Abstract: Focusing on the example of professional sports, this contribution argues that an ongoing "media escalation" (the perpetual innovation of techniques to enhance comprehensibility for a diverse audience) fosters an entanglement of transparency and controversy. Combining historical and systematic perspectives, Markus Stauff claims that for more than 100 years, the imperative to make performances accountable turned the public visibility of the competition into a key concern. Drawing on a concept from laboratory studies, Stauff analyzes how sports' "spaces of visibility" reconfigure and blend multiple, often competing, modes of visibility, thereby entangling increased transparency with persistent controversy. In the conclusion, similarities and differences between sports and other social practices are discussed.
In literary studies, the death of the author has become a disciplinary truism in conflict with the imperative to listen to the voice of the other. How can the other speak when the author cannot? Recent vital materialist accounts of textual agency open a new approach to this problem, but they need to be complemented with an account of agency in terms of subjectivity, because subjectivity is inseparable from the study of aesthetic form. Agamben's concept of the relation of exception explains how the situatedness of a creating subjectivity is materially continuous with its negation in the text. As a situated subjectivity withdraws from a text, it leaves behind a form with potential subjectivity. Potential subjectivity is agentic through its potential merging with a situated reading subjectivity that can actualize it at any time. Ultimately, the author can be understood as the situated rich potential subjectivity immanent in aesthetic form.
The novel, while historically understood as a tool for cultivating empathy through narrative dislocation, reinforces conceptions of proper subjectivity central to Enlightenment thought. Drawing on Denise Ferreira da Silva's theorization of the "transparent 'I,'" this article explores how the novels Open City and The Other Name disrupt the transparent subject through their portrayals of madness and trauma. Through this depiction, these novels challenge the limitations of empathetic engagement and offer a site to deconstruct modern subjectivity, envisioning opaque alternatives to the transparent, rational self.
