Me demonstrating ude kime nage
I was an unapologetic "theory head" in my later years of college and first years of graduate school. I devoured theories as soon as I heard of them, pouring through books by Lyotard, Deleuze, Agamben, Adorno, etc., Some of these stuck with me and became lasting obsessions, and some just went by the wayside. For a long time Pierre Bourdieu was in the former. I read a few things, his book on a theory of practice, some of his polemics about the market, etc., but never really connected. However, I been driven to a kind of belated appreciation of Bourdieu as of late. This is driven by two very different areas of inquiry. The first, predictably, has to do with the way that Bourdieu has become an implicit or explicit point of reference in what I think of as Spinozist social thought. More or less implicit in case of someone like Frédérique Lordon, who uses problems and terms like "symbolic violence," and more explicit in someone like Chantal Jaquet, who takes up what many see to be Bourdieu's central problem, that of reproduction, and Jacques-Louis Lantoine, who examines the connection between Spinoza's concept of ingenium and Bourdieu's habitus. The second point of reference, also belated is Michael Buroway, whose book on/with Bourdieu is one of the best things I have read all summer.
