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The Subject of Sport

Exploring Sport’s Psychoanalytic Significance

The Subject of Sport cover

The Subject of Sport

Exploring Sport’s Psychoanalytic Significance

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Pre-order. Available 07 Jan 2027
$28.79 RRP $35.99 Website price saving $7.20 (20%)

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Description

Jack Black offers a groundbreaking exploration of the cultural significance of sport through the lens of Lacanian psychoanalysis, which also serves as an introduction to Lacanian theory through sport.

The Subject of Sport shows that, despite its apparent triviality, sport provides a unique arena where the contradictions of the human subject and society are performed and experienced. With a scholar's rigour and a fan's love of the topic, Jack Black explores sport's irrationality and examines why sport enthralls as much as it disappoints.

By drawing upon concepts such as desire, fantasy, jouissance, and the illusion of the Other, Black illuminates the unconscious dynamics that underpin our engagement with sport. Although sport is typically characterized as installing and promoting ideals of fair play, meritocracy, and sportsmanship, Black argues that these ideals function as fantasies that help sustain a number of unethical practices within sport. Readers are encouraged to explore such multifaceted roles in sport's shaping of both the subject and society by challenging traditional disciplinary boundaries and viewing sport as a profound site of cultural expression, ideological conflict and identity formation.

Broadening the scope of psychoanalysis and of sport studies, The Subject of Sport reveals how this seemingly trivial activity provides a platform for confronting lack, negotiating desire, and forging a sense of belonging in a world defined by uncertainty and contradiction.

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Table of Contents

Introduction: The Meaning of Meaningless Games
1. The Subject of Lack: Language, Desire, and Sport
2. Sport's Impossibility: Desire, Drive, and Sporting Achievement
3. Jouissance and the Other: The Radicality of Sporting Enjoyment
4. Sport, Fantasy, and the Real
5. Sport's Obscene Underside: Alienation, Ideology, and the Great Sport Myth
6. Traversing the Fantasy: Confronting Contradiction in Sport
7. Sport and the Illusion without Owner
8. Self-decentrement in Sport
References
Index

Product details

Bloomsbury Academic Test
Published 07 Jan 2027
Format Ebook (Epub & Mobi)
Edition 1st
Pages 256
ISBN 9798216490159
Imprint Bloomsbury Academic
Series Psychoanalytic Horizons
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

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