4 responses to “Roland Barthes was right about professional wrestling”
-
Let’s now pose the question: was Sartre correct to claim (in the second volume of his posthumously published Critique of Dialectical Reason) that “Every boxing match incarnates the whole of boxing as an incarnation of all fundamental violence”? Or, more interestingly perhaps, consider his argument that the “so-called witness” to the match is in fact a “participant: he intervenes to stop a brawl or else lets it run its course–out of cowardice, sadism, or respect for tradition. [….] The brawl is a COMMON EVENT.” [capitalized in lieu of italics] Sartre proceeds to demonstrate how “bourgeois capitalism itself is expressed through boxing.” I wonder if Sartre’s analysis (originally drafted in 1958) was somehow inspired by (even though very different from) Barthes’ essay. Although I’m not a professional philosopher, I’ve always thought the first part of this volume is chock full of provocative or suggestive material (for philosophers).
LikeLike
-
I just looked up Ronald Aronson’s discussion of the boxing section of the Critique and he mentions the possible comparison with Barthes’ essay.
LikeLike
-
Mandela was a keen boxing fan, and trained himself in what he called scientific boxing. Surprise, surprise, just that is attributed by Diogenes Laertius to Long-Haired Pythagoras of Samos, evidently a Dorian, so not the natural philosopher of mathematical interest. There are some Pythagorean fragments on ethics in Dorian, so you can bone up on Mandela that way, if you can retrieve them from the wikibins marked ‘forgeries’ in the weary tradition of academic vandalism. The historic connection is real enough: it runs through precisely Azania, once a province of Arcadia in the south of Greece, now a lingering legend in the south of Africa.
PS Niobe is consigned to the Underworld!! (now = niophe, via Grimm’s law).LikeLike
-
Awesome stuff.
For Barthes, professional wrestling is the perfect incarnation of the titanic struggle between good and evil. I don’t know if boxing can measure up, just because the fact that the outcomes are (most of the time) not predetermined severely limits the space of possible story-lines.
Some day I’m going to take the time to go through Sartre’s second big book. I forget who it was a few months ago who posted some other really interesting stuff about it in one of these threads.LikeLike
New APPS 
Leave a comment