Pierre Bourdieu-Sketch For A Self-Analysis-University of Chicago Press (2008) PDF

Sketch for a Self-Analysis
PIERRE BOURDIEU
Translated by
RICHARD NICE
The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London
This is not an autobiography
Pierre Bourdieu
Contents
Publisher's Note to the French Edition ix
Sketch for a Self-Analysis i
Index i14
Publisher's Note to
the French Edition
A sociological analysis excluding psychology,

except for some moods.
Pierre Bourdieu, preparatory notes
This text, which Pierre Bourdieu wrote between October

and December 2001 - but which he had worked and
reflected on for several years, wondering in particular what
form it should take - was conceived, starting from his last
lecture at the College de France, as a new (extended and
reworked) version of the last chapter of Science of Science
and Reflexivity} And, to mark clearly the continuity
between the two texts, he gave them the same title: 'Sketch
for a self-analysis'. He had decided that the book should
first be published in Germany" and, although he envisaged
reworking it for the French edition, we have chosen to
publish the German version, only adding some biblio-
graphical notes for the explicit references.
Just as he had made his entry to the College de France
with a very reflexive 'Lecture on the lecture','" so Pierre
I
Science of Science and Reflexivity (Cambridge: Polity, 2004).
II
Ein So{iologischer Selbstversuch (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2002).
jii
Lecon sur la lecon (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1982), trans, as
'A lecture on the lecture', in In Other Words: Essays towards a
Reflexive Sociology (Cambridge: Polity, 1990), pp. 177-98.
Publisher s Note to the French Edition
Bourdieu decided to deliver his last lecture by subjecting

himself, as if as afinalchallenge, to the exercise of reflexivity
that he had defined throughout his life as a researcher as one
of the necessary preliminaries to scientific research.
He knew that to take himself as his object exposed him to
the risk not only of being accused of self-indulgence, but
also of giving weapons to all those who only wait for an
opportunity to deny the scientific character of his socio-
logy - precisely on the grounds of his own position and his
trajectory - and who do not see that the exercise of reflex-
ivity was built up over a long time as an instrument of sci-
entificity. In this supremely paradoxical project, it was much
less a question of an ostentatious gesture ('to summon
the reader to ask himself why he is reading this', Pierre
Bourdieu wrote in his preparatory notes) than of an entirely
original undertaking that wouldfinallybring the researcher
into conformity with his conception of scientific truth, a will
to give a kind of ultimate guarantee of the scientific charac-
ter of the propositions set out throughout his whole oeuvre,
by means of a very controlled return upon himself ('I place
the most objective analysis at the service of what is most
subjective,' he also wrote, commenting on this text).
It is clear now that he was right to fear the ill-use that
could be made of it. In one of the early versions he wrote:
'This is not an autobiography. That genre is forbidden to
me not only because I have identified and denounced the
biographical illusion; it is also profoundly antipathetic to
me, and the aversion mingled with fear that has led me to
discourage several "biographers" is inspired by reasons
that I think legitimate.'
December 2003
I
do not intend to indulge in the genre of autobiography,
which I have often enough described as both con-
ventional and illusory. I would simply like to try to
gather together and present some elements for a self-
socioanalysis. I do not conceal my apprehensions, which
go far beyond the habitual fear of being misunderstood. I
have indeed the feeling that, particularly on account of the
scale of my path through social space and the practical
incompatibility of the social worlds that it links without
reconciling them, I cannot wager - being far from sure of
achieving it myself with the instruments of sociology
that the reader will be able to bring to bear on the experi-
ences that I shall be led to evoke, the gaze that, in my view,
is the appropriate one.
In adopting the point of view of the analyst I oblige
(and authorize) myself to retain all the features that are
pertinent from the point of view of sociology, in other
words necessary for sociological explanation and under-
standing, and only those. But, far from seeking to produce
thereby, as one might fear, an effect of closure, by impos-
ing my interpretation, 1 intend to subject that experience,
set out as honestly as possible, to critical confrontation, as
if it were any other object. I am well aware that, analysed
in that perspective, and as is appropriate all cases, in
accordance with the 'principle of charity', all the moments

of my history, and in particular the various choices I have
made in matters of research, may appear as reduced to their
sociological necessity, that is to say, in that respect, justi-
fied, and, in any case, much more rational or even reasoned
and reasonable than they were in reality, rather as if they
had emerged from a project conscious of itself from the
outset. But I know, and will do nothing to conceal it, that
in reality I discovered only little by little, even on the
terrain of research, the principles that guided my practice.
Without being truly unconscious, my 'choices' mani-
fested themselves above all in refusals and in intellectual
antipathies that were most often barely articulated; and
they expressed themselves explicitly only very belatedly
(for example, the fairly deep revulsion that the cult of
Sade, which was briefly fashionable, or the vision of sexu-
ality associated with Georges Bataille or Pierre Klossowski
inspired in me found afirstexpression only in an issue of
Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales devoted to 'The
body trade' in 199V)- Perhaps because I was too fully com-
mitted to my work and to the group I was leading to look
around me, perhaps because I thought I had too much to
do to devote a part of the time I so much needed to dis-
cussing or criticizing even the most prominent of those
who surrounded me, in France or abroad, in the social sci-
ences and philosophy, and for whom I did not always have
much regard, perhaps because I am somewhat clumsy and
1
'Le corps et le sacre', Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales,
no. 104 (1994) ('Le commerce du corps'): 2.
ill at ease in intellectual discussions about problems that are

not my own (I have a somewhat mitigated memory of an
encounter with Habermas, admittedly a very warm one,
organized in Paris by Dreyfus and Rabinow), I have
tended to plough my own furrow in my own way, and it
was only slowly, and almost always retrospectively, that I
began, especially when abroad, to spell out my 'difference'
from authors such as Habermas, Foucault or Derrida,
about whom I am often questioned nowadays, and who
were infinitely less present and less important in my
research than the likes of Cicourel, Labov, Darnton or
Tilly, and many other historians, ethnologists or sociolo-
gists unknown in intellectual or media spheres. In my effort
to explain myself and understand myself, I shall nonethe-
less be able to draw on the scraps of self-objectivation that
I have left in my path, throughout my research, and which
I shall endeavour here to deepen and also systematize.
T
o understand is first to understand the field with
which and against which one has been formed.
That is why, at the risk of surprising a reader who
perhaps expects to see me begin at the beginning, that is to
say, with the evocation of my earliest years and the social
world of my childhood, I must, as a point of method, first
examine the state of thefieldat the moment I entered it, in
the 1950s. If I recall that I was then a student at the Ecole
Normale Superieure, in philosophy, at the summit of the
scholastic hierarchy, at a time when philosophy could
appear as triumphant, I shall have said, it seems to me, what
one essentially needs to know in order to explain and
understand my subsequent trajectory within the academic
field. But in order to understand why and how one became
a 'philosopher', a word whose ambiguity helped to favour
the enormous over-investment that is excluded by less
indeterminate choices, more directly adjusted to the real
chances, I must also try to evoke the space of possibles as
it then appeared to me and the rites of institution that
tended to produce the element of inner conviction and
inspired attachment which, in those years, were the condi-
tion for entry into the tribe of philosophers.
I cannot relate here the whole machinery of the process
of consecration which, from the concours general and the
classes preparatoires to the concours for entry to the Ecole
Normale, leads the elect (and most especially the oblats
4
miracules)1 to elect the School that has elected them, to rec-

ognize the criteria of election that have constituted them
as an elite; and, then, to orient themselves - no doubt with
all the more eagerness, the more they have been conse-
crated - to the 'queen of disciplines'. One became a
'philosopher' because one had been consecrated and one
consecrated oneself by securing the prestigious identity of
'philosopher'. The choice of philosophy was thus a mani-
festation of status-based assurance which reinforced that
status-based assurance (or arrogance). This was more
than ever true at a time when the whole intellectual field
was dominated by thefigureof Jean-Paul Sartre and when
the khdgnes? notably with Jean Beaufret, the addressee
of Heidegger's Letter on Humanism, and the entrance
examination for the Ecole Normale itself, with its jury
composed at one point of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and
Vladimir Jankelevitch, were, or could appear as, peaks of
intellectual life.
Khdgne was the site where French-style intellectual ambi-
tion in its most elevated, that is to say, philosophical, form
was exhibited. The total intellectual, the model of which had
just been invented and imposed by Sartre, was called for by
2
Concours general: a national competition for lycee pupils;
classes preparatoires: the lycee classes training for the competitive
examinations for entry to the grandes ecoles; oblat miracule or
'oblate': Bourdieu's term for a pupil who commits himself entirely
to the scholastic success which gives him a 'miraculous' social
mobility (trans.).
3
khdgne: the classes preparatoires training for the entrance
examinations in the 'humanities' for the grandes ecoles (trans.).
5
a curriculum which offered a vast range of disciplines - phi-

losophy, literature, history, ancient and modern languages -
and which, through its training in the dissertation de omnire
scibili (as Durkheim put it4), the keystone of the whole
edifice, encouraged a self-confidence often verging on the
unself-consciousness of triumphant ignorance. Belief in
the omnipotence of rhetorical invention could only be
encouraged by crafted, theatricalized exhibitions of philo-
sophical improvisation: I am thinking of masters like Michel
Alexandre, a belated disciple of Alain, who used his
prophetic poses to cover the weaknesses of a philosophical
discourse reduced to the unaided resources of reflection
without any historical basis, or Jean Beaufret, who initiated
his dazzled pupils into the arcana of the thinking of a
Heidegger who was not yet translated, except for a few frag-
ments. (The extraordinary fortune of the Black Forest
philosopher in France is fully explicable only if one sees
that, as the exemplary incarnation of professorial aristo-
cratism and the undisputed philosophy of philosophy that
inhabits philosophy teachers - without their being aware of
it - he is closer than it seems to the old French tradition of
Lagneau and Alain - as is shown by the fact that so many
'philosophers' trained in the 1950s were able to glide from
admiration for Alexandre to a passion for Heidegger.)
And so were constituted the status-linked legitimacy of a
universally recognized scholastic aristocracy and - noblesse
oblige - the sense of elevation which imposes the greatest
4
'About everything that can be written' - ironically quoting
the motto of Pico della Mirandola (trans.).
6
intellectual ambitions on every 'philosopher' worthy of the

name and forbids him to stoop to certain disciplines or
certain objects, in particular those that are of interest to spe-
cialists in the social sciences (for example, it took the shock
of 1968 to bring the philosophers trained in the khagnes of
the late 1940s to consider the problem of power and politics,
albeit in a highly sublimated mode. There is no doubt that
Deleuze and Foucault, and all the others after them, would
not have been able to pose a question so clearly excluded
from the old-style philosophical canon as that of power, if
it had not been brought right into the heart of the univer-
sityfieldby the student contestation that drew its inspiration
from theoretical traditions entirely ignored or despised by
the academic orthodoxy, such as Marxism, the Weberian
conception of the state, or sociological analysis of the edu-
cational institution).
The grip of strongly integrated groups, the limiting
case (and practical model) of which is the standard family,
is to a larg&exrent due to the fact that they are linked by a
collusio in the illusio, f deep-rooted complicity in th#
Iective fantasy, ^hich provides each of its members with
ihe-expenence of an exaltation of the ego, the principle of
a solidarity rooted in attachment to the group as an
enchanted image of the self. It is indeed this socially con-
structed feeling of being of a 'superior essence' which,
together with the solidarities of interests and the affinities
of habitus, does most to engender and support what must
indeed be called an 'esprit de corps' - however strange the
expression may seem when applied to a set of individuals
persuaded of their perfect non-substitutability. One of the
functions of initiation rites is to create a community of

unconsciousnesses that makes possible the discreet con-
flicts between intimate adversaries, the hidden borrow-
ing of themes or ideas that everyone feels entitled to
attribute to himself because they are the product of
schemes of invention very close to his own, the tacit refer-
ences and allusions intelligible only within the small circle
of initiates (to look in this way on what has been written
since the 1960s is to discover, beneath the glitter of pro-
claimed differences, the profound homogeneity of the
problems and themes, and to be able to recognize, for
example, in the Derridean motto of 'deconstruction' -
beyond the transfiguration resulting from the complete
change of theoretical context - the Bachelardian theme of
the break with preconstructions which, having become a
scholastic topos, was also orchestrated, at the same
moment, at the other pole of the field of philosophy - by
Louis Althusser, especially, and in the social sciences - par-
ticularly in Le Metier de sociologue?
But the most important and also most invisible property
of the philosophical universe of that time and that place -
perhaps at all times and in all countries - is no doubt the
scholastic enclosure which, even if it characterizes other
high places of academic life - Oxford or Cambridge, Yale
or Harvard, Heidelberg or Todai - takes one of its most
exemplary forms in the closed, separate world, set apart
5
With J.-C. Chamboredon and J.-C. Passseron, Le Metier de
sociologue (Paris and The Hague: Mouton), trans, as The Craft of
Sociology (New York and Berlin: De Gruyter, 1991).
8
from the vicissitudes of the real world, which, around the

1950s, produced most of the French philosophers whose
message now inspires a worldwide 'campus radicalism',6
particularly through 'cultural studies'.7 The effects of
enclosure, compounded by those of scholastic election and
the prolonged cohabitation of a socially very homoge-
neous group, can indeed only favour a social and mental
distance from the world that, paradoxically, is never more
apparent than in the (often desperate) attempts to rejoin the
social world, particularly through political commitments
(Stalinism, Maoism, etc.) whose ^responsible utopianism
and irrealist radicalism attest that they remain a paradoxi-
cal wayftTdenying the realities of the social world.
It is clear that, for me as for all those who then had any con-
nection with philosophy, the figure of Jean-Paul Sartre
exerted a fascination that was not without ambivalence, as
much in the intellectual order as in the domain of politics.
However, the domination of the author of L'Etre et le
Neant* was never exerted without contest in those spheres,
and those people (of whom I was one) who sought to resist
'existentialism' in its fashionable or academic forms could
draw support from a set of dominated currents: first, a
history of philosophy very closely linked to the history of
the sciences, the 'prototypes' of which were represented by
6
In English in the original (trans.).
7
In English in the original (trans.).
8
J.-P. Sartre, L'Etre et le Neant (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), trans.
as Being and Nothingness (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956).
9
two major works, Dynamique et metaphysique leibniyennes,

by Martial Gueroult,9 a graduate of the Ecole Normale and
professor at the College de France, and Physique et meta-
physique kantiennes, by Jules Vuillemin,10 another normalien,
then a young lecturer at the Sorbonne and a contributor to
Les Temps Modernes, who later succeeded Gueroult at the
College de France; and, then, an epistemology and a history
of the sciences represented by authors such as Gaston
Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem and Alexandre Koyre.
Often of lower-class or provincial origin, or brought up
outside France and its academic traditions, and attached to
peripheral university institutions, like the cole des Hautes
Etudes or the College de France, these marginal and tem-
porally dominated authors, hidden from common percep-
tion by the celebrity of the dominant figures, offered a
recourse to those who, for various reasons, sought to react
against the fascinating but rejected image of the total intel-
lectual, present on all the front lines of thought. (I should
add the name of Eric Weil, whose commentaries on Hegel
I had attended at the time, and whom I later came to know
better when I was appointed to the faculty at Lille, in the
early 1960s.)
Georges Canguilhem, a contemporary at the Ecole
Normale of Sartre and Raymond Aron, from whom he was
separated by his lower-class provincial origin, could be
9
M. Gueroult, Dynamique et metaphysique leibni{iennes (Paris:
Belles Lettres, 1935).
10
J. Vuillemin, Physique et metaphysique kantiennes (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1955).
10
invoked by the occupants of opposite positions in the uni-

versity field. As an exemplary homo academicus^ he was to
serve as an emblem for professors who occupied positions
in the institutions of reproduction of the teaching corps
entirely homologous to his own, such as Francois Dagonet;
but as the advocate of a tradition of the history of science
and epistemology which, at the height of the triumph of
existentialism, represented the heretical refuge of serious-
ness and rigour, he would be consecrated, with Gaston
Bachelard, as the maitre a penser of philosophers more
remote from the heart of the academic tradition, such as
Althusser, Foucault and some others. It was as if his at once
central and minor position in the university field and the
entirely rare, even exotic dispositions that had predisposed
him to occupy it had designated him to play the role of a
totemic emblem for all those who sought to break with the
dominant model and who constituted themselves as an
'invisible college' by rallying around his name.
The desire to shun fashionable enthusiasms could also
lead one to seek another antidote to the 'facile* aspects of
existentialism - often identified, especially in its Christian
version, with a somewhat fatuous exaltation of le vecu
('lived experience') - in reading Husserl (translated by Paul
Ricceur11 or Suzanne Bachelard,12 the daughter of the
philosopher, herself a historian of science), or among those
1
' E. Husserl, /dees directrice pour une phenomenologie (Paris:
Gallimard, 1950).
12
E. Husserl, Logique formelle et logique transcendantale (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1957).
11
phenomenologists who were most inclined to conceive phe-

nomenology as arigorousscience, such as Maurice Merleau-
Ponty, who also offered an opening towards the human
sciences, through child psychology, which he taught at the
Sorbonne, before moving to the College de France; but also
towards Saussure, Weber and Mauss. In this context, the
journal Critique, edited by Georges Bataille and Eric Weil,
by giving access to an international and transdisciplinary
culture, made it possible to escape from the closure effect
exerted by every elite school. (The reader will have under-
stood that, in this evocation of the space of the philosophi-
cal possibles as it then appeared to me, are expressed the
often very strong and always lively admirations I felt in my
early twenties, and the particular point of view from which
my representation of the academic field and of philosophy
was engendered.)
So it can be seen that it is possible to produce at will the

appearances of either continuity or rupture between the
1950s and the 1970s, depending on whether or not one
takes account of the dominated figures of the 1950s who
served as references for some of the leaders of the anti-
existentialist revolution in philosophy. But just as - except
perhaps for Bachelard, who sprinkled his writings with
ironic comments on the peremptory assertions of the exis-
tentialist masters, particularly as regards science - the
dominated thinkers of the 1950s provided many indica-
tions, both in their lives and in their works, of their sub-
mission to the dominant philosophical model, so too the
new dominant figures of the 1970s did not perhaps carry
12
through to its conclusion the revolution they had under-

taken against the empire of the total philosopher. The
works of theirs that are most liberated from the grip of
academia still bear the marks of the hierarchy, inscribed
both in the objective structure of institutions - with, for
example, the opposition between the major thesis, the
vehicle of the most ambitious, original and 'brilliant'
developments, and the minor thesis, formerly written in
Latin, devoted to humble products of erudition or the
human sciences and in the cognitive structures, systems
of classification incorporated in the form of the opposition
between the theoretical and the empirical, the general and
the specialized, philosophy and the social sciences.
They were no doubt all the more intent on marking and
maintaining their distance from those 'common' sciences
because, by the early 1960s, those sciences had started to
threaten the hegemony of philosophy. So it was that, in
their very confrontation with those sciences, they were led
to mimic the rhetoric of scientificity (particularly through
what I call the '-ology' effect: 'grammatology', 'archaeol-
ogy', etc., and other rhetorical resources, particularly seen
among the Althusserians) and to appropriate, discreetly,
a number of their problems and discoveries (one day
someone should catalogue the borrowings that the philoso-
phers of that generation made, almost invariably without
saying so - not so much out of dishonesty as on account of
a tradition of sovereign elevation and so as not to lose
status - from the lower caste of linguists, ethnologists and
even, especially after 1968, sociologists). This played a
significant part in preventing them from seeing that the
13
break they were making with the pious naiveties of per-

sonalist humanism only led them Back, by the indirect paths
of structural anthropology and structural linguistics, to the
'philosophy without subject* that the social sciences had
advocated from the beginning of the century. (As I tried to
show in an article I wrote with Jean-Claude Passeron just
before the events of 1968,13 the swing of the pendulum that
had led the normaliens of the 1930s, and especially Sartre
and the young Raymond Aron (the Aron who wrote
Introduction to the Philosophy of History)1* to react against
Durkheimianism, which was perceived as somewhat 'total-
itarian', had started to move back in the opposite direction,
in the early 1960s, particularly through the impetus given
by Claude Levi-Strauss and structural anthropology,
towards to what was then called, by Paul Ricoeur and con-
tributors to Esprit, a 'philosophy without subject*. And the
immobile motion of philosophical life was merely bringing
the game back to its starting point when, in the 1980s, Luc
Ferry and Alain Renaut - abetted in their dirty tricks by
Esprit, of course, but also by the journal Le Debat, under
Pierre Nora and Marcel Gauchet, and by the whole band of
media acolytes of Francois Furet, with the magazine Le
Nouvel Observateur taking the lead - tried to restart the
13
With J.-C. Passeron, 'Sociology and philosophy in France
since 1945: death and resurrection of a philosophy without
subject', Social Research, 34, no. 1 (spring 1967): 162-212.
14
R. Aron, Introduction a la philosophic de Vhistoire. Essaisur les
limites de Vobjectivite'(Paris: Gallimard, 1938), trans, as Introduction
to the Philosophy of History: An Essay on the Limits of Historical
Objectivity (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961).
14
pendulum of fashion by declaring, in a squalid polemic

based on a paradoxically sociologistic amalgam, the 'return
of the subject' against those who, in the 1960s, had them-
selves proclaimed the 'death of the subject'.)
The consciously denied 'return' to the 'despiritualized'
philosophy of the social sciences that 'Zarathustra's
nephews', as Louis Pinto calls them,15 performed in the
1960s, under the aegis, of course, of prestigious and semi-
heretical ancestors (especially Nietzsche), is quite the oppo-
site of a true reconciliation. Even for those most 'liberated'
from the spirit of caste, like the Foucault of the post-'68
theory of power, the frontier with the social sciences,
and especially sociology, remained socially uncrossable.
Perceived by outsiders as being close, by virtue of its object,
to a kind of journalism, sociology is also devalued with
respect to philosophy by its air of scientistic, even positivis-
tic, vulgarity, which is never more visible than when it
touches on the most undisputed beliefs nf tê intellerhial
^Qildr-such as those that concern art and literature, and
when it threatens to 'reduce' (one of the vices most regularly
attributed to 'sociologism') the sacred values of the person
and of culture, and therefore the value of the cultured
person. I have had many occasions to experience the fact that
the tranquil iconoclasm of VAmour de l'arty16 which, with its
h
L. Pinto, Les Neveux de Zarathoustra. La reception de Nietzsche
en France (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1995).
16
With A. Darbel and D. Schnapper, VAmour de Van. Les
museesdart et leurpublic (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1966); 2nd edn
1969, trans, as The Love of Art: European Art Museums and their
Public (Cambridge: Polity, 1990).
15
statistics and its mathematical model, was directly (and

coldly) opposed to the academic cult of the work of art, was
no less opposed to the academically tolerated, if not pro-
grammed, transgressions of the anti-academic academicism
of the disciples of Raymond Roussel and Antonin Artaud.
(And I can testify that it was much better received and
understood by the artists, who, at that same moment, were
calling artistic belief and the very game of art into question
in their works, than by those philosophers who were seem-
ingly most liberated from artistic fetishism. It was, for
example, only the fear that its demonstrative (and critical)
context would be undermined by artistic derealization that
prevented me from authorizing a conceptual artist to use in
one of his works a statistical table showing the mathematical
probability of access to museums and galleries according to
level of education.)
There is no better way of measuring the structural dis-
credit that sociology and everything associated with it
suffers in the intellectual world than by comparing its fate
(any aspiring author or philosopher can enhance his objec-
tive and subjective stature by expressing all the elegant
contempt he has for it) with the treatment given to psycho-
analysis, with which it nonetheless shares some important
features, such as the ambition of giving a scientific account
of human behaviours. As Sarah Winter has shown,17 psy-
choanalysis has draped itself in the transhistorical univer-
sality and grandeur that are traditionally granted to the
17
S. Winter, Freud and the Institution of Psychoanalytic Knowledge
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).
16
Greek tragic poets, deliberately dehistoricized and univer-

salized by the scholastic tradition. By setting the new
science in the line of descent of Sophocles* tragedy, one of
the jewels of classical Bildung^ Freud gave it its academic
letters of nobility. And Jacques Lacan, returning to the
Greek sources to put forward new interpretations of
Sophocles' tragedy, reactivated thatfiliation,which is also
attested by a style of writing that combines the obscurities
and audacities of a Mallarme and a Heidegger. But this is
only one of the factors that explain the (at least apparent)
affinity between psychoanalysis, as a 'cure of souls', and
spiritualism (and, more precisely, Catholicism). What is
certain is that psychoanalysis, at least in 1970s France, was
lodged among the noblest and purest intellectual activities,
in short, at the antipodes of sociology. The latter, a ple-
beian and vulgarly materialist science of ordinary things,
is commonly seen, especially in nations with a long cultural
tradition, as given to coarse analyses of the most vulgar,
common and collective dimensions of human existence,
and its excursions into humanist culture, taken as a refer-
ence or an object, far from having the effect of a captatio
benevolentiae, are seen as sacrilegious usurpations or intru-
sions tending to compound the exasperation of the true
believers.
The French university system, too immersed in the lit-
erary fads of the intellectual field and too attentive to jour-
nalistic preoccupations and consecrations, does not offer
the researcher what he is granted on the other side of the
Atlantic by an autonomous and self-sufficient university
field, with, in particular, its tight networks of specialists in
17
different disciplines, its forms of scientific exchange, at

once supple and strict - seminars, informal colloquia, etc.
This coherent set of specific institutions provides satisfac-
tions capable of discouraging the pursuit of the dubious
prestige and factitious recognition of non-academic
worlds and shields him from the unwanted intrusions
of the innumerable cohort of essayists, the 'daubers'
[iousilleurs], as bad painters were called in the nineteenth
century, who, perpetuating the inflated ambitions of the
khdgne, live as semi-plagiaristic parasites on the works of
others. (One may concede, if one is entirely realistic, that,
despite everything, they do play a role, in the long run, in
making known the works on which they feed, while
masking them, and to which they owe the appearance of
originality that makes their success, especially abroad.)
That is why, when I compare the overall style of my
scientific work - albeit in permanent discord with the great
humanist traditions of France, and some other European
countries - with that of an American researcher like Aaron
Cicourel, with whom I share not only the interest in certain
privileged objects, such as the educational system, but also
the intention of founding a materialist theory of knowl-
edge, I cannot fail to note with some envy the irreplaceable
role played in his case by a scientific environment that is
both stimulating and demanding.
I wonder in fact if a number of the difficulties that our
research group constantly encountered, outside the univer-
sity field but especially within it, from the most het-
eronomous sectors of thefield,do not derive from the fact
that in trying to introduce - like the Durkheimians a
18
century earlier, and with analogous difficulties - the rigor-

ous and modest logic of collective work, and the associated
ethic, it constituted itself as a foreign body, threatening and
worrying for all those who are able to live intellectually
above their means only thanks to an almost Mafia-style
collusion capable of providing a social context of indul-
gence for their usurpations of identity, their cultural
embezzlements and their literary or philosophical frauds. I
think in fact that a good proportion of the negative or
hostile reactions that I have aroused, and increasingly so as
the autonomy of the university field with respect to the
journalistic field has tended to weaken, stem as much as
from the critical content of my remarks and writings (which
is clearly not without effect, especially when it touches on
intellectual interests) - from the existence and particulari-
ties of the group that I formed. The metaphors used to
describe the group when it is mentioned in gossip or jour-
nalism are those of political indoctrination (an article about
me in the newspaper Liberation a few years ago referred to
an 'Albania', no less) or sectarian affiliation. What is neither
perceived nor understood, except as an object of fear or
indignation, is the intense intellectual and affective fusion
that, to different degrees and in different ways from one
period to another, united the members of the group in par-
ticipation in a mode of organization of the work of thought
that was perfectly antinomic to the literary (and very
Fdiisiail') vision ot 'creationâs the singular act flf pn kr^
lated researcher (a vision which inclines so many ill-trained
and intellectually ill-equipped researchers to prefer the
sufferings, the doubts and, very often, the failures and the
19
sterility of solitary labour to what they perceive as the

depersonalizing alienation of a collective undertaking).
How can one deny that the intense intellectual and
moral integration that favours collective work which is
both gratifying and highly productive does not come
without the permanent effort of encouragement and
unification that falls to the leader [animateur] of the group,
a kind of orchestral conductor or stage director, or, more
modestly, trainer, as the role is called in the world of sport,
on whom the group that he galvanizes confers in return his
'charismatic' powers through the affectionate recognition
that they accord him? Does it need to be said that this
integration is indissociable from a mobilization against
certain intellectual adversaries and in favour of certain
causes, which are inseparably scientific and political? The
members of the Centre18 acted - without using those grand
words - as activists of the univecsal, or, in HusserFs
phrase, 'functionaries of humanity'7 conscious of receiv-
ing mucrTTrorn the collectivity, in the form of salary and
information in particular, and concerned to repay it. It goes
without saying that the seriousness, without any 'spirit of
seriousness' (but perhaps a little too grave and too tense),
which sustained the group, and also the high standards it set
itself in terms of work and publications, were not likely to
be understood and applauded by all those who, even in the
Centre de Sociologie Europeenne, the research centre within

the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales which Pierre
Bourdieu directed and/or 'animated' from the early 1960s (French
editors' note).
20
world of research, affected-lhe-kindof- 'role distance- by-

which distinguished intellectuals are recognized in France.
That is why, by its very existence as much as by its pro-
ductions, it presented something like a challenge and a
questioning. And the effects of a school of thought,
whether they be real, like the affinity of style (in all senses
of the word), or fantasized (like the myth of the 'clan' or
'sect'), could only favour, encourage, and, in any case,
justify undertakings of imitation and distinction, but above
all resistances that could go as far as exclusion from all the
institutions of power over reproduction of the corps,
not to mention symbolic aggression through gossip and
rumours more or less orchestrated by powerful rivals (both
in the university world and in journalism), which surface
at intervals even in newspaper articles.
T
he field effect is partly exerted though the con-
frontation with the position-takings of all or some
of those who are also engaged in the field (and
who are themselves so many different, and antagonistic,
embodiments of the relationship between a habitus and a
field): the space of possibles is realized in individuals exer-
cising an 'attraction' or 'repulsion' that depends on their
'weight' in thefield,in other words their visibility, and also
on the more or less great affinity of habitus, which leads
one to find their thought and action 'sympathetic' or
'antipathetic'. (Unlike posterity, which can only judge the
works, contemporaries have a direct or quasi-direct expe-
rience, through newspapers, radio and now television, but
also through rumour and gossip, of the person in his
totality, his body, his manners, his dress, his voice, his
accent - so many features of which, with a few exceptions,
narratives leave no trace - and also of the company he
keeps, his political positions, his loves and friendships,
etc.). These sympathies and antipathies, which pertain to
the person as much as to his works, are the principle of
many intellectual affinities, which remain entirely obscure
and are often experienced as inexplicable, because they
engage the two habitus concerned.
After having shared for a moment the vision of the
world of the 'lyjos-French-normalien-philosopher that
Sartre brought to fulfilment, and one might say, to its
22
pinnacle - and in particular the disdain with which, espe-

cially in Being and Nothingness, he regarded the sciences of
man - psychology, psychoanalysis, not to mention (but,
precisely, he did not mention it) sociology - 1 can say that
I constructed myself, as I left the scholastic universe, and
in order to leave it, against everything that the Sartrian
enterprise represented for me. What I liked least in Sartre
was everything that made him not only the 'total intellec-
tual' but also the ideal intellectual, the exemplary figure of
the intellectual, and in particular his unparalleled contribu-
tion to the mythology of the free intellectual, which earned
him the eternal recognition of all intellectuals. (My sym-
pathy for Karl Kraus stems from the fact that to the idea of
the intellectual as constructed and imposed by Sartre he
adds an essential virtue, that of critical reflexivity: there are
many intellectuals who call the world into question, but
there are very few intellectuals who call the intellectual
world into question. This can be readily understood when
it is seen that one cannot dare to do so without running the
risk of having the weapons of objectivation turned back on
oneself, or worse, suffering ad hominem attacks aimed at
destroying in his principle, i.e. in his person, his integrity,
his virtue, someone who can only be seen as setting himself
up, through his interventions, as a living reproach, while
being himself without reproach.)
I shall never place myself, however, in the camp of those
who now proclaim the death of Sartre and the end of the
intellectuals or who, more subtly, invent a Sartre/Aron
couple which never existed, in order to award the palm (of
reason and lucidity) to the latter. In fact, between the two
figures (who, as Aron himself knew, had no common

measure) the resemblances are much greater than the
differences - starting with what makes both of them,
despite everything, profoundly appealing to me: I mean by
this what I shall call their naivety or even the innocence of
overgrown bourgeois adolescents who have succeeded
in everything (while I cannot testify as regards Sartre, I
knew and - need I say it? - felt affection for Raymond Aron
enough to be able to attest that behind the cold, disen-
chanted analyst of the contemporary world was a sensitive,
even tender and sentimental man, and an intellectual believ-
ing naively in the powers of the intelligence). Pure prod-
ucts of a triumphant scholastic institution which granted
an unconditional recognition to its 'elite', for example,
turning a teachers' recruitment examination (the philoso-
phy agregation) into a tribunal of intellectual consecration
(one has to see how Simone de Beauvoir describes all this
in her memoirs)19 these child-prodigies-by-decree found
themselves endowed, at the age of twenty, with the privi-
leges and duties of genius. In a France that was economi-
cally and politically diminished, but intellectually as
self-confident as ever, they could devote themselves in all
innocence to the mission they were assigned by the univer-
sity and by a whole university tradition imbued with the
certainty of its own universality in other words a kind of
universal rergn-of the intellect. Armed with their sheer
inteHrgenc^- n^ ^ply has m )ook at their footnotes to see
that they scarcely burdened themselves with positivistic
19
S. de Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance (London: Putnam, 1965).
24
knowledge - they could confront the most immense intel-

lectual tasks, such as that of philosophically grounding
the science of society or of history, or peremptorily adju-
dicating the ultimate truth of political regimes or the
future of humanity. But their unbounded self-assurance was
accompanied by the uncompromising acknowledgement
of the obligations attached to their dignity.
No one believed more than Sartre in the mission of the
., intellectual of did more than him to endow jthis self-
/ interestedmyth with the force of soriq] helief/The myth
ancH>artre himself, who, in the splendid innocence of his
generosity, is both its producer and its product, its creator
and its creature, are, I think (no doubt by an effect of the
same innocence), something to be defended at all costs,
against everything and everyone, and especially perhaps
against a sociologists interpretation of the sociological
description of the intellectual world: even if it is still
much too great for even the greatest of intellectuals, the
myth of the intellectual and his universal mission is one of
those ruses of historical reason
intellectualsmostjunrrptihlf toihi |iinfil "f unlu^îly
can be led to contribute to the progress ofthe universal,
in the name 6f motivations which mayliaye nothing uni-
versal about them.
Another 'beacon' (phare - the metaphor is perhaps hack-
neyed, in spite of Baudelaire,20 but it well expresses what
certain individuals, constituted if not always as models, at
20
Cf. Charles Baudelaire's poem 'Les Phares* in Les Fleurs du
Mal (trans.).
25
least as references, represent for a new entrant) was a figure

who is almost perfecdy antithetical to Sartre: Georges
Canguilhem, who helped me a great deal to conceive the
realistic possibility of living the intellectual life differently.
It is no doubt in his relationship to Sartre that one sees most
clearly what there was in this man and in his work that could
have inspired such admiration and affection in a whole gen-
eration of French thinkers. Extending the work of Gaston
Bachelard, of which he gave an admirable presentation,21
Georges Canguilhem made a decisive contribution to his-
torical epistemology, or, more precisely, to the historiciza-
tion of epistemology, to therigorousanalysis of the genesis
of scientific concepts and the historical obstacles to their
emergence, in particular through clinical descriptions of
the pathologies of scientific thought, the false sciences and
the political uses of science, especially biology. Thereby he
no doubt represents what is best in the tradition of the ratio-
nalism that can be called French, inasmuch as it is rooted
in a political, or, more precisely, civic tradition, although
it is, in my view, truly universal (as witness, for example,
its fortune on the other side of the Atlantic, through
Alexandre Koyre and Thomas Kuhn).
What made him an exemplary figure, for me and also, I
think, for many others, was his dissonance, not to say his
resistance: although he occupied the apparently most con-
ventional positions at the heart of the university system, he
was not wholly of this world, which, moreover, granted
21
G. Canguilhem, Etudes d'histoire et de philosophic des sciences
(Paris: Vrin, 1968).
26
him all the signs of recognition and towards which he

fulfilled all his duties. He simply did his job, without indul-
gence or bombast, but also without concessions, as a
teacher, and a teacher of philosophy; he never played the
philosopher. Those who evoke his memory speak of his
gravelly voice and his accent, which made him sound per-
manently angry, and the wry look and ironic smile which
accompanied his remorseless judgements on academic
mores. Marked by the tradition of a region and a milieu
where, as one can tell from the vibration of the voice or the
sharpness of the eyes, the body is always engaged, com-
mitted, in speaking, he was hardly disposed to join in the
gratuitous games of irresponsible thinking with which
some people identify philosophy or in mystico-literary
exaltation of the Holderlinian-Heideggerian thinking that
enchants the poet-thinkers.
He took a liking to me, in one of those movements of
sympathy obscure to itself that are rooted in the affinity
of habitus. I remember that after the agregation, he offered
me a post at the lycee in Toulouse, thinking that I would
be delighted to be sent back to my 'home territory',
and that he was astonished, even a little shocked, when
I turned it down (in favour of the lycee in Moulins
which brought me closer to Clermont-Ferrand and Jules
Vuillemin). When I envisaged a thesis, I turned to him,
rather than to Jean Hippolyte, for example, as others did,
in a kind of relation of identification which many signs
make me think went both ways (he had laid out for me an
academic and scientific career modelled on his own).
Later, when I used to visit him, in his office in the Rue du
27
Four, he would set aside whole afternoons for me (he

