Cfp 2026: Fields of Tension. Sport as a Ground for the Emotional Representation of Conflict
Noam Chomsky famously observed that, rather than dedicating their intellect to such truly important matters as politics, people use it to comment on and discuss sport in the media without any deference to professionals or experts. In his view, this squanders a depth of participation, competence, and attention that would be better directed toward other, nobler causes (Chomsky 2002, 129-131). However, in criticizing its instrumental use as a weapon of distraction and social control, Chomsky’s analysis risks blurring the historical image of sport and its actual cultural centrality in contemporary society. Sport matters: it counts, it is important (Dunning 1999). And this is not merely a question of quantitative relevance. Indeed, its daily presence on social media, the web, television, and radio – including live broadcasts, reports, news, and commentary – is undeniable; so are the billion-strong number of spectators, fans, and practitioners of various disciplines, among which football remains the undisputed king in terms of reach and practice; and the global significance of events such as the FIFA World Cup or the Olympics, with all the prestige, investment, and economic spin-offs that follow for the organizing, participating (and winning) nations. Yet, it is sufficient to browse the nearly one hundred and fifty sports-themed documentaries available on Netflix, verify the growing importance of sports events in Prime Video’s offering, and glance at the book titles in the specific section of the Amazon bookstore to gauge the length and breadth of a cultural field that is more boundless than ever.
But there is more: while we attempt to measure (or even question) its scope, we must not overlook the intimate relationship binding sport to the civilizing process of Western society. On the pages of this journal, addressing the theme of the neurocognitive genesis of football fandom through the narrative lens of Osvaldo Soriano’s stories – while drawing on Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning –, Stefano Calabrese recalled how modern sports are the result of a process of symbolic translation and the ablation of aggression that began in England in the 18th century and concluded in the 19th. In parallel with the birth of the Modern State, the centralization of violence control, and the parliamentarization of political life, sporting activities channel and regulate the admitted forms of aggression and violence. In Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, these were situated either in celebratory displays of a sovereign power demonstrating its capacity for war through simulation, or in folkloric tournaments involving literally no-holds-barred combat (Calabrese 2022, 89-90). In other words, the ‘sportization’ of society is the product of a pacified State. Here, the emergence of sporting activities such as football and rugby – which, not coincidentally, originated in their current conception within the aristocratic schools and among the English elite of the 19th century – serves as an indicator of a civilizing process in Western Europe. In this context, regarding certain manifestations of citizens’ social life, the internal discipline of the practice wholly replaces the constraints imposed by the State’s central power. The self-regulation (or fair play) of a civilized society neutralizes, limits, and penalizes violence in sport, ultimately loosening the umbilical cord linking it to war training and instead legitimizing it as an end – both individual and collective – that is healthy and enjoyable in and of itself (Dunning 1999, 53-62).
Beyond the persistent ambiguity of a phrase like ‘Olympic Games’, it is likely due to this perspective shift within the civilizing framework that we find an imperfect overlap between the two concepts of ‘sport’ and ‘game’. According to anthropologist Philippe Descola (2024), a definition of game can be approximated only by considering two distinct practices attributable to ludic activity: the first is that of emulation and learning practiced in childhood and adolescence, a trait shared with other animal species; the second is that of ritual, practiced among adults, where the ritual aim is the potential cooperation and collaboration between two distinct groups (Descola 2024). The competitive idea of the game emerges only after this primitive and archaic phase, with chariot races, tournaments, and, above all, the English schools mentioned earlier. It is in/on those fields and in those changing rooms that modern individualism finds fertile ground. This individualism – born of the theories of Hobbes, Locke, and Harrington, among others – views the human being as an economic agent inserted into a series of competitive mechanisms through which to acquire advantages (wealth, status, etc.) over other individuals. Sport is the quintessence steeped in beauty of this mechanism. And it is in this that “sport” is different from “game” (Descola 2024).
