At the Paralympic Games, “we can clearly see that we can use our bodies differently,” says philosopher Bernard Andrieu.

Bernard Andrieu is a philosopher of the body and sport, professor of science and technology of physical and sports activities at the University of Paris Cité and director of the Institute of Sports and Health Sciences in Paris. In June, he published, with researchers in the sociology of sports performance Hélène Joncheray (National Institute of Sport, Expertise and Performance, Insep) and Rémi Richard (University of Montpellier and Insep), Philosophy of sport: Olympism and Paralympism (éditions Vrin, 2024, 440 pages, 15 euros), an anthology which shows in particular the need to take into account the existence of bodies other than athletic and socially standardized bodies.

Before the Paralympics, disabled athletes were sometimes called “superheroes”, their resilience was praised. They just want to be seen as top athletes. What does that inspire in you?

I was struck by the series Unbreakablebroadcast on France Télévisions, which portrays athletes with disabilities. These mini-interviews always end with a question: “Are you unbreakable?” Most of them answer: “Yes, I am unbreakable. “However, these people were born with a disability or had an accident that caused them to lose a limb, their body cannot be unbreakable. We are witnessing a sort of heroization of bodies, of which Paralympism would be the culmination. On the other hand, some of them do not want to be considered as having a disability. We understand them, but there is the risk of making invisible those who do not take the spotlight and do not achieve exploits.

In your work, you talk about hybridization. What exactly is it?

When, with Joël Gaillard [enseignant à la faculté du sport de Nancy]we released our book Towards the end of disability [en 2010] and I presented it to associations for the disabled, everyone attacked me on the pretext that we were putting forward the idea that the status of disabled person should be abolished. That’s not it at all!

We wanted to show that, in their daily lives, people with disabilities do not see themselves as such, that they see themselves at best as hybrids because they have prostheses, a wheelchair… These “objects” allow them to reclaim their bodies and give them the ability to do a certain number of things that bring them closer to able-bodied people.

But hybridization is an extremely unstable state. It is a becoming and not a status, they warned [le philosophe] Gilles Deleuze and [le psychanalyste] Félix Guattari in their work A thousand trays [Editions de minuit, 1980]. Everything will depend on the person’s environment, their prosthesis, their wheelchair…

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