Hands, Feet, Eyes, and the Object a: A Lacanian Anatomy of Football

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we present a Lacanian perspective on football, while notably fathoming its normative dimension. Starting with a defining imperative, the prohibition against ‘handling’ or touching the ball with your hands, diverging football historically from rugby, we will subsequently focus our attention on the role of the foot, the eye (notably the eyes of the audience) and the ‘object a’ (in the context of gender). Against this backdrop, we will address pressing issues such as the troubled position of the referee (as an ‘impossible profession’), the commercialisation of football, and the rising tides of violence, match—fixing and other instances of systemic deviance. As we will argue, football exemplifies modern sport as an arena defined by prohibitions and desire, by inclusion and exclusion, by purity and abuse, culminating in recent challenges involved in gender trouble. Symbolical practices, like modern football, are based on in- and exclusion. Instead of more regulations and dichotomies, we advocate careful attention to the delicate art of handling desire in practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Lacan
• integrity
• prohibition
• ethics
• gender

A defining prohibition

Modern football is defined by a ban, namely the prohibition to intentionally use our hands (which applies to all players except the goalkeeper), with the result that the role which is usually assigned to our hands (capturing, carrying, and throwing things) is taken over by other body parts, notably our feet. Typically, players will control the ball with their feet, head, or chest, and kick it away with their feet again, preferably as soon as possible, usually to fellow players, while professional practitioners will invest years of training in developing their kicking techniques, so that their feet will all but equal their hands in terms of reliability, dexterity, and precision.

Thus, the use of the hand, that part of the body that is able to handle or even caress things like no other part, is prohibited, – and this should strike us as quite remarkable (Van Den Berg 1963, 301). Phrased in terms of Lacanian psychoanalysis, prohibitions of this nature are introduced to establish a symbolic order, a symbolic and artificial ecosystem if you will, based on a basic rule, an unconditional Law, in this case: rigidly outlawing the use of the hand. Touching the ball with your hands is seen as foul play, as cheating. Subsequently, we will continue our Lacanian anatomy by focussing on other body parts of interest in football, such as the feet and the eyes (of referees and audiences respectively), until we will finally zoom in on what Lacan refers to as the ‘object a’, the object of desire: a ‘partial organ’ that can be either present or absent, such as a breast, a phallus, an uterus, etcetera, and their various symbolic substitutes. However, before we further develop our analysis, allow us to present a concise introduction into Lacanian thinking.

A short introduction into Lacanian psychoanalysis

Lacanian psychoanalysis builds on the work of Sigmund Freud, while at the same time shifting the emphasis and adapting the vocabulary. And Lacan was also a dialectical thinker, profoundly influenced by Hegelian philosophy. Basically, Lacanian psychoanalysis can be seen as an effort to reframe psychoanalysis by confronting it with important developments in twentieth—century science (Zwart 2019, 2022).

Starting point of Freudian psychoanalysis is the oedipal trauma: the experience that our object of desire is unapproachable for us, due to a fundamental prohibition. What Lacan emphasises, however, is that what makes the object of desire so alluring is precisely this prohibition. Without prohibition, no desire. This can be elucidated by a comment Lacan once made on an argument used by Immanuel Kant. According to Kant (1788/1971/1971, A54), we should expect humans, as autonomous, rational beings, to be able to contain their desire. Suppose, Kant argues, that we are suddenly allowed to spend the night with someone we are madly in love with, on the one condition, namely that we will be hanged on the gallows the very next day. Surely, we will be able to repress our desire in such a case, Kant surmises. Lacan (1959–1960 turns the argument upside—down. What makes this object of desire so alluring? The presence of the gallows, of course! We are overwhelmed by desire precisely because the ban has been imposed. Bans and prohibition constitute the symbolic order and the symbolic order generates desire. Although we are biological organisms, humans first and foremost exist in a symbolical environment, which is relentlessly blocking and triggering our drives. A sportive practice such as football is primarily defined by this dialectic reciprocity of prohibition and desire, and we will present a number of examples of this below.

Thus, the oedipal trauma is the primordial experience in early childhood that some things are forbidden, although the reasons behind such prohibitions are shrouded in mystery and difficult to explain. Besides this oedipal trauma, however, Lacan (1966) discusses an earlier primal scene, which was explored by experimental psychologists and which he refers to as the mirror experience. Sometime between six and eighteen months, Lacan argues, building on contemporary scientific sources, there is a moment when young children suddenly recognise themselves in a mirror. Until then, young children experience their bodies as fragmented bodies, decisively dependent on interaction with the primary caretaker, usually the mother, who makes sure that all biological needs are satisfied. By recognising themselves in their mirror image, young children for the first time experience themselves as an individual unity, and as separate from the mother. Paradoxically however, this experience of identity and ‘integrity’ (literally: wholeness) entails an element of exteriority as well, because it is the effect of recognising yourself in your mirror image, or—like in prehistoric times—your reflection in a pond. This already emphasises that the experience of unity and identity is ‘imaginary’. The real body is far from independent. We are inhabited by a plethora of organisms (the microbiome), highly dependent on caretakers, embedded in a social and ecological environment, and so on.

