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A.D. Reader Pt 2. - p66-69
"In his youth, Jean-Paul Sartre was a scrappy muscular amateur boxer who took pride in his skill and toughness. He was fascinated by boxing during its 'golden age' in the 1920s and 1930s, the epochs of Jack Dempsey and Joe Louis. And this was not irrelevant to his philosophy. In his later Critique of Dialectical Reason, he dedicates approximately thirty pages to the subject of boxing. There Sartre suggests to philosophers that they approach any historical (class) conflict in the same way that an intelligent, knowledgeable spectator views boxing: as a single event with two fighters, two *subjective systems' of perception and practice, each of whom may be: (a) conditioned by techniques and bound by normativity, (b) trapped in 'degrading' subjective process of transcended transcendences, and (c) striving unsuccessfully to overcome socio-economic alienation and self-defeatingly undertaking the 'deterioration' of its own praxis. This approach to the 'sweet science' has several intriguing ramifications for both philosophy itself and Sartre's work in particular."

"First, Sartre is the only renowned philosopher to approach the significance of fighting as something other than either a social problem (Hobbes) or a scarcely understood instance of anonymous violence (Hegel, Nietzsche). Sartre is unique in perceiving that fighting is as important for understanding the human condition as, for example, artistic creativity and appreciation, charitable giving and romantic loving have been.

Second, his knowledge of the sport and his experience in the ring inform a phenomenological perspective that makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of fighting. In many respects, Sartre understands how the sport of boxing 'incarnates' certain elements of the violent socio-economic struggles by which history is intelligible. Unlike boxing journalists, he does not merely present the psychology of the fighter or the cultural significance of the fight event. Phenomenologically, he sketches (albeit a little crudely, I argue) the fight from the perspectives of the life-worlds of the fighter and the audience alike; and, praxiologically, he links (inadequately, I argue) these perspectives to socio-economic forces (classes, social practices, the business' of boxing) that may produce the fight-event. In principle, his view of the praxiological significance of boxing is not fully intelligible without his detailed phenomenology of the lived experiences of boxing, even if the link between the two is problematic. Third, the manner in which he presents boxing illustrates the transition from his earlier 'existential-phenomenological approach to his later Marxian orientation in the Critique of Dialectical Reason. Whatever one may think of the notion that the Sartre of the Critique was striving to turn his back on his earlier *existentialism', his work in Being and Nothingness develops an intriguing phenomenology that serves as the foundation of his 'dialectical' appropriation of historical conflict generally."

"In the Critique, Sartre writes: 'antagonistic reciprocity is a bond of immanence between epicenters, since each adversary totalizes and transcends the totalizing actions of the other." From :  Sartre on the Phenomenon and Praxis of Boxing 

Sartre:
There are, in fact, two ways of watching a boxing match, and two alone. The inexpert spectator will choose : favourite and adopt his point of view; in other words, he will consider him as the subject of the fight, the other being merely a dangerous object. This is tantamount to making the duel into a hazardous but solitary activity and to totalizing the struggle with just one of the contestants. Enthusiasts or experts, for their part, are capable of passing successively and very rapidly from one system to the other.

They appreciate the blows and parries, but even should they succeed in changing system instantaneously do not totalize the two opposed totalizations. To be sure, they do give to the fight a real unity: as they leave they say 'It was a good fight . . . etc'. But this unity is imposed from outside upon an event. In fact, in so far as boxing is sport, a job (related to other jobs manager, trainers, seconds, referees, etc.) and a spectacle which corresponds to certain requirements of certain society-in so far as, within the framework of a certain economy, you can organize a bout and reckon on it drawing numerous spectators this bout itself, as an objective to be attained (with all the operations you may imagine, from the signature of the contract to the renting of the hall and the publicity), becomes an object. And it is likewise as a particular object- as an event that interests or thrills and will actually take place in real and limited time; as a certain opportunity to see this or that boxer in action, etc.-that the spectators will go to see the fight. In particular, they will make it the aim of sometimes difficult undertakings (booking seats for a championship bout, etc.), and in some cases the means to bring off other undertakings (betting on one of the contestants, earning money by managing a team of boxers, etc.). An object for individuals, groups and collectives- defined as a totality by language, the press and the organs of information; then later designated (in the past) as a unity in its past-being by memory ('It was the day of the Carpentier-Dempsey fight?): the bout, in itself, appears as one of those mathematical symbols which designate an ensemble of operations to be carried out, and figure as such in the series of algebraic equivalences without the mathematician's ever actually troubling to carry out the indicated operations. It is an object to be constituted, utilized, contemplated, designated. 

