Vesper No. 9 | The Adversary | Fall-Winter 2023
Marco Mazzeo
The Adversary by Definition. The Case of
Muhammad Ali
Keywords
Aggression, shock, language, boxing, ritual
The essay examines a case that lies at the heart of the conflicts of the
1960s and 1970s. Muhammad Ali is not only a boxer: he is an orator, a poet, a
political actor in the United States of the Vietnam War. The contribution
analyses his conflicting characteristics: on the one hand, he is the adversary
by definition because he seems to follow the cliché (boxer, black, histrionic);
on the other hand, Muhammad is the one who redefines the very notion of
adversary because he disrupts the categories of the time to which he belongs.
He is a boxer who speaks; he is a black man who does not submit; he anticipates
certain characteristics of the world and work typical of the 21st century.
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