The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner: a meditation on destituent power

This short essay ponders themes of Giorgio Agamben’s corpus through the story of Colin Smith, the protagonist of the short story The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1959) by Alan Sillitoe and the film of the same name by Tony Richardson (1962). The essay considers how Smith’s infamous refusal to cross the finish line is paradigmatic of Agamben’s destituent power. The essay, as a sort of love letter to Smith, further engages questions of thought and feeling in the face of the contemporary apparatuses with which, as Agamben phrases it, we are in hand-to-hand combat.