sashonska

One more thing: "Sports" does not deprive people of their humanity. You do.

sashonska

1. JESSE OWENS! There's your "esthetic challenge" found in sport. Come on. What of Jesse Owens' athletic performance in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the famous African-American track runner who won several gold medals under Hitler's very nose? Was he not competing against something other than the clock? Please. 2. Mohammed Ali? Billy-Jean King? Roberto Clemente? State Power and its political subjects indeed exist in a grossly unbalanced relation -- but even fascism is not Absolute -- we wouldn't be having this conversation otherwise. To reduce their athletic, aesthetic, and political performances as powerless and meaningless in the face of State Power, is to deny each athlete, and by extension, any person of their agency. YOU "disappeared" Jesse Owens in your historical narrative of the 1936 Games, something the Third Reich would have LOVED to do, except for the fact that it was recorded by Reifenstahl herself, and broadcast internationally. Was Jesse Owens one of the "civilized beasts" you were talking about, b/c he was an athlete? 3. You need to revisit the meaning of "aesthetics." It comes from its Greek root, which means "that which is perceptible through the senses." You are using the word, as a substitute for "taste" -- and what could be more reactionary than that. The totality of our experience of the external world is thus within the aesthetic realm...sports as much as art. Aesthetics is a discourse of THE BODY. You speak of "man's esthetic being" as somehow seperate and apart from his physical ("materialist") experience of the world - which quite frankly, is of the very same Modernist logic that you condemn. It was the Age of Enlightenment that defined the body as chaotic, primordial, bestial (female) - and who polarized it from Reason, the ethereal rational mind (male). You fell into the trap, or rather, never climbed out of it. To think critically, is to also turn that critical gaze inward. 4. Yes, a resurrected Olympics is necessarily reactionary: in its spectacle, in that it posits the Nation as Natural; and that within it, athletes don;t compete with eachother (in direct conversation), but with the clock, or the yardstick. 5. Condemning the practice/art/craft of sport, however, is misguided. And further, it denies the human being of her body's discursive potential. 6. Lastly, if you think that "Art" is not just as vulnerable to political manipulation, if not more so, than you have not yet grasped the core mechanism of Fascism.

Nebojša

This is Duci’s new E-mail address: comrade@sezampro.yu The old address : simonovic@simonovic.info is no more valid!