How could Lacanian concepts, such as the symbolic order and the mirror experience, help us to come to terms with football as a social practice? Although we will further expand on this in other sections, we already emphasised that football is a symbolic environment, defined by a fundamental prohibition, which is reinforced by the famous outcry occasionally audible during matches: ‘Handball!’, or even simply ‘Hands!’.¹ It is difficult to explain why this prohibition was introduced in the first place. Or rather, all explanations tend to be tautological: it is prohibited because it is against the rule. If violations would be condoned, that would be the end of the game, and so on. We need rules to constitute games in the first place. However, the temptation to violate a prohibition is always there. And sometimes, it seems impossible to resist the temptation, even when players are meticulously monitored by referees, codes, and cameras. They know that ‘hands’ equals ‘foul’, but still there is this existential urge to deviate at times.

Besides the symbolic dimension, however, the imaginary dimension is likewise important, for instance when young children identify themselves (through identification) with a famous, iconic player, whose image is visible on television, social media, and billboards. Generations of fans admired Johan Cruyff or Diego Maradona, nowadays children identify with Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, or Megan Rapinoe. The icon becomes a mirror. This is what the child aspires to become. This iconic player apparently has ‘something’ (referred to by Lacan as the object a, to be explained in more detail later) which the child also would like to have, although it seems difficult to tell what this something exactly is. Their desire says: ‘One day, this will be me’. And to some extent, by using this external image as a mirror, they already are this person, albeit in a somewhat smaller version, as something is still missing. Moreover, the object of identification is not a real person (a real human being, who is facing financial troubles, health problems, relational crises, conflicts of interests, who is immersed in financial negotiations, etcetera); the object of identification is of an imaginary nature: an icon, an image, an artefact or construct, produced and disseminated by fans, mass media and commercials.

This imaginary dimension continues to play its role, however, for instance because cameras continue to zoom in on famous players, the icons of their team. On social media, we share seductive images and narratives around players to keep the fire burning. This also goes for the symbolic dimension. Because football is defined by—or rather beset by—prohibitions, it is inevitably a practice of desire. For instance, if you are a complete outsider, you may watch a match with indifference. Whether a goal is scored by one team rather than the other, does not make much difference. For an uncommitted viewer, it is mere entertainment. For others, however, the question who scores will be the difference between euphoria and trauma, between justice and injustice. An apparently simple and everyday event, – a ball crossing the line and touching the net of a goal—can be a source of jouïssance², like kissing someone you are in love with for the very first time, but it can also kill a dream; for instance, when the one we desire is kissed by someone else. In other words, a prohibition is never just a prohibition. After all, a libidinous surplus is created by this enforced practice of self—control, and this surplus is likely to come out sooner or later, somehow and somewhere, and often where we would not expect it to resurge: the return of the repressed in the real, as Lacan often phrases it.

Why this ‘Return to Lacan’?

In mainstream sport literature, the logic and terminology of psychoanalysis are far from absent. For instance, when it comes to the birth conditions of English football, David Winner claims in ‘Those Feet!’ that: ‘What we cannot do by sleight we eke out by strength’. (Winner 2005). Winner states it was precisely Victorian morality, the prohibition of a libidinous lifestyle, that spawned English football. The British were taught to manifest mainly ‘masculine’ qualities in football. This in contrast with the sexy football other countries (like Portugal) show nowadays, according to former Dutch football player Ruud Gullit, quoted by Winner as saying: ‘…when players perform with skill and style, when they express themselves playfully, reveal their fantasy, they create rather than destroy’. (Winner 2005, 8).

This typically masculine gendered narrative explains modern sport as a disciplinary regime: it should bring (men) strength, commitment, courage, and loyalty. In the early days, football was also to help eradicate pernicious libidinous tendencies, especially masturbation, ‘…. a danger to race and Empire… In an age when women were assumed to have no sexual energy at all, men’s “beastly” urges were terrifying. Victorian men were continually encouraged to “master the beast” as if their bodies were like the wild animals of Africa’. (Winner 2005, 11–13). According to Winner, repression and its counterpart, sublimation, are at the heart of the genesis of football. In this analysis, we wish to stress the sexist implications this narrative has on modern sports’ prevailing ontology. In an ironic sense, by comprehending sport to be exclusively masculine and heterosexual, Winner’s thesis reproduces the repressive regime he tries to debunk.

Martin Gessmann broadens Winner’s findings to the rest of Europe. He also recognises the ‘…connection of football and drift drain…’ in the work of Heinrich Böll and Pierre Bourdieu, although he does accuse the latter of a Nietzschean cynicism: ‘All that remains is the representation of a planned subjugation or manipulation of the body by sport, which has become its own goal…’ (Gessmann 2012, 61–63).

Peter Sloterdijk also holds this view, but sharply places the abstinence practice of sport in the broader context of twentieth-century secularisation. First, Sloterdijk characterises modern sport as ‘… the most comprehensive form of organisation for human effort and exercise behaviour that could ever be observed outside the world of labour and war…’ (Sloterdijk 2009, 93). Subsequently, this ‘religion of the athlete’, as Sloterdijk ironically summarises the Olympic ideology, foundered in ‘… a system of stepped exercises and diversified disciplines, integrated into a superstructure of hierarchical managerial acts, relations between associations that have become routine and professionalised media presentations. Nothing remains of the structural features of the expanded “religion” but the hierarchy of functionaries and a system of exercises, called “training units” in keeping with their secular nature’. (Sloterdijk 2009, 104). In such analyses, the echoes of psychoanalysis are omnipresent. What is important, however, even transcendent and absolute in the sport ethical canon, is to safeguard sport’s pure ethical core, yet this core precisely consists of the intricate dialectic, outlined above, a continuous dance between prohibition and desire (Meeuwsen 2020). This article endeavours a return to Lacan to come to terms with some of the paradoxes of contemporary football.

