Date: Sun, 13 May 2001 23:43:50 +0200
Subject: Re: Leibnitz


Thanks for that John Evans - I think that we are all puzzling with the
relation between the critical and the merely disciplinary energies of theory
in general and Bourdieu in particular. The descriptive rules we might derive
from his own practice - he is louder and angrier in general with more
powerful groups than with less powerful - are cheerily under-theorised: they
even look happily sentimental; but they do sign an inchoate relation to the
inchoacies of the world. That is, there's something of beautiful and blind
allegiance behind what can't be a fully scientific dialectical engagement.

I like this in Bourdieu, even though I am less sure of what MY relation
should be to it (those of us whose Marxism began as primarily sentimental,
fed on popular music, and the experience of the fatigue of parents, and
simple hatreds, will know the difficulty of balancing the continuing
responsibility to that first moment of engagement with the exigiencies of
the relatively autonomous institutional positions we occupy now).


Geoff Gilbert

-- 
Geoff Gilbert - gilbert-AT-aup.fr

Dept of Comparative Literature and English
Dept of European Cultural Studies and Philosophy
American University of Paris
31 Avenue Bosquet
75007 Paris

tel (home): 01.48.07.21.81

le 12/05/01 21:41, John Evans à jevans-AT-eircom.net a écrit :

> 
> 
> Bravo! Simon - you should be proud.
> 
> 
> "The manifest brutality of some epithets - which would not be permissible in
> ordinary usage: where 'servile', for example would be replaced by
> 'humble'...or 'modest' - should not deceive us: the academic excuse which
> maintains that the judgment is applied to a piece of work and not its
> author, the fact that these are adolescents who may still improve, and who
> may be treated more roughly and frankly..., none of these suffices to
> explain the complacency and freedom in symbolic aggression observable in all
> examination situations", P.  Bourdieu, Postscript - The Categories of
> Professorial Judgment, Homo Academicus (Cambridge: Polity Press,1996), p.
> 205.
> 
> John Evans
> 
> ----------
>> From: Simon Beesley <simonb-AT-beesleys.freeserve.co.uk>
>> To: bourdieu-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
>> Subject: Re: Leibnitz
>> Date: Sat, May 12, 2001, 3:45 pm
>> 
> 
>>> Can anybody tell me what the connection is between Bourdieu's thought and
> that
>>> of Liebnitz. If Althusser was influenced by Spinoza (presumably in terms of
>>> lack of free will and monism) how is Bourdieu influenced by Liebnitz
>> 
>> Why is a fox's tail bushy? The connection between Bourdieu's thought and that
> of
>> Leibnitz is ... X, quantifiably so, demonstrably thus. Do you think Bourdieu
>> studied under Leibnitz?
>> 
>> I.e. whatever the connection is -- didn't the young Bourdieu write a thesis
>> on
>> Leibniz? -- how can you imagine that the connection could be distilled or
>> reduced or given a philosophy-by-numbers treatment? This is misplaced
>> concretism, reversed-literalism, run riot. The fatuously confident note of
>> the
>> fatuous remark "presumably in terms of lack of free will and monism" -- why
>> presumably?
>> 
>> Pip! pip!
>> Simon
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
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