Sport ritually re-enacts subjection that society has already inflicted
Evidence
Sport is the imageless counterpart to practical life. … Sport itself is not play but ritual in which the subjected celebrate their subjection. They parody freedom in their readiness for service, a service which the individual forcibly exacts from his own body for a second time. In the freedom which he exercises over his body the individual confirms what he is by inflicting upon this slave the same injustice he has already endured at the violent hands of society. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 133
Categorization
- ADDENDUM: Relevant to the sacrifice essay: sport as ritualized self-violation parallels the way ritual re-enacts foundational violence in sacrificial practice.
- QUESTION: Is this claim empirically testable in any way, or is it purely a psychoanalytic-style interpretive claim about spectators’ inner experience?
- XREF: connects to: Sade’s sexual orgies prefigure and mirror the regimentation of modern sport
Related
- Sport converts submission to authority into voluntary self-imposed ritual discipline (similarity 0.92)
- Sade’s sexual orgies prefigure and mirror the regimentation of modern sport (similarity 0.83)
- Sport trains bodies for work while pretending fitness is its own end. (similarity 0.79)
- Sport reduces people to the objects capitalist society has already made them (similarity 0.79)