would search in his library and give me offprints of arti-
cles by great foreign scientists, such as Annie Jump
Cannon, often signed and dedicated by the authors) and 1
would stay until it began to grow dark. I was struck by the
fact that his thought and speech did not have those relax-
ations of tension that so disappointed me when I saw them
in so many other philosophers of my acquaintance (some
of them dazzling and profound when they spoke of Kant
or Malebranche) as the conversation shifted from the
most technical subjects of philosophy or science to the
mundane questions of life. He would say things, with
extraordinary adroitness of expression, that seemed to me
very audacious and very wise.
After a brief falling-out (he was greatly annoyed that I
had turned down the post at the Lycee Pierre Fermat in
Toulouse where he had started his own career), we
resumed our exchanges and we often talked during the tur-
bulent days of May 1968, which were a great trial for him:
he was one of those 'oblates' who had given everything to
the educational system and who saw the sympathy of their
pupils (of my generation) for the student movement as a
betrayal inspired by opportunism or ambition. He told me,
because he was no doubt discovering it at that moment,
how difficult it had been for him to adapt to the scholastic
world (for example, when he arrived, as a new boarder, at
the lycee in Castelnaudary, he did not know what wash-
basins were for). It seems to me that he was becoming
aware, for thefirsttime, of what it was that separated him
from his fellow students at the Ecole Normale, Sartre or
28
Aron (the latter played tennis, at a very high level, whereas

he played rugby) and which, although the integrative
power of the 'republican schoor had led him to forget or
repress it, was perhaps at the root of the kind of rage that
seemed always to inhabit him, beneath an exterior of the
warmest civility, and which occasionally exploded in the
face of some forms of Arrogant incompetence. ___
He left the limelight to others, who were happy to
praise his modesty, integrity and rigour. He sometimes
wrote for the regional newspaper, La Depeche de Toulouse
(I think that is where I first read him, in my summer
vacations), whereas others wrote for the major Paris
newspapers; he was a resistant (and not only during the
Occupation) to all forms of compromise with temporal
power. And those who do not forgive him for his pitiless
judgements, or even his mere existence, may even
reproach him for having completely fulfilled his role as a
'mandarin' he was successively a teacher in khagne, a
chief inspector of schools, a member of the jury for the
agregation - rather than devoting himself to activities
more becoming to the image of the free philosopher. He
never gave interviews, never spoke on radio or television.
(I was able to confirm that this was a quite deliberate
choice: after a mutual friend had told me that if he were to
make an exception, it would be for me, I one day invited
him to grant me an interview, and, after asking me, with a
hint of a smile, what it was I so much wanted to know, he
talked to me about a great number of very personal things
that I had never read or heard before, but took care to
do so while we were standing in a small street on the
29
Montagne-Sainte-Genevieve, in other words in conditions

such that no form of recording was possible.)
Although Georges Canguilhem, and other philosophers,

such as Jules Vuillemin, or, in my generation, Jean-Claude
Pariente, Henri Joly and Louis Marin, never ceased to be
part of it, at least during the long period of transition
between philosophy and the social sciences (I showed them
what I was writing, before it was published, and discussed
my research with them), scientific life was elsewhere. To
reconstitute the space of possibles that offered itself to me,
I have to start by describing the state of the social sciences
as it appeared to me, and in particular the relative positions
of the various disciplines or specialities. The sociology of
that time was a closed world where all the places were
assigned: first, the generation of the elders - Georges
Gurvitch, who held the Sorbonne in a fairly despotic
manner; Jean Stoetzel, who taught social psychology at
the Sorbonne and ran the Centre d'Etudes Sociologiques,
but also IFOP,22 and who controlled the CNRS;23 and
Raymond Aron, recently appointed at the Sorbonne,
who, to the native, spontaneously relational, perception,
appeared as offering an unhoped-for opening to those
who wanted to escape from the forced choice between the
theoreticist sociology of Gurvitch and the scientistic,
Americanized psychosociology of Stoetzel. Then, the rising
generation, all aged around forty, who carved up research
22
French Institute of Public Opinion.
23
French national science research council.
30
areas and powers among themselves, in accordance with a

division into specialties, often defined by common-sense
concepts, and clearly demarcated like so manyfiefdoms:the
sociology of work, with Alain Touraine, Jean-Daniel
Reynaud and Jean-Rene Treanton; the sociology of
education, with Viviane Isambert; the sociology of reli-
gion, Francois-Andre Isambert; rural sociology, Henri
Mendras; urban sociology, Paul-Henri Chombard de
Lauwe; the sociology of leisure, Joffre Dumazedier; and no
doubt a few other minor or marginal provinces that I
forget. The space was marked out by three or four recently
founded major journals: the Revue Fratifaise de Sociologies
controlled by Stoetzel and some second-generation
'barons' (Raymond Boudon inherited it a few years later);
the Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologies controlled by
Gurvitch (and inherited by Georges Balandier); the Archives
Europeennes de Sociologies founded by Aron, and edited,
with great rigour, by feric de Dampierre; and a few sec-
ondary journals, less decisive in the structure - rather like
Georges Friedman in the older generation - Sociologie du
Travail and Etudes Rurales. Everything that might appear
new, in thefieldof the social sciences, was then clustered at
the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, run by Fernand
Braudel, who, although critical of my early work on
Algeria, because in his view it took too little account of
history, always gave me very friendly and very trusting
support, both in my research and in my running of the
Centre de Sociologie Europeenne - with the incomparable
'mover and shaker' who seconded him in everything (some-
times ahead of him .. .), Clemens Heller.
31
(The passage that Raymond Aron devoted to me in his

memoirs24 was a very partial evocation of my relationship
with him, which, in i960, on the eve of the generals' putsch
in Algiers, was what enabled me to make a rapid return to
Paris, when he invited me to become his assistant - a debt
that could never be forgotten. (I had made his acquaintance
shortly before, on the advice of Clemence Ramnoux, pro-
fessor of Greek philosophy at the University of Algiers, a
contemporary of his at the cole Normale, who had
advised me to ask him to supervise, for a thesis, the work
that I was doing for other purposes on Algeria, and he had
received me very warmly - one sees, once again, the role
of the Ecole Normale in the seeming accidents that have
shaped my career.) His analysis of our relationship, a ret-
rospective reconstruction slanted by the bitterness stem-
ming from the final crisis, was based, as is shown by the
allusions to my supposed mistreatments of my disciples, on
a selective and very misinformed perception of certain
events (in particular those surrounding the election of his
daughter, who had studied and worked with me, to the
Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes), of which he had a very
imperfect knowledge and understanding. Few people rec-
ognized me as early and as fully as he - even in the
reproach he often addressed to me and in which he
expressed the fears he had for me: 'You are like Sartre, you
have got a system of concepts too soon/ I remember the
long evenings we spent together, in his apartment on the
24
See R. Aron, Memoirs: Fifty Years of Political Reflection
(New York: Holmes & Meier, 1990) (trans.).
32
Quai de Passy, when he would discuss my sketches in a

very friendly way, as an equal, no doubt on the basis of nor-
malien fraternity (which led him, a few years later, when,
after the publication of Les Heritiers25 and shortly before
1968, our relations were becoming more tense, to start
using tu to me, to my great embarrassment). The esteem
that Canguilhem, with whom he discussed me, had for me
perhaps also played a part.
At the time when - to rid myself of the thesis which was
a great burden to me, and the 'logic' of which would have
forced me to precede what I really had to say (the theory of
practice that, once any idea of a doctorate was abandoned,
was to become the Esguiss26^wi&xwcrenormoiis, purely
scholastic sections, one, phenomenological in inspiration,
on the primary experience of the social world, the other on
the structuralist conception of language and, by transposi-
tion, of culture I suggested to him that I should bring
together the work that had served as the basis for Travail
et travailleurs en Algerie and Le Deracinement, adding a third
section on the domestic economy of Algerian families,
based on an extensive statistical inquiry (this, fully
analysed, is still in a cupboard at the College de France. . . ) ,
he said to me: 'It would not be worthy of you/ It was a
sincere and profoundly generous warning, but a very
25
Les Heritiers. Les etudiants et la culture (Paris: Editions de
Minuit, 1964), trans, as The Inheritors: French Students and their
Relation to Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).
26
Esquisse d'une theorie de la pratique, precedee de trois etudes
d'ethnologie kabyle (Geneva : Droz, 1972), trans, as Outline of a
Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
33
ambiguous one too, being the perfect form of the symbolic

violence that one exerts without realizing it, because one
undergoes it in the very moment and movement of exerting
it. I shall say no more about my relationship with him,
which was something very important to him, I think,
among other things because it was my principle never to lie
to him - while more or less consciously stressing our points
of agreement, with the intention, itself quasi-conscious and
no doubt somewhat naive, of doing him a service by awak-
ening in this way the critical velleities or virtualities that
would have brought him closer to the liveliest fraction of
the intelligentsia, which was always so fascinating for him
(he showed many times in many ways the immense admi-
ration he still had for Sartre), I never disguised our points
of disagreement, especially in politics except to say that
our 'rupture', if it ever happened (I met him from time to
time for interminable discussions that would have alarmed
his conservative friends, who had 'taken him in hand* after
1968), sprang not from some disagreement, political or
other, but a bitterness commensurate, I think, with the (no
doubt excessive) affection he had had for me - and which,
^n his view, I had not lived up to.)
L'Homme, the journal founded and controlled by Levi-
Strauss, occupied a quite separate and dominant position:
although almost entirely devoted to ethnology, it exerted a
great attraction on a number of new entrants (of whom I was
one). That is another indication of the pre-eminent position
of ethnology, and the dominated position of sociology. One
should even say doubly dominated - dominated within the
field of the 'hard' sciences, where it had difficulty in gaining
34
>
acceptance, while ethnology, through Levi-Strauss, was
fighting to be recognized as a science in its own right (par-
ticularly by making use of reference to linguistics, which was
then at its zenith); and also dominated within the university
field, where, for many philosophers, still full of statutory
self-assurance, and for many literary scholars concerned for
distinction, the 'human sciences' were jumped-up newcom-
ers and intruders. Not surprisingly, in this 'refuge' disci-
pline - a welcoming, indeed, too welcoming haven that, as
Yvette Delsaut has neatly put it, 'did not intimidate' - one
found a small stratum of professors teaching the history of
the discipline and doing little or no research, and a 'mass'
(not in fact a very large one) of researchers attached to the
CNRS and some other institutions, who came from the most
diverse academic origins (the licence11 in sociology did not
exist when the second generation entered the field). These
researchers devoted themselves mainly to empirical research
which was as ill-armed theoretically as it was empirically
so many indices and factors of an enormous dispersion
(especially as regards level of qualifications) which was not
conducive to the establishment of a universe of rational dis-
cussion. It is not exaggerated, I think, to speak of a pariah
discipline-, the 'devaluation' of everything concerned with-
Tajcial mutters, in an intellectual milieu nonetheless very
occupied and preoccupied with politics (but many commit-
ments, especially those in the Communist Party, are still a
paradoxical way of keeping the social world at arm's length),
compounded - or was the primary cause of - a dominated
27
Equivalent of Bachelor's degree (trans.).
35
position within the university field. (And one sees, if one

reads Frederique Matonti,28 how, in their debates, which
were in appearance open to the whole world, the intellectuals
grouped around the journal La Nouvelle Critique managed
to reproduce the oppositions and hierarchies of the small
enclosed world of the kkagnes and the Ecole Normale, of
which Louis Althusser is no doubt the exemplary figure.)
The social world was absent, because ignored or re-
pressed, from an intellectual world that might seem ob-
sessed with politics and social realities. While specifically
political interventions petitions, manifestoes or state-
ments, even the most intellectually adventurous ones
could bring prestige to their authors, those who devoted
themselves to the direct knowledge of social realities were
at once somewhat despised (the prestige of historical spe-
cialisms increases with the distance in time of the periods
studied), and, as in the Soviet regimes, viewed with dis-
creet suspicion: for example, condensing the essence of the
normalien sense of the scholastic hierarchies and their com-
mitment to 'Marxist' prejudices, the Althusserians would
refer to the 'so-called social sciences'. And there was no
philosopher, writer or even journalist, however minuscule,
who did not feel authorized to teach lessons to the sociolo-
gist, especially, of course, in matters of art or literature,
and entitled to ignore the most elementaryfindingsof soci-
ology, even when talking of the social world, and who was
not profoundly convinced that, whatever the problem, one
28
F. Matonti, La Double Illusion. La Nouvelle Critique9, une
revue du PCF, 1966-1980 (Paris: La Decouverte, 2004).
36
had to 'go beyond sociology' or 'transcend [depasser]

purely sociological explanation', and that such a depasse-
ment is available to anyone who chooses.
My perception of the sociological field also owed much to

the fact that the social and academic trajectory that had led
me there set me strongly apart. Moreover, returning from
Algeria with experience as an ethnologist which, having
been acquired in the difficult conditions of a war of libera-
tion, had marked for me a decisive break with scholastic
experience, I was inclined to a rather critical vision of soci-
ology and sociologists - the vision of the philosopher
being reinforced by that of the ethnologist - and, above all,
perhaps, a somewhat disenchanted, or realistic, representa-
tion of the individual or collective position-takings of
intellectuals, for which the Algerian question had consti-
tuted, in my eyes, an exceptional touchstone.
It is not easy to think and to say what this experience was
for me, and in particular the intellectual but also personal
challenge represented by that tragic situation, which would
not let itself be contained within the ordinary alterna-
tives of morality and politics. I had refused to enter the
reserve officers' college [Ecole des Officiers de Reserve,
EOR], no doubt partly because I could not bear the idea of
dissociating myself from the rank-and-file soldiers, and
also because of my lack of affinity with the candidates
for the EOR, often graduates of HEC29 or lawyers, with
whom I felt little common ground. After three months of
29
The leading French business school (trans).
37
fairly tough training in Chartres (every week I had to step

out from the ranks at the call of my name to be presented,
before the assembled troops, with my copy of L 'Express,
the magazine which had become the symbol of a progres-
sive policy in Algeria, and to which I had somewhat naively
subscribed), I first landed in the Army Psychological
Service in Versailles, following a very privileged route
reserved for students of the Ecole Normale. But heated
arguments with high-ranking officers who wanted to
convert me to 'I'Algerie francaise soon earned me a reas-
signment to Algeria. The Air Force had created a regiment,
a kind of sub-infantry whose task was to guard airbases
and other strategic sites, made up of all the illiterates of
Mayenne and Normandy and a few recalcitrants (in par-
ticular some communist workers from the Renault works,
who were lucid and congenial and who told me how proud
they were of 'their' cell in the Ecole Normale).
On the ship that took us to Algeria, I tried in vain to
indoctrinate my fellow soldiers, who were full of inherited
military memories and in particular all the stories from
Indochina about the dangerous terrorists who would stab
you in the back (even before setting foot in Algeria, from
their contact with the junior officers who had trained them,
they had acquired and assimilated the whole vocabulary of
everyday racism - terrorists, fellaghas, fellouses, bicots,
ratons, etc. - and the vision of the world associated with it).
We were assigned to guard an enormous explosives store
in the plain near Orleansville. It was a long, gruelling
mission. The officers were young and arrogant; they had
been educated to the first level of the baccalaureat and done
38
their national service, then been recalled, integrated, and

promoted. One of them entered the crossword competi-
tion in Le Figaro and asked me, in front of everyone, to
help him. My fellow soldiers could not understand why I
was not an officer. I found it hard to sleep and would
often take their place on guard duty. They would ask me to
help them write to their girlfriends; I would write their
letters for them in doggerel. Their extreme submissive-
ness towards the military hierarchy and everything that
it imposed on them severely tested such populism as
remained in me, nourished by the muted guilt at sharing in
the privileged idleness of a bourgeois adolescent that had
led me to leave the Ecole Normale, immediately after the
agregation, in order to take up a teaching post and do some-
thing useful, when I could have spent a fourth year there.
I started to take an interest in Algerian society as soon
as, in the last months of my military service, thanks to the
intervention of a colonel from Beam, whom my parents
had approached through relatives of his who lived in a
nearby village, I was able to escape from the fate which I
had chosen for myself and which had become very hard for
me to bear. Being seconded to the military staff of the
French administration (Gouvernement general) in Algiers,
where I was subjected to the obligations and schedules of a
private soldier assigned to clerical duties (drafting cor-
respondence, contributing to reports, etc.), I was able to
embark on writing a small book (for the Que Sais-je?
series) in which I would try to tell the French, and espe-
cially people on the left, what was really going on in a
country of which they often knew next to nothing - once
39
again, in order to be of some use, and perhaps also to stave

off the guilty conscience of the helpless witness of an
abominable war. While telling myself that I was moving
into ethnology and sociology, in the early stages, only pro-
visionally, and that once I hadfinishedthis work of politi-
cal pedagogy, I would return to philosophy (indeed, during
the whole time that I was writing Sociologie de VAlgene
and conducting my first ethnological fieldwork, I contin-
ued to write each evening on the structure of temporal
experience according to Husserl), I flung myself totally,
oblivious to fatigue and danger, into an undertaking whose
stake was not only intellectual. (No doubt the transition
was eased by the extraordinary prestige that the discipline
of anthropology had just acquired, among philosophers
themselves, thanks to the work of Claude Levi-Strauss,
who had also contributed to this ennobling by substituting
for the traditional French designation of the discipline [eth-
nologic] the English label anthropology*, thus combining the
prestigious connotations of the German sense - Foucault
was then translating Kant's Anthropologic - with the
modernity of the Anglo-American meaning.)
But there was also, in the very excess of my commitment,
a sort of quasi-sacrificial will to repudiate the specious
grandeurs of philosophy. For a long time, oriented no
doubt by the dispositions I owed to my origins, I had been
trying to tear myself away from what was unreal, if not illu-
sory, in a good part of what was then associated with phi-
30
Sociologie de VAlgerie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1958), trans, as The Algerians (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962).
40
losophy: I was moving towards the philosophy of science,

the history of science, towards the philosophers most
rooted in scientific thought, such as Leibniz, and I had filed
with Georges Canguilhem a thesis subject on 'The tempo-
ral structures of affective life' for which I intended to draw
both on philosophical works such as those of Husserl and
on works in biology and physiology. I found in the work of
Leibniz, to read which I had to learn some mathematics
(diffprpntifll aqH integral calculus, topology) and a bit of
logic, another opportunity for /partjvp iHpnrifirarii (I
remember my indignation at a commentary, as worthless as
it was ridiculous because it was always in the register of
the grandiose - that Jean Hippolyte had produced of a
passage in Leibniz's Animadversiones about a 'finite surface
of infinite length', which integral calculus enables us to
know, but which Hippolyte had converted, misled by an
elementary error on the grammatical agreement in the J
Latin text, into 'an infinite surface of finite length', some-j
thing infinitely more metaphysical).
I thus understood retrospectively that I had entered into
sociology and ethnology in part through a deep refusal of
the scholastic point of view which is the principle of lofti-
ness, a social distance, in which I could never feel at home,
and to which the relationship to the social world associated
with certain social origins no doubt predisposes. That
posture displeased me, as it had for a long time, and the
refusal of the vision of the world associated with the aca-
demic philosophy of philosophy had no doubt contributed
greatly to leading me to the social sciences and especially
to a certain way of practising them. But I was to discover
41
very quickly that ethnology, or at least the particular way

of conceiving it that Levi-Strauss incarnated and that his
metaphor of th^ 'view from afar5 encapsulates,31 also
makes it possible^-frTa somewhat paradoxical way, to hold
the social world at a distance, even to 'deny* it in Freud's
sense, and thereby to aestheticize it. Two anecdotes seem
to me to express very exactly, in the mode of the parable
or the fable, all the difference between ethnology and soci-
ology (at least as I construe it): In the Course of a visit to
him, on the occasion o f my candidacy for the College de
France, an art historian who was very hostile to me for
reasons that were not only political (he had written, for the
front page of Le Monde, a very hostile article on Erwin
Panofsky, just when I had published my translation of
Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism'1), and who, to
demolish me, had spread the rumour that I was a member
of the Communist Party, said to me: * What a pity that you
did not stop after your Kabyle house!'33 An Egyptologist,
31
C. Levi-Strauss, Le Regard eloigne (Paris: Plon, 1983), trans,
as The View from Afar (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985).
32
E. Panofsky (ed. and trans. P. Bourdieu), Architecture gothique
etpensee scolastique. Precede de VAbbe Suger de Saint-Denis (Paris:
Editions de Minuit, 1967).
33
'La maison kabyle ou le monde renverse', in J. Pouillon and
P. Maranda (eds), Echanges et communications. Melanges offerts a
Claude Levi-Strauss a Voccasion de son 6oe anniversaire (Paris and
The Hague: Mouton, 1970). English trans, in Algeria i960
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), and in Outline of
a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1977).
42
the secretaire perpetuel of the Academie des Sciences

