Session 2: The Darker Side of Hope

Session 2: The Darker Side of Hope
Chair: Bill Lawson

Hope When the Game is Over: The Effect of Exploitation on Athletes
Janet Horrigan
Department of Philosophy, California State University, Fullerton, USA

How do factors of exploitation and coercion affect a person’s experience of hope?  Alan Wertheimer’s conception of mutually advantageous exploitation coupled with Gabriel Marcel’s work in philosophy on hope provide a theoretical background for this exploration of the connection between elite athletes, the exploitation of their bodies, and their capacities to maintain existential hope.
Using the distinction made between having a body and being a body, as well as Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s articulation of the body as subject, I argue that our social institutions, including the medical establishment reduce the professional athlete to a “function” to be exploited for profit rather than recognized as a full human life, worth more than athletic ability.  This “functionalization” of an athlete’s life, the reduction of the human being to a “performing body” has a detrimental result once the athlete’s body can no longer perform in a manner requisite of professional sports. This person is summarily dismissed and is often left in an existential state of hopelessness, having so thoroughly internalized an identity premised on the exploitation of their own physical excellence.  I argue that to continually treat a person as a means, to reduce them to a function, and to continually exploit their bodies is to contribute to a dehumanizing economic process and in so doing, a sense of hopelessness.  Finally, I consider whether “mutually advantageous exploitation” can ever truly promote a sense of hope in elite athletes or if any form of exploitation, however advantageous to the parties involved, is always a contributing factor in the hopelessness experienced by athletes.

Hopes, as we all know, can deceive us. But we can also deceive ourselves to gain or to maintain hope. Especially, if we on one hand attach great importance to what we hope for and on the other hand have good reasons to think that our hope will not be fulfilled. While even under these conditions hope does not necessarily involve self-deception, self-deceptive hopes are not uncommon. The connection be­tween self-decep­tion and hope is contin­gent, but natural.
I shall focus on ordinary, intentional hopes, i.e. on hopes that have a definite object which is secular rather than transcendent. In ordinary language, such hopes are com­monly expressed by sentences of the form ›S hopes that p‹. Propositions of this form imply that S desires that p; that he judges the probability of p in a certain way (he must at least hold that p is neither impossible nor certain); and that S is affectively involved: I shall argue that we may distinguish (at least) fearful and expectant hope. Both may in­volve self-deception.
It is notoriously difficult to define self-deception. However, it is relatively uncon­tested that a self-deceiver believes that something, q, is the case because he desires that q. In self-deception, desire tampers with belief. I shall argue that it does so in­directly: S’s belief, that q, is based on reasons, and these reasons are mis­inter­pre­tations of the evidence available to S. These misinterpretations are motivated (but not intentional), and are caused by S’s desire, that q.
Self-deceptive hopes, I shall argue, are based on a judgement of probability which in turn is grounded on motivatedly misinterpreted evidence. We can only hope as long as we do not believe our hope to be in vain. If what we hope for is very important for us, but we are faced with evidence against its possibility, it is natural to fall into self-decep­tion so as not to give up hope.

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Over the past few years, a number of Paul Celan’s correspondences with scholars and friends as well as with his wife and his son have been published, which presently re-frame Celan’s intellectual and personal commitment as a writer and translator in the aftermath of the Shoah. Indeed, reading Celan at the beginning of the 21st century has become, in German Studies, paramount not only because Celan has become part of the canon of the most important poets in the German language, but also because Celan’s writing strives for a non-violent relationship to the other and holds, thus, and ethical dimension so profound that its analysis of the Shoah is the touchstone of any analysis of the relation between violence, anti-Semitism, and language in German literature. Moreover, for both the definition of the ‘human’ in ways radically different from biopolitical production and technological reductions and a new thinking of the policito-metaphysical foundations of genocide, Celan’s recently published letters not only offer an interpretation of the violent, but also entail a vital concept of hope. This concept of hope, which lies a the centre of the reading of Celan I would like to present, is articulated as the unstable and always already melancholy undertaking of friendship, the relevance of which for the question of ethical justice an ethics at the beginning of the 21st century shall be the focus of my paper.

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Advertising, the most visible service industry of modern times, has now inundated  Croatia to the same extent as the Western world. Every time we open a newspaper, turn on the TV or drive down the street, we are confronted and assaulted by ads. Product packaging often features ads for other products in the same range, theatre programmes usually carry the names of the companies that sponsored the show, leaflets are pushed through our letterboxes and slipped under the windscreen wipers of our cars almost every day and posters are stuck up all over the walls of our towns.
The aim of this article is not to look at the general trends in advertising, but merely an attempt to approach the topic from a different, more human perspective. I will argue that in the New Branded World (an allusion to  Huxley’s Brave New World) the advertising industry in general is a gendered activity, that television  commercials and magazine ads, for example, are carefully constructed to appeal to the sex of the viewer or reader most often using  sex appeal as a powerful strategy( since the products in sexual ads are viewed as more exciting and electrifying than those in ads with more mundane stimuli) to please particular audiences and imbue them with false hope. Advertising provides customers with a certain satisfaction by its daydreaming qualities just as the films do, but at the same time it increases and accentuates their feelings of smallness, hopelessness and powerlessness.  The principal point of this work is to support the popular theory advocated by a number of experts in the field of humanities, among whom Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Naomi Klain and Noam Chomsky are the most prominent ones, that the field of human relations is similar to the market and that advertising, as its most powerful tool, contributes to even bigger alienation, despair, hopelessness and weakening of the critical abilities of the individual in our era concerning his role as a customer.

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