‘Hands!’

Now let us take up the thread of our analysis. We argued that football as a practice is defined by a central prohibition, the interdiction to use our hands, those crucial parts of our body which play such an important role in other practices, including making love. Let’s zoom in on this paradoxical prohibition a bit further. First of all, there is always an exception to the rule which, precisely by being an exception, underscores the importance of this primordial ban. The prohibition to use your hands applies to all players except the goalkeeper. Yet even the goalkeeper’s hands are basically used to stop the ball, not to handle it. In a way, goalkeepers are comparable to clowns. Certain liberties are granted to them, like the use of their hands, albeit within a strictly defined area, and even their outfit is different, more colourful. Often, goalkeepers are comedians, their gestures and signs indicate a sense of humour, in contrast to the seriousness and determination of most of the professional field players.

Now the prohibition in itself, the No against the use of our hands, is a quite dramatic restriction, given the importance of our hands in human existence and human history. According to dialectician Friedrich Engels (1925/1962), in his famous, yet unfinished essay concerning the role of human labour in the transition from ape to human, we humans, in the course of evolution, distanced ourselves from our fellow primates precisely by developing our hands, in close interaction with tool use. Thus, the human hand became available for the development of crafts, which again relied on, but also stimulated the dexterity of, the human hand. A similar view was already brought forward by G.W.F. Hegel, whose thinking Engels adopted as a student in Berlin and who likewise emphasised the importance of the use of the hand in human history (Zwart 2022). Humans are manual animals. Until the development of machines during the industrial revolution, labour was basically manual labour, the manual handling of tools, and until the emergence of artificial intelligence, even machines were operated and manipulated with the help of our hands.

As the Hegelian philosopher of technology Ernst Kapp (1877) phrased it, the human hand plays a threefold role in human history. First and foremost, it is an instrument in its own right, but it also provides a model for other tools and artefacts (a hammer resembling a fist, etc.). Finally, the human hand is the tool or instrument which allows us to produce other tools and instruments. The decisive evolutionary characteristic of humans is not tool use, for many other animals do this (like using sticks, stones, etcetera), but the use of our hands to construct and handle new tools, things which are not found in nature but are human—made—albeit initially from natural materials—and adapted to the shape and function of the human hand. Self-consciousness is not a result of bigger brains alone. The freeing of the hands allowed early humans to gaze on what their hands took hold of: a new chapter in the history of subject-object interaction (Zwart 2022). It is by transforming the world hands—on that we become ourselves, that we as humans realise our potential, dialectically speaking.

Thus, humans are a product of evolution, but also self-made, and the history of technology is the realisation of self—consciousness through the use of our hands, as Hegel phrases it. In short, ‘manuality’ is a core dimension of human evolution, history, and identity, although circumstances may force us to revert to compensations, for instance when their strength and precision is insufficient, or when hands are even lacking, so that we revert to tool use. Against this backdrop, the awareness that human existence is defined by the freeing of our hands in the course of evolution, the ban on the use of hands is all the more remarkable. An artificial ‘handicap’ (literally) is introduced, which must be compensated, notably by strengthening the dexterity of our feet. Therefore, we will now continue our Lacanian ‘anatomy’ by unpacking the story of the human foot.

‘Those feet!’

The human foot is quite a different story. While primordial ancestors supposedly used both hands and feet to climb trees, as most apes continue to do, from the moment the first humans entered a savannah environment, the role of the hand became closely connected to tool use, as we have seen, while the evolving anatomy of the human foot allowed humans to become long-distance runners. Against this backdrop, football’s defining prohibition seems even more awkward, because now, players have to use their feet not only to run and move around, but also to handle of manipulate the ball, even though the words ‘handle’ and ‘manipulate’ (echoing the word manus, hand) literally presume the use of our hands. For indeed, a football player’s use of the foot as a means of expression and interaction, in combination with forward movement, occasionally ‘approximates the artistic’ (Free 2008, 279). How on earth is it possible to combine running with handling a ball?

In psychoanalysis, the foot has a special status because of its connection with fetishism. In many cultures, Freud already argued, the female foot is an object of reverence and desire (Freud 1927/1948/1948, 309–319). And thus, in foot fetishism, the object of desire is a woman’s footwear: not exactly the foot as such, that rather that particular body part which had been inside a shoe or slipper, and is now invisible or even absent: the absent object of desire, referred to in Lacanian psychoanalysis as the object a. This concept is an enigmatic yet crucial component of a Lacanian anatomy; it refers to our deepest, repressed desire (so lack), and might for instance be symbolized as a ‘partial organ’, a body part that can be present or absent. In fetishism, the (absent) female foot symbolises an imaginary item, namely the female phallus, suggested by the phallic shape of the empty space inside the female shoe, especially in the case of heels. In fetishism, the foot functions as Ersatz.³ From the perspective of psychoanalysis, there is an undeniable erotic dimension involved in our fascination with football, for why would human societies spend so much time and money on it? It can never be mere entertainment, desire must somehow be involved, and the special role of the foot, in combination with the prohibition to use our hands, may be one element which can be helpful when it comes to exploring this dimension.

