Morisset, Thomas

The blow in pro wrestling or pleasure taken to the limits of fiction - 2022.


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In this article, my aim is to reflect upon the features of professional wrestling as a marginal art form. Against the views held by Roland Barthes in a famous article, I argue that the appreciation of pro wrestling is, in part, sadistic, but is not to be understood as the mere search for extreme sensations, but rather as an appreciation that deepens our relation to the sensible world. More precisely, this appreciation has its own specific object, the blow, i.e., the apparition of actual pain amid a fictional framework, thus prompting a pleasure-inducing play between fact and fiction, which is possible thanks to the permeable fictional structure of pro wrestling. Three kinds of blow are distinguished: the fall, the bruise, and blood.