Episode 7: The Unspeakable Mystery at the Heart of Boxing

For as long as they've been pounding the crap out of each other for good reasons, humans have also been pounding the crap out of each other for fun. Everywhere, in ever age, elaborate systems, rituals, and traditions have arisen to ring in the practice of violence and thereby offer the rough beast that lurks in every soul a chance to come out for a stretch in the sun. In this episode, Phil and JF delve into one of the most scandalous affairs of all: the illicit dalliance of Aphrodite and Ares, beauty and violence.

WORKS & IDEAS DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE:

Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon
James Hillman, A Terrible Love of War
Homer, The Odyssey
Joyce Carol Oates, On Boxing
La fosse aux tigres (documentary directed by Jason Brennan and JF Martel; Nish Media)
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Richard Strauss's opera Salome
Gur Hirshberg, "Burke, Kant, and the Sublime"
Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense