is a philosopher, deputy editor-in-chief of the Jesuit journal Etudes, and author of a number of books in French.
Is sharing your values or skills so different from passing a ball? Not if the ball is oval! says Nathalie Sarthou-Lajus. The philosopher and author of a book titled “The Gesture of Transference” (in French, 2017) believes that rugby has a lot to teach us in this area. Let’s quickly take a look at her essay, in time to watch the rugby World Cup with another eye!
Passing and scrums are beautiful metaphors for the act of transference. The first one is easy to understand: it’s simply a way of sharing the ball, and one of the first games we learn to play as children. To pass the ball around, accelerate, slow down, feign a movement, and in doing so, assess each other’s ability to send and receive. But in rugby, the pass isn’t just about handing the ball over, which would be a bit simplistic as a metaphor for knowledge transference. To say to a child or a colleague, “this is how we live, this is how we work, and whatever you do, don’t change anything,” isn’t really transference, but rather an identical legacy, which only aims at its own preservation without leaving room for creation.
In rugby, the passing game is more dynamic and inventive: the ball has the particularity of being oval and of bouncing in an unpredictable way. It’s considered a living object: it must be fecundated, so to speak, or made fruitful. This is the only sport where you move forward collectively by passing to the player behind you: to move forward and invent the future together, you also have to know how to turn back to those you are ahead of. Most of this game of passing is based on this risky art of receiving a legacy, which consists in keeping the ball and circulating it so that it remains alive.
At first glance, the scrum is more difficult to grasp, especially for a mere spectator: it’s hard to tell what’s going on. At the end of one match, I realised that the scrum is in fact an act of collective delivery of the ball, comparable to what, in philosophy, we call the “…
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