DCR Pt 2. Glossary:

George Bellows, A Knockout, 1921:

Jack Johnson—Arthur Cravan Fight, 1916:

Johnson and Cravan were more collaborators than competitors

Cravan:
Born Fabian Lloyd in 1887 in the gentile Swiss town of Lausanne, beside Lake Geneva, Arthur Cravan carried a British passport yet preferred to speak French. A human chameleon, he never identified with any place in particular, and often masqueraded behind forged papers, claiming all the while to be Oscar Wilde’s nephew. (As the son of the notorious scribe’s brother-in-law, this was one piece of bombast actually true.) At two meters and 120 kilos, Cravan was built like the Eiffel Tower and for a brief period even held the European heavyweight title. In 1916, he fought ex-world champion Jack Johnson in Barcelona, in a rigged fight, a spectacular ploy to earn a broke Cravan—and a spent Johnson—sufficient steerage to New York, where the boxer-poet-cum-conscientious objector could avoid military service. Cravan tumbled in the sixth round, amid a delirious and suspecting crowd, simultaneously chanting and booing when he didn’t get up. A riot ensued; Cravan slipped out a side exit and soon set sail on the Montserrat across a storm-tossed ocean, alongside a motley crew of deserters, adventurers and dissidents, as well as a certain Leon Trotsky.

Little wonder Cravan bequeathed an oeuvre slender and never fully realized. He never let himself realize it, of course, and that, to my mind, made his oeuvre worth reading all the more. He was a latter-day Rimbaud eloping to Africa, sailing a drunken boat down an unknown backwater, never to write again; he was a prototypical Dean Moriarty, blasting at breakneck speed on the road, across North and South America, throughout Europe, up and down, back and forth, in dusty forgotten texts. Cravan was the dialectical spirit incarnate: like Turgenev’s Bazarov, Dostoevsky’s underground man, Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, and the Hegel of Phenomenology of Mind, Cravan "looked the negative in the face and lived with it." This is probably the sense in which surrealist kingpin André Breton once claimed Cravan’s actions "develop in an atmosphere of absolute irreverence, of provocation and scandal that herald ‘Dada’." Cravan had "accomplished," Breton said, "without compromise, Rimbaud’s desire ‘to be absolutely modern.’" BR

Paris Review article:

"Amid the craze for brutal novelty, boxing became a sensation. Though originally based on Victorian aristocratic ideals, it was championed by the modernists of Montmartre as an embodiment of the new century. It was also regarded as a fundamentally American pastime, a visceral, primal, and demotic endeavor redolent of the popular culture that was beginning to excite the world beyond the United States. When Jack Johnson fled racially motivated prosecution in the U.S. in 1913, he arrived in Paris to a hero’s welcome. After he’d beaten Jim Jeffries to become the first black heavyweight champion of the world in 1910, he’d been tarred as a threat to social order back home. A film of the fight had been a hit in France but was banned in America for fear that images of a black man schooling a white man in the ring would cause grave insult and incite sedition. In Paris, African American athletes and entertainers were in vogue, and Johnson gained celebrity status, mixing in nightclubs of Montparnasse and performing sell-out shows that combined pugilism displays with dancing and singing.

By the time Johnson arrived in Paris, Cravan had carved out a reputation as a boxer himself, a discipline he first picked up while traveling across the USA. He was also known as an ardent proponent of the “American” attitude toward life, by which he meant living according to desire and instinct, and telling so-called civilized society to take a running jump. In an essay titled “To Be or Not To Be … American,” he wrote that, thanks to the influence of cakewalk dancers, track athletes, and boxers such as Joe Jeanette, the whole of Paris had turned American. “Overnight,” Cravan said, “everyone began to spit and swear” and “floated around in clothes two sizes too big for them.” He finished the piece with a crib sheet for how to pass as American: “Chew … never speak … always look busy … and, above all else, crown yourself with arrogance.” It was advice he followed assiduously.

His spindly legs excepted, Cravan looked every inch the serious athlete: six foot four, a lean two hundred and thirty pounds, muscular and broad shouldered. It’s difficult at this remove to judge his mastery of the sport, but he unquestionably excelled in other parts of the boxer’s skill set: the swagger, the hype, and the trash talk. On entering the ring, Cravan acted as his own hype man, bragging about his brilliance and achievements, announcing himself as, among other things, “a hotel thief, snake charmer,” and nephew of Oscar Wilde. He did not mention, but was surely aware of, the irony that the man behind Wilde’s scandalous downfall was the Marquees of Queensbury, the same man after whom the rules of boxing are named.

