/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.13880161]

Speaking of Deleuze, what does /lit/ think of his disciple, the late Canadian philosopher Dr. Brian Pronger? Dr. Pronger's work helped create the modern field of philosophy of sport, focusing specifically on homosexuality and its implications in the context of competitive sports. Ie, in his famous paper "Outta My Endzone: Sport and the Territorial Anus," he writes:

>Drawing selectively on aspects of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1983, 1987), I will suggest that modern competitive sport constructs desire by systematically limiting its expression to a libidinal economy of territorial domination. I question what Drusilla Cornell (1992) has called the philosophy of the limit as it is operative in competitive sport. I will argue that competitive sport demands a libidinal economy and emotional formation that is embedded in the masculine colonizing will to conquer the space of an "other" while simultaneously protectively enclosing the space of the self, in an attempt to establish ever greater sovereignty of self and consequent otherness of the other...

>Embarking on a demythologising trajectory, the article suggests that competitive sport fosters the emotional logic that is embedded in the will to power produced by the mythical union of an ever-expanding phallus and territorially enclosing anus - these work together in sport in the desire to conquer the space of the other and protectively enclose the space of the self. Drawing parallels, the violating phallus with the desire to win and the closed anus with the desire not to lose, the article deconstructs the emotional logic of sport as a celebration of patriarchal violation and homophobic resistance to penetration. As an immensely popular cultural spectacle and practice, therefore, competitive sport plays an important role in the reproduction of phallically aggressive and anally closed cultures of desire.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0193723599234002

[Anonymous No.13880187]

>>13880161
What exactly does this sort of analysis achieve other than being able to relate things in some tangentially weird way to sexuality? Like, this does nothing other than say “a force seeks dominance over another”. My intuition tells me it’s a sort of psyop which induces a sort of thinking or pattern of behavior that extends this sexual thinking further into other fields, or at least has an affect on other fields. Maybe in a sense logic has succumb to a virus of sorts which has attached itself to the logic being, and now seeks to spread its virus further through the utilization of the highly possessed logic being.

[Anonymous No.13880205]

>>13880187
It's much more complex than that. A few more quotes:

>The practice of competitive sport itself can have homoerotic dimensions: the contact of the playing field, the spectacle of the partially clad body, the steamy environment of the showers and locker room... I argued that men's sport allows men and boys to exclude women and girls from their all-male environments, permits them to play with each other's bodies, to surround themselves with naked men in the showers and locker rooms, to enjoy that all-male contact, without suffering the vilification that usually comes from the open acknowledgment and pursuit of masculine erotic contact, the stigma of "being homosexual. ...

>In other words, the homophobia of competitive sport allows men to play with each other's bodies and still preserve their patriarchal heterosexist hegemony; they can have their (beef) cake and eat it, too.

...

>Less boastful than the phallus, perhaps because of its embarrassing vulnerability or even more terrifying potential openness, is the phallus's companion, the protective side of phallic desire, the side than can repel or admit others into the space carved out by phallic aggression. The simulacrum of this other side of phallic desire, I suggest is the asshole. It is the tightly closed orifice of the phallic conqueror, as well as the (perhaps) reluctantly opened orifice of the phalically conquered. Masculine desire is thus produced in the play of the phallus and asshole. It stimulates desire as both homoerotic and homophobic: homoerotic in its preoccupation with phallic intent, homophobic in its resistance to penetration.

>It goes without saying that a limp, shriveled penis is not effective in simulating the domineering masculine organization of desire. Given that no penis can live up to its phallic boast, no matter how swollen it gets, phallocentrism finds other ways to territorialize the body: innocuously, possibly, in body building, and more despotically in the territorial violence of warfare and competitive sport, for instance.

[Anonymous No.13880258]

>>13880205
Again, nothing but a restatement of “one will dominating another”, except he’s put Postmodernist lingo into the passage in order to somehow frame the act of competitive sports to a release of sexual energy which would have otherwise been pent up due to the inability of men to overcome some hidden homosexual stigma the harbor deep within their unconscious. What a crock of shit.