Deconstruction, Post-Structuralism & Emile Heskey

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The great philosophers have turned their bearded faces and long words in the direction of young Emile.

The issue was brought to a head after the recent cup game against Blackburn. Amid the inexplicable miscues, Emile had scored two goals. Then he got really excited, Liverpool were awarded a penalty. The crowd sang his name around Anfield and Heskey lumbered towards the penalty spot grabbing the ball and thinking hat-trick. Jacques Derrida turned to Shroedingers Cat in the Kop End and shook his head, "Danny Murphy should be taking this."

Noam Chomsky was watching the game round my flat as he doesn’t have Sky. I asked him to deconstruct the fluffed penalty. “It was gay. Have you got any Pringles?”

Bless the ungainly.

― MikeyG (MikeyG), Friday, 5 December 2003 10:40 (twenty-two years ago)

Rio Ferdinand de Saussure, mobbed in the press box afterwards, looked sheepish. "But he's got a tremendous workrate", he said. "He works very hard. He really tries."

― Matt DC (Matt DC), Friday, 5 December 2003 10:52 (twenty-two years ago)

I saw that. Heskey needs to work more on his finishing.

― Plato (Johnney B), Friday, 5 December 2003 10:53 (twenty-two years ago)

He scores goals like that every week in training.

― Jacques Lacan (Tico Tico), Friday, 5 December 2003 10:59 (twenty-two years ago)

I really do despair of the boy.

― Art Schopenhauer, Friday, 5 December 2003 11:04 (twenty-two years ago)

please don't mock my hero

― chris (chris), Friday, 5 December 2003 11:14 (twenty-two years ago)

I didn't know you were so into Schopenhauer, Chris.

― Tim (Tim), Friday, 5 December 2003 11:15 (twenty-two years ago)

he does well in training

― chris (chris), Friday, 5 December 2003 11:16 (twenty-two years ago)

he doesn't even look like a real player to me - rather a shadow, a shade, spectre, an endlessly repeated signifier stretching to infinity, shattering the mirror of a tattered Merseyside reality – that Liverpool are a misfiring engine, the wheels have come off, the system is infected, and the machine screeches, even as we kick it, abuse it; in the words of Yeats; "things fall apart – the centre-forward cannot score," and we see Heskey stood naked in front of the posts, reflected from a billion screens, spooning his shot high into the stands like a twat.

― Jean Baudrillard, Friday, 5 December 2003 11:18 (twenty-two years ago)

As my fellow countryman, Gerard Houllier, says, if you look at the figures, Emile has an average of 13.87633333 chances every game, this makes him better than any other striker in the world, including Ronaldo and Van Nistelrooy and Henry and certainly Nicholas Anelka.

― Michel Foucault (Matt DC), Friday, 5 December 2003 11:19 (twenty-two years ago)

When he touches the ball, he seems frail, revolted even; one might perceive that it’s leathery slap offends his boot such is his inadequacy when confronted by its presence. His impotence flickers like a Giacometti sculpture, the stadium shrinks to a pin dot as he approaches the area; screams and chants ring in his ears and the weight of expectation presses upon him, but even the grass itself seems set against him, this he knows, though he knows nothing; he skids, slips, slides, spoons, reality falls away, all that is left as he stares up from his knees in the mud are the catcalls and cries of "wanker."

― Jean-Paul Sartre, Friday, 5 December 2003 11:30 (twenty-two years ago)

Once the Striker is removed, the claim to decipher a team becomes quite futile. To give a team a Striker is to impose a limit on that team, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the play. In the multiplicity of play, everything is to be disentangled, nothing is scored; the structure can be followed, ‘run’ (like the thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath: the space of football is to be ranged over, not pierced; Liverpool ceaselessly create chances ceaselessly to squander them, carrying out a systematic exemption of meaning. In precisely this way Liverpool, by refusing to play a ‘striker’, an ultimate meaning, to the game (and to the world as game), liberate what may be called an anti-theological football, a football that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to score is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases—reason, science, law.

― Theresa Tzara (Jerrynipper), Friday, 5 December 2003 11:33 (twenty-two years ago)

Explains why he keeps running offside too.

― MikeyG (MikeyG), Friday, 5 December 2003 11:35 (twenty-two years ago)

Can I play with you?

― Eric Cantona (Matt DC), Friday, 5 December 2003 11:37 (twenty-two years ago)

Emile Heskey couldn't trap a bang of sand.

― Martin H (Nick Southall), Friday, 5 December 2003 11:39 (twenty-two years ago)

"knock the ball down for michael owen" is the only line in his job description. What a great job!!

