The Seba library treats Agonistic in 9 passages, across 7 authors (including Burkert, Walter, Marcel Detienne, Schore, Allan N.).
The agonal spirit, der agonale Geist, has, since Friedrich Nietzsche, often been described as one of the characteristic traits and driving forces of Greek culture.
Burkert establishes the agonistic as a culturally generative force in archaic Greece, tracing the concept to Nietzsche and showing how virtually every domain of Greek life—sport, art, beauty, disputation—was organized under the jurisdiction of the contest.
, Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical, 1977thesis
The law that begins to appear on the scene does not seem to be a special professional technique. It simply emanated from the life of the games; there is certainly a continuity between the agonistic and the legal customs.
Detienne, via Gernet, argues that Greek legal institutions grew organically out of agonistic practice, establishing a direct institutional continuity between competitive ritual and juridical authority.
, The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece, 1996thesis
Gilbert and Trower (1990) who emphasize the immense developmental importance of parental 'reassurance signals' after agonistic encounters.
Schore cites the developmental psychology of agonistic encounters—competitive or threatening social interactions—to argue that parental reassurance following such events is critical to the infant's construction of positive internal working models.
, Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development, 1994thesis
Walter Ong writes of this as the 'agonistic' requirement in oral storytelling. See Ong, pp. 43–45.
Abram, following Ong, identifies an agonistic structural requirement in oral narrative tradition, framing combative and confrontational dynamics as constitutive features of pre-literate cognition and storytelling.
, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996supporting
they decide to have nothing further to do with agonistic matters. At the end of the piece, we may assume, they returned to the service of Dionysus.
Snell's reading of Aeschylus's satyr play presents the agonistic domain—the games, the pentathlon—as antithetical to the Dionysian, dramatizing a psychic choice between competitive self-assertion and devotional surrender.
, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953supporting
Scott, J. P. (1966). Agonistic behavior in mice and rats. Am. Zool. 6:683–701.
Panksepp's citation of Scott's foundational ethological work places agonistic behavior within the scientific literature on aggression, anchoring the term in a precise behavioral-biological taxonomy of animal conflict.
, Affective Neuroscience The Foundations of Human and Animal, 1998supporting
Ethopharmacology of agonistic behaviour in animals and humans (B. Olivier, J. Mos, & P. F. Brain, eds.), pp. 132–144.
The cited volume on the ethopharmacology of agonistic behavior signals that the term designates a distinct, pharmacologically tractable category of social conflict behavior in both animal and human subjects.
, Affective Neuroscience The Foundations of Human and Animal, 1998supporting
Ewart, C. K., & Jorgensen, R. S. (2004). Agonistic interpersonal striving: Social-cognitive mechanism of cardiovascular risk in youth?
Johnson's bibliography introduces 'agonistic interpersonal striving' as a social-cognitive construct linked to cardiovascular risk, extending the term from ethology into personality and health psychology.
, Individual Differences in Aesthetic Engagement and Proneness to Aesthetic Chill: Associations With Stress-Related Growth Orientation, 2021supporting
Influences of the mesocortical dopaminergic system on activity, food hoarding, social-agonistic behavior, and spatial delayed alternation in male rats.
A bibliographic reference in Schore situates social-agonistic behavior within neuroendocrine and mesocortical dopaminergic research, treating it as one parameter in the study of affect regulation and self-development.
, Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development, 1994aside