File spoon-archives/bourdieu.archive/bourdieu_2004/bourdieu.0410, message 16


Date: Mon, 25 Nov 1996 11:30:57 +0200
From: sestoft-AT-coco.ihi.ku.dk (Carsten Sestoft)
Subject: Re: Derrida and Bourdieu


Dear George

Your very interesting comments merit some further words.

>        The relationship between Bourdieu and Derrida is quite
>fascinating. I wish I knew more about it.

I suppose you know that Bourdieu and Derrida were born the same year (1930)
and that they both have the agregation de philosophie, although I think
that Derrida entered the Ecole Normale Superieure a year later than
Bourdieu. As Bourdieu says in "Fieldwork in Sociology" (Choses dites,
1987), they were together in a group (around 1951) at the Ecole which aimed
at defending liberty against stalinism. Derrida was born in one of the
Maghreb countries (Maroc?) and arrived at Paris at the age of circa 18,
much like Bourdieu, who also, with his time in Algeria, no doubt has had
some of the same non-Parisian experiences, i.e. experiences of something
different from the legitimate world of Parisian learning, which in that
context became stigmata of social marginality. As Louis Pinto (in "La
theorie en pratique", Critique, no 579-580, August-September 1995)
suggests, their strategies in relation to philosophy can be seen as having
much the same kind of non-conformist habitus as their condition of
possibility, only with the difference that Bourdieu chose to leave the
philosophical field, while Derrida remained on the borders of the field.

>        On the surface they would seem to be worlds apart. What has
>become known as "deconstruction" would seem to have nothing whatever to
>do with Bourdieu's sociological approach to the study of culture.

I think one should distinguish the image of Derrida produced in America,
mainly by literary scholars, from the image of Derrida in France, although
it becomes less and less easy as the American reception begins to influence
the perception of Derrida in France. It is in the American reception that
Derrida has become identified almost exclusively with deconstruction.

>        Yet, I think that it is possible to identify commonalities. While
>Bourdieu criticizes Derrida in his essay "Towards a 'Vulgar' Critique of
>'Pure' Critiques" in _Distinction_, he does so by saying that Derrida
>does not go *far enough* in his reading. Bourdieu obviously relies in
>large part on Derrida's reading of Kant--for it uncovers the social
>distinctions at the heart of Kant's critique without naming them as such.

You are surely right here: Bourdieus critique is that Derrida doesn't go
far enough in a questioning of the very activity of philosophy (the
philosophical illusio), cf. above.

>        I think the real point of identity lies in the fact that both
>Derrida and Bourdieu uncover the pratico-logical dimension of culture. It
>seems to me that Derrida concentrates especially on how practice can
>revolutionize established relations (overturn and displace them--the true
>meaning od "deconstruction"). While Bourdieu is largely interested in
>breaking with idealized visions of the culture, exposing the social basis
>of culture (while at the same time avoiding reductionism).

I also agree here, although with one reservation: because Derrida remains a
philosopher, he refuses (or is unable) to give a historical and
sociological explanation of the ways practice changes and undermines
established relations; he can only show that, in a philosophical
perspective, the relations become unstable and contradictory, i.e. he shows
that philosophy is somehow false, but not what could be true.

>        One thing I find especially refreshing about Bourdieu is that he
>encourages us to think about these points of commanality and
>complementarity and not to remain stuck in typical (and ultimately
>destructive) academic polemics.

Yes, I agree, - and it has taken me a long time to understand that even the
positions with which I disagree may be able to say something sensible on
particular points! So much academic nonsense comes from the inability to
discuss issues outside the traditional trenches (if you can say that in
English).

Carsten Sestoft
University of Copenhagen
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