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| ISBN-13: | 9781478005551 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/28/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 264 |
| File size: | 19 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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CHAPTER 1
A Condemned Man | Between the Nation and the Autonomista
All this time the chestnuts and the jug went round and round; and by and by they had a song, about a lost child traveling in the snow, from Tiny Tim; who had a plaintive little voice, and sang it very well indeed.
— CHARLES DICKENS, A Christmas Carol
The subject is what it does, it is its act, and its doing is the experience of the consciousness of the negativity of substance, as the concrete experience and consciousness of the modern history of the world — that is, also, of the passage of the world through its negativity; the loss of references and of the ordering of a "world" in general (cosmos,mundus), but also, and thereby, its becoming-world in a new sense. It becomes immanent, and it becomes infinite. The world is only this world.
— JEAN-LUC NANCY, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative
TINY TIM: DICKENS AND HEGEL, HEGEL AND DICKENS · There is a distinctly Dickensian aspect to Lionel Messi's fate with Argentina's national team in the finals of international competitions such as the World Cup and Copa America. There is something Yeatsian about it too, but that will have to wait a moment.
This is not, of course, to suggest that Charles Dickens knew it all along. But it is to acknowledge a certain Dickensian prescience after Argentina's 2014 loss in the World Cup final, in extra time. In this regard, Dickens's gently ominous warning to Scrooge about his skinflint behavior around Christmas, "this Ghost's province was the Future," applies, regrettably, to the footballing fate that Messi has endured. Some would, and not without good reason, call that fate cruel. From 2014 to 2016, Leo Messi played in three finals, the World Cup (2014) and the Copa America competition (2015 and 2016), and he suffered defeats in all three finals. Hard not to argue about the cruelty of fate when a player some consider the greatest to have ever played the game loses finals, back-to-back-to-back.
We can assert without fear of contradiction that as a footballer Messi, as Dickens phrases it, always "sings it very well indeed." His gift of "song," as it were, is especially evident when he wears the blaugrana ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]), the blue and deep red/maroon colors of his club, FC Barcelona, of Catalunya. The particularity of his gift, or the particular application of his gift, if you insist, brings us to the core difficulty of Messi's relationship with his native Argentina. This difficulty, which constitutes die Sache selbst ("the thing itself") of this chapter, can be summed up in the (nacional) designation Argentines apply to Leo Messi when he plays for the national team. They call him "El Catalán" ("The Catalan"), although it would probably be more appropriate to use "Catalano." Since the aspersion is so serious, the least that fans of the Argentine national team can do is get their terms of approbation right. They should hurl the linguistically accurate invective, "Leo Messi, el Català!" (the Catalan) at him. By naming him as they intend to, rather than as they do, Argentines would be acknowledging the history of Catalunya's long resistance to the hegemony of Castillia — that is, its desire for independence from "Spain" as we know it.
Messi, then, for all his gifts, and they are indeed many, and perhaps precisely because of these gifts, must be thought in excess of his talents. Messi must, as it were, be thought beyond his gifts, as that player in international football who, more than any other, demands that we, following Jean-Luc Nancy, "reorder" our understanding of the " 'world' in general (cosmos, mundus)" in order to achieve a "new sense" of "becoming-world." In figuring Messi as deconstituted Argentine, the cosmos as such opens up to the prospect of "becoming-world," being in the world of international football, in a sense for which there has been, until Messi, no need. What is it that the "subject" Messi does that causes Argentines, and the world as such, to "lose its references?"
What is it about Messi in relation to Argentina (M -><-><-A) that so unsettles Argentines? That causes them to "lose," if only for a moment, something more than their "references?" Causes them to lose something on the order of their minds?
I was moved to ponder this on October 5, 2017, as I left a bar in the Recoleta district of Buenos Aires after watching Argentina draw ("tie") 0 – 0 with unfancied Peru in their World Cup qualifying game. The game had just been played at the nearby La Boca stadium, home to one of Buenos Aires' most storied teams, Boca Juniors. As the fans tumbled disconsolately out onto the street, I could not decide if a pall had just descended upon the city or if the utterly depressed fans cast that pall upon my beloved "Baires," my favorite city in the world. But I heard this, distinctly. Deadly afraid that this lackluster draw had sealed Argentina's fate, that because of this draw the team would not be going to the 2018 World Cup in Russia, the fans muttered darkly about how Messi couldn't fashion a goal for the national team whereas he always seemed to come through for Barça. In the Recoleta district, a fancy quarter with boutique hotels, designer stores, gourmet coffee and pastry shops, and, I am glad to say, old-fashioned bakeries, that quarter in "Barrio Norte" (the other two quarters that make it up are Retiro and Palermo) could not have been more somber. The Barrio Norte, where Jorge Luis Borges lived (on Quintana Avenue) and wrote, strolled and took his coffee, saw everyone hurry home with shoulders slumped. With only one match remaining in the qualifying round, and that against Ecuador, at altitude, in Quito, Argentina resigned itself to its fate. Gloomily.
In the world that he is unmooring, Messi enables us to "experience the negativity of substance." That is, if we understand "negativity" as the first (Hegelian) principle. Freedom, being, and separation are all made possible by "negativity."
