Flow, skilled coping and the sovereign subject

According to Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1986), skilled coping in sport occurs when an athlete reaches an expert level and can execute a sport skill on ‘automatic-pilot’, in a state of ‘flow’. In this paper we reframe phenomenological accounts of sport that try to depict flow-states as part of an athlete’s competency framework. We do so from the point of view of post-structural and post-phenomenological scholars such as Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive work on sovereignty and Jean-Luc Nancy’s (2000, 2008) ontological vantage of ‘being-with’. This lens pushes us to challenge phenomenological accounts of sport such as skilled coping and flow that, we argue, portray zombie-like performances as optimal. We suggest that such a phenomenological account of sport is not only impoverished as Breivik (2007, 2009) has argued, but also misses the very promising aspects of sport that can generate the possibility for creative and relational experiences. In making this claim we aim to reorient sport philosophy’s uptake of phenomenology toward a relational ethics.