Morales et Politiques, one of the most conservative insti-
tutions of cultural France (which has no lack of them),
told me, at the reception for the new academic year - 1 had
not visited him [during my candidacy], he was away from
Paris - alluding to the extraordinary score (two votes) that
I had obtained in the ballot of the Institut to ratify the elec-
tion by the College (a purely formal procedure, despite a
few 'accidents' without consequence in the past, linked to
the names of Pierre Boulez, who, in reality or legend, also
obtained two votes, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, three
votes): 'My colleagues (or confreres^ I no longer remem-
ber) did not much appreciate your writing about the obit-
uaries of the alumni of the Ecole Normale Superieure.'
(He was alluding to an article on 'The categories of pro-
fessorial understanding'34 in which I had taken as my
object the obituaries published in the Newsletter of the
Alumni of the ENS.) This gives a good measure of the dis-
tance, often unnoticed, between sociology, especially
when it confronts the most burning issues of the present
(which are not necessarily where one thinks they are,
namely, on the_ terraia-of puliiicu), and ethnology, which
authorizes and even fosters, among authors as much as
readers, the postures of the aesthete Never having fully
"Broken with the tradition of the literary journey and the
artist's cult of exoticism (a lineage within which stand
34
'Les categories de l'entendement professorar (with Monique
de saint Martin), Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales,
3(1975)169-93.
43
Sketch for a Self Analysis
Levi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques but also a good part of the

writings of Michel Leiris and Alfred Metraux, all three
linked in their youth to tfre avant-g^rde artistic movement^
of the time), this science without a contemporary stake,
otherthan a purely theoretical one, can at best churn the
social unconscious (I think for instance of the problem of
the division of labour between the !WAi!S), bill vuy deli ^
cately, without ever wounding or traumatizing it.
(I think that, although he always gave me very generous
support - it was he who, along with Braudel and Aron,
brought me, when I was still very young and had published
next to nothing, into the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes
and was the first to call me to discuss the College de France
and although he always wrote me very kind and laudatory
things about each of my books, Levi-Strauss never felt great
sympathy for the fundamental orientations of my work and
for the relation to the social world engaged in my research in
ethnology and, even more, in sociology (I remember that he
had asked me some oddly naive questions about the sociol-
ogy of art, in particular). For my part, while I had immense
admiration for him, and while I placed myself in the tradi-
tion he had created (or recreated), I had very soon discov-
ered in him, as well as the objectivism that I explicitly
criticized in Outline of a TJt^s^j Practice and in The Logic
of Practice^ a pcientistic naturalism which, manifest in the
metaphors and bft^n superficial references to the natural sci-
ences to cladistics, for instance with which he sprinkled
35
Le Sens pratique (Paris: Editions de Minuit, f.1980), trans, a s
The Logic of Practice (Cambridge: Polity, 1990).
44
his writings, underlay his profoundly dehistoricized vision

of social reality. It was as if the science of nature was for him,
aside from a source of inspiration and of 'effects of science',
an instrument of order which allowed him to legitimize a
vision of the social world founded on the denial of the social
- to which aestheticization also contributes. I remember
that, at a time when he was surrounded by an aura of critical
progressivism - he was in debate with Sartre and Maxime
Rodinson about Marxism - he had distributed, in his seminar
at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, a text by Teilhard de
Chardin, to the total stupefaction of even his most uncondi-
tional followers. But the profoundly conservative vision that
has always been at the basisofhialhought unveils or betrays
itself unequivocallyTn The ViewJromAfar, with the eulogy
of Germany and Wagner, the apologia for realist painting,
the defence of authoritarian and repressive education (he
had written, in 1968, a rather mediocre text on the 'student
revolt' which he interpreted as a conflict of generations),
and, in his Marc Bloch Lecture of July 1983, he critiqued,
under cover of the ambiguous, more political than scientific,
concept of 'spontaneism', both the subversion of the stu-
dents of 1968 who (like Aron, Braudel and Canguilhem, and
many others) had profoundly called him into question, and
the critique of 'structuralism' to which I had contributed, in
particular in the Outline-, he could only or wanted only to see
in this critique a regression from the objectivist vision that he
had imposed in ethnology, that is, a return to subjectivism,
to the subject and his or her lived experience, which he had
sought to expel from ethnology, and which I was revoking
just as radically as he, with the notion of habitus.)
45
With military service over, to be able to continue the

investigations that I had undertaken, and to which I was
increasingly committed, I took up a post of assistant pro-
fessor in the Faculty of Letters of the University of Algiers
and, especially during the short and long university vaca-
tions, I was able to continue my ethnological inquiries and
then - thanks to the Algerian branch of the INSEEV> - my
sociological inquiries. I can say that, throughout the years
I spent in Algeria, I never ceased to be, so to speak, in the
field, carrying out more or less systematic observations of
one kind or another (I had for instance collected several
hundred descriptions of sets of clothing with the intention
of relating the various possible combinations of elements
borrowed from European dress and from the variants of
traditional dress - chechia, turban, sirwal, etc. - to the social
characteristics of their wearers), taking photographs,
making surreptitious recordings of conversations in public
places (I had, for a time, intended to study the conditions
of the shift from one language to another, and I continued
the experiment for a time in Beam, where it was easier for
me to do so), conducting in-depth interviews with infor-
mants, questionnaire surveys, archival forays (I spent
whole nights copying out by hand the surveys on housing,
locked, after the curfew, in the basement of the HLM37
office), administering tests in schools, holding discussions
in social service centres, etc. The somewhat exalted libido
36
French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies
(trans.).
37
Municipal social housing.
46
sciendiihax drove me, rooted in a kind of passion for every-

thing about this country, its people and its landscapes, and
also in the dull but constant sensation of guilt and revolt in
the face of so much suffering and injustice, knew neither
rest nor bounds. (I remember for instance the rather
gloomy day in autumn when I was trekking up [with
Abdelmalek Sayad] towards Ait Hichem, a village in
Greater Kabylia, the site of my first fieldwork on social
structure and ritual. In Tizi Ouzou, the clatter of machine-
guns could be heard; we started into the valley through a
road littered all along with carcasses of burnt-out cars; in
the climb up to the pass, above a curve, sitting on top of a
kind of alluvial cone beside the road, we saw a man dressed
in a djelljba^rrir\a rifle between his knees. Sayad showed
great sang-froidJie acted as if he had seen nothing unto-
ward though, as an Algerian, he was perhaps taking even
greater risks than me. We kept going without speaking a
word and my only thought was that we would have to come
back along this path in the evening. But so great was my
desire to return to my fieldsite and confirm a number of
hypotheses onritualthat my thoughts went no further.)
This total engagement and disregard for danger owed
nothing to any sort of heroism but, rather, was rooted, I
believe, in the extreme sadnes&ând anxiety in which I lived
and which, with the desire to decipher a conundrum of
ritual, to collect a game, to see an artefact (a wedding lamp,
an ancient coffer or the inside of a well-preserved house,
for instance) or, in other cases, the simple desire to observe
and witness, led me to invest myself, body and soul, in the
frenzied work that would enable me to measure up to
47
experiences of which I was the unworthy, disarmed witness

and which I wanted to account for at all costs. It is not easy
to describe simply, as I lived through them, situations
and events perhaps adventures that have profoundly
shaken me, to the point sometimes of coming back in my
dreams and not only the most extreme of them, such as
the accounts that one informant gave me, while apologiz-
ing for paining me, in an entirely white cell of the
monastery of the missionary White Fathers, and another
at the end of the pier of Algiers, so that no one would over-
hear us, of the torture the French army had inflicted on
them. (At Djemaa Saharidj, where I had come to gather
data on the allocation of land - something I had not been
able to do in Ait Hichem, where I had to content myself
with drawing up the distribution of the different lineages in
the space of the village - on the day I arrived, the White
Fathers were not there (I had forgotten that it was Sunday,
they were at mass). I walked along a path above the
monastery all the way to a small grove where I came upon
an old Kabyle man, with a thin face, an aquiline nose and a
superb white moustache - he reminded me of my maternal
grandfather - busy drying figs on wicker trays. I started to
speak with him about the ritual and about lakhrif the
season of fresh figs and fighting . .. Suddenly, he seemed
to me strangely nervous. A shot rang out, very close to us,
and while remaining very courteous, he quickly disap-
peared. I learned a few days later from a young man who
did odd jobs for the White Fathers and with whom I had
spoken at length, that the grove was a place where the sol-
diers of the ALN [National Liberation Army] used to
48
come and sleep in the afternoon, and that they hadfireda

shot to warn us to make off. A few days later, when I had
already become quite accustomed to the village and was
well accepted by the residents, thanks no doubt to the spon-
sorship of my hosts, two White Fathers - Father Devulder,
a tall, bearded, very friendly man whose name I readily
recall because he was the author of some very fine studies
of the symbolism of murals in Kabylia that I used exten-
sively in my work, and another, younger man, who had
links with the ALN - there was suddenly great agitation
and the French soldiers (in whom I readily recognized
myself, since, only a year earlier, I was still wearing their
uniform) advanced in single file along a sunken path
towards the mountains. I knew from my young friend (who
had himself learned it from the children who circled
around the soldiers) that they were setting out to search for
a hide-out, which they suspected was on the side of the
mountain, where the ALN held its meetings and kept its
archives. I followed their progress, amidst the men and
women of the village, who, like me, hoped that they would
notfindthe place before the evening and that the occupants
would be able to make their escape. And that is what hap-
pened. But, the next day, the cache was taken, together with
the papers that were deposited there, including lists of the
names of all the ALN supporters in the country. My friend,
who was directly threatened, asked me to take him in my
car. So I set off the next morning, although my work was
far from finished, and we passed through the military
checkpoints, despite some scares, without too much
difficulty.)
49
To conduct sociological fieldwork in a situation of war

compels one to reflect on everything, to monitor every-
thing, and in particular all that is taken for granted in the
ordinary relation between the observer and the infor-
mant, the interviewer and the interviewed: the identity of
the interviewers, even the composition of the interview-
ing unit one or two persons, and, if two, a man and a
woman, an Algerian man and a Frenchwoman, etc. (I
evoked a small part of the reflections that were forced on
me by the conduct of this research in the foreword to part
2 of Travailet travailleurs en Algerie)?* The very meaning
of the observation and interview is in question, more than
ever, for the interviewees themselves (are these people
perhaps police or spies?). Suspicion was generalized:
several times, agents of the French intelligence services
came on the tracks of the interviewers, asking their own
questions about the nature of the questioning (for quite
some time, every morning, when I set off in my car to go
and pursue my inquiries in the hidonville [shanty-town] of
Le Clos Salembier, I was followed by a police car, and,
one day, I was called in by the young S AS39 officer respon-
sible for the sector, who wanted to know what I was
doing).
One cannot survive, in the literal sense, in such a situa-
tion (also experienced by other ethnologists, who have
38
With A. Darbel, J.-R Rivet and C. Seibel, Travail et tra-
vailleurs en Algerie (Paris and The Hague, 1963), pp. 2607.
39
Sections Administrates Specialises - government agents
working to 'integrate' the native population (trans.).
50
worked on crack dealers, like Philippe Bourgois,40 or on the

gangs of Los Angeles, Boston and New York, like Martin
Sanchez-Jankowski)41 unless one exercises a permanent
practical reflexivity which is indispensable, in conditions of
extreme urgency and risk, to interpret and assess the situa-
tion instantaneously and to mobilize, more or less con-
sciously, the knowledge and know-how acquired in one's
earliest social experience. (The critical vigilance that I
engaged in my later works no doubt originates from these
first experiences of research in situations where nothing is
ever self-evident and everything is constantly called into
question. Hence, once again, the irritation I cannot help
feeling when specialists of opinion polls - surveys con-
ducted vicariously, at a distance - vexed by my (purely
scientific) objections to their practices, make arrogant and
puerile critiques of investigations which, like those in La
Misere du monde*1 draw on all the acquired experience.)
I remember very clearly, for example, the day when, on
the Collo peninsula, in a centre where the population was
being 'regrouped', the fate of the interview, and perhaps of
the interviewers, hung momentarily on the answer I was to
give to the question put to me by the people among whom
we wanted to conduct our study. It all started in Algiers, at
40
P. Bourgois, En Quite de respect. Le crack a New York (Paris:
Editions du Seuil, 2001).
41
M. Sanchez-Jankowski, Islands in the Street: Gangs in Urban
American Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
42
P. Bourdieu et al., La Misere du monde (Paris: Editions du
Seuil, 1993), trans, as The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in
Contemporary Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1999).
51
Sketchfara Self-Analysis
the Institut de Statistiques in the Rue Bab Azoun, where

Alain Darbel, the IN SEE administrator responsible for
'drawing a sample' of the population of the regrouping
centres - which, given the lack of information on the
parent population, was virtually meaningless - chose, as if
at random (he was more favourable than not to 'Algerie
fraâise' and very hostile to the intrusion of sociologists
into the holy of holies of INSEE), two particularly
'difficult' regions: Matmatas, near Orleansville, and the
Collo peninsula, the region most fully under the control of
the ALN, which at one point had considered setting up a
provisional government there. It was one of the main
targets of the major military operations (called 'operations
Challe9), in which armoured vehicles, helicopters and para-
troopers were deployed in devastating but futile attempts
at 'pacification'. Although I was aware of the danger and,
more vaguely, of the arbitrariness of the choice (as I told
Darbel on the eve of our departure), I decided to go to
Collo, with a small team: two 'liberal' pied-noir^ students
('liberal' in the sense of that place and time, that is to say,
roughly, in favour of Algerian independence) - though
one of them, unable to bear the tension, opted to leave
before the investigation started; a young Arab, who told us
he was a law student, although he had no qualifications, and
who proved to be an extraordinary interviewer; and
Adbelmalek Sayad, who was a student of mine at the
43
Pied-noir (literally 'black feet*) is the ethnic self-designation
of French colonists born in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia during
the colonial era, and their descendants (trans.).
52
Faculty and himself also involved in the 'liberal student'

movement. After a long car journey in my Renault
Dauphine, we arrived in Constantine, which had the air of
a besieged city. The doors of all the cafes were covered
with wire mesh, to protect against grenade attacks, and at
four in the afternoon there was no one on the streets. Our
plan to go on to Collo by road terrified the sous-prefet, a
young enarque who hardly dared cross the street to join his
mother. He insisted that we go by boat, via Philippeville.44
The voyage from Philippeville to the small harbour of
Collo seemed to me exhilarating: at last I would see things
close up for myself. Along the whole shoreline, the moun-
tains were in flames.
The sous-prefet of Collo, whose previous post had been
at Romorantin,45 had a message conveyed to me that I
should take care, and that 'a fake terrorist attack (organized
by the French army) can come out of the blue*. Colonel
Vaudrey (I think it was he), the former commander in chief
in Algiers, knew that we were there and who we were (I
was on the 'red list', no doubt since the end of my military
service. I had learned this on the morning of 13 May 1958,
from one of my pied-noir students. Although well aware of
my views on Algeria - I had given a lecture the title of
44
An enarque is a graduate of the Ecole Nationale
d'Administration or EN A, France's top grande ecole for the train-
ing of upper civil servants. The city of Philippeville was renamed
Skikda in 1962, after the proclamation of Algerian independence
(trans.).
45
A small town in rural France, a hundred miles from Paris
(trans.).
53
which, 'On Algerian culture', was perfectly transparent in

the context of the time, and which the Algerian students
had suspended their strike to attend en masse - and,
although they entirely disagreed with what 1 told them,
without provocation but also without concessions, about
the difference between the effects of the colonial situation
and those of the acculturation linked to the 'contact of civ-
ilizations', a very fashionable theme in American ethnol-
ogy at the time, they had wanted to warn me that I would
be well advised to go into hiding. To convince me that they
were well informed, they asked me if I knew Gerard
Lebrun, who was indeed a friend of mine, at that time a
philosophy teacher at the khdgne in Algiers and himself on
the list of people to be 'neutralized', perhaps in the way
that Maurice Audin46 had been). I had also been made
aware of the ill-will of the military authorities by a young
student from the Ecole Centrale [another leading grande
ecole in Paris], who was against the war and who, in order
to be able to go and judge for himself, had asked to take pan
in one of the field trips organized by the army to convert
young people to the cause of 'Algerie franâise': he had
been sent to Collo, and he accompanied us in our fieldwork.
I chose to go to Ain Aghbel, about twenty kilometres
from Collo. The SAS captain, who could not quite under-
stand (or understood too well) what we had come for,
wanted to accommodate us in the army post. I refused the
offer and we went and set ourselves up in the former school,
46
Maurice Audin, lecturer at the University of Algiers,
abducted and murdered by the French army in 1957 (trans.).
54
outside the protected zone but in neutral territory (this

