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The great instigator of the modern Olympic movement, Pierre de Coubertin (1863–1937) considered that the most important message of his mission to young people consists in the Greek ideal of harmony and in the perfect unity of a healthy body, soul and mind. He considered the first modern Olympic Games, organized in Athens in 1896, the prelude to a future in which the harmony between nations and world peace would prevail. However, as history has taught us, the associations between the Olympic Games and world politics are all too close, and uplifting ideals are often contradicted by the painful or even tragic reality.
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Sex and sexuality play an important role in the theories of biopolitics of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben. A theoretical division of biopolitics into two domains: zoopolitics (politics of bodies) and etopolitics (politics of behavior) exposes the differences between the two philosophers: Agamben focuses on zoopolitics, while Foucault – on etopolitics. This is why their research interests diverge: Foucault analyzes rather „typical” (etopolitical) medicine, sexology, or psychiatry, and Agamben – (zoopolitical) Nazi eugenics. Both thinkers have different attitude towards the body and conceptualize the political divergently. These differences in the basic assumptions result in different concepts of sexual bioresistance, however, Foucault and Agamben do not propose competing projects but rather operate on different levels – Foucault is focused on sexual practices of bioresistance, while Agamben – on a philosophical sexual utopia. Furthermore, both thinkers share the belief that non-normative, deviant sex has potential of bioresistance.
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The subject of this review is the book published in 2008 of the Hungarian historian Béla Borsi-Kálmán, which is dealing with issues of Hungarian sports history. The central figure of the book is represented by the legendary soccer player, Ferenc Puskás, but it is also dealing with the biographies of other players. Through the mirror of these players’ life, we also receive a complex image of Hungarian sports and social life through the socialist era.
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The main scientific objective of the paper is to investigate the problematization of protest, resistance, and explosions of social discontent in the discourse of European symbolic elites. The analysis of three dimensions of the intellectualization of protest serves to answer the following questions: how is protest shaped as an object of intellectual discussion, how it gains the attention of symbolic elites, and how intellectuals support social protest and make it a subject of public attention. The second objective is to identify the paradoxes and dilemmas of the intellectualization of protest on the example of Michel Foucault and the organization Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons. Following Foucault’s case, the author argues that the protest cannot avoid symbolic appropriation by those who claim to be its greatest advocates, and elites declaring themselves to be social critics are often uncritical towards their ideological positions.
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Michel Foucault is one of those authors who significantly impacted upon broadening the meaning of the term “power, ” including realms in which one is to look for its symptoms. Foucault’s contribution to the developmental tendency within the studies of power is especially striking. In the History of Sexuality, Foucault was to openly claim that power was plainly everywhere. For years Foucault had been elaborating two ways of legitimizing this view, which is named here “a prevalence of power” thesis. For the sake of the below analysis, the first justification is going to be called historiosophical, and the second—social differentiation justification. The article aims at criticizing both of them and, although indirectly, the very thesis they support. Since the boundaries of all Foucauldian analytics of power are outlined by these two justifications, their reconstruction and critical consideration are of crucial importance for the post-Foucauldian current in social sciences.
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The aim of this paper is a critical reflection on Michel Foucault’s concept of dispositive and its application in social research. Dispositive means a heterogenic composition of discursive and non-discursive elements of social reality linked together with the dynamic relations of power. Since two decades in the frames of post-Foucauldian discourse analysis the attempts at operationalizing the category of dispositive have been made. As an analytical category dispositive refers to the mechanisms of socially dispersed power, which can be studied empirically on the basis of discursive and non-discursive data. A research perspective of dispositive analysis has emerged as a result of an interest in dispositive. This paper presents the main guidelines of this perspective, as well as a typology of applications of the Foucauldian category of dispositive in empirical research, illustrated with chosen examples of German and Polish scholars’ works. This presentation is accompanied by a consideration of inconsistencies and deficiencies of such methodological approach.
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Hungarian successes at the Winter and Summer Olympic games preceding 1945 have been linked in numerous cases to athletes who have been, at the same time, officers or sub-officers of the Austro-Hungarian Imperial and Royal Army, respectively the Royal Hungarian Army. The reason for this close association between military and sports life lies in factors pertaining to military education and the various military education institutes, as well as the specific education of the military officers. Physical education and sports have always been an important part of military training in Hungary. During their preparation for military service, the recruits have gained proficiency not only in the so-called “military sports” (such as marksmanship, fencing and horse riding), but sports such as swimming or gymnastics have also played a major role in their military training.
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Sports have become the most encompassing and characteristic cultural formation of modern societies in the past century, functioning at the same time as mass movement and entertainment, popular pastime and spectacle, hobby, profession, industry and commercial business. Modern sports culture was born in England, from where it spread worldwide through such means as aristocratic sports life, college sports, mass sports companies, sports clubs and associations, as well as the pacifist Olympic ideal and the sport cult of totalitarian states, until it has finally become, in the last decades of the 20th century, one of the most profitable branch of the global entertainment industry.
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