Being outside yourself
Nigel Warburton: You’ve just written a book called ‘What We Think About When We Think About Football’. How did the book begin?
Simon Critchley: The book began with an interest in football which goes back to when I was two years old. And I have written some three or four journalistic pieces on football, particularly around World Cups. But then I was teaching with Taylor Car-man from Columbia. We were teaching texts together and we did Hans-Georg Gadamer. We took the chapter on play from Truth and Method. That’s where I saw that this could really develop in interesting ways because Gadamer is fascinating. He is thinking about the phenomenon of play and what’s going on in play. The essential point is that what’s going on in play is reducible neither to subjective qualities nor objective reality. Play is this phenomenon which takes place in the space between human beings and the objective world. The key thing for him is that play does not take place in our heads. There’s a chapter in my book called “De-subjectifying Football” and what I’m trying to do there is to get us to be able to describe two things. There’s both the experience of play when you’re actually playing. When you’re playing a game, are you in your head? Well, obviously, your head is involved and your cognitive faculties are important, but the experience of play is an experience of being outside yourself amongst the movements of play. And then, secondly, the experience of being a spectator isn’t being in your head. It’s being out there alongside what’s happening on the pitch. Play in general, and football in particular, are wonderful ways of bringing out this dimension of experience that’s between the subjective and the objective, which just happens to be what I would just call the world.
It is a very different phenomenon when someone’s engaging with an imaginary world, where it’s a make-believe game, and something like a sport where it’s not really the same sense of play. With sport, you are engaging in activity within a set of rules and norms, but you’re not imagining something in that sense. You might be imagining moves
