"Olympic Hope": Fucoldian interpretations

Abstract

The study of literary works devoted to running makes it possible to determine their plot dominant as a conflict between the feeling of freedom generated by running and such properties of professional sports as fierce competition of competitive activities and authoritarian regulation of the training process. Sociocultural tensions of this kind were fruitfully conceptualized in the works of Michel Foucault using the concepts of bio-power as a unity of anatomical and biopolitics; disciplinary practices as methods of normalization of bodies; supervision and panopticism as means of control, as well as technologies of self and subjectivation aimed at dampening the effects of excessive domination. The article uses the fantastic sports novel by Danish writer Knud Lundberg "Olympic Hope: The Story that Happened at the 1996 Olympic Games" published in 1955 and not translated into Russian as an object of application of the Fucoldian means of analyzing the above conflict situation. The research methodology is based on a conceptual analysis of M. Foucault's theoretical legacy and the reception of the French philosopher's ideas by Russian and Western scientists. The study revealed that the novel presents four variants of bio-power: German (genetic eugenics), American (hormonal eugenics), Soviet (crippling practices) and Danish (based on the free development of natural predisposition), used to organize the birth and training of top-level runners. The disciplinary practices of runner training are most pronounced in totalitarian states. The methods of their implementation are specialized closed training spaces; strict daily routine; daily monotonous running exercises; constant differentiation of athletes by rating; exams in the form of competitions; medical experiments. The realization of the technologies of selfhood and subjectivation by runners is carried out in the forms of resistance and transgression. K. Lundberg associates his Olympic hopes in sports running not with cruel professionals who are ready to give up their health (the problem of doping) and even their lives for the sake of personal awards and increasing the prestige of their states, but with educated means of humanistic sports by amateur athletes, for whom running has existential significance as a way of holistic, bodily and spiritual self-realization in the ethically loaded sphere of freedom.