― ken c, Friday, 5 December 2003 11:41 (twenty-two years ago)

My idea of paradise is a straight line to goal with Emile Heskey at the end of it

― Frederic Nietschze (or however I spell my name) (chris), Friday, 5 December 2003 11:50 (twenty-two years ago)

Arrayed against the hostile forces of the elements and the brute force of the burly adversary, the centre-forward may at once obtain the status of the ubermensch simply by slotting home the winner, and yet so often, we see that he refuses. We shall call he that refuses Heskey, and in attempting to understand this refusal, or is it instead fear, we shall find exposed the heinous genealogy of desperate forays into the realm of the transfer market, made by Heskey’s God, or rather his Houllier. For the Heskey, Good and Bad shots on goal are religions, yet his categories are informed by an ethical confusion stemming from a complex belief structure linking him to his God, a belief that his God’s faith is in some sense deserved. We say again, there is no such God – only man! Thus we see instantly that this notion of ‘deserving’ is but a shackle. For the Heskey, true freedom to score twenty-plus goals a season lies in disposing of his proto-religio classifications, which derived from a corrupted master-slave moral code, forever see him hiding in the mass of the herd, unwilling, unable perhaps, to smash it home form twenty yards out, for fear of rising above.

― Fred Nietzsche, Friday, 5 December 2003 11:54 (twenty-two years ago)

Heskey, you Kant.

― MikeyG (MikeyG), Friday, 5 December 2003 11:55 (twenty-two years ago)

oh for crying out loud.

― Markelby (Mark C), Friday, 5 December 2003 11:56 (twenty-two years ago)

Heskey has a super structure, but at the base, his feet just can't support him. He's always falling over. Maybe the Independent Supporters Association should hail him. 'Hey you, donkey', they said, and he turns around, feeling they are calling to him.

― Louis Althusser (daveb), Friday, 5 December 2003 11:58 (twenty-two years ago)

sur Le Heskey - Le penalty spot

― chris (chris), Friday, 5 December 2003 12:10 (twenty-two years ago)

Irresistible. The full monty: Merseybeat, Rush, Toshack, alchemy, Marsden, terraces, The Kop, the pressing game. All we had to do was transcribe Shankley’s thesis, shakily handwritten across a map transposing Govan shipyards onto the Mersey, slipped inside the dustsheet of Kendall’s autobiography, lying in the leaf litter on Linnet Lane. Sacred lands, energy fields run through crane pentacles, Harland, Heighway, Wolff, Wolves, but Hibbett stays safely across Stanley Park. The Liver Birds stand totemic but the cranes have fallen like Emile himself. Penalty!

― Psychogeography? I don't think so mate (Tim), Friday, 5 December 2003 14:46 (twenty-two years ago)

Emule Heskey often makes me angry, but I dislike the mockery he gets.

― Ronan (Ronan), Friday, 5 December 2003 15:28 (twenty-two years ago)

What is it that a man may fear above all else? That informs the feeling of anxiousness; that causes a man to freeze or blanch. It is nothing more than nothingness; that is the unknown. Take the case of the centre-forward who, face to face with a gaping net into which he must prod a soft spherical object, with the goalie beaten, stands rather like a rabbit caught in lamplight instead of gloriously and triumphantly lashing the ball home, before wheeling away with familiar chants of endearment ringing in his ears. Why should this be? What is the cause of this inaction, this dreadful malaise? Why should he jibber so? Put simply, it must be that the centre-forward who knows not the euphoria of rocketing home a thirty-yarder or stabbing a cross from six yards out into the roof of the net, is faced with a colossal wave of uncertainty, or unknowing, when he stares into the abyss of the net. The anxiety he experiences in the face of this ‘nothingness’ is enough to cause him to trip over his own feet, or spoon his shot wildly into the air. Of course, he sees immediately that the net remains uncharted. Thus, the nothingness remains to confront him on the next occasion of a glorious through ball from Kewell. The cycle is repeated and each time another brick is placed in the unbreacheable wall of his anxiety. He will never know the joy of confidently stroking the ball home, nor hear the crowds deliriously sing his name. The unknown will remain to stoke his fears and claim victory over victory.

― Søren Kierkegaard, Friday, 5 December 2003 15:37 (twenty-two years ago)

Chaque fois que Heskey est sur le champ d'immanence, le probleme n'est pas celui de l'un et du multiple, mais de la multiplicite. Les pulsions, les desirs, les intensites - des intensites en substance, et des substances en intensite. Le CsO est fait de plateaux, le plateau est fait de morceaux d'immanence. Du pli dans le champ d'immanence se deploie le joueur, et le but, le CsO, n'a pas besoin d'organes.

― Gilles Deleuze (daria g), Friday, 5 December 2003 20:36 (twenty-two years ago)

i find the vast majority of post-structuralist/postmodern thought to be needlessly complicated ways of stating the obvious,and there's nothing more obvious than observing that emile heskey is an awful player

― Ruel Fox (robin), Friday, 5 December 2003 23:22 (twenty-two years ago)

Has anyone read Q by Luther Blisset?

― pete s, Friday, 5 December 2003 23:28 (twenty-two years ago)

Abject.

― Julia, Sunday, 7 December 2003 21:46 (twenty-two years ago)

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