seemed to me to be very important in order to carry out the
fieldwork). As Sayad and I worked late into the night,
writing out the day's observations, shadows would roam
around. Every morning we would drive ten or so kilometres
in my Dauphine, along a gorge that was an ideal place for
real or fake ambushes (the SAS captain was attacked there
by the ALN shortly after we left - 1 do not remember how I
learned of this, perhaps from Salah Bouhedja, whom I first
met there and who later came to work in our research centre
in Paris). On the day we first arrived at the regrouping
centre, a cluster of men were sitting under some big olive
trees (I still have a whole series of photographs taken a few
days later). We left the car and walked towards them. Two
or three of them had weapons bulging under their djellabas.
One of them, very dark-skinned, with a round head and a
small beard, wearing a grey astrakhan hat which set him
apart from the others (he was one of the Bouafer sons, who
would turn out to be an amahbul^ a visionary and unpre-
dictable character, but nonetheless one who commanded
attention and respect; one of his brothers was a harki*7 and
the other was in the ALN), stood up and addressed me
(although nothing, in my appearance at least, distinguished
me from the others). He asked me with some excitement
what we had come to do there. I replied that we had come to
see and hear what they had to say and to report it, that the
French army was several kilometres away and that we were
at their mercy, or words to that effect. He invited us to sit
47
An Algerian siding with the French in the war of independence.
55
down and offered us coffee. (I was often helped in my

fieldwork, in Algiers and elsewhere, by such characters,
often highly intelligent autodidacts who, because of their
ambiguous location between two social conditions and two
civilizations, and sometimes between two religions - the
most educated of them sometimes professed syncretic
beliefs, which they explained by invoking Rene Guenon -
showed clear signs of oddity, even 'madness* (as suggested
by the term amahbul that was applied to them, from which
the French maboul [slang for 'crazy'] is derived), but were
nonetheless very highly regarded. One of them, who often
served as my safe-conduct and guarantor in my visits to the
kasbah (in the tensest moments of the Battle of Algiers, he
would introduce me with the words 'you can talk1, which
instandy dispelled mistrust), contrived things one day so
that we would walk arm in arm down the whole street in
front of the Faculty of Letters, at a time when the cafes were
full oipied-noir students in favour of 'Algerie franâise '.No
doubt to give the show its full force as a test and a challenge,
he had dressed in ostentatiously oriental style, with silk
sirwal trousers and an embroidered doublet, which, together
with his elegantly trimmed black beard, ensured that he
would not pass unnoticed. As for the Bouafer of Ain
Aghbel, he liked to accompany us in our fieldwork, and
often, after interviews which he had attended (I will not
easily forget the old man, said to be over a hundred years
old, who, when he uttered the names of the neighbouring
tribes, would get exhilarated in his enthusiasm for battle
before slumping back on his side in exhaustion), he would
give us his thoughts, each more typical than the last of what
56
I have called the cultural sabir, and of which I will give just
one example: 'The Beni Toufout (the name of a tribe) . . .
what's that, what does that mean?' he would ask. 'Beni
Toufout? Tu votes [you vote, pronounced with an Algerian
accent, to sound like Toufout]. You see, we invented
democracy. . .')
Rather as empirical study of the working classes has some-

times been seen by the prophets of the proletariat as a man-
ifestation of scepticism, the common-sense step of going
into thefieldto see what the situation was really like could,
in those days of political certainties, seem strange and even
suspect, especially when it concerned military operations
such as the 'regrouping' of populations. And it sometimes
happened, in 1960s Paris, that people would call me to
account for myfieldwork,almost as if the fact that I had
come back unharmed had somethingfishyabout it (my only
safe-conduct - I remember one day when I was driving
alone in my car towards a Kabyle village and, having come
upon a long column of military vehicles, was stopped and
forced to turn back - was a letter from the INSEE in
Algiers, saying that I was authorized to carry out research,
which I would show to the military authorities, who were
always surprised to encounter me in such dubious places).
Hence all the situations of disconnection, by excess or
by default, or, better, of being 'out of phase' or 'out of
place', in which I have constantly found myself in my rela-
tions with the intellectual world. For example, observation
of the 'regroupings' made it possible to anticipate and
announce, in a quite counterintuitive - and untimely - way
57
that these sites, hastily described by some as being in the

mould of concentration camps, would for the most part
live on after independence (in some places, ironically, the
old original villages became almost 'holiday homes' for the
villagers 'regrouped* in the plains); or that the self-
managed farms that fed the imagination of some 'pieds
verts\A% carried away by revolutionary enthusiasm, would
fall into the hands of an Algerian petite bourgeoisie of
authoritarian technocrats or the army, or even the barons
of a 'socialist neo-feudalism', as Mohammed Boukhobza
was to say later of the great estates that some high officials
of 'socialist* Algeria had carved out for themselves in the
south of the province of Constantine. (I must acknowl-
edge here the immense support that my realistic, and often
rather disenchanted and therefore, in those times of
collective utopianism, somewhat scandalous predictions
received from Algerian friends - among many others,
Leila Belhacene, Mouloud Feraoun, Rolande Garese,
Moulah Hennine, Mimi Bensmaine, Ahmed Misraoui,
Mahfoud Nechem and Abdelmalek Sayad. These Algerian
friendships, no doubt born of affinities of habitus, helped
me to arrive at a representation that was at once intimate
and distant, attentive and, if I might say so, affectionate,
warm, but without being naive or fatuous.)
The transformation of my vision of the world that
accompanied my transition from philosophy to sociology,
in which my Algerian experience is no doubt the pivotal
48
Supporters of an agrarian route towards Algerian socialism
(trans.).
58
moment, is, as I have said, not easy to describe, no doubt

because it is made up of the imperceptible accumulation of
the changes that were gradually imposed on me by the
experiences of life and that I brought about through a
work on myself that was inseparable from the work I was
doing on the social world. To give an approximate idea of
this apprenticeship, which I have often described as an ini-
tiation (I know that such terms will surprise those who
harbour a harshly reductive vision of sociology, which is
ritually described, especially in philosophy teaching, as
reductive and banally positivist), I would like to turn back
to the research project that I carried out, in parallel with
the work I was doing in Algeria, on the bachelorhood of
eldest sons in Beam. This gave rise to three articles, at
intervals of ten or fifteen years.49 Indeed, it is perhaps
not entirely misplaced to see a kind of intellectual
Bildungsroman in the history of that research, which,
taking as its object the sufferings and dramas linked to the
relations between the sexes in peasant society which is
more or less the title I gave, long before the emergence of
'gender studies', to the article in Les Temps Modernes
devoted to that object'0 - was the occasion and the opera-
tor of a veritable conversion. That word is, no doubt, not
too strong to describe the transformation, at once intellec-
tual and affective, that led me from the phenomenology of
emotional life (springing perhaps also from the emotions
49
See The Bachelors* Ball(Cambridge: Polity, 2008) (trans.).
'Les relations entre les sexes dans la societe paysanne', Les
Temps Modernes, 18, no. 195 (1962): 307-31.
59
and afflictions of life, which had to be consciously denied)

to a scientific practice implying a vision of the social world
that was both more distanced and more realistic. This
intellectual reorientation was fraught with social implica-
tions: it was accomplished through the shift from philoso-
phy to ethnology and, within this, to rural sociology,
situated at the very bottom of the social hierarchy of spe-
cialities; and the deliberate renunciation implied in this
negative displacement within the hierarchies would no
doubt not have been so easy if it had not been accompa-
nied by the confused dream of a reintegration into my
native world.
In my fieldwork in Kabylia, to defend myself against
the spontaneous sociology of my informants, I would
often think back to the peasants of Beam: did the social
unit that the Kabyles called either adhrum or thakharrubth
have any more 'reality* than the vaguely defined entity
that in Beam is called lou besiat, the totality of neigh-
bours, lous besis, to which some ethnologists of Europe,
following a local scholar, had given a scientifically recog-
nized status? It seemed necessary to conduct fieldwork
directly in Beam in order to objectivate the experience
that served, consciously or unconsciously, as my point of
reference. Thanks to Raymond Aron, who had known
him, I had just discovered the work of Alfred Schiitz, and
it seemed to me useful to question, like the phenomenol-
ogist, the familiar relationship to the social world, but in
a quasi-experimental way, by taking as the object of an
objective, even objectivist analysis a world that was famil-
iar to me, in which I was on first-name terms with all the
60
agents, where the ways of speaking, thinking and behav-

ing were entirely self-evident to me, and by the same
token to objectivate my relationship of familiarity with
that object, and the difference that separates it from the
scientific relationship which one arrives at, as I did in
Kabylia, through an effort armed with instruments of
objectivation such as genealogy and statistics.
In the first text, written in the early 1960s, when the
ethnography of European societies hardly existed and
when rural sociology kept a respectful distance from the
'field', I undertook to resolve the social enigma of the bach-
elorhood of eldest sons in a society renowned for its fierce
attachment to the principle of primogeniture. Remaining
very close to the naive vision from which I nonetheless
intended to break away, I threw myself into a somewhat
frantic total description of a social world that I knew
without truly knowing it, as is always the case with a famil-
iar universe. Nothing escapes the scientistic frenzy of
someone who discovers with a kind of wonder the pleasure
of objectivating, as taught in Marcel Maget's Guide d'etude
directe des comportements culturels, a tremendous hyperem-
piricist antidote to the fascination then exerted by the
structuralist constructions of Levi-Strauss (a fascination
attested by my article on the Kabyle house, which I wrote
at almost the same time51). The most visible sign of the con-
version of the gaze that is implied in adopting the posture
of the observer was the intensive use I then made of pho-
tographs, maps, ground plans and statistics: everything was
51
See above, note 33.
61
thrown into the pot - a sculptured door in front of which I

had walked a thousand times on my way home from school
or the games played in the village festivities, the age and
make of the cars, the age pyramid of the population; and I
offered the reader (without identifying it as such) the
ground plan of a house familiar to me because I had
played in it throughout my childhood. The immense work
required for the statistical construction of many double- or
triple-entry tables on relatively large populations without
the aid of calculator or computer, or the many interviews
accompanied by in-depth observations that I carried out
then, had the character of the somewhat perverse trials of
an initiatory ascesis.
But, proving that the heuristic trajectory also has some-
thing of an initiatory journey about it, through total
immersion and the happy reunions that accompany it, I
experienced a reconciliation with things and people from
which the entry into another life had imperceptibly dis-
tanced me and for which the ethnographic posture quite
naturally imposed respect: childhood friends, relatives,
their manners, their routines, their accent. A whole pan of
myself was given back to me, the very part by which I was
bound to them and which distanced me from them,
because I could not deny it without renouncing them,
ashamed of both them and myself. The return to my
origins was accompanied by a return, but a controlled
return, of the repressed. Of that, the text itself bears
hardly any trace. While the few vague and essayistic final
remarks on the gap between the primary vision and the
scientific vision may give a glimpse of the intention of
62
reflexivity that underpinned the whole undertaking (I

wanted to do a 'Tristes Tropiques in reverse'), nothing,
except perhaps the pent-up tenderness of the description
of the ball, evokes the intensely emotional atmosphere in
which my fieldwork was conducted. I think back, for
example, to what was the starting point of my project, the
school class photo that one of my fellow pupils, by then a
low-ranking clerk in the neighbouring town, commented
on, pitilessly intoning 'unmanageable!' with reference to
almost half of those who appeared in it; I think of all the
interviews, often very painful, that I conducted with old
bachelors of the generation of my father, who often
accompanied me in my work and, through his presence
and his discreet intercession, helped me to elicit trust and
confidence; I think of an old school friend, whose almost
feminine tact and refinement endeared him to me, and
who, having retired with his mother into a magnificendy
maintained house, had chalked on the stable door the
birthdates of his mares and the girls' names he had given
them. And the objectivist restraint of my remarks is no
doubt partly due to the fact that I felt the sense of com-
mitting something like a betrayal - which led me to refuse
to this day any republication of texts whose appearance in
scholarly journals with small circulation protected them
against malicious or voyeuristic readings.
No doubt because the progress it manifests lies in the
order of reflexivity understood as the scientific objectiva-
tion of the subject of objectivation, the second text marks
in a fairly clear manner the break with the structuralist
paradigm, through the shift from rule to strategy, from
-63
structure to habitus, and from the system to the socialized

agent, himself inhabited by the structure of the social
relations of which he is the product, that is to say the
decisive moment of the conversion of the gaze that is
accomplished when, underneath the rules of kinship, one
discovers matrimonial strategies, thus recovering the prac-
tical relationship to the world. This reappropriation of the
truth of the logic of practice is what, in return, made pos-
sible the discovery of the truth of the - at first sight so
strange ritual or matrimonial practices of the Kabyle
stranger, thus constituted as an alter ego.
The final text, which attains the most general, the most
simple and also the most robust model, is also the one
which makes it possible to understand most directly what
was both presented and disguised in the initial scene: the
small dance evening that I had observed and described, and
which, with the pitiless necessity of the word 'unmarriage-
able', had given me the intuition that I was confronted with
a highly significant social fact, was indeed a concrete and
visible realization of the market in symbolic goods. In
becoming unified at the national level (as it is, today, with
homologous effects, on a world scale), the matrimonial
market had condemned to a sudden, brutal devaluation
those who were bound up with the protected market of
the old-style matrimonial exchanges controlled by the
families, the eldest sons, 'good catches' suddenly converted
into 'empeasanted' peasants, savage hucous ('men of the
woods'), repellent and graceless, forever excluded from
the right to reproduce. Everything, in a sense, was present
from the inception, in the initial description, but in a form
64
such that, as the philosophers would say, the truth unveiled

itself there only by veiling itself.
(This kind of experimentation on the work of reflexivity
that I carried out in work on Beam, which was also, and
above all, an ethnography of ethnography and the ethno-
grapher, shows that one of the rarest springs of the practi-
cal mastery that defines the sociologist's craft, a central
component of which is what people call intuition, is
perhaps, ultimately, the scientific use of a social experience
which, so long as it is first subjected to sociological critique,
can, however lacking in social value it may be in itself, and
even when it is accompanied by crises (of conversion and
reconversion), be converted from a handicap into a capital.
As I have said elsewhere, it was no doubt a banal remark of
my mother's, which I would not even have picked up if I
had not been alerted to it ('they've become very "kith and
kin" with the X's now that there's a Polytechnicien in the
family') that, at the time of my study of bachelorhood, trig-
gered the reflections that led me to abandon the model of
the kinship rule for that of strategy. I shall not undertake
here to try to understand and set out the profound trans-
formations of this privileged relation of kinship that were
necessary for a remark that could only be made in a 'natural
setting', in a casual exchange of domestic familiarity, to be
received as a piece of information capable of being inte-
grated into an explanatory model. And I will simply indi-
cate that, in a more general way, it is only at the cost of a
veritable epistemological conversion, irreducible to what
the phenomenologists call the epoche, that intrinsically non-
pertinent lived experience can enter into scientific analysis.)
-65
It has no doubt been the taste for 'living all lives' that
Flaubert speaks of, and for seizing every opportunity to
enter into the adventure that opens up each time with the
discovery of new milieux (or simply the excitement of
starting a new research project), that, together with the
refusal of the scientistic definition of sociology, has led me
to interest myself in the most diverse social worlds. I think
that the reading I did in my interminable summer vacations
gave me a desire to explore unknown social milieux that is
perhaps felt less by those whose existence has confined
them to a more or less perfectly homogeneous social world.
In myfirstyear of khagne, as a young student still dazzled
by a Paris that gave reality to literary reminiscences, I
naively identified with Balzac (I remember a stupefying
first encounter with his statue, at the Vavin crossroads!), so
much so that more than once, when I was out walking on a
Sunday, I would follow strangers so as to discover their
quartier, their building, their surroundings, which I would
endeavour to guess.
There have been few times when I have not been
working on several personal research projects in parallel,
often very different in their objects, not to mention those
that I pursued vicariously, through the research that I
directed, often very closely, or that I proposed and coordi-
nated within the framework of the Centre de Sociologie
Europeenne. And so I have been able to participate in uni-
verses of thought, past or present, very distant from my
own, such as those of the aristocracy or bankers, dancers at
the Paris Opera or actors at the Theatre Fran9ais, auction-
eers or notaries, and work myself into them, through a
66
'sample' of the category that I met, and drawing on

analogy with positions or experiences that I knew well
(those of the scholastic nobility, for example, in order to
understand those of the social nobility). I went through
great periods of passion for inquiry, when I conducted the
research that led to Distinction*1 (I would sometimes regret
that people did not display their occupation on a lapel
badge, as at conferences, to assist my observations), or
when I spent hours listening to conversations, in cafes, on
petanque or football pitches, in post offices, but also at
society receptions, cocktail parties or concerts. Quite often
I could hold back no longer and would find a pretext to
strike up a conversation (it is much easier than one thinks)
with someone I wanted to know better and to inquire,
without seeming to do so, into some problem that inter-
ested me. I wondered whether I liked people, as I had long
supposed, or whether I had simply come to take a profes-
sional interest in them which may imply a form of affection
(Abdelmalek Sayad, for example, had become the close
friend of a doctor who was a specialist in the very rare
disease of which he was one the bearers . . .).
But this dispersion was also a perhaps somewhat strange
way of working to reunify a social science that had been
fictitiously fragmented and of refusing in practice the spe-
cialization imposed by the model of the more advanced sci-
ences, which appeared to me entirely premature in the case
,2
La Distinction. Critique sociale du jugement (Paris: Minuit,
1979), trans, as Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of
Taste (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984).
67
of a science still in its infancy (I remember in particular the

sense of scandal I felt, at the World Congress of Sociology
in Varna, when I saw the division of working parties
between the sociology of education, the sociology of
culture and the sociology of intellectuals, which led each of
these 'specialisms' to abandon to one of the others the true
explanatory principles of its objects). And the 'butterfly'
temperament (to use Fourier's term) that constantly led me
towards new research, new objects - or which, more pre-
cisely, led me to grasp every opportunity to take hold of
new areas of research - perhaps explains why, without
ever having consciously willed it and above all without
the slightest 'imperialist' intention, I have found myself
present in the totality of the field of the social sciences.
I am well aware that my undertaking may appear as a
way of pursing the inflated ambitions of the total intellec-
tual, though in another mode, more demanding and also
more hazardous: I did indeed run the risk of losing on both
counts and appearing too theoreticist to pure empiricists
and too empiricist to pure theoreticians and of sometimes
leaving behind me research programmes rather than com-
pleted research (as in the case of socio-linguistics). In fact,
everything combined in such a way that the space of
possibles that offered itself to me could not be reduced to
the one that was put forward by the constituted positions in
the space of sociology. Indeed, I cannot avoid connecting the
breadth of my intellectual undertakings, indifferent to
the frontiers between sociological specialisms, with my
move from philosophy, a prestigious discipline in which
some of my peers had remained - a fact which is no doubt
68
very important subjectively and with the loss of symbolic