This means that, as Nancy argues, following his rendering of Hegel's famous phrase the "negation of the negation," that we are, firstly, released from the "position of the given" (the "fixity which holds back, freezes and annuls the movement of sense"). For Nancy there is no condition of being that can be presupposed, experienced as already determined or "given." Situating himself in a philosophical tradition that runs from Parmenides through Heidegger, Nancy argues that everything, every experience, must be subjected to the necessary force of thinking. Every "given" is, as such, nothing but the call to thought; every "given" demands thinking. If the "first negation is already freedom, but still only negatively experienced," then the project of "negativity" is fulfilled in the "second negation": the "negation of the negation" "denies that the first is valid on its own." As such, the "second negation" constitutes the "positive liberation of becoming, of manifestation, and of desire. It is therefore self-affirmation."
As a "self-affirming negativity," as a "consciousness of negativity," to figure him in Nancy's terms, Messi's "acts" in relation to Argentina present a challenge to how we understand the singular footballer — unique, unreproducible, beyond the mimetic — in relation to the nation-state and in relation to the historic desire that the Copa Mundial evokes in Argentines. Messi's singularity is indeed singular: he is the greatest player in the world, by far the best player representing his country. Not for nothing, after all, is he the Argentine captain. He is absolutely necessary to his country and yet he instantiates the interplay, if that is the correct term and not just a seductive pun, between the "first" and the "second" "negations." (Into which must be introduced a contradiction: he is absolutely necessary to his country, but irreplaceable as he may be to Argentina's footballing fortunes, he is not understood as being of his country. That is to say, he is, at the level of "Argentineness" — "patriotism" is too ugly and ideologically oversaturated a term for our purposes here — presumed or condemned to be ontologically other; which is to say, he is affectively other; which is to say, "his heart is not in it"; his "heart," metaphorically understood, is not for Argentina. And even if his Argentine "heart" can be said to be in the "right place," a matter that is itself in grave doubt, his "soul," that is, who he is at his essence, is not. Following this logic, Messi is perceived to relate to the nation-state only at the level of representation, which is always secondary and as such never constitutive. As such, it is the test of ontology — the truth of his soul — that Messi fails.) Messi gives form to the "positive liberation of becoming" through his play (in it we recognize "freedom" and "self-affirmation" as we have rarely seen in football), and he is able to do so because his very "movement" is against the "fixity" — the stasis, the statist impositions of belonging, the state's appropriation of those born within its national borders — of the "givens."
In this way, every time that Messi touches the ball on a football field or on the practice ground, he is, inveterately, entre-nous: he is between the political force of birth (Argentina, national identity) and the political promise of life (the joy, as such, that is playing for Bar?a). But Messi's is not simply the experience of being entre-nous. He is not just "between," alluring as such a designation might be.
Messi's condition of being entre-nous is that of, in Nancy's sense, relentless movement, mimicking, as it were, his play on the field — where his style of play is about intelligent, seemingly unending motion. Leo Messi is, to invoke a phrase coined in relation to a different set of figures, the football "body in motion." Messi's movement, as such, is fully Hegelian. It is movement in direction of becoming; it is, as Nancy phrases it, "infinite negativity in and as act." That is, the "negativity" on the order of the "second negation," which works resolutely to, first, achieve "self-affirmation," and then, secondly, to transpose that "having-become" as the football body's motion, as the football body enacting itself as the thinking of the game, of movement itself as, above all, the effect of thinking: the body in motion as thinking.
The body in motion is the embodiment of the relentlessness of restless thought; restless thought knows no repose, as Nancy might phrase it. Like Messi, restless thought is always in search of producing a "new sense," a "new sense of the world," in football; and, possibly, through his entre-nous place in world football — the "world in general (cosmos,mundus)." For both those nation-states that aspire to participate in it (those for whom qualification is enough; for those who set the bar at the opportunity to just play in the Copa Mundial) and for those who set their sights higher (perennial challengers such as Brazil, Germany, Argentina, and Italy), Messi poses the difficulty of how to think the constituent self (the individual player) in relation to the nation.
In turn, in taking this turn, Messi himself is thrown into question. In Being Singular Plural, which begins as a critique of Heidegger's "one," Nancy argues that there is "no pure and simple 'one,' no 'one' in which 'properly existing' existence [l'existant 'propement existant'] is, from the start, purely and simply immersed." "From the start," then, Messi is "immersed" not in the "one" but at once entre la Catalogne et l'Argentine (between-two, entre-deux) and immergé dans deux (immersed in two; national-/nation-state formations, that is). Messi is immersed in, made of, in unequal measure (it could not be otherwise because no equivalence is possible), both Argentina and Catalunya. Entre-moi-et-moi: between Messi and himself, because of Messi and himself, there can be no "one." Messi, the one that is not "one," can never be any such "one." "Messi" (birth/Argentina) is not so much the "negation" of "Messi" (life/Catalunya), as the condition of being entre-moi-et-moi (literally, "me and me," but invoked here to designate — what is — between the self and it-self), of "being between," renders Messi the "first negation" that makes imperative the "second negation." At the very least, Messi propels our thinking in such a direction so as to make possible the "positive liberation of becoming, of manifestation, and of desire." How can such a "desire" be spoken, how can it be achieved as a "l'existant 'propement existant'" — an existence "proper" to the desire out of which it arrives, from which it derives?