Hence, let’s shift our attention to that which is touched by the foot, or by the shoe, namely the ball. Here again, the shape, the Gestalt of the ball is quite suggestive, psychoanalytically speaking. From the perspective of psychoanalysis, the spherical shape, in combination with the white colour, could easily be associated with the image of a human ovum, an egg cell. The ball is kicked by human feet, as if these kicking feet represent the heads of sperm cells, trying to fertilise the ovum. And desire is fulfilled as soon as the ball reaches its goal, nestling itself in the net, as a kind of uterus.⁴ From a Lacanian perspective, such ‘free associations’, centred on the Gestalt or image (imago) of the items we are dealing with, resort under the imaginary dimension of the game. And as explained before, we need this imaginary dimension to understand how something apparently pointless (a ball touching a net) may have such tremendous effects. Indeed, it may help us to explain how the soft sound of a ball touching a net may reverberate around the globe, producing a lot of noise, not only immediately (the sudden roar of crowds assembled in stadiums or cafes), but also the endless deliberations by experts afterwards (especially in the news, the morning after). For Lacan, however, if we want to come to terms with football as a societal phenomenon, the symbolic dimension is even more decisive. Which brings us back to football’s defining prohibitions, not only against the use of the hand, for on closer inspection a whole plethora of prohibitions is involved, such as the prohibitions against resorting to physical violence and harassment.

The referee

Besides the basic prohibition (in football: the No against hand use), there is another element which draws our attention. According to Lacan, the prohibition must be imposed by an authoritative father figure. In principle, outlawing the use of the hand is an opaque rule. There is no satisfying answer to the question ‘why’? In football, scoring a goal, or preventing our opponents from scoring a goal, seems much easier if we could use our hands, – which explains why players, under certain circumstances, continue to be inclined to use a hand, although such an offense against the rule may be severely punished, even with a red card. This elimination of the player, within the context of a game, turns the use of your hands into a kind of suicidal act, to which players at times revert, for instance to prevent greater damage for the team, so that ‘hands’ becomes an act of self-sacrifice. Remember, for instance, Maradona’s ‘Hand of God’ goal during the Argentina—England final quarter match at the World Cup Football in Argentina 1986. The ultimate sacrifice and a ‘symbolic revenge’, as Maradona stated later, for Argentina’s defeat during the Falklands War a few years earlier.

The crucial constitutive rule of football was imposed by a founding Father figure, a rule—giver, somewhere in the distant past, and currently, on the playing field, this symbolic Father figure is represented by someone who supposedly acts ‘in the name of the Father’, and on whom oedipal resentments are transferred, namely the referee. The referee has some striking features. First of all, referees hardly touch the ball, neither with their hands nor with their feet. Referees notably perform their function with their eyes. In a flash of a second, they are expected to see the difference between intentional and unintentional hands, for instance, or between a sliding and a foul. Referees are usually dressed in black, the colour of mourning. They are the ones who put an end to an action, who kill a dream, who freeze a game. Yes, they may kill a game by blowing the whistle too often, or by suddenly announcing that all is over. With a whistle and a card, the referee can eliminate a player. Lacan assesses such a constellation in terms of ‘castration’: not so much the act of sending someone off the field as such, but rather the awareness that the referee has the power to do so. Castration refers to the awareness that the entitlement to stay on the field, and perhaps even the future career of a player, is dependent on things like whistles and cards. For Lacan, castration is not something biological. Rather, it is this experience of chronic dependence on a symbolic authority, so the players’ awareness that they may only participate in the game as long as the referee or the coach (acutely monitoring their performance), or some other symbolic figure condones it.

In addition, to communicate with players, referees will refrain from any form of verbal communication as much as possible. Again, this should strike us as quite remarkable. In virtually all other situation of doubts, conflicts of opinion, or uncertainty, humans will resort to verbal deliberation to sort things out and come to an agreement. In football, verbal deliberations between players, coaches and referees are kept to a minimum and prevented if possible. Preferably, referees use certain symbolic items which allow them to communicate by giving signals. Or they use their eyes for non-verbal communication, via a particular grimace or stare. Referees will use their hands primarily to handle iconic items: a whistle, a coin, two types of cards (yellow and red) and a booklet, in which the names of offenders are noted, again a highly symbolical practice.

All of these items allow referees to maintain the symbolic order, as guardians of the rule. Rules and prohibitions typically constitute the symbolic order in the form of dichotomies: allowed or not allowed, valid or invalid, in or out, 1 or 0, violation or no violation, card or no card. Often, players or their coaches will try to enter into discussions, but referees will try to avoid this as much as possible, and in the end, they will simply fall back on their authority to decide; discussion closed. Referees may even use a card to stop any further discussion, – these discussions will probably be transferred to newspapers and television, to discussions among commentators, without affecting the game, – mere talk (‘Gerede‘, as Heidegger once phrased it). The rules of the game, and their interpretation by the referee, literally draw a line, or a series of lines: in or out. The referee blows the whistle, precisely to avoid further discussion. Discussions are not only unpractical (because of the background noise, the differences of interpretation, the different angles of perception, the biases involved, etc.), they constitute a risk because discussion seems to suggest that decisions that were made are questionable. As the synonym arbiter indicates, however, there is an element of arbitrariness at work in every single decision made by referees. But this is precisely their role: to make a quick and, if needs be, decisive decision in the case of uncertainty: Yes or No, in or out, hands or no hands, appropriate or inappropriate. No further discussion. No further reasons or explanations are given. And yet, in football the authority and arbitrary decisions by referees are more vehemently disputed than in rugby. Could it be that this striking difference has something to do with the permitted use of hands in rugby, the practice of ‘handling’?⁵

And then there is a remarkably ancient symbol of arbitrariness: the coin. There are two teams involved, but which of the two sides of the field will be their side? That is an arbitrary decision, decided by the coin, handed over by the referee. The die is cast. A time-old practice, the pinnacle of arbitrariness, is still part of an intensely commercialised and professionalised practice. What about the cards? In case of an offence, if it is serious enough the player will be given a warning (yellow card). A red card means that the player will be removed from the field. There can be endless discussions about whether the offense was serious enough, which is why there is an irreducible element of arbitrariness at work in the arbiter’s decision. The decisions of a referee may trigger furious reactions precisely because oedipal resentments are projected on this father figure; a process which in psychoanalysis is known as transference. The referees are the ones to blame for frustrating the desire to experience football as pure, unhampered jouïssance. They spoil our pleasure. And yet, without a referee, there would be no such jouïssance at all.

