On an Enigmatic Text by Pierre Bourdieu

Abstract

A largely unknown commentary by Pierre Bourdieu on the poet Guillaume Apollinaire allows us to explore the non-theoretical, and even non-theorized, aspects of the relationship between the sociologist and literature. The present article begins by analysing Bourdieu's 1995 text as an example of close reading or explication de texte emerging, as it were, from a ‘scholastic unconscious’ dating from the 1950s. The article then proceeds to look at other ways in which Bourdieu has had recourse to literary references in his work (as a repertoire of techniques, as rhetorical elements for an argument from authority, as an equivalent or approach to sociological analysis, as ethical models or invocations). The article argues that, over and beyond his sociological objectification of literature, Bourdieu entertained a range of other relations to literature. These cannot be subsumed under a single theoretical system, but emerge at different times and with different, sometimes apparently ‘anachronistic’, effects.