Implicit Possibility: Stupidity and Sport "Without Qualities"

Abstract:This article discusses sport and stupidity to understand modernity's valorization of explication. It reads Robert Musil's modernist novel The Man Without Qualities, which takes numerous excursive opportunities to discuss the role of sport in modern culture and its relationship to "genius," claiming that the grammar of industrial sports has reduced our ability to pay attention to the possibilities within acts we increasingly judge as simply "stupid." To do so, it follows Peter Sloterdijk's critique of modernity's mania for explication at all costs—to the detriment of the vital underside of thinking, or what he calls the implicit. This is explored in numerous examples from Musil's "essayistic" novel, a text that its author showed no willingness to complete—thus leaving its implicit possibilities open, and interminably "without qualities."