Abstract

The author examines implicit relationship between sports agon, athlete’s psychophysical subjectivity and problems of understanding the constant presence of death in life. Preference is given to sport of greatest achievements such as the type of agon, in which a man who is extremely involved and who constitutes himself through his own efforts, realizing his personal vocation, and is the author of his own fate and his own physicality. In referring to the philosophy of existence and achievements of relevant studies in philosophical problems of death, it is proved that between the practice of sports and death problem exists not only cultural and historical connection, but the correlation of existential nature. It is shown that this correlation is due to several factors. The main among them are: the impact of the awareness of death motive to choose sport as a sphere of human self­actualization and the degree of involvement in this process; the possibility to transcending provided by agon sports practice; the possibility of slipping out of conditioning any discourses, including the discourse of death in the agon; author essence of athlete’s physicality, that’s why agonistics can be regarded as «an exercise in dying.» It is noted that the identified relationships between psychophysical subjectivity of an athlete and the death are existential and more natural than the displacing death to the periphery of consciousness, beyond the social space and removing the death and the deads beyond symbolic turnover, as it is in modern societies.