Cravan found a place for boxing and braggadocio outside the ring too. Perhaps inspired by Jack Johnson’s performances, he held events that combined dancing, boxing, and lectures on modern art. But whereas Johnson had inserted boxing into a stage show, Cravan essentially did the opposite, turning his fights into something between a pantomime and a bracing piece of performance art, intended to make the audience as uncomfortable as possible. He advertised one performance promising it would climax with his suicide, only to profanely rebuke those who packed the venue for being so depraved that they would pay to watch a man take his own life. A newspaper report of another show says he “fired several shots into the air, then, half in jest, half seriously, made the most insane pronouncements against art and life. He praised athletes above artists, he praised homosexuals, those who rob the Louvre … Things almost went too far, however, when Cravan threw his briefcase into the audience. It was only by accident that no one was hit." More

"Arthur Cravan, the the 'poet with the shortest hair in the world,' founder and sole editor of the journal Maintenant (five explosive issues), boxer, anarchist , lecturer, dancer, adventurer, handsome, insulting, direct, secretive, traveler, deserter. He haunted the rebellious imaginations of André Breton and Guy Debord."

"Cravan was the dialectical spirit incarnate"

"Art was "more in the guts than in the brain," he said

From 1911-1915 Cravan published Maintenant, a literary review that lasted for only five issues but had enormous influence upon the young artists and intellectuals who had come together in Paris and were on the cusp of changing the world.

Absurdity, the ridiculous, the eccentric, the striking, the outrageous, and the shocking  were Cravan's bread and butter. His identity was whatever he decided it would be; long before Madonna made self-invention and re-invention standard operating procedure, Cravan practiced it with a vengeance. It is no wonder, then, that Cravan became the darling of Dadaists Marcel Duchamps, Andre Breton, and Francis Picabia."  More

Guy Debord:
"Arthur Cravan foresaw this world when he wrote in Maintenant: 'Soon we will only see artists in the streets, and it will take no end of effort to find. single man.' This is indeed the sense of the revived form of an old quip of Parisian loafers: 'Hello there, artists! Too bad if I've got it wrong."

 This fight was in a way the first  "happening", the first "performance" in the history of art.

THE FIGHT:

Sunday, April 23, 1916. In the most intellectual circles of Barcelona, there was no another topic of conversation than the third centenary of the death of Miguel de Cervantes, the Quijote’s author. But the matter of the day was the combat of boxing between Jack Jonson and Arthur Cravan.

The filmmaker Ricard de Baños had arranged strategically to six «routiers» with their cameras at different points of the Monumental to film the big fight. Everything was ready, when the sky began to fill with clouds. Ramón, Ricard’s small brother and experienced operator, warned that if they were late in beginning the Jonson-Cravan combat they were registering the movie in very low conditions of light, which could throw to loose all the work. Ricard commented to Jack. Finished the fourth assault with Rhodes, Kid feigned not to be able to keep on fighting. Other «introductory» duels announced in the program, Munich-Seem and Martínez-Cutchet, remained deferred and, before the awaited thing, Jack Johnson and Arthur Cravan jumped to the ring.

The fans were glad, but his hopes of seeing a great fight did not last long. The boxer poet, with white trousers and short bathrobe of the same color, trod on the canvas very palely. Meanwhile the gloves were placing him, was necessary to sit in his corner because him the legs were trembling. His brother Otho tried to infuse encouragement from the corner, but Arthur was very afraid. Shortly before entering the ring, Johnson had threatened that he would beat him up.

«Don Jack» spent the strings with his eternal smile, wearing a striped coat and pants darker than the color of their skin. The American boxer was disappointed by the scarce entry. However, concealed and distributed smiles generously. Before the Chilean coach Tony Berton, doing the functions of referee, announced the beginning of the fight, the chief Bravo Portillo presented himself in the ring to remind participants that they could not overextend their attacks. The authorities ordered that the expected clash of the titans had just as a simple exhibition by decree law.

The fight was a complete failure. Gripped by fear, Arthur Cravan barely managed to move the site: unthinkable that an attack could in conditions against his rival. Johnson realized that they were offering to sorry sight, but have wanted to give swindle to Ricard could register the movie.

Seeing Stars

Alessandro Piccolomini, Star Map of Gemini, 1566

A Bayer designation is a stellar designation in which a specific star is identified by a Greek or Latin letter followed by the genitive form of its parent constellation's Latin name:

Pollox and Castor, the Gemini Twins. Also the archetypal BOXERs.
During the expedition of the Argonauts,Pollux took part in a boxing contest and defeated King Amycus. 

Cravan born May 22

Anticipating Andy Kaufman:

Dick Higgins's An Exemplativist Manifesto (1976):