Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Rethinking the Political: The Sacred, Aesthetic Politics, and the Collège de Sociologie

Abstract

Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi: Rethinking the Political: The Sacred, Aesthetic Politics, and the College de Sociologie. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2011, 294 pp. $39.95 softcover (978-0-7735-3901-3. The mutual blindness of Weber and Durkheim with respect to each other has long fascinated historians of sociology. Whatever its circumstances, it signals a disconnect between two approaches to social inquiry continued, with some exceptions, by subsequent generations. A similar disjuncture may haunt Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi's picture of Durkheimian and post-Durkheimian social inquiry, one many Durkheim scholars might find difficult to recognize. Falsaca-Zamponi has previously published on fascist aesthetics and politics, and extends that concern here to an examination of the work of George Bataille and Roger Caillois, central figures in the prewar College de Sociologie, and to their Durkheimian and Maussian intellectual inheritance. She argues that their insufficient theorization of politics and aesthetics, their denigration of the aesthetic sphere and their tendency to separate the social from politics, left the College unprepared to deal with the fascist aestheticization of politics, and unable to recognize and counter effectively elements of its conception of the social susceptible to proto-fascist interpretation. Falasca-Zamponi argues that the cultural context of Durkheimian and post-Durkheimian sociology included a differentiation of spheres attendant on the rationalization of modern life (p. 20), circumscribing politics and aesthetics as distinct and limited domains. She relates Durkheim's alleged neglect of the political to this context, suggesting it also circumscribed and isolated his conception of the social. She suggests that these disconnections be critically interrogated in terms of Claude Lefort's notion of the political as the ensemble of social structures, concepts and principles that organize a society. While Durkheim is occasionally described as a sociological imperialist, Falasca-Zamponi argues that his isolation of the social from the political shaped his eventual reduction of the social to affectively charged representations binding members to a totality, neglecting institutional and power relations to focus on ideas and emotions, in concert with a psychological impulse at the root of [his] sociological project (p. 44). He also retreated from contemporary social or political life into an examination of basic religious mechanisms constitutive of meaning and solidarity in primitive societies, suggesting they were universal, and privileging the emotional aspects of social totality at the expense of division, contestation and power. In addition to an ambivalence about politics, Falasca-Zamponi notes his refusal to grant sociological significance to aesthetics, save in a narrowly ethnological sense, and uncritical acceptance of circumscribed, anti-political and individualist characterizations of the modern aesthetic sphere. Falasca-Zamponi is more admiring of Marcel Mauss, especially his concept of the total social fact which, she claims, broke with a narrow Durkheimian sociologism, and also his sensitivity to power in studying phenomena such as the potlatch. Yet Mauss, too, she argues, did not anticipate a contagious spread of fascist politics through porous social institutions (p. 210) because of a lingering identification of the political with the delimited and discredited sphere of bourgeois politics. Mauss was also ill-equipped to deal with fascism, she says, by a commitment to a pure social science separated from the art of politics (pp. 5960), and though he had a more positive regard for aesthetics than did Durkheim, his inherited theoretical scaffolding rendered him unable to challenge its denigration or its museological reduction to ethnographic data. His intellectual heirs in the College de Sociologie also failed to challenge effectively the modern compartmentalization of value spheres. …