The seduction of the Olympics: Concentration camps and spectacle

Abstract

This article deals with the construction of subjectivities from a capitalist space-time logic based on a specific conjuncture of global significance: the Rio de Janeiro Olympics of 2016. Based upon a conceptual discussion, it takes on the current conditions of subjective production within a televised mass society in which the spectacularization of human activities endows them with ephemeral transcendence for the consumption of passive masses before a handful of subjects turned into heroes. This is the case of Olympic sports today. The Rio games marked certain continuities with their predecessors, but they deepened marked tendencies towards the construction of enclaves that are contradictorily territorialized in urban centers of global convergence, but which simultaneously suffer a geographical dislocation during a short period of time, with immense, swift and ephemeral diasporas of people from around the world. In the face of the apparent banality of sports, it is precisely there that naked behavior of contemporary subjects is exposed, willing and predisposed to relegate politics, to displace the legitimate inhabitants of a captured space, to see the world according to what the cameras show us, and get lost in the glorification of athletes increasingly distant from the common people, with training, diets, rigorous routines executed with mastery, ie without fail, more like a machine than a human body, although this body is objectified and, as such, openly sexualized.