Bernard Andrieu is a philosopher of the body and sport, professor of science and techniques of physical and sporting activities at Paris Cité University and director of the Institute of Sports and Health Sciences in Paris. He published, in June, with researchers in sociology of sports performance Hélène Joncheray (Institute National de l’Institut de l’Experience et de l’Performance, Insep) and Rémi Richard (University of Montpellier and Insep), Philosophy of sport: Olympism and Paralympism (Vrin editions, 2024, 440 pages, 15 euros), an anthology that shows in particular the need to take into account the existence of bodies other than the athletic and socially standardized ones.
Before the Paralympics, disabled athletes were sometimes called “superheroes” and their resilience was praised. They just want to be considered top athletes. What does this inspire in you?
The series caught my attention. Unbreakablebroadcast by France Télévisions, which profiles disabled athletes. These mini-interviews always end with a question: “Are you unbreakable?” Most people answer: “Yes, I am unbreakable. » However, these people were born with a disability or had an accident that caused them to lose a limb, their body cannot be unbreakable. We are witnessing a kind of heroisation of the body, the culmination of which would be Paralympics. On the other hand, some of them do not want to be considered disabled. We understand them, but there is a risk of rendering invisible those who do not embrace the light and do not achieve feats.
In your work you talk about hybridization. What exactly is it?
When, with Joël Gaillard [enseignant à la faculté du sport de Nancy]We launched our book Towards the end of disability [en 2010] and I presented it to disabled people’s associations, they all attacked me on the pretext that we were putting forward the idea that the status of disabled person should be abolished. That’s not all!
We wanted to show that in their everyday experience, disabled people do not feel like such, but at best they feel like hybrids because they have prostheses, a wheelchair… These “objects” allow them to reclaim their bodies and give them the ability to achieve a certain number of things that bring them closer to healthy people.
But hybridization is an extremely unstable state. It is a future and not a status, he warned. [le philosophe] Gilles Deleuze and [le psychanalyste] Félix Guattari in his work A thousand plateaus [Editions de minuit, 1980]. It will all depend on the person’s environment, their prosthesis, their wheelchair, etc.
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