It is difficult, in our world, to account for the time and place of the "proper" place of origin, the origin of "desire." And yet, as Nancy argues through his evocative concept, the "singular plural," it is entirely possible that Messi presents us with precisely such an instance. It is not simply that Messi embodies the "singular plural" but that he embodies the "distance opened up by the singular as such, as its spacing of meaning." Messi maps, in and because of his being, the distinct and "interlaced" "spaces of meaning": his birthplace, Rosário, the Argentine nation-state, Catalunya. In, and through, (the body of) his being entre-nous, Messi shows how these "strands of meaning" remain at once "separate" from and in "touch" with each other, discrete but invariably evocative of each other (how could they be otherwise?), inconsistently bonded, relentlessly disconnected, so that it becomes necessary to think the "space," the body (Messi's), the mode (football, on a global scale, as the imperious practice of international capital) from the "interlaced center of the knot" to its furthest reaches, there where various strands are most dispersed and "independent" (which is also to say "interdependent," within touching distance of each other) of each other; this is to say, in Nancy's terms, that the intensity and the degree of "immersion" of one space in the other, makes possible "penetration," that is, "negation" of the second order.
Such a thinking, the act of (making) meaning through spacing ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.] — apóstasi), or apprehending the meaning that emerges out of spacing, sets in motion nothing other, this movement from the "center" to the periphery, this movement back and forth, than a version of Nietzsche's "eternal return of the same." Repetition: to think again. To confront again that which already was. To know that just, but never exactly the same, such a confrontation will (always) be forthcoming. The same that "resembles" but does not, can never, must not be allowed to, emulate, itself. The ways, and the frequency with which, Messi moves between these "spaces of meaning," the ways in which he has long done so (since the age of thirteen, and well before, we can speculate, given his father's Catalan heritage), attests to the "originary plurality of origins and the creation of the world in each singularity, creation continued in the discontinuity of discrete occurrences," culminating in the "truth of this paradoxical 'first-person' plural." Here one risks hyperbole (is there any other way to establish truth?), but the resonance is too insistent, too provocative, possibly even too unyielding in its hopefulness, to ignore. As such, the question presents itself: is it possible to discern, no, to see, the "world" in the singular "singularity" that is Leo Messi? Is he not so much what stands between us, entre-nous but rather the "unique event whose uniqueness and unity consist in multiplicity?"
Messi's is a "singularity" that makes imminent, and immanent, the "multiplicity" of origin and, as such, presents the possibility of a world that will not yield to anything other than the "creation of a world in each singularity." Messi is, as conceived on the philosophical terms that Messi instantiates (as explicated and made possible by Nancy), the event, the face, the Sein, of that world. Is that world also our world, the world we struggle toward? Is that world, a world that far exceeds that of the "world of football," already extant in Messi but one in which we, and possibly even him, are unable to be? We are called upon to answer: is Messi what, who, we want to-be, want to-be-with? Is Messi the absolute horizon of our Mitsein? Is he how we want to-be-with-the-other, as the infinite multiplicity of the "singular plural?" Is Messi what stands against the proclivity to return to, in the terms of Nietzsche's pejorative, those "humans" who are, as Zarathustra phrases it, "All-too-similar ... to each other still?" (Is Messi the "last man," the "bridge that passes over," and still we cannot recognize it? Recognize and account for it in him?) Those, we might say, who are entirely devoid of the capacity for the "singular plural"; or, worse, those for whom the "singular plural" is not at all visible, for whom it lies beyond the horizon of their thinking. The choice is stark: Messi, the "singular plural," or a (fatal?) return to the "all-too-similar?" Is Messi the enunciation in whom Nancy and Nietzsche converge?
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Preface ixAcknowledgments xxv
Introduction. Entre-Nous: Between the World and Me 1
1. A Condemned Man: Between the Nation and the Autonomista 29
Interlude. "Nog Lansur!" 97
2. The Shame of Loving the Condemned: The Philosophy of Óscar Washington Tabárez 163
Postscript 219
Notes 225
Bibliography 251
Index 253
What People are Saying About This
“Masterfully illuminating the intersections between football, historical and social context, and fan and player affect, Grant Farred has written a powerful and far-reaching book. Entre Nous is quite moving in its combination of philosophical reflection, humor, touching personal recollection, and Farred's very evident love for football.”
“Masterfully illuminating the intersections between football, historical and social context, and fan and player affect, Grant Farred has written a powerful and far-reaching book. Entre Nous is quite moving in its combination of philosophical reflection, humor, touching personal recollection, and Farred's very evident love for football.”
“While numerous scholars have used different social theories to explore the meaning of sport, Grant Farred employs philosophy to present a fascinating and profound interpretation of football along with fresh understandings of the ontology and politics of sport. Entre Nous is an exemplary piece of scholarship that offers scholars a template for exploring sport in a new and highly stimulating manner. It completely transcended my disinterest in football!”