On Legitimation: Wisnik and Soccer

Abstract

Analysis of the operation of legitimation of soccer as an object of intellectual concern in José Miguel Wisnik’s Veneno remédio. Correspondences with similar works of legitimation in the literary and pop music studies. After a preliminary discussion about legitimation, three steps follow: 1) characterization of the antagonist against whom Wisnik legitimizes his object, through the comparison with propositions by Hannah Arendt, Gilles Lipovetski and René Girard; 2) discussion of Wisnik’s ethics of legitimation (through comparisons with the pop music critique), as he absorbs the accusations against soccer while re - shaping them; 3) discussion of how Wisnik understands the analysis of soccer’s specificities as a pathway for an analytic that does not smother it under expectations external to its own logic. There follows a final comment on Wisnik’s proposition that soccer expresses as soccer the problems that haunt it, which goes parallel to his refusal of establishing any values that would subtract soccer from the free-flow of culture and freeze it into some specific hierarchical position, be it high or low.