Vesper No. 9 | The Adversary | Fall-Winter 2023
Fabio Salomoni
The Football Supporter’s
‘Work’. Football, Adversaries, War Rituals
Keywords
Supporter, rites, adversary, conflict,
pacification
In the contemporary imaginary the
‘profession’ of the football fan is intrinsically linked to the
presence of an adversary and the need to stage a collective symbolic battle
with him based on the amicus/hostis antinomy in a particular space, the
stadium. This ritualisation of the battle has a predominantly symbolic and
metaphorical dimension, often even when it includes manifestations of
aggression and physical violence. These weekly rituals have long been reduced
to momentary loss of control and substantially tolerated. For a couple of
decades now, the fan and his warlike rituals have instead been transformed into
social alarm and have legitimised a series of coercive and control measures. In
the discomfort of tolerating symbolic expressions of carnivalesque enmity and
subversion and in the will to produce a hyper-pacified social world,
contemporary societies reveal the isolation and insecurity on which they are
founded.
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