Pierre Bourdieu vis-à-vis Martin Heidegger: the first ‘conservative revolution’

Abstract

As a philosophy student in 1950s Paris, Pierre Bourdieu experienced a ‘certain fascination’ with the German phenomenologists, Husserl and Heidegger. He later went on in 1975 to write a lengthy article on The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, translated into English in 1991. Recently, notable Bourdieusian theorists have emphasised this Heideggerian contribution to Bourdieu’s thought, stressing its significance alongside the classical sociological theorists (Marx, Weber and Durkheim). They thus directly assert or imply its continued importance for the genesis of new social theory. The present article argues against this position and it does so in part by using Bourdieu’s own reflections on Heidegger. Like Theodor Adorno, this analysis rooted Heidegger’s thought in his social position as a lower-class outsider to the patrician German university system. Going beyond Adorno, however, Bourdieu stressed the crises of interwar Germany including the crisis within the country’s academia. Drawing attention to the interwar ‘conservative revolution’ of Carl Schmitt, Oswald Spengler, Erich Jünger, and Fritz Lang, amongst others, Bourdieu delineated Heidegger’s ‘alchemical transformation’ of this conservative current into ‘philosophical form’ to create a symbolic revolution. The article concludes by discussing later scholarship as well as the posthumous publication of Heidegger’s journal, The Black Notebooks. These newly-published sources reveal Heidegger’s coded but virulent antisemitism. In light of these, it is argued that Heideggerian ontology can be used neither for philosophy nor for social theory.