Esquisse pour une auto-analyse

Abstract

Reviewed by: Esquisse pour une auto-analyse Vincent Leitch Bourdieu, Pierre . Esquisse pour une auto-analyse. Paris: Raisons d'agir, 2004. Pp. 144. The late Pierre Bourdieu made significant contributions to literary and cultural studies, especially with his concepts of cultural capital, habitus, and field. Of his two dozen books (all but a few translated into English), several remain widely cited, including the co-authored Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture (1970), Outline of a Theory of [End Page 184] Practice (1972), most notably Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979), and Homo Academicus (1984). It is as a sociologist of culture and as an alternative to mainstream poststructuralism that Bourdieu made his reputation during the heyday of French theory. The posthumous publication of his peculiar "autobiography," Outline for an Auto-Analysis, provides an insider's account of contemporary French intellectual history, and a portrait of the famous sociologist as a pugnacious and melancholy, divided soul. Although he was a philosophy graduate of the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and the École Normale Supérieure, and later inducted at mid-career into the Collège de France, prestigious Parisian institutions all, Bourdieu came from humble roots. He was born in Béarn near Pau in Southwestern France, close to the Spanish border, where his family, on both his mother's and father's sides, sprang from peasants. His father rose to become a minor village official. Because of his academic promise, Bourdieu spent most of his early years in the 1940s as a boarding student, first in Pau, then in Paris. He documents many humiliations from these unhappy times. "I believe Flaubert was not completely wrong to think as he writes in Mémoires d'un fou, that 'Those who have known boarding school know, at twelve years old, nearly all of life'"(124). It is no surprise, based on his critical works about schooling, published decades later, that for Bourdieu "the boarding school is separate only by differences in degree from the series of 'total institutions,' from instances like the prison or psychiatric hospital or, closer, the penal colony such as Jean Genet describes it in Le Miracle de la rose" (119). Bourdieu's intellectual bent distanced him not only from family but from schoolmates, the latter including fellow-residents with similar lower-class backgrounds as well as day students from the better-off middle class. By his own account, Bourdieu never quite fit in, neither at lycée, nor university, nor during his mandatory army stint during the Algerian war, nor later at the Collège de France, except early on when playing sports (rugby in his case), where solidarity in quest of victory and mutual support in the event of fights, not to mention unconditional admiration for athletic prowess, were possible. Of his acknowledged "bad character" he observes: Little by little I discovered, perhaps mainly through others' looks, the particularities of my habitus, such as a certain propensity to masculine pride and ostentation, a confirmed tendency to quarrel, often slightly dramatized, a propensity to get indignant about "small things," all appear to me now to be tied to the cultural particularities [End Page 185] of my region of origin, which I have perceived and understood best by analogy with what I have studied about the "temperament" of linguistic or cultural minorities like the Irish.. (114-15) Defined as dispositions, habits, ways of being—habitus, in Bourdieu's work, famously includes clothes, body language, and accent as well as values and outlook, operating like a social unconscious. Ultimately, Bourdieu's oddly amalgamated peasant and academic disposition, his "habitus clivé" (split habitus, 127), set him off from both well-born Parisians and, ironically, from the working class and peasantry. It isn't until the closing thirty pages of Esquisse pour une auto-analyse that these personal details appear, which should be no surprise. The otherwise blank dedication page declares: "This is not an autobiography." Bourdieu could not have written autobiography, unlike other French theorists such as Barthes, Derrida, Kristeva, and Cixous. His major contribution to theory of subjectivity—habitus—self-consciously merged phenomenology with structuralism (subjectivism and objectivism), while skirting psychoanalysis as too subjectivist, giving us...