Newsletter of July 14, 2020, 3:17 PM (Tuesday): "CONTRACTING EXISTENCE (The Psychodynamics of Body-Building)."

Nationalism is a form of projective identification: human beings equate their own bodies with a body politic: escape from concrete reality into an "imagined community."

The physical fitness revolution (1977-1981, running, body-building and disco) had the purpose of returning the body to concrete (physical) existence. Freud: "The ego is first and foremost a body ego." Olivea Newton-John: "Let me hear your body talk."

Separation from society and the symbolic order. Studio 54: Enacting sexual fantasies. Norman O. Brown's dream of polymorphous perversity (the "res-erection of the body") came true. "Oh Lord, is it really here at last (Bob Segar)"

"I need some hot-love (Donna Sommers)." "Push, push in the bush (Musique)." "Let's do it, let's do it, there's nothing to it. Living our our phantasies (Convertion):" the climax of disco.

Reclaiming libido from society. Separation from the symbolic world.

Body-building sought to return existence to the place at which life and death actually occurs: within one's own body; one's musculature. 

George Sheehan, Running and Being: "Scraping away the illusions of social existence to discover the undeniable core of existence in physical effort and physical experience."

Some academics couldn't take it. Return to what they knew best and their source of prestige: words, symbols, language. Lacan would have been laughed out of the gym, but he became very popular: words, words, words (My Fair Lady). Escape from Freud positioned as "return to Freud:" very clever; gaslighting.