capital that resulted from it 'objectively'. (The fact that I am
here both subject and object of the analysis compounds a
very common difficulty of sociological analysis - the
danger that the 'objective intentions', which are brought
out by analysis, will appear as express intentions, inten-
tional strategies, explicit projects, in the particular case the
conscious or quasi-cynical intention of safeguarding a
threatened symbolic capital.) So it was that litde by little an
eclectic yet highly selective disposition asserted itself,
leading me to refuse options that were likely to restrict the
universe of theoretical resources (like the exclusions per-
formed by the Marxists) and of empirical possibilities (like
all methodological monisms), a disposition of which it can
be said at one and the same time that it is, in some ways,
'anti-everything', and, from another angle, 'catch-all', like
some political parties.
But all these causes and reasons are not enough truly to
explain my total, slighdy crazed, investment in research.
No doubt this compulsion found its principle in the very
logic of research, which endlessly generates new ques-
tions, and also in the extraordinary pleasure and joys
derived from the enchanted, perfect world of science. The
group that I set up, based on affective affinity as much as
intellectual convergence, played a decisive role in this
enormous investment, with my own belief producing in
others the belief capable of reinforcing and confirming my
belief. Everything thus combined to favour an individual
and collective self-certainty that induced a profound
detachment from the external world, its judgements and its
- 6 9 -
sanctions. (I have had the good fortune to be able to live for

a long time in fairly great indifference to social success.
And I remember often having thought that, to the extent
that I strove to bring together competences and intentions
that are rarely combined, especially theoretical and techni-
cal ones, it was probable and natural that I should long
remain misunderstood and unknown; so I was entirely pre-
pared for it, to the point of seeing with some astonishment
the relative recognition that my work obtained, no doubt
partly on the basis of misconceptions. I saw myself rather
in the image of the medieval sculptor in the church at La
Souterraine,53 who, high up in the obscurity of a dark vault,
where it was destined to pass unnoticed, carved a capital
representing a human coupling. The recognition I was
granted by a small 'invisible college* was sufficient for me
and I did not suffer at all from my relative obscurity, which
was to a large extent elective. All the more so since 1 was
greatly supported and encouraged by the testimonies I
received, in chance encounters or in letters, from people
who told me they had been profoundly touched, sometimes
transformed or 'liberated', by what I wrote (especially in
Distinction). Many a time I had to reassure or console
young foreign researchers, from New Zealand, Australia,
Italy, Denmark. . . who told me of their disappointment or
sense of grievance that my work remained litde known in
their country, despite all their efforts to get it better recog-
nized, especially by the imiversity authorities. I came to be
worried by these things only belatedly, perhaps as an effect
53
In the departement of La Creuse, in the Limousin region (trans.)
70
of age, and especially through the affectionate concern that

they provoked in persons who were dear to me and in
whose eyes I wanted to cut a good figure.)
This self-certainty was also based how to say this
without pose or pathos? on the inner conviction that my
task as a sociologist, which did not appear to me as either a
gift or an entitlement, nor as some grandiose 'mission', was
without any doubt a privilege implying a duty in return.
But I cannot not say it here all these reasons are in part
only the relay and rationalization of a deeper reason or
cause: a very cruel unhappiness which brought the irreme-
diable into the childhood paradise of my life and which,
since the 1950s, has weighed on every moment of my exis-
tence, converting for example my initial dissension with
the Ecole Normale and the impostures of intellectual arro-
gance into a resolute break with the vanity of academic
things. This means to say that, without ever being menda-
cious, the descriptions and explanations that I have so far
given remain inaccurate and partial inasmuch as all my
behaviours (for example, my choice of Moulins as much as
my momentary investment in a musical career or my initial
interest in emotional life and medicine, which had led me
to Canguilhem) were overdetermined (or subtended) by
the inner desolation of solitary grief: frenetic work was
also a way of filling an immense void and pulling myself
out of despair by interesting myself in others; abandoning
the heights of philosophy for the wretchedness of the
bidonville was also a kind of sacrificial expiation of my ado-
lescent avoidances of reality; the laborious return to a style
stripped of the tricks and tics of scholastic rhetoric also
71
marked the purification of a new birth. And what I have

said here of the causes or reasons of each of the experi-
ences described, such as my Algerian adventures or my
scientific enthusiasm, also masks the subterranean impulse
and the secret intention that were the hidden face of a
double life.
The disappointment mingled with revolt that the state of

intellectual things inspired in me mainly crystallized, in the
initial phase of my undertaking, around the then dominant
American sociology, and also, but on another terrain,
around philosophy, which, whether in its traditional de-
finition or in its most ostentatiously innovating form,
seemed to me to represent a major obstacle to the progress
of the social sciences. I have often had occasion to describe
myself, with some irony, as the leader of a liberation
movement of the social sciences against the imperialism o f
philosophy. I had as little indulgence for the sociologists
who saw a visit to America as a kind of initiatory voyage as
for the apprentice philosophers who, ten or fifteen years
earlier, rushed to the archives of a Husserl whose major
works were still largely unpublished in French.
American sociology, through the Capitoline triad o f
Parsons, Merton and Lazarsfeld, subjected social science t o
a whole series of reductions and impoverishments, from
which, it seemed to me, it had to be freed, in particular by a
return to the texts of Durkheim and Max Weber, both o f
whom had been annexed and distorted by Parsons (Weber's
work also had to be rethought, to free it from the neo-
Kantian coating with which Aron, who introduced it into
72
France, had shrouded it). But to combat this global ortho-

doxy, it was above all necessary to engage in theoretically
grounded empirical research, by refusing both pure and
simple submission to the dominant definition of science and
the obscurantist refusal of everything that might be or seem
associated with the United States, starting with statistical
methods.
If, in the early 1960s, despite weekly reminders from the
authorized representatives of the master in a missionary
land, I had stubbornly refused to attend the lectures that
Paul Lazarsfeld gave at the Sorbonne, before the assem-
bled world of French sociology, it was because it had all
seemed to me more like a collective ceremony of submis-
sion than a simple technical enterprise of scientific train-
ing and updating. This did not prevent me, far from it,
from working, as my collaboration with statisticians from
INSEE had encouraged me and prepared me, to master the
whole panoply of techniques - multivariate analysis or
latent classes - that could be offered by the former Austrian
socialist who had turned into the spokesman of a scien-
tific imperialism acting under the banner of the Ford
Foundation or the Congress for Cultural Freedom; but to
do so without taking on, at the same time, the scientistic
baggage designed to legitimate it. This strategy was prob-
ably too realist, without being in the least cynical, to be
easily understood, in times when scientific positions were
hardly differentiated from political positions. For, aiming
among other things to take hold of the instruments of the
adversary and use them in the service of other scientific
ends, it was as much opposed to the eager or resigned
73
submission of mere camp-followers still marvelling at

having 'discovered America* as to the fictitious and de-
feated revolt of those who sought to resist the grip of the
dominant concepts and methods without providing them-
selves with the weapons that could combat them effectively
on the very terrain of empirical research, such as the theo-
rists of the Frankfurt school and their French acolytes. (In
parenthesis I should mention another, entirely comple-
mentary scientific strategy, which, in the context of the
time, when any association with state statistics was sus-
pected of conservative compromise, was just as much mis-
understood, the strategy of working with statisticians from
IN SEE to try - as I briefly thought I had succeeded in
doing, when the state institute adopted the classifications of
Distinction - to bring state science back into the scientific
field or, more modestly, to introduce into the minds of state
scientists a certain number of preoccupations and disposi-
tions specific to the most advanced scientific research, such
as reflexivity with regard to the tacit presuppositions of the
problematics and systems of classification routinely imple-
mented by the institution.)
The history of my (atfirstsight hopeless) confrontation
with Paul Lazarsfeld, who at that time exercised a social and
scientific hegemony over world sociology that is difficult to
imagine, found, for me, something like a satisfying conclu-
sion, one day in the late 1960s, when, being then at the
height of his renown, he had literally 'summoned' Alain
Darbel and me to the Hotel des Ambassadeurs, where he
habitually stayed when visiting on behalf of the Ford
Foundation, to tell us his criticisms of the mathematical
74
model of gallery visiting that we had published in VAmour

de lart.SA He arrived with a copy of the book on which he
had scrawled in blue ink and, with a big cigar in his mouth,
he pointed out, with some brutality, what he regarded as
unforgivable errors. They were in fact in each case, as any
reader less persuaded of the backwardness of French
science would have realized, crude misprints introduced by
a typesetter less accustomed to such refinements, which the
publisher would not let us rectify until the second edition.
When these corrections were granted, Lazarsfeld declared
with some solemnity that 'nothing so good had ever been
done in the United States'. But he took care never to put it
in writing, and continued to give his spiritual investiture to
Raymond Boudon, the accredited agent of his scientific
multinational.
In the struggle against the theoretical and methodological

orthodoxy which dominated sociology worldwide and in
the effort to escape the obligatory choice presented by the
opposition between the Marxists, stuck in their refusal
of Weber and of empirical sociology, and the simple
importers of unlabelled American methods and concepts,
one could scarcely look for support from philosophy, even
the seemingly very subversive kind which was beginning
to assert itself in Paris. Paradoxically, this contestatory
movement no doubt owed its particular vigour to the very
privileged situation of philosophy in France, in large part
a consequence of the quite unique existence of philosophy
S4
See above, note 16.
75
teaching in the final years of secondary education, and of

the dominant position of that discipline in the scholastic
hierarchies (I am thinking here of the model I invoked to
explain the exceptional force of the movement of subver-
sion which appeared in France, with Manet and the impres-
sionists, in reaction against an all-powerful academic
institution, and its contrasting absence in Britain, which did
not have a similar concentration of symbolic powers in the
field of art).
Because the university institution, which was in very
deep crisis, could not fulfil the promises implied in their
exceptional scholastic trajectories, relegating almost all of
them to marginal positions, these philosophers were ani-
mated by an especially critical disposition against an insti-
tution that was particularly well armed to impose a
representation of philosophical activity that was both
exalted and narrow (with the agregation and its very
French exercises and syllabuses . . .). They therefore
responded in a manner that was miraculously adapted
(without of course in any way having sought it) to the
expectations aroused, in France and perhaps especially in
the United States, by the 'revolution' of 1968, a specific
revolution, which had introduced politico-intellectual
contestation into the universityfield(Feyerabend in Berlin
and Kuhn in the United States being also used to give a
language to a spontaneous contestation of science). But
despite these airs of radicalism, this movement remained
profoundly ambiguous, both politically and philosophi-
cally, because the revolt against the university institution
was also a conservative reaction to the threat that the rise
76
of the social sciences, especially through linguistics and

'structuralist' anthropology, represented for the philoso-
phers, who were both fascinated and worried. And it was
no doubt again the concern to maintain their hegemony
with respect to the social sciences that led them, paradox-
ically, to take over, while radicalizing it, the historicist cri-
tique of truth (and of the sciences), in a strategy very close
to that of Heidegger's ontologizing of historicism. They
thus offered an unexpected comeback for what the hitherto
dominant logicist tradition had condemned as the 'genetic
fallacy', by inducing a view of attachment to formal and
universal truths as old-fashioned and even somewhat reac-
tionary, compared to the analysis of particular historical
and cultural situations.
The refusal, which had long oriented my intellectual
choices, of what Merleau-Ponty called, in a very differ-
ent sense from the common usage, 'intellectualism' was
rooted in dispositions that inclined me to stand aside from
the great fashionable intellectual 'movements', such as the
exoteric form of 'structuralism' or its journalistic liquida-
tion - of which one of the centres was, in both cases, the
magazine Le Nouvel Observateur. (My only participation in
the structuralist debate, apart from critical analyses
intended for learned journals, such as the article entitled
'Structuralism and theory of sociological knowledge',55
was a fairly clearly anti-structuralist text on the intellec-
tual field, published in the issue of Les Temps Modernes
" 'Structuralism and theory of sociological knowledge', Social

Research, 35, no. 4 (winter 1968): 681-706.
77
edited by Jean Pouillon on structuralism'6 - so that one has

to be very ill-intentioned, or simply ill-informed, to count
me among the 'structuralists'.) I very consciously
excluded the double-game and double-profit strategies of
all those who liked to call themselves 'sociologist and
philosopher' or 'philosopher and historian', which, I
must confess, were fairly antipathetic to me, among
other reasons because they seemed to declare a lack of
ethical and scientific rigour. Nor did I take part in the
semiologico-literary fads that prevailed for a moment in
the university field and in the camp of Tel Quel, and I was
not much better disposed towards those who, combining
the prestige of philosophy, Nietzschean or Heideggerian,
and that of literature, with obligatory references to
Artaud, Bataille or Blanchot (not to mention Sade, a com-
pulsory dissertation topic for every intellectual), helped to
blur the frontiers between philosophy (or science) and lit-
erature. That is why, even if I might have had some points
of agreement with them that can be called political and
which are no doubt explained in part by the fact that we
had in common the anti-institutional dispositions linked to
a similar position in a profoundly transformed academic
space, I am not a little surprised to see myself some-
times counted today, by virtue of the allodoxia*1 that
56
'Champ intellectuel et projet createur', Les Temps Modernes
(Problemes du structuralisme), 246 (Nov. 1966): 865-906; trans, as
'Intellectual field and creative project', Social Science Information^
8, no. 2 (1968): 89-119.
,7
See below, p. 82 (trans.).
78
accompanies transmission across the Adantic, among the

'postmodernists', whom the reactivation of the old preju-
dices of the philosophers against the social sciences has
often led to the verge of nihilism.
(I hesitate to undertake to say here - but I cannot avoid
doing so, for the sake of the clarity of the analysis and also
for the truth that I owe to younger readers, who are liable
to be misled, especially abroad, by the apparent resem-
blances - how I situated myself objectively and subjec-
tively in relation to Michel Foucault. As was brought home
to me very clearly, when, after his death, I undertook to
write for a foreign journal an evocation of his life and
work58 that would avoid obituary rhetoric, I had almost all
the pertinent properties in common with him: a normalien
and an agrege de philosophic a few years before me (I had
attended his courses at the Ecole Normale), he held philo-
sophical positions very akin to my own, and in particular
very close to Canguilhem and the Clermont-Ferrand
group (he had been recruited by Vuillemin), with whom I
associated myself. Almost all - except two, but these, in my
view, had very great weight in the constitution of his intel-
lectual project: he came from a well-to-do provincial bour-
geois family, and he was homosexual (one could add a
third, although in my view it is only an effect of the first
two, at the same time as being an explanatory factor,
namely the fact that he was and declared himself to be a
58
'Non chiedetemi chi sono. Un profilo de Michel Foucault',
L'indice (Rome), no. i (Oct. 1984): 4-5 (cf. 'A free thinker: "Do not
ask me who I am" \ Paragraph (London), no. f (1985): 80-7).
79
philosopher). It follows that one can, almost at will, almost

efface the differences or, on the contrary, accentuate them,
by noting that, as the 'last difference', they are particularly
significant and powerful.
The resemblances, on which I shall not dwell for long,
are visible in terms both of research and of action.
Ignoring the established hierarchy of objects and the
sacred frontier between philosophy and the historic sci-
ences, Michel Foucault never ceased to expand the tradi-
tional definition of philosophy to bring into it the world as
it is, and consequently all kinds of objects, unknown or
excluded - madness, imprisonment, power, etc. - appre-
hended each time through precise cases, situated and
dated, and detailed dossiers. He also strove to combine
autonomy vis-a-vis the social world, and especially poli-
tics, with the scientifically armed engagement in the social
world that defines what he calls 'the specific intellectual*.
To go onto the terrain of politics, as he did, especially in
his battle over the prisons, was to put himself in the situa-
tion of extreme vulnerability of the self-declared homo-
sexual, who, according to David Halperin, 'opens himself
up to accusations of pathology and partiality, and gives
others an absolute epistemologicalprivilege over him (and
it is known that some campaigns that were conducted
against him, especially in the United States, took advan-
tage of the particularities of his sexual orientation to
weaken and discredit - by making it appear as relative and
relativizable - a thinking which profoundly questions the
moral order and the political order). In short, no one has
more or better managed than Foucault to realize this
80
reconciliation of scholarship and commitment59 that

confers its immense power of attraction on his life and
work, especially in traditions which, like the German or
the American ones, and quite wrongly in my view, set
these two dimensions of the intellectual worthy of the
name against each other.
The fact remains that, in spite of the very great proxim-
ity, which appeared particularly in the action we took
together over Poland, and the solidarity that united us, from
the early 1980s, as much in public life as in university life, I
was separated from Michel Foucault by a whole series of
differences of style, visible especially in the areas of politics,
art and research, some of which I have mentioned, and
which seem to me to flow from profound differences in our
dispositions and our respective positions. Whereas, in
engaging myself resolutely in thefieldof the social sciences,
initially ethnology, then sociology, I was in fact breaking
with the expectations and demands of the philosophical
world in order to submit myself to the constraints of a
scientific discipline, endowed with its specific capital of
problems, theories and methods, Michel Foucault, however
great his distance, sanctioned by his remoteness, first geo-
graphic, then social, from the heart of the university insti-
tution, always remained present in the philosophical field
and attentive to the expectations of the Paris intellectual
world. These differences in the objective situations are,
quite clearly, in a relationship of circular causality with our
dispositions: on my side, they pushed me to engage in
59
The two terms are in English in the original (trans.).
sociology, and of a kind particularly antithetical to the

expectations of the French intellectual field, such as the
analysis of artistic practices and intellectual worlds, and to
invest myself primordially in the collect ive undertakings of
a research group engaged in tasks and p reoccupations very
remote from the intellectual world, such as ethnographic
fieldwork and statistics; on Foucault's side, they inclined
him to singular commitments which, as such, better con-
formed to the expectations of the world s of art and litera-
ture and to scientific practices less different from those of the
traditional scholar, such as assiduous use of the great
libraries (it was only at the very end of his life that he
thought of creating a research group - and I helped him do
so). The difference between the two sets of subversive dis-
positions and the position-takings that th ey favour, both in
research and in political intervention, is reinforced by the
effect of the expectations objectively inscribed in the two
fields and is also amplified by the fact that, depending on
whether it comes from a sociologist or a philosopher, the
same action, in art for example (but also in politics), may
appear as the grossness of a Philistine or the audacious and
refined transgression of an aesthete. I shall stop here this
evocation of the resemblances and differences which, as
much in reality as in representations, bring together and sep-
arate two intellectual styles, hoping that it will suffice to
avoid that particular form of allodoxia which, by leading
readers to recognize the similar in the different and the
different in the similar, can only do harm to the circulation
and adequate understanding of the two bodies of thought
concerned.)
82
One should also, as a point of method, analyse here the