As a product of Western civilization, sport remains effectively trapped in a double contradiction. On the one hand, its archaic origins betray an intimate connection with the art of war and the exercise of violence expressed as “game”; on the other, its modern affirmation emphasizes a competitive nature within which ancient barbarism is channeled into a system of social rules that, in any case, involves the overpowering of one side – the victor – over the other – the defeated. On football pitches, on rugby fields, on basketball and tennis courts, on athletics tracks, in boxing rings, and on the roads of cycling races, these tensions come back into play whenever the initial state is triggered: a state that pits the two teams, the two players, the two athletes, or the two individuals against each other at opposite poles, facing off and clashing in the circumscribed and regulated theater of the contest. The chain reactions stemming from this initial tension transcend the competition itself. They unleash the involvement of both the actors on the field and the spectators in the stands as beings who are not only rational but, above all, emotional. These actors project onto the field a search for identity, both individual and collective, in which to recognize themselves: a process activated precisely by the competition of one against the other – a behavioral mode that Gregory Bateson (1976) defines as “symmetrical schismogenesis”.
Indeed, literature and the arts have always shown an interest in the formalization of conflicts and the sublimation of competition, particularly in those ludic activities occupying the greyest area on the boundary between sport and game. One need only think of the cerebral nature of chess and the geometry of billiards, which lie at the center of so many works where the chessboard (Maurensig 1993; Zweig 2013; Bontempelli 2022) and the green baize (Richler 2002; Tevis 2008) act as vantage points for observing the intimate folds of the human soul. And, speaking of the green baize, one cannot fail to consider gambling, which stages a sick and tragic form of clash to which authors, directors, and writers have devoted extraordinary attention: the conflict of the gambler against himself – recall the obsession with the gaming table in Landolfi (1998, 2000). In the contemporary sporting sphere, through the legalized mechanism of betting, gambling addiction spills over onto (and acts against) sport as a paroxysmal mechanism exacerbating the audience’s emotional involvement. Similarly, doping pushes the limits of athletic performance to the extreme (Walsh 2015) against the integrity of athletes’ health, both professional and amateur (Henning and Dimeo 2025). Equally extreme, moreover, are those sporting feats that do not pit two individuals against one another but rather place the subject alone against nature in a titanic confrontation – as in the case of mountaineering tales and accounts (Kracauer 1998), or stories of the sea and sailing. Here, sport carries to its final consequences the Romantic tension of conquest and the overcoming of limits, becoming a clash with the Absolute and a significant experience that redefines, in a modern sense, the relationship between human beings and the environment.
The Monographic Dossier of issue 30-2026 of Testo e Senso specifically aims to reflect on the cultural field of sport as a space for the manifestation and emotionally saturated representation of conflict. The clash between sport, politics, and racism (Mailer 1975); the ideological clash (Soriano 1995); the generational clash between father and son (Agassi 2011); and the clash – fueled by the late-capitalist colonization of sport (Brohm 1992; Andrews 2009) – between the professional athlete’s ideal body and the ordinary spectator’s socially undesirable body (Jackson et al. 2005) are but a few further examples, straddling the line between non-fiction and fiction. Starting from these premises, comparative literature and literary criticism, cultural studies, intermediality, linguistics, anthropology, and cognitive sciences offer perspectives for the interdisciplinary dialogue that the journal has always promoted.
Article proposals for the Dossier, as well as for the journal’s other permanent sections (Other Criticism, Digital Humanities, Narrative Medicine and Neuronarratology, Art Comparison, Gender Studies), must be sent to the Editorial Board by July 31, 2026, following the guidelines and procedure published on this website. Starting from issue 30, the journal adopts the citation style established in the Chicago Manual of Style, 18th edition (Author-Date system) for bibliographic references.
Publication of issue 30-2026 is scheduled for December.
References
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Calabrese, Stefano. 2022. «Neurogenesi del tifo calcistico: il caso di Osvaldo Soriano». Testo e Senso, 24: 89–100. https://doi.org/10.58015/2036-2293/595.
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