Breaking new ground, records, and norms, the Swedish discus throw champion and cultural chameleon Ricky Bruch (1946–2011) had a multi-faceted career and lived an illustrious life. He acted in both children’s movies and explicitly adult ones; he recorded songs, wrote poetry, and joined a populist party. Other than that, he was constantly up in arms about the governance of and funding from sport federations. The aim of the article is to flesh out and assemble the various actions and expressions of this protean figure into a coherent picture. Bruch’s early athletic career was characterised by success and the continuous breaking of records, both due to meticulous planning and training, as well as to systematic doping. His later attempts at reaching the international elite were wrought with frustration and failure. We scrutinize Bruch as an outsider in view of Bruno Latour’s conception of modernity as a project to separate nature and culture, a project which, however, produces hybridities – one of which is Bruch himself. By sorting out the differing outputs of athleticism, poetry, biography, acting, songs, and the outspokenness in interviews, the present essay argues that Bruch’s provocation and appeal, i.e. his ‘outsiderness’, are to be found in the way he makes the works of the moderns explicit all at once (albeit distributed over a whole life). © 2025 the Author(s). 

This chapter explores the meanings of the notion of ‘life’ in French vitalism during the eighteenth century, especially concerning the significance of conceptions of the body in the materialist forms of vitalism founded in medicine and physiology. Focussing on the Montpellier physician Théophile de Bordeu and his connections to the French Enlightenment, particularly to Denis Diderot, the aim is to demonstrate how non-spiritual, quasi-mechanical ideas of the movements of individual body parts within the whole of the organic body conceives of specific and general ‘lives’, operating in systems which challenge the primacy of the individual subject. The key metaphor of such vital systems is the ‘bee swarm’. Furthermore, the political implications of this metaphor, and the ideas thereby expressed, are related to contemporary theories of biopolitics and the resurgence of vitalism in modern philosophy.    

Many James Bond films have frequented the Caribbean islands and other archipelagos throughout their run. This paper aims to delve into the epistemological implications of the secret agent’s travels and movements in epic fashion. The study applies theories of archipelagic and abyssal thinking in Édouard Glissant, as well as the significance of ideas about the abyssal and dynamic features of thought in German philosopher F.W.J. Schelling. Bond is viewed as a mythopoetic character in the making of his own epic, comparable with Odysseus, both gaining knowledge from their travels and exploits and forming patterns of thought through their movements. We ask, how does thinking evolve and how is it applied when epic heroes arch their way through hardships during the adventure of their grand tours?

Famously, Ian Fleming wrote all of the Bond novels and novellas on his estate in Jamaica, and he set several of the stories on the island. In comparison, the film series began its adventures in Jamaica, in Dr. No, but did not return until what was proven to be the final EON production, No Time to Die, where Daniel Craig made something of a show of returning to the Fleming-esque idyll as a retreat from service, before his final and fatal adventure. Nevertheless, many Bond films have frequented the Caribbean islands throughout their run, as if displacing the Jamaican point of origin and scattering it in a nomadic distribution across the archipelago. This symbolizes a problematic relationship with traditional hierarchy, both challenged and maintained, in relation to the legacy of the imperial mainland – both the UK and the USA, as powers of production (increasingly problematic). 

This paper aims to delve into this ambiguous state of affairs by associating the secret agent with the “archipelagic” and “abyssal” thinking of Édouard Glissant, a postcolonial geopoetics and geophilosophy to challenge “continental” imperialist thought, in an attempt to problematize the significance of the apparent escapism of the Bond mythos. Significantly, this mythos also reveals Bond’s affinity with another secretive and cunning archipelagic figure: Odysseus. The Caribbean métissage (mixing of races) would therefore be conflated with the Odyssean polymêtis (thinking as ruse) as conjoining, hybridizing strategies to understand the destiny of James Bond as a transformative, mythopoetic character of significant importance to thinking critically the conditions of thought and action in the presumed post-colonial and post-Cold War era, but also problematizing the contemporary paradox of neo-imperialist globality and hyper-nationalist insularity. 