We may try to minimalize this arbitrariness for instance with the help of a ‘Video Assistant Referee’ (VAR), but this will not eliminate the arbitrariness. Video’s may even result in more complicated decisions and undermine the authority of the arbiter. The referee is the Big Other, a surveillant, monitoring the behaviour of the players, and the VAR is installed as a kind of second—order monitor, so that the playing field becomes a panopticon. In principle, players are continuously under surveillance, but this will not put an end to the discussions. Rather, it is a technologically enhanced form of arbitrariness. What is decisive, from a Lacanian perspective, is that there is someone who has the authority to say Yes or No (goal or no goal, 1 or 0, etc.), thereby safeguarding the symbolic order.

In a certain sense, referees fulfil the function of an archetypical psychoanalyst. Through their stoic silence and questionable interpretations, they attract the excessive oedipal desires of players and spectators, transforming them into a collectively sublimated energy, so that a new equilibrium can be temporarily established. In Lacanian terms, this analysis (or match) should help the patients (or players) to access their desire. This process is accompanied by resistance, not only in the patients (players) but also in the psychoanalyst (referee) themself. And yet, the object of desire, the object a, will never be fully reached, while moments of fulfilment only last for a very brief while. New flows of desire will fuel the game, on and on. In the end, we can get no satisfaction, as the Stones once phrased it.

And there is another paternalistic figure in football, who may spoil a player’s craving for jouïssance and therefore trigger oedipal resentment, namely the coach. The coach is the gatekeeper who decides whether a player may enter the field in the first place, but coaches may also decide to remove someone from the field, usually without any verbal explanation. That will probably happen in secret and afterwards, in the locker room. A good coach should be an (autodidactic) psychoanalyst, who understands the dialectic of desire and prohibition, of desire held in check, and who can offer some therapeutic sessions in the case of deviance.

Thus, on various levels (players, arbiters, coaches), desire is omnipresent, installing a circuit that constantly produces new desires. An athlete’s sporting performance is fuelled by desire, tapped by coaches, who will exploit this and feed their own desire into the circuit. With this, the coach produces his or her own peak experience, which in turn becomes a driver, draining his or her own desire stream, – for instance when the achievement of a player is actually attributed to the coach (Meeuwsen 2020, 161).

And yet, as stated earlier, this symbolic circuit will never fully satisfy our desires. Our ‘desire to win’ (Gilbertson 2016) is an impossible desire, basically because it is the desire to completely dominate the other. And here, another psychoanalytic concept comes to play a role, namely displacement. Football may allow us to sublimate basic drives connected with love and aggression. Seen from this perspective, football becomes a domesticated form of hunting and warfare, an effort to satisfy erotic and aggressive desire with other means. For instance, Desmond Morris’ classic ‘The Soccer Tribe’, presents modern football as a tribal activity dating back to prehistoric times, when humans had to hunt for survival and thus learned to fight against stronger species. Although the introduction of agriculture turned hunting into a marginal or privileged practice (a game for the elite), humans continued to crave for hunting, according to Morris: ‘We still needed the challenge of the chase, the exciting tactical moves, the risks, the dangers, and the great climax of the kill’. (Morris 2016 (1981)). Here modern sport, especially football, is considered to be a compensation for this desire, a ritualistic chase.

To fully appreciate this connection between football, hunting and warfare, we must broaden our perspective, both spatially and temporally. So far, we zoomed in on what is happening on the field, on the grass. Let us now zoom out in order to attain a more comprehensive view, a broader picture, involving the role of the audience in our analysis, as well as the remarkable topology of the football stadium. The players are in the field of vision of an audience, they literally play their game under the eyes of an audience, and the architecture of a stadium is organised as a field of vision, offering optimal view to thousands of eyes, – and via camera’s perhaps to millions of eyes. Therefore, in the next section we will continue our Lacanian anatomy by zooming in on the optic dimension of football and on the role of the audience as a collective eye or hyper-eye.

