Football meets opium a topological study of political violence, sovereignty, and cinema archaeology between 'England' and 'China'.

摘要

Is violence necessary for the constitution of a political community? If so, can we ever go beyond simply managing the relationship between violence and the law, and instead release ourselves from their seemingly unbreakable relationship, what Giorgio Agamben calls a "juridical tension?" In this dissertation, I address these questions, most recently examined by Agamben in his book Homo Sacer (1995), in terms of cinema and media studies and comparative literature. I argue that modes of cinema today are best understood ontologically and anthropologically at different archaeological sites at which they have been conceived, reconfigured, and instantiated with the potential of releasing their spectators from the seemingly unbreakable relationship between violence and the law. I do so by investigating the topological layouts of "football" (primarily Association football, or soccer, and sports that have been historicised as its variants) as a form of cinema, and see how scholastic and vernacular discussions of its forms, history, and politics have changed in relationship with "opium" and the Opium Wars (c. 1839-42; 1856-60). "Football" and "opium" are treated here as signs (and being put within quotation marks as such) that have been considered, in both scholastic and vernacular discourses, as opposing forces and indexes of modernity and sovereignty, in the process of commodity, cultural, and political exchanges between two imaginary poles "England" and "China." In this dissertation, however, I put into question the topology that shapes the ways we discuss the "histories" of the exchanges between football and opium, and as a result, versions of political ethics. Works discussed include the origin myths of football in ancient and mediaeval debates on sovereignty, definitions of fair play in relation to biopolitics, the early football films in England, opium-related literature from the 17 th to the 20th centuries and their visions of political equity, Griffith in Shanghai, historicisation of opium and football in relation to political justice, Chinese cinema in the 1930s and the vernacular imagination of international justice, the martial arts film and football as mutual parapraxes in the public sphere, football and hooliganism in British cinema and television, and the Premier League as global cinema.