present state of the field of sociology and the field of the
social sciences in order to give oneself the means of under-
standing individual and collective trajectories (especially
that of the research group that I led, the Centre de
Sociologie Europeenne) in relation to the changes in the
symbolic power relations within each of the twofieldsand
between them; and consider in particular my individual
trajectory, taking into account the specific character of the
position of the College de France, which, as I showed in
Homo academicus was (above all) a site of consecration
of heretics, situated outside all temporal powers over the
academic institution. The revolution that was accom-
plished, while it succeeded at the symbolic level (at least
abroad) met with a relative failure that is clearly seen in the
fate of the group: it would not have been so continuously
subject to pressures and reactions of collective defence
aimed at preventing its 'normal' reproduction if, by the
logic of its functioning as much as by the content of its
scientific productions, it had not threatened the order and
the routines of the field.
60
Homo academicus (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1984), trans, as
Homo Academicus (Cambridge: Polity, 1988).
83
T
his sketch for a self-analysis cannot avoid giving
some space to the formation of the dispositions
associated with the position of origin, dispositions
which we know play a part, in relation with the social
spaces within which they are actualized, in determining
practices. I shall not dwell at length on the properties of my
family of origin. My father, a peasant sharecropper's son,
who, when he was about thirty, in other words roughly
when I was born, became first a postman and then clerk of
the village post office, continued this white-collar occupa-
tion for the rest of his working life, in a particularly remote
little village in Beam (although only twenty kilometres
from Pau, it was unknown to my lycee classmates, who
would make jokes about it). I think that my childhood
experience as a 'renegade' who was the son of a renegade
(which I seemed to recognize in the Paul Nizan whom
Sartre evokes in his preface to Aden Arable6*) no doubt
weighed heavily in the formation of my dispositions
towards the social world: I was very close to my primary
school classmates, the sons of small peasants, craftsmen
or shopkeepers, with whom I had almost everything in
common, except the scholastic success that distinguished
61
J.-P. Sartre, Preface to P. Nizan, Aden Arable (Paris: Maspero,
i960), trans, as Aden, Arable (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1968).
84
me somewhat, but I was separated from them by a kind of

invisible barrier that was sometimes expressed in various
ritual insults against lous emplegats, clerks 'with white
hands', rather as my father was separated from these peas-
ants and manual workers in the midst of whom he lived
the life of a poorly paid low-ranking civil servant.
Housed with his family in an apartment that came with the
job but lacking the most basic comforts (for a long time,
water had to be fetched from the public fountain), he was
tied to a gruelling schedule, from Monday morning to
Saturday evening and from six in the morning when
the post van came and the mail was collected, until the
accounts were balanced, often late at night, especially when
the end-of-month accounts had to be finalized; he kept his
own garden, bought and sawed his firewood, and the
slightest purchase - a Levitan-style bedroom suite that my
mother and he had had made for them in Nay, when I must
have been aged eight or nine, the little twenty-franc bicycle
they gave me and which a girl friend of mine to whom I had
lent it had badly damaged by crashing into the church wall,
before I had even had a chance to try it - was a major deci-
sion, discussed for days on end. He was also separated from
his father, of whom he was very fond, and his brother: they
had stayed on the farm, and he would go and lend a hand
when they were most busy and he had some leave. He
showed some signs that it pained him. He was never
happier, I think, than when he could assist the most help-
less, with whom he felt at ease and who trusted him totally,
and he expended a wealth of kindness and patience, for
which, when I was older, I sometimes reproached him a
85
little, helping the neediest to make sense of the paperwork

they entrusted to him ('Aquets papes!', 'These papers!',
they would say) - war pensions or invalidity benefits,
bonds, postal orders, etc. - and I remember having wept
several times when I thought of the fact that his name,
despite his many merits, would not be commemorated in
any reference book. I cannot say how much I was pained at
the clear signs of the guilt he felt, even towards peasants
who were often better-off than he and in which I shared
through the wounding insults and aggressive jokes of some
of my schoolmates. He taught me very simply, by his
whole attitude, to respect 'humble folk', among whom he
counted himself, and also, although he never spoke in such
terms, their struggles (he made me listen to the guns of the
last batdes of the Spanish Civil War and 1 often saw him
talking, in an indecisive mixture of Bearnais, Spanish and
French, with the /rente popular, as they were called, the
defeated Republican fighters who came fleeing over
the border). He voted far on the left, was a member of the
union, which caused some problems in that fairly conserv-
ative rural world, especially during the strikes, and he had
some great political admirations, for Robespierre, Jean
Jaures, Leon Blum, Edouard Herriot, embodiments of the
ideal of the Republic and its schools, which he wanted me
to share.
My mother came, on her mother's side, from a 'great
family' of peasants and had had to defy her parents to make
a marriage that was seen as far beneath her (my father
never spoke without some fury about his experience of
social differences as they asserted themselves in the village
86
microcosm, and he was always fairly truculent and mis-

trustful towards the local notables doctors, gendarme
sergeants, the priest or even primary school teacherswho
had scarcely encouraged his efforts to push me to the
lycee). She lived with her parents in a small one-storey
house, detached from the great family house, which her
mother had received for her dowry as the youngest daugh-
ter, and there I was born. My maternal grandfather had
been, successively or simultaneously, a pit sawyer and
timber transporter, a fabric retailer and a smallholder - he
always had a few cows and some pasture, and a few
hundred square metres of marshy woodland; as the poor
relation of a 'great family', he had a great concern for
respectability, and I discovered later, when I helped my
parents to renovate it (destroying all traces of the past, in a
kind of gleeful fury that was somewhat hurtful to my
grandmother the pigsty and the henhouse, the wooden
shed that had served as a privy, lean-tos crammed with old
jumble and absurd bric-a-brac collected from every
corner), the wealth of improvisation and salvaging that he
had deployed to give to what was only a small single-storey
tenant farmer's or sharecropper's house, consisting essen-
tially of a large room with a mud floor and a 'salon'
reserved for great occasions, the appearances of a 'great'
house with two storeys, the sign by which 'great families'
used to be recognized. (At the Ecole Normale, among the
young men who served as waiters at the tables of the stu-
dents who made up the hard core of the communist cell in
which Louis Althusser liked to exercise his talents as a
political strategist, especially in blocking the initiatives
87
of non-communist students, I found a whole group of

Bearnais emigrants, from the village of Lanneplaa; my
grandfather was from there, and also his father, who was in
Paris during the Commune, employed as a waiter at the
College Sainte-Barbe, and therefore no doubt at the origin
of the tradition of emigration that had brought us our
'justins', as the waiters were called, from thefirstname of
one of them.) My grandfather had passed on his concern
for respectability and his respect for conventions and pro-
prieties to my mother, who was totally devoted to him. She
clashed with my father, who was of a more rebellious tem-
perament and somewhat anarchist, when she tried without
much conviction to impose a modicum of external compli-
ance with the local customs, especially the religious ones,
which I refused (mainly because I felt real panic at the idea
of walking the whole length of the church on Sundays to
reach the boys' pews), or cosmetic or sartorial particulari-
ties, a white smock on one occasion, or long trousers
another time (not to mention the impeccable parting she
would struggle to make in my hair, which I would ruffle as
soon as I was out of the house), which repelled me because
they set me apart from the others and exposed me to their
taunts. It was again her veneration for everything associ-
ated with the memory of her father that led her to rush,
without regard for the danger, to warn a friend of her
father's when she learned from my father, himself alerted
by his contacts in the Resistance, that the Germans were
about to come looking for a maquisard leader hidden in his
farm. (During the War of Liberation in Algeria I often saw
similar 'political' actions that also sprang from quite other
88
motivations.) She told me, not so long ago, with much

laughter ('A medal, for me? What a joke!'), that the maquis-
ard whom she had saved had, after the Liberation, wanted
her to be awarded a commemorative medal.
I discovered little by little, mainly through the gaze of
others, the particularities of my habitus which, like a
certain propensity to masculine pride and ostentation, a
marked taste for disputation, most often somewhat put on,
or the propensity to indignation over trifles', now appear
to me to be linked to the cultural particularities of my
region of origin, which I perceived and understood more
clearly by analogy with what I read about the 'tempera-
ment' of cultural or linguistic minorities such as the Irish.
Only slowly did I understand that if some of my most
banal reactions were often misinterpreted, it was often
because the manner - tone, voice, gestures, facial expres-
sions, etc. in which I sometimes manifested them, a
mixture of aggressive shyness and a growling, even
furious, bluntness, might be taken at face value, in other
words, in a sense too seriously, and that it contrasted so
much with the distant assurance of well-born Parisians
that it always threatened to give the appearance of uncon-
trolled, querulous violence to reflex and sometimes purely
ritual transgressions of the conventions and common-
places of academic or intellectual routine.
Rediscovering a photograph in which I was walking
alongside my father in a street in Pau (in the days when
photographers offered instant snapshots to passers-by),
probably on a prize day, I remembered what he once said
to me when, coming out of the lycee, I related one of my
- 8 9
latest clashes with the school administration (it was only

thanks to the affectionate complicity of the headmaster,
Bernard Lamicq, one of the few Bearnais normaliens, if not
the only one, who decisively oriented my 'career', that I
escaped exclusion, just a few months before the baccalau-
reate after a dispute with the director of studies): 'Maynat,
qu'as cachaou!', 'My boy, you've got guts!' (the cachaou is
the 'big tooth', the molar, and by extension something like
the capacity to bite and not let go, to hold firm). He no
doubt wanted to praise the quality of stubbornness that the
whole local tradition glorifies, to the point of seeing a good
sign, whether in a thing or a person, in being difficult to
approach or having an aggressively defensive exterior:
'Arissou arissat, castgane lusente', 'Prickly husk, shiny
chestnut'. (In the course of my research on the grandes
ecoles, I accidentally discovered that Lamicq, a contempo-
rary of Sartre and Aron at the Ecole Normale, had been
mocked, together with Pierre Vilar, the Marxist historian,
who also came from a remote corner of the province of
Languedoc, in a particularly cruel passage in one of the
ritual songs of the initiation rites of the Ecole, 'La com-
plainte du khagneux'. I recall that the same Pierre Vilar,
when I met him shortly after the publication of Les
Heritiers, publicly rebuked me for that book, which he
saw - thereby proving the power of the system - as an
unjustifiable assault on 'the School as a liberating force'.)
The experience of boarding school no doubt played a deci-

sive part in the formation of my dispositions - in particu-
lar, by inclining me to a realistic (Flaubertian) vision of
90
social relations, which had already been present from

my childhood upbringing and which contrasted with the
irenic, moralizing and neutralizing vision that is encour-
aged, it seems to me, by the protected experience of bour-
geois existences (especially if they are tinctured with
Christian religiosity and moralism). This came in particu-
lar through the discovery of a social difference, inverted
this time, from 'bourgeois' urbanites, and also the disjunc-
ture between the violent and abrasive world of the board-
ing school - a terrible education in social realism, in which
everything is already present, through the necessities of
the struggle for survival: opportunism, servility, sneaking,
treachery, etc. and the world of the classroom, where
systematically opposite values reigned, and those teachers
who, especially the women, offered a world of intellectual
discoveries and human relationships that can be called
enchanted.
The old seventeenth-century building, vast and rebar-
bative, with its immense corridors, the walls white above
and dark green below, or the monumental stone staircases,
worn down in the middle, that we would take in the
evenings, walking two by two, up to the dormitory, offered
nothing on our own scale and left no secret corner for our
solitude, no refuge, no respite. This feeling was never more
intense than in the dormitory, a disciplinary alignment of
three rows of beds with uniform bed linen, all visible at a
glance from the doorway, or from the cabin of the pion,a
installed in the middle. In winter, we would pile all our
62
Student paid to supervise in a lycee (trans).
91
clothes on our beds in the evening to be a little less cold.

The washroom contained a kind of grey trough, several
metres long, where we jostled for space in the morning and
where I secretly rinsed my crackling handkerchiefs in the
season of headcolds. This was one of the little daily obses-
sions, the preoccupations of every moment, which, though
they are no doubt common to everyone, remain perfectly
incommunicable, locking one into the lonely, shameful
fear of accidents, and which haunt the minds of children,
unarmed fake tough guys, stubborn and always scrapping,
yet often desperate to the point of tears, without anyone to
complain to or even talk to. Another was the block of
Turkish-style lavatories, right in the middle of the court-
yard, or at least positioned to be observed from all direc-
tions, with their wooden doors that could not be bolted, no
doubt to prevent the boys from locking themselves in for a
clandestine cigarette, and offering no protection against
jokers who would ignore the scarf placed outside as a
signal and throw them abrupdy open.
This universe devoted to routine and repetition, which
was more or less my whole life from 1941 to 1947? c o n "
tained no significant events, apart from those that it engen-
dered by its own logic such as the collective classroom
disorders [chahuts] that some like to call 'memorable'. It
enveloped all our existences in its monotonous regularities
which leave no trace beyond shafts of disconnected mem-
ories, and in the routine of everyday anxieties and strug-
gles, all the calculations and ruses that had to be deployed,
at every instant, to secure one's due, keep one's place,
defend one's share (especially at mealtimes, when we ate at
92
tables of eight), arrive on time, win respect, always ready

to exchange blows, in a word, to survive. The reader may
think I am darkening the picture. In reality, the adult man
who writes this does not know how, has never known how,
to do justice to the child who lived through these experi-
ences, his times of despair and rage, his longing for
vengeance. To give an idea, I could invoke Goffman's
Asylums^ and point out that, in the set of 'total institu-
tions', only a difference of degree separates the boarding
school from milieux such as the prison or the psychiatric
hospital, or closer, the penal colony as evoked by Jean
Genet's Miracle of the Rose.64 But I shall perhaps be more
convincing if I simply say that I well remember confiding
to a friend in khagne, in one of those somewhat literary
confidences that can be exchanged between aspiring intel-
lectuals, that I would never have children, because I did not
want to be responsible for casting them into miseries like
those I had suffered (I was then a boarder at the Lycee
Louis-le-Grand, which was infinitely more liberal than
what I had known in Pau, but where, no doubt because of
the refractory dispositions of a hardened boarder, I had
again managed to make trouble for myself - among the
new arrivals from the provinces, those who had already
been boarders could be recognized by the kind of disen-
chantment that is also observed in the army, in soldiers
approaching the end of their stint, who have been through
and seen through everything).
63
E. GofFman, Asylums (Chicago: Aldine, 1961).
64
J. Genet, The Miracle of the Rose (London: Blond, 1965).
93
But this experience appeared to me as incommunicable

also at the very time when I was going through it. I remem-
ber that my father, during my (rare) weekends at home
(I accumulated 'detentions' and 'gatings', and I think I
received over three hundred in my school career), would
often ask my mother, who was firing questions at me, to
leave me in peace while I 'readjusted* to home. For I was
paradoxically so well adapted to the boarding school world
which I so profoundly detested that I came to love the
Sundays spent in tranquillity (in spite of thepions who per-
sisted in expelling me from the study rooms to which I
would retreat to read) in the almost totally deserted lycee.
The summer holidays brought me little joy, because the
social distancing that access to the lycee had brought upon
me earned me the boredom and solitude of an existence
without any tasks or pastimes that could be shared with my
former classmates from primary school (except for a few
football matches on Sundays, in a neighbouring village).
The account of my clashes with school discipline remained
incomprehensible to my parents, who thought me so priv-
ileged (my father had left school at fourteen and my
mother, lodging for a while with an aunt in Pau, had been
at high school until she was sixteen) that they could only
hold me responsible for my torments, in other words for
the misbehaviour that threatened to jeopardize my vital
and unhoped-for enterprise of salvation through the
school.
I have often wondered whether my difficulties stemmed
from myself, from what was very early on called my
'difficult character'. I still remember the incidents that were
94
probably responsible for my being placed once and for all

on the list, passed between the tutors andpions, of trouble-
makers who have to be punished at the first sign of disor-
der. One was thus caught in a kind of cycle: preventive
punishment, individual or collective, generated revolt and
revenge - chahuts organized several days in advance, tricks
played on xhepions, which gave rise to more punishments,
organized as reprisals, and disappointment at the treachery
of those who, after having often encouraged rebellion, fled
before the threat of collective sanctions and summoned the
'leader', locked in his pride, to own up. Never was solitude
greater than in those moments. (I rediscovered this feeling
on the ship which took us to Algeria, when I lectured the
other second-class soldiers, illiterates from the whole of
western France, about the need to revolt against the absurd
'pacification' which we were being sent to assist, and they
replied, more out of fear and docility than malevolence:
'You'll get us all killed' or "They'll shoot you for that.') I
was eleven or twelve years old, and had no one to confide
in or who would even understand. I would often spend part
of the night preparing my defence for the morning.
The disciplinary staffof that small provincial lycee very
commonly resorted to collective punishments, threatening,
in order to stop a chahut, to take 'hostages', apparently
picked out at random but in reality chosen on account of
their 'record', or promising the worst sanctions if the
perpetrators of some outstanding misdeed did not come
forward or were not 'denounced' by their classmates.
'Denounce yourself!' - a terrible injunction, especially
when it comes from an accomplice who, in the face of a
95
threat and the fear it inspires, abandons all loyalty. And

they knew so well how to induce a collective fear - as in the
army, when a parade is announced and someone starts
the rumour that boot soles must also be polished - with the
complicity of the most submissive and most fearful, who
pass on rumours and threats intended to force the most
mutinous back into line or who endlessly relate quasi-
mythic experiences aimed at inspiring terror: such as, for
example, the apparition of the head supervisor, who mate-
rialized unexpectedly and inaudibly in the dormitory
doorway, with one of those banal but proverbial and
endlessly mimicked remarks ('Well, well, what fun we
are having!*), uttered in a gentle, seemingly astonished
tone, instandy sending back to bed all the boarders
who a moment before had been shrieking and running
riot through the dormitory, bolster in hand. One can
imagine the satisfaction that the sadism of these would-be
galleyslave-drivers could find in exercising the absolute
power that the institution granted them and in the eager
servilities that their position secured for them.
At once terrified and refractory, unarmed and uncom-
promising, always in a state of revolt close to a kind of
delinquency, which lacked only the possibilities and the
opportunities, and yet always ready to trust and abandon
the struggle, and to quit the retrenchments of the point of
honour, in order to have peace at last, I lived my life as
a boarder in a kind of stubborn fury (it is no doubt this
experience that enabled me to communicate, in spite of
differences of every order, and without having the least
need to force myself, forgetting my age and my status - far
96
too much, no doubt, and to the extent (as has been pointed
out to me) of approving behaviour normally regarded as
entirely reprehensible - with the young Beur65 and his
friend in La Misere du monde,66 in whom I immediately per-
ceived what was disarmed in them, beyond the appearance
of uncompromising closure, which they might well
have maintained with another interlocutor). I think that
Flaubert was not entirely wrong in thinking, as he wrote in
Memoires dun fou, 'Someone who has known boarding
school has learned, by the age of twelve, almost everything
about life/
The immense contrast between the world of the board-
ing school and the normal, sometimes even exhilarating,
world of the classroom made no small contribution to my
revolt against the punishments and persecutions imposed
by the petty officials whom the very norms of scholastic
life led one to despise. On one side, the boarders' study,
with the boarders from the countryside or the small sur-
rounding villages who, apart from a few eccentrics - who
were readily suspected of homosexuality, in that universe
of strong masculinity - read Miroir-Sprint, Midi Olympique
or firai cracker sur vos tombesf who liked to talk about
girls or rugby, who copied their French essays from older
pupils or collections of model answers and prepared 'fake
65
A young 'North-African' born in France of immigrant
parents (trans.).
M
'L'ordre des choses', in Bourdieu et al., La Misere du monde,
pp. 81-99.
67
Magazines devoted to cycling and rugby; and a novel by Boris
Vian (1946) (trans.).
97
scripts' for the termly history tests. On the other, the class-
room, with the teachers, of course, whose most gruelling
trials - being 'called up to the blackboard', for example, in
mathematics - still had, especially on the part of the
women teachers, a kind of affectionate gentleness, alien to
the boarding school; and also the day pupils, strangers who
seemed somewhat unreal in their affected attire, rather old-
fashioned short trousers or well-cut plus-fours, contrast-
ing with our grey overalls, and also in their manners and
their preoccupations, which evoked all the self-evidence of
an inaccessible world. I remember one of them, a 'refugee'
with a 'refined' accent who always sat in the front row,
indifferent to everything around him, writing poems.
Another, the son of a primary teacher, suffered persecution
but it was never clear whether this was because he was rec-
ognized as homosexual or because he regularly disap-
peared in break times to play the violin. The violence of
the interactions often took the form of a kind of class
racism based on physical appearance or surname. A boy
who became my main rival in the last years of that lycee,
whose mother had a clerical job in a suburb of Pau but
whose scouting activities brought him into contact with the
sons of teachers or doctors from the town, whose manners
and polished accent he imitated, often tormented me by
pronouncing my name in the manner of the peasants of the
region and joking about the name of my village, which
symbolized all peasant backwardness. (Much later, in
khdgne at the Lycee Louis-le-Grand, I encountered the
same boundary, between the boarders, bearded provincials
in grey overalls with a string belt, and the Parisian day
pupils, who greatly impressed one teacher of French,

himself of humble provincial origin and eager for intellec-
tual recognition, by the bourgeois elegance of their dress
as much as by the literary pretensions of their scholastic
productions, which were then conceived as artistic cre-
ations. I am struck, thinking back to it, by the role that
physical appearances or dress played both for my fellow
pupils and for the teachers, as purported indices of intel-
lectual or moral properties, as much in everyday life as in
oral examinations.)
I understood recently that my very deep ambivalence
towards the scholastic world was perhaps rooted in the dis-
covery that the exaltation of the diurnal and supremely
respectable face of the school had as its negative counter-
part the degradation of its nocturnal reverse side, mani-
fested in the contempt of the day pupils for the culture of
the boarding school and of the boys from the small rural
communes - which included some of my closest friend-
ships, forged in brawling and chahuts - the sons of crafts-
men and small shopkeepers, with whom I lost touch more
or less quickly as the years of schooling went by, but with
whom I shared, among other things, bemusement and
helplessness in the face of certain 'cultural features' (in all
senses) unknown in our milieux. Caught between two
worlds and their irreconcilable values, and somewhat dis-
gusted by the anti-intellectualism combined with coarse,
loud-mouthed machismo in which my boarding compan-
ions revelled, I often read during the breaks, when I was
not playing pelota, and especially on Sundays, during
detentions. And I think that I probably started to play
99
rugby, alongside my fellow boarders, only so that my aca-

demic success and the suspect docility that it is assumed to
imply would not lead me to be excluded from the 'manly'
community of the sports team, the only site (in contrast to
the classroom, which divides by hierarchizing, and the
boarding school, which isolates by atomizing) of a genuine
solidarity, in the common struggle for victory, in mutual
support when there was afight,or in the unreserved admi-
ration given to exploits, which was much more solid and
direct than that of the scholastic world.
This dual experience could only compound the durable

effect of a very strong discrepancy between high academic
consecration and low social origin, in other words a cleft
habitus, inhabited by tensions and contradictions. This kind
of 'coincidence of contraries' no doubt helped to institute
in a lasting way, an ambivalent, contradictory relationship
to the academic institution, combining rebellion and sub-
mission, rupture and expectation, which is perhaps at the
root of a relation to myself that is also ambivalent and con-
tradictory - as if the self-certainty linked to the feeling of
being consecrated were undermined in its very principle by
the most radical uncertainty towards the consecrating insti-
tution, a kind of bad mother, vain and deceiving. On the
one hand, the docility, even eagerness and submissiveness
of the 'good pupil', thirsting for knowledge and recogni-
tion, that had led me to comply with the rules of the game
and not only the most cynical and facile techniques of aca-
demic rhetoric: at Louis-le-Grand, for example, I excelled
in the philosophy 'mock examinations' in which Etienne
ioo
Borne, one of the accredited representatives of Christian

personalism (with which I had many subsequent clashes),
regularly gave top place to my dissertations; on the other
hand, a recalcitrant disposition, especially towards the edu-
cational system. Perhaps because I loved it too much, the
ambiguous alma mater provoked a violent and constant
revolt, springing from debt and disappointment, which
manifested itself in a whole series of crises, particularly at
the time of examinations or in situations of academic
solemnity, prize-day speeches, inaugural lectures, thesis
juries, academic references, which, by triggering the unease
provoked by the tacitly imperative expectation of the signs
of submission (what Spinoza called ohszquium, the pure
respect for institutional forms that institutions demand
above all else, of which people say, in reproachful tones,
that 'it costs nothing' and which costs me an infinite
amount), bring out my hankering for dissidence, the temp-
tation to spoil the game. And how can I not include in that
series the refusal to submit to the unthinkable rite of the
submission of a thesis, which I justified to myself with
Kafka's axiom: 'Do not present yourself before a court
whose verdict you do not recognize'?
On the one hand, the modesty, linked among other things
to insecurity, of the self-made parvenu, who, as they say in
the world of rugby, does not have to force himself to 'get
stuck in' and to invest the same interest and attention in
drawing up a coding schedule or conducting an interview as
in constructing a theoretical model (I would have thought
this self-evident had I not seen so many sociologists of high
social or academic origin invent every possible way of
101
avoiding the tasks to my mind most imperatively required of

a researcher, but often regarded as inferior, and heard a
young beginner, garlanded with national and international
honours, publicly declare that there was no question of his
personally administering a questionnaire and who has kept
up that refusal, without ceasing to teach 'methodology* to
general satisfaction, in the highest academic institutions); on
the other, the lofty self-assurance of the miracule who
comes to see himself as 'miraculous' and is inclined to chal-
lenge the dominant on their own ground (I see a paradig-
matic example of this in the challenge that Heidegger
throws at the Kantians when he tears down one of the pillars
of rationalism by disclosing the existential finitude at the
heart of the Transcendental Aesthetic): I have to confess
that many of my choices have been determined, from the
Ecole Normale on, by a form of aristocratism, not so much
arrogant as desperate, because based on retrospective shame
at having been caught up in the game of competitive exam-
inations, combined with the reaction against the 'good stu-
dents' in which I must have indulged at some point, and on
the form of self-hatred inspired in me by my horror of the
petit-bourgeois arrivisme of some of my fellow students
who subsequently became eminent members of the univer-
sity hierarchy and accomplished incarnations of homo acad-
emicus. (How could I fail to recognize myself in Nietzsche
when he says, roughly, in Ecce Homo, that he has only ever
attacked things that he knew well, that he had himself expe-
rienced, and that, up to a point, he had himself been?)
68 See above, p. 5 m.
102
But this cleft habitus, the product of a 'conciliation of

contraries' which then inclines one to the 'conciliation of
contraries', is perhaps most clearly manifested in the par-
ticular style of my research, the type of objects that inter-
est me, and the way in which I approach them. I am thinking
of the way I have invested great theoretical ambitions in
often atfirstsight trivial empirical objects (the question of
the temporal structures of consciousness through the rela-
tion to time of subproletarians, or the major problems of
aesthetics, Kantian aesthetics in particular, apropos of pho-
tography), or, more generally, in a simultaneously ambi-
tious and 'modest' way of doing science. Perhaps the fact
of coming from what some like to call 'modest' origins
gives in this case virtues that are not taught in manuals of
methodology, such as the lack of any disdain for patient,
painstaking empirical work; attention to commonplace
objects; the refusal of dazzling ruptures and spectacular
outbursts; the aristocratism of discretion which induces
contempt for the brio and brilliance rewarded by the acad-
emic institution and nowadays by the media.
So, for example, seeking the opposite of the rhetoric of
importance through which philosophical elevation distin-
guishes itself (and which I analysed in vivo in the limiting
case of the Althusserians69 - not so different, for a sociolog-
ical pragmatics, from the cases of Heidegger or Habermas),
I have striven to leave the most important theoretical
69
'Le discours d'importance. Quelques reflexions sociologiques
sur "Quelques remarques critiques a propos At Lire le CapitaF* \ in
Ce queparler veut dire (Paris: Fayard, 1982), pp. 207-26.
103
contributions in parentheses or notes or to engage my most

abstract preoccupations in hyperempirical analyses of
objects that were socially secondary, politically insignificant
and intellectually disdained. The first sketch of the whole
subsequent theory - the supersession of the forced choice
between objectivism and subjectivism and the recourse to
mediating concepts, such as disposition - is set out in a short
preface to a collective work on a minor subject, photogra-
phy;70 the notion of habitus is present, together with its
critical implications for structuralism, in an afterword to a
J)ook in which I translated two texts by Erwin Panofsky71
that had been published separately in English and where the
word habitus is never used; one of my most extensive cri-
tiques of Foucault is put forward in the last note of the
article entitled 'Reproduction interdite'72 which no philoso-
pher worthy of the name would ever think of reading; the
critique of Derrida's style of philosophy is consigned to a
Postscript to Distinction and an elliptical passage in Pascalian
Meditations. Sometimes only the subtitle gives an idea of
70
With L. Boltanski, R. Castel and J.-C. Chamboredon, Un Art
moyen. Essai sur les usages sociales de la photographie (Paris: Edi-
tions de Minuit, 1965), trans, as Photography: The Social Uses of an
Ordinary Art (Cambridge: Polity, 1989).
71
See above, note 32.
72
Reproduction interdite. La dimension symbolique de la
domination economique', Etudes Rurales (Paris), 113-14
(Jan.June 1989): 15-36. English translation in The Bachelors*Ball
(Cambridge: Polity, 2008).
73
Meditations pascaiiennes (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1997).
Trans, as Pascalian Meditations (Cambridge: Polity, 1999).
104
the theoretical stake of my books. Such a strategy of discre-

tion no doubt also has something to do with the dual (and
contradictory) vision that I have of my intellectual project:
sometimes lofty and even a litde cavalier (on the principle:
'those who can will understand') and ascetic (truth is some-
thing to be won, and khalepa ta kala, 'beautiful things are
hard'), it is also prudent and modest (I put forward my con-
clusions - and also my ambitions - only under the cover of
precise and detailed research) and, while it sometimes
shrinks from the positivistic exhibition of data and even
proof (I have little indulgence for the interminable experi-
mental protocols that freight so much uninspired research),
it refuses the 'seigneuriaP poses or, more simply, the theo-
retical brashness that leads so many philosophers and even
sociologists (those who win the favour of philosophers) to
think beyond their philosophical means.
Similarly, from the outset I took the decision, in my
teaching at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, to exclude all the
forms of 'happening'74 which, in accordance with some
people's model of politics, and others' of literature, were
much practised in some elevated circles of the academic
world. I remember having learned with some satisfaction
that two young Germans, who had come a long way to
anend the seminars that I had just begun to give at the
cole des Hautes Etudes, which, owing to a major mis-
understanding, attracted a high proportion of the aspir-
ing intelligentsia - including some of the future leaders and
thinkers of May 1968 - went away thoroughly disappointed
74
In English in the text (trans.).
105
by the dull and somewhat pedestrian character of the

objects of analysis - accounts of social workers, primary
school teachers and office workers - and by what I had to
say about them, which gave hardly any place to authors or
concepts of importance, such as praxis, hermeneutics or
'communicative action*. And even quite recently, by adopt-
ing a deliberately Socratic approach which, significantly,
they did not recognize, I managed to disappoint the natu-
rally 'philosophical' expectations of a group of normaliens
who had invited me to inaugurate a series of lectures on 'the
political* and whom I wanted to send back, by means of a
methodical comparison with the relations to politics of past
generations of normaliens, to a reflection on what their
vision of politics owed to their position as normaliens in a
particular state of the intellectual and political fields.
The intellectual world, which thinks itself so pro-
foundly liberated from custom and convention, has always
seemed to me inhabited by profound conformisms which
have acted on me as repulsive forces. The same recalcitrant
dispositions towards enrolment and conformisms - and
therefore also towards those who, following the inclina-
tions of habitus different from mine, changed in accor-
dance with the rhythm of the transformations that have
led that inconstant world from the enchantments of a fake
revolution to the disenchantments of a real conservative
revolution - have meant that I have almost always found
myself on the opposite side from the models and modes
dominant in the field, whether in my research or in
my political position-takings, conspicuously Weberian or
Durkheimian for example when it was imperative to be
106
Marxist. I was not a communist when most intellectuals

were but I never indulged in the anti-communism into
which they moved on ceasing to be so. This has often led
to my being branded a 'neo-Stalinist' by people who, for
the most part, have passed through the Communist Party
or Maoism, and who, in so doing, continue to illustrate the
stalinoid modes of thought and expression that led me to
oppose them as much then as now.
The sense of ambivalence towards the intellectual world
that is rooted in these dispositions is the generative princi-
ple of a double distance of which I could give countless
examples: a distance from the great game of French-style
intellectual life, with its fashionable petitions, its demon-
strations dujour or its prefaces for artists' catalogues, but
also from the great role of professor, engaged in the circu-
lar circulation of thesis juries and examination boards, the
games and stakes of power over reproduction; a distance,
in politics and culture, from both elitism and populism.
The tension between contraries, never resolved into a har-
monious synthesis, is particularly visible in my relation to
art, the combination of a real and never qualified passion
for real avant-gardes (rather than the scholastically pro-
grammed transgressions of academic anti-academicism)
and an analytical coldness that was intensified as I built up
the method of interpretation presented in Les Regies de
Vart^ and which is inspired by the conviction that while it
7:>
Les Regies de Van. Genese et structure du champ litteraire (Paris:
Editions du Seuil, 1992), trans, as The Rules of Art (Cambridge:
Polity, 1996).
107
may bruise the Holderlinian-Heideggerian-Blanchotian
cult of the sacred in literature and art, the 'impious dis-
mantling of thefiction*of which Mallarme speaks can only
intensify the pleasure of the love of art.
This tension perhaps never appeared to me in more dra-
matic fashion than when I gave my inaugural lecture at the
College de France, in other words at a moment of entry
into a role that I found hard to integrate into my own idea
of myself. I had several times refused to be a candidate and
I had explained this, to Franois Jacob in particular, and
then to my friends, in particular Andre Miquel, who
insisted that I should be a candidate and whom I had even
tried to convince that my eventual competitor, a grandilo-
quent and propheticfigure,would fit the part very well, in
a sense better than me. This reluctance (the word is too
weak, but 'repugnance' is too strong), springing from deep
inside me, led me to a whole series of acts designed to burn
the bridges, such as lending my name in support of the can-
didature of Coluche76 for the presidential election of 1981,
or an article in Actes de la Recherche on haute couture77 in
which, killing two birds with one stone, I quoted an article
by Roland Barthes in Elle about Chanel and an essay by
Andre Chastel78 in Le Monde which amounted to an adver-
torial for a brand of perfume. Preparing that inaugural
76
An anarchic comedian (trans.).
77
With Yvette Delsaut, 'Le couturier et sa griffe. Contribution
a une theorie de la magie', Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales,
1 (Jan. 1975): 7-36.
78
Art historian and professor at the College de France (trans.).
108
lecture brought home to me all my contradictions, in a con-

centrated form; the sense of being perfectly unworthy, of
having nothing to say that was worth saying before such a
court, probably the only one whose verdict I recognized,
was intensified by a sense of guilt towards my father, who
had just died in a particularly tragic and wretched way and
whom, in the folly of the moments of despair of the early
1950s, I had helped to make more attached to his house,
absurdly situated beside a main road, by encouraging and
helping him to renovate it. Although I knew he would
have been very proud and happy, I made a magical con-
nection between his death and a success that I conceived as
a transgression and a treachery. There were many sleepless
nights.
Finally, I thought I saw a way out of the contradiction
into which I was thrown by the very fact of a social conse-
cration which assaulted my self-image: to take as the object
of my lecture the idea of delivering an inaugural lecture,
of performing a rite of institution, thus setting up a dis-
tance from the role in the very exercise of the role. But I
had underestimated the violence of what, in place of a
simple ritual address, became a kind of 'intervention' in the
artists' sense. To describe the rite while performing the rite
is to commit the supreme social barbarism, that of wilfully
suspending belief or, worse, calling it into question and
threatening it in the very time and place where it is sup-
posed to be celebrated and strengthened. I thus discovered,
in the moment of doing this, that what had become for me
a psychological solution constituted a challenge to the
symbolic order, an affront to the dignity of the institution
109
which demands that one keep silent about the arbitrariness

of the institutional rite that is being performed. The public
reading of that text which, written outside the situation,
still had to be read as it stood, without modification, before
the assembled body of masters, Claude Levi-Strauss,
Georges Dumezil, Michel Foucault and others, was a terri-
ble ordeal. People told me later that my voice was toneless.
I was on the point of breaking off and leaving the rostrum.
Jean-Pierre Vernant gave me a severe look, or so it seemed:
I read on to the end, for better or worse. Afterwards, I felt
a terrible unease, a sense of having blundered rather more
than transgressed. I remained alone with two fellow pupils
from Pau, whom I had not seen since our schooldays, and
have not seen again. I spoke wildly, in the relief that
follows enormous tension, with the sense of still having to
pay very dearly for it. Why, in order tofinda way out, did
I have to practise that kind of semi-controlled schizophre-
nia in which, just as a patient describes what he says or does
while saying that he is doing or saying something else,
I give the commentary on my message, the giving of
a lecture, through another message which contradicts its
essential features by giving away everything that is
signified and presupposed by giving a lecture? It is not the
only time in my life when I have had the sense of being
constrained by a greater force to do something that cost me
dearly and the need for which was felt only by me.
no
W
hy have I written and, above all, for whom?
Perhaps to discourage biographies and biogra-
phers, while providing, as a kind of profes-
sional point of honour, the information that I would have
liked tofindwhen I tried to understand the writers or artists
of the past, and while seeking to extend reflexive analysis
beyond the generic discoveries obtained from scientific
analysis itself - and to do this without giving way to the
(very strong) temptation to deny or refute distortions or
defamations, to undeceive or to