Abstract
Given his famed profligacy and irresistibly broad range of high and low cultural interests, it is at least a little surprising that Slavoj Žižek has been virtually silent about football.1 As the world’s most popular mass mediated conduit of jouissance, as an increasingly integrated multibillion dollar node in the networks of global capital, and as a site of unprecedented ideological influence, the modern football landscape seems like just the kind of field Žižek might be inclined to turn his attention to.
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Notes
David Goldblatt, The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Football (London: Penguin, 2007), x.
Slavoj Žižek, “What Rumsfeld Doesn’t Know That He Knows About Abu Ghraib,” May 21, 2004, http://www.lacan.com/zizekrumsfeld.htm
Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 30.
Slavoj Žižek, “Afterword: Lenin’s Choice,” (167) in Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Slavoj Žižek (Ed.) Revolution at the Gates: A Selection of Writings from February to October 1917 (London: Verso, 2002), 165–336.
Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 217.
Slavoj Žižek, Violence (New York: Picador, 2008), 40.
Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanksi, Soccernomics, (Philadelphia: Nation Books, 2012), 267–268.
Interviewed in Craig Tanner, Fahrenheit 2010: Warming Up for the World Cup in South Africa (2009. Levitation films/ Journeyman Pictures, 2010), DVD.
The wealthy son of a Brazilian arms dealer, Havelange rose to fame as a swimmer at the Berlin Olympics, an event that he predictably admired very much: “The organization. The attention to detail. The efficiency. The Berlin Games was one of the most excellent spectacles I have seen in my life. Everything was grandiose and perfect.” David Yallop, How They Stole the Game (London: Constable, 2011), 28.
These two FIFA presidents have had friendly relations with a veritable who’s who of dictators and war criminals: including Augusto Pinochet in Chile, Hugo Banzer in Bolivia, the military leaders of the successive dictatorships that ruled Brazil between the 1960s and the mid-1980s, Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, Muammar Qadaffi in Libya, Charles Taylor in Liberia, General Than Shwe, the leader of the Burmese military junta, and Sani Abacha in Nigeria. The FIFA president (Havelange) was actually in Nigeria with the president in the days before he authorized the murder of the Ogoni leader Ken Saro-Wiwa and his Ogoni Nine colleagues in November 1995, drawing worldwide condemnation: “[I]n Prague two days after the hangings Havelange said defiantly, ‘I will not let politics affect my promise to award the 1997 World Youth Soccer Championships to Nigeria. Sport and politics should not be mixed.” Andrew Jennings, Foul!: The Secret World of FIFA (London: HarperSport, 2006), 63.
Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2008), 258–259.
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© 2014 Matthew Flisfeder and Louis-Paul Willis
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Walters, T. (2014). White Elephants and Dark Matter(s): Watching the World Cup with Slavoj Žižek. In: Flisfeder, M., Willis, LP. (eds) Žižek and Media Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137361516_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137361516_10
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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