Professional wrestling star Chris Benoit was found dead in his Florida home earlier this week. Even in a business where premature exits from this mortal coil are the industry equivalent of the common cold, the development seemed to strike a powerful chord with ringside followers around the world, not least those in the scholarly seats.
Displaying the same sense of bad timing that has taken professional wrestling from minor-league sporting fetish to worldwide entertainment phenomenon, the Canadian-born grappler's parent company, World Wrestling Entertainment, hastily screened a tearful tribute to the fallen hero - only to repudiate the entire performance hours later after police investigators revealed that the organisation's beloved fallen hero was a homicidal psychopath.
Benoit had strangled himself with a weight-machine pulley after killing first his wife, Nancy, 43, and then the couple's 7-year-old autistic son, Daniel.
The academic commentariat has certainly been actively theorising. A search earlier this week threw up the names of more than 60 scholars speaking their own pieces to camera.
Todd Schlifstein, a clinical assistant professor at the New York University School of Medicine, had a word to offer about steroid abuse while one of Benoit's Canadian counterparts, the University of Western Ontario's Kenneth Kirkwood, pooh-poohed that angle.
Still no word, alas, from Ohio University's Scott Beekman, a professor of American history and possibly the academic world's only scholar whose major area of specialisation is professional wrestling.
Fans with an urge to learn more about the bigger academic picture of the same subject can always check out Duke University's recently published Steel Chair to the Head, a collection of 14 impenetrably intellectual takes on the sport, including the following collector's item, having to do with a match involving Mick Foley, by film studies maven Lucia Rahilly:
Within a Foucauldian formulation, significantly, the practice of deconstructing the discursive body represents a method of askesis, a process of cultivating, fashioning and styling the self in order to effect a specific kind of self-transformation. Less the inner exploration of a unique, private space - the true self constructed and confessed in the tradition of bourgeois humanism - than a rigourous strategy of self-scrutiny deployed to achieve a new relationship of self-reflexivity, askesis provokes an encounter with the self as other, ultimately leading beyond the limits to the self as a place of transcendence.
Which probably sounds, all things considered, about as worthwhile as the past week's international rash of Benoit studies.