Teichoscopy

We will start with the latter: the football stadium. Genealogically speaking, the architectural ancestor of the modern football stadium is the ancient amphitheatre, exemplified by the Colosseum in Rome. The amphitheatre was a kind of city inside a city, an area surrounded by walls inside a city surrounded by walls. Roman amphitheatres are spherical: if you are an athlete, there is no escape, until the whistle blows. The walls are important. Initially, there was no amphitheatre. The competition between rivals took place outside the city walls, in front of the walls, with the audience (the non—combatants) positioning themselves upon the walls to closely follow the course of events. We find a famous example of this original topology in Homer’s Iliad, Book III, where Helen, the legendary queen of Troye, situated on top of the wall (near the Skaian gates, Homer adds) follows the movements of both parties: the Trojans, playing a home game as it were, defending their city, and the Achaeans, as Homer calls the invading Greek coalition. Like a commentator, Helen identifies the key players of the ‘other side’, unbeknownst as yet to the Trojan spectators on the wall: ‘That’s Agamemnon, that’s Odysseus, that’s Ajax … ’, etc. After this scene, the duel commences, with both armies praying to Zeus and the other gods. This archetypal paradigm of modern football also nicely demonstrates the reciprocity of desire and surveillance. The Trojan war started because of Helen, a forbidden object of desire, the object a of the Trojan war, an imaginary woman of dreams, comparable to iconic Hollywood actresses perhaps. Helen was seduced or purloined by Paris; a grave offence which could not remain unpunished. And now, this woman, Helen, appears on top of the wall, where all the Greeks can see her, yet not as a real woman, but as a kind of glittering figure; the object a of their war game. Later on, a discussion will evolve concerning the question whether Helen had really been there, – an important theme in poetry, both ancient (Homer, Stesichorus) and modern (Hilda Doolittle). Helen was the alluring object a, both present and absent, and in modern football, this object a is represented by the Cup, not coincidentally in the shape of a uterus, the telos of each tournament. This is the object all players want to kiss, embrace, and firmly grasp hold of … with their hands! From a Lacanian perspective, it is not a coincidence that the form of the cup suggests the shape of an enigmatic body part which triggers human desire, namely the uterus.

Let us return to the walls for a moment. In literary studies, this device, viewing the war game from the walls, is known as teichoscopy: watching the rival armies (or competing teams of athletes) engaged in warfare. The term is derived from τεῖχος (walls in ancient Greek). Football can be seen as a sublimation of this original situation. The game is no longer decided by the death of the other (or the others), although the objective may still be the elimination of a rival (in the sense of elimination from the pool of competitors). Warfare is replaced by a competitive game, aggressive desires are kept in check, and the referee’s role is to prevent physical harm, on the basis of the rules of the game. Today, the reward is no longer Helen of Troy (the unreachable, iconic object of desire) but the Cup: the object a, glittering in the distance; although, much like Helen, a cup can still be stolen, for instance by a foul committed by player, thereby triggering the desire to take revenge and bring the cup back.

In ancient epic or dramatic literature, the main objective of teichoscopy is to discuss the events as they happen, as opposed to these events being reported later on by messengers (or, in modern times, by newspapers). The history of the term ‘rival’ (derived from river or riverbank) indicates that, in the past, rival armies met to fight on riverbanks, perhaps to come to a decision concerning the right to make use of these rivers or riverbanks. The decision was considered a divine judgement. Eventually it was up to the gods to decide the case, by granting the victory to one of the rival parties involved.

Now in the present, the perspective has become inverted as it were. Fans are still seated or standing on an edifice which resembles a wall (especially from the outside), but now they gaze at what is happening within the area encircled by the (spherical) walls. The theatre is internalised. The rivals are invited inside the walls, albeit within a clearly defined space. Commentators will identify who is who, like Helen (the arch-commentator) once did, while, in the case of success, many players still thank their Gods for the support that was offered. Like in ancient times, audiences are not mere passive spectators. They play an active role, cheering and encouraging, or booing and criticising the players, coaches, or referees, chanting hymns. Dignitaries, prime-ministers, or queens may be among the audience, like Helens of Troy, supporting one of the teams merely with their visible presence, looking down upon the players from their seat on the wall. Meanwhile, the desires of anonymous spectators merge into one collective, applauding or threatening mob, the ‘twelfth player’, as the audience in football is often called. Without an audience, there would be a disconcerting gap, symbolised by empty seats during Covid times.

Inside the stadium, the mob becomes an organised collective, kept in check by the topology of the stadium (which nowadays includes technology-enhanced panoptic forms of control). The audience represents what in ancient Greek was called the bios theoretikos: watching, studying, and discussing the events (hands—off). The players represent the bios praktikos. Mostly they keep silent. They practice their sport, they act, they interact. As Freud pointed out, in his analysis of the behaviour of masses (Freud 1921/1940/1940), an organised mass requires identification to prevent chaos. An important condition which determines the support of the audience, is the extent to which audiences may identify themselves with leading figures (key players, or perhaps their coaches). But still, the collective of supporters may disintegrate into a mob again, especially when they leave the stadium, – notably to voice discontent with the arbiter’s arbitrariness, or their disappointment in the performance of iconic players, – they are dissatisfied, and a dissatisfied mob can be dangerous. The resurge of violence (both on the field, between players, and hooliganism) indicates what in psychoanalysis is known as the return of the repressed in the real. In Lacanian terminology, the real is not reality (filtered and structured by the symbolic order) but the raw real, that which the symbolic order fails to capture and therefore resurges in an obstructive or even traumatic manner.In the case of football: the return of the repressed may involve the forbidden use of hands, but it notably involves the violent origin and nature of the game, which may suddenly resurge in instances of hooliganism, or in offensive chants, in a sudden, excessive violation that severely damages an opponent. In hooliganism, that which is not sufficiently addressed by the symbolic, resurges in the real, often outside the artificial topology of the stadium, as a power structure designed to keep unruly behaviour in check.⁶

Gender

Speaking about the return of the repressed, another important dimension of football as a symbolic order is gender. Especially during the decades following World War II, when football rapidly evolved into a global enterprise (turning the game into Big Business) and a global media phenomenon, football was often perceived as a male sport, a theatre of testosterone masculinity. Recently, more attention and acknowledgement is offered to women’s football, although the difference in terms of global media attention and salaries is still considerable. If we study the history of football, however, we find it abundantly documented that women participated in football from the very outset (Van Den Heuvel 2021). They were actively banned during the Twentieth Century, so that the masculinity of football rather seems a symptom of a relatively recent, arbitrary intervention, and as a side—effect of football becoming big business. In Lacanian terms, the rise of women’s football is not an innovation, but rather a return of the repressed, the return of the figure of the female athlete, the ancient Amazon. Since the renaissance of the Olympic games and sport stadiums, a process which began during the fin-de-siècle, the focus has been on masculinity, although gradually, in one sport after the other, the female top athlete (the modern version of the Amazon) made her appearance, and modern football is part of this process. At the same time, one of the key dichotomies of sport is being challenged, namely the binary polarity between masculine and feminine. Let’s explore this somewhat further.

We already mentioned the association between foot and phallus. Although football is a practice of desire, straightforward erotic encounters are circumvented (or at least delayed until after the game is over) with the help of an oedipal device: a prohibition, so that the foot replaces the hand we are forbidden to use, – although ultimately the foot replaces the phallus we are forbidden to use, in the context of the oedipal symbolic prohibition discussed above. At the same time, the other (the object of desire, of which Helen offers an archetypal exemplification) is replaced by something else: the cup as object a. Thus, the tenacity of the emphasis of masculinity may strike us as arbitrary, – since both male and female players may become quite dexterous in the use of their feet to handle the ball –, but it can also be explained as a symptomatic legacy of the oedipal structure of the game. In other words, there is an obfuscated symbolic reason behind segregation and the exclusion of women, namely the association between masculinity and the so-called ‘active principle’. The player is the archetypal active male (Paris, Achilles, Ajax, etc.) while the Cup (whose shape may be seen as reminiscent of a uterus) replaces Helen as the ultimate reward, passively awaiting the outcome of the game. The return of the female athlete initially confuses this traditional schema but may at the same time strengthen the attractiveness of the game, because the performance of female players indicates that some basic dichotomies are being challenged. A dichotomy is never neutral, moreover. Dichotomies are about presence and absence (e.g. the absence of the phallus), resulting in exclusion, but the attractive performance of female football teams indicates the possibility of difference without hierarchy.

Precisely here, Lacanian psychoanalysis has something extra’s to offer. In what sense? As the oedipal complex affects both boys and girls and engenders their desire, it marks the discovery of one’s own desire through the desire of the Other. Until then, children inhabit an imaginary world, where images dominate self-awareness. Then something decisive happens. For boys, the oedipal crisis basically means that they conceive their mother as a desiring woman. This is what happens to Hamlet, who discovers that he is not ‘all’ to his mother, because his mother desires, and makes her body available to, a third, intrusive figure, a man who, apparently, has something which the young boy lacks, and cannot offer, a phallic something: the object a of his mother’s desire. This may result in various scenarios. Often, the young boy will identify with the male intruder who spoiled his exclusive relationship with his mother, so that he wants to become like him: a phallic figure, but he also realises that from now on it is forbidden to desire his mother in an exclusive, possessive manner. Girls have a similar oedipal wake-up, yet slightly different; they also see their mother for the first time as a desiring, sexual being, and experience a kind of Y-junction. Will they identify with this desiring woman (represented by their mother), so with traditional femininity and motherhood, or rather with the symbolic power of the father, by becoming a phallic figure themselves?

At this very point, Freud and Lacan opt for slightly diverging interpretations. According to Freudian psychoanalysis, girls conclude that they miss something, namely the male sex, the phallus. In Freudian terms, during the oedipal crisis, this absence is experienced as castration. According to Lacan, however, the experience of castration affects both sexes. The awareness that the young child cannot fully claim the attention of the mother, because her desire also points in another direction, is an experience of lack. For a child (boy or girl) the adult world of erotic and professional activity is experienced as inaccessible because they lack something which they desire to have. For some of these boys and girls, a possible point of access (an attractive way to supersede the lack) is offered by sport: becoming an athlete, arousing desire while serving as target for identification. According to Lacan, our desire, circles incessantly around the desire (and thus the lack of) the Other (Lacan 1958–1959, 1962-1963).

Whereas Freud on various occasions still endorsed a more or less biologistic understanding of the relationship between female (passive) and male (active), Lacanian psychoanalysis shifts the focus quite radically to the symbolical, linguistic and therefore structural dimension of these gender dynamics. The oedipal conflict provides all human beings access to the world of language: the symbolic order par excellence. When children learn to speak, they also acquire the binary logic engrained in grammar. Feminine and masculine constitute linguistic structures, based on presence or absence of signifiers (letters, suffixes, for instance: ‘man’ versus ‘wo—man’); on negation in short. How these structures function evidently varies across cultures, and doubtlessly it makes quite a difference whether cultures are patriarchal or matriarchal, indigenous, or globalised, while Norway will differ from Dubai or elsewhere, but what Lacan claims is that these symbolic (and often binary) structures are present in all cultures in a very fundamental way, for instance because they are part of the grammar, or the architecture, the educational system, the history of emancipation, etcetera. They can be challenged and questioned, but even questioning them is also a way of acknowledging their existence.

Symbolical practices—like modern sport—based on inclusion and exclusion, echo what Lacan refers to as castration, not in a biological, but in a symbolic sense. Both males and females are subject to castration, – also for biological males the entitlement to have or use a phallus becomes questionable as a result of the oedipal trauma. To be or not to be a phallic figure requires a symbolic form of acknowledgement, resulting in inclusion. In the case of a male player, by being included in football as a Big Business masculine sport, the castration seems to be superseded by becoming a professional player, and perhaps even an iconic player, who has something which others apparently lack. By becoming a key player on the field, the athlete becomes a phallic figure, someone who can score. In the case of female players, their temporary exclusion (not at all a ‘natural’ situation, but an artificial policy, a ban, as we have seen) allegedly contributed to a stable symbolic order based on inequal dichotomies, resulting in the exclusion of female players. The masculine gender ideal has been dominating sport for decades.⁷

The recent re—inclusion of women into the arena of global football (as the negation of the negation, the removal of the ban) has important symbolic repercussions. Instead of being a passive Helen, following the fight (match) from the walls, the female player becomes an active figure, more like an Amazon queen, stepping in the footsteps of Atalante, Penthesilea, Hippolyta and the other iconic Amazons, emphasising that the symbolic is disconnected from the biological. Prestige is not a question of masculinity or phallic superiority, or something like that. It is the ability to handle the ball with your feet, instead of with a phallic organ, thereby becoming an iconic figure, an opportunity for identification, applauded by the organised masses. Yet, precisely now that hierarchy gives way to equality, the dichotomy as such is being challenged. We live in ‘gender troubled’ times, as Judith Butler, inspired by Lacanian psychoanalysis, predicted in Butler (1990). There is no reason to assume that gender ought to be seen as two. The presumption of a binary gender system implicitly retains the belief in a straightforward linkage between symbolic gender and biological sex (Butler 1990). Let us unpack these terms in the context of modern football. Although the game of football still suffers from homophobia, increasingly we witness football players who come out as being gay, and football, like other sports, may attract non-binary or transgender people, to such extent that identities and categories become increasingly fluent, moving away from the hyper masculine imaginary constructs of Big Business football. In the future, female football players may include lesbians, non-binary players, and transgender women. These developments call for a referee, but now in the sense of someone who is able to draw a line notably in situations of uncertainty, but these lines, drawn by arbiters or committees or regulators, will increasingly become blurred (arbitrary). The referee herself may increasingly often be a woman or a nonbinary person. How can football, a practice based on rigid dichotomies, cope with all this?

We wish to stress that the entrance of non-binary players will not erase the symbolic order. Rather, there will be an emergence of more subtle differentiations, cis versus trans, trans—male versus trans—female, cis-male versus cis-female, etc. Thus, football becomes an arena for playing out these gender category games (Labridy, 2014). Something similar is noticeable when it comes to other aspects of diversity. In the past, a national team would represent a national identity, while football teams from Italy, Brazil, France, or Germany could be distinguished visually more or less, not just in terms of eye, hair, or skin colour, but also in terms of style, haircut, sportwear, gestures and other forms of non-verbal communication, etc. Nowadays, it is very difficult to determine at face value the nationality of a particular team. Players are transferrable more or less continuously on the Big Business football market (Jansen and Engbersen 2017). They are ‘free’, there are no hindrances anymore, or if there are, these borders become increasingly difficult to uphold. Identification becomes a more complicated puzzle. Rather than with a particular team, youngsters will probably seek identification with (easily transferrable) individual players, for instance via social media. In other words, when everyone is transferrable, all players are trans to some extent.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The latter—so ‘Hands’ – is the way ‘Handsball’ is shortened in the Netherlands.

2. The French word jouïssance has several layers of meaning, which Lacan also pointed out. In ‘Lacan: The Silent Partner’, edited by Slavoj Zizek, Lorenzo Chiesa discusses this pluralism. In his last lectures, Lacan used various meanings, including ‘jouis-sans’ (‘pleasure in pain’), but also the ‘j’ouï-sens’ used here: ‘It is only on the basis of a’ j’ouï-sens’ that the barred subject is able to ‘hear’ (ouïr) the sense of the symbolic order: we could render j’ouï-sens as ‘I enjoy; therefore I can make sens’. ’ (Chiesa 2006, 355).

3. ‘Der Fetisch ist ein Ersatz … nicht der Ersatz eines beliebigen, sondern eines bestimmten, ganz besonderen Penis … des Fetisch ist der Ersatz für den Phallus des Weibes’. (Freud 1927/1948/1948, 312).

4. Scoring a goal has an erotic dimension and be construed as a ‘symbolic little death’ (Cochand 2019).

5. In his iconic history of the Rugby Union, ‘A Game for Hooligans’, Huw Richards even explains the birth of Rugby from the regression football experienced in the early nineteenth century. The practice grew during the 1830s by adopting the ‘running in’ and violating the forbidden ‘picking up the ball and running with the ball in the field’ (Richards 2006, 29).

6. Sloterdijk is also famous for his critical deconstruction of the stadium. He characterises our modern football stadiums as ‘the cathedrals of the post-Christian commune’, as ‘collectors for large numbers of physically agitated people in their temporary symbiosis’. In these ‘swaying phonotopes’, both participants and spectators preside over a modern pilgrimage, in which the ‘phantom of unanimity’ may emerge. (Sloterdijk 2009).

7. This might explain why female professional football players are willing to make substantial more sacrifices than male players, in terms of health, social life and financial security (Van Den Heuvel 2021). From the seventies onwards, Julia Kristeva will attack Lacan on his ‘patriarchal’ assumptions and add a complementary, semiotic discourse to comprehend the structural repressive tendencies in modern society (Kristeva 1979).