The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
a meditation on destituent power
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.53981/destrocos.v6i1.57394Keywords:
Giorgio Agamben, Destituent Power, Alan SillitoeAbstract
This short essay ponders themes of Giorgio Agamben’s corpus through the story of Colin Smith, the protagonist of the short story The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1959) by Alan Sillitoe and the film of the same name by Tony Richardson (1962). The essay considers how Smith’s infamous refusal to cross the finish line is paradigmatic of Agamben’s destituent power. The essay, as a sort of love letter to Smith, further engages questions of thought and feeling in the face of the contemporary apparatuses with which, as Agamben phrases it, we are in hand-to-hand combat.
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AGAMBEN, Giorgio. The Use of Bodies. Trans. Adam Kotsko. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016.
BENJAMIN, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. George Steiner. London and New York: Verso, 1998.
SILLITOE, Alan. The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. London: Harper Perennial, 2007.
THE LONELINESS of the Long Distance Runner. Director: Tony Richardson. Production: Tony Richardson. London: Woodfall Film Productions, 1962. DVD (99 min), sound, black and white.
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Copyright (c) 2025 Jenny Doussan
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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