb — 4,000 “labor and re-education camps” — Chinese gulag, Laogai) about a people that has been suffering, for decades, from such inhuman treatments that we already hear, Olympic blazons all the revolts that growl.
