By Loïc Wacquant.How can you be a professional boxer? A sociologist initiated into the art of striking, "Busy" Louie takes us to the land of the pugilists of the Chicago hyperghetto to taste the flavor and pain of the action between the ropes. Far from journalistic and literary clichés, he makes us feel the thread of the nagging daily work in the gym, an island of order and morality in an ocean of destruction and danger; share the boxers' devotion to the catechism of "sacrifice", an ascetic code of life which regulates their relationship to the secular world - food, social life, sex. And he thrills us during amateur tournaments and goes behind the scenes and the intimacy of professional gala matches.
Master an honorary art of the body, immerse yourself in a sensual and moral world, feel the thrill of confrontation on stage, enter into this homoerotic and yet chaste communion that is combat, access a higher grade of masculinity, and build a glorious self as attested by the clamor of the crowd, the esteem of peers and the admiration of loved ones: such are the existential benefits that pugilism guarantees to those who indulge in it, failing to serve as a vector of economic promotion and social ascension. Physical risks and symbolic benefits, which does not mean illusory or secondary, quite the contrary, because man is, fundamentally, a spiritual animal as much as one of flesh and blood. Thus the mystery of homo pugilistica is resolved, caught in the web of the bittersweet love he devotes to his profession.