This paper concerns the judgement and critique of athletic movement in moving images. Inspired by the ski crash trial case of Paltrow v. Sanderson, and by comparing different media representations of downhill skiing, the essay outlines a framework that discerns as well as connects elements of movement and images, developing the concept of the ‘diorama’ in relation to Deleuze’s notion of the diagram and Kant’s idea of critique. Thus, moving images featuring elite alpine skier Mikaela Shiffrin, fictional character James Bond, and an official skiing game for the international ski federation (World Cup Ski Racing, FIS) figure as comparative material to the animation that played a central role in the celebrity trial. Diorama and diagram are posited on a continuum to assess when and how judgement takes place in each of the exhibits. The essay concludes by discussing how the judging of athletic movement in moving images contributed to Paltrow winning the case, and theoretically by connecting this finding to dioramas and diagrams as tools apt for a framework aiming at the critique of athletic movement in moving images. © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

In “Postscript on Societies of Control”, French philosopher Gilles Deleuze proclaimed that “Everywhere surfing has replaced the older sports”. By this, he alluded to Foucault’s thoughts on older societal regimes and power diagrams of sovereignty and discipline, and that now such models have been supplemented with governance through control and allegations of increased freedom. This article has as its point of departure the potential of sports to reflect social change. Contemporaneously to the coining of Deleuze’s surfing sentence, a new sport emerges: parkour, in which practitioners “surf” the urban realm. This practice gained attention globally when it was featured in the 2006 James Bond film Casino Royale. The analysis in this article revolves around the different ways of moving in and through the environment in the renowned parkour chase in the beginning of the movie. How do different kinds of displacement in the parkour chase of Casino Royale relate to the transition between the societies described by Deleuze, and what new adaptations emerge and what old logics and models return? It is concluded that the older forms of power prevail and that the ideal of the society of control cannot be realised.

The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of the history of home automation, by looking at how the automation of private life in homes of the future have been imagined for the past 100 years. The notion of an automated house brings home ideas of efficiency and productivity which are otherwise reserved for working life, putting the human perspective at the fore by implying values expected for the individual or the family. When the architect Le Corbusier in 1923 proposed that a house should be seen as a “machine for living in”, he initiated a modernist view which conflates architecture and technology in an ideal of functionality; it takes machinery in the industrial age as its model but places it in the private sphere of the home. Promotional and instructional material reflect a development of this imaginary into the present day. From the 1930s on, this vision is exhibited at world fairs and home shows, where model homes are not only planned for optimal functionality but are increasingly filled with technology that would facilitate domestic life. From the 1960s, the mechanical home begins to be supplanted with prospects of computerisation, paving the way for an idea of ‘smart’ homes, built on digital, interactive technologies, until needs are anticipated by artificial intelligence. The current prospect of living in a ‘metaverse’ implies a virtual home which brings into question the very nature of physical dwelling.

The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze repeatedly referred to a wide range of sports and games throughout his career. This article assembles a comprehensive view of the philosophy of sport seen from Deleuze’s perspective. By studying the development of how he discussed different sports and games, and by pinpointing the concepts he constructed with reference to them, the article attests to the merits of a Deleuzian philosophy of sports. His term athleticism is utilised as a node to overview his allusions to sports and games in general. Special attention is paid to sport as a companion to the creative domains of science, philosophy, and art. Thus, it is concluded that what athletes create are moves, which amounts to inventing new styles which may alter the sport and attest to new ways of thinking through bodies in motion. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

This article revolves around conceptualising temporality and drama, with the example of how the broken time sequestered by Karl Marx’s notion of historical repetition and the struggles relating to this, in his supplement to Hegel, is displayed in James Bond films. A focus of the inquiry is an hauntological analysis (in the Derridean sense) of how the connection between heroism and tragedy in films evokes haunting presences of older versions of Bond, between actors, between films, and within the specific story arcs. While the heroism of Bond is exemplified by his sportive endeavours, time and temporality are understood as repetition, and foremost in relation to the phenomenon of the reboot—a specialty of our protagonist. In his battles with various villains, Bond becomes embroiled in action sequences that are curiously spiced up with extreme sporting activities. Such sports are often transformed in the cinematic context: sometimes they are emphasised for stylisations of prowess and violence; sometimes they are distorted into parody and comic relief, in an oftentimes ironic fashion. Fulfilling Marx’s adage about how history repeats itself (“first as tragedy, then as farce”), Bond’s personage not only reappears in different incarnations, portrayed by different actors over time; each actor also repeats a similar pattern in their respective Bond biographies enacting a sustained heroism emanating from the extreme athletic displays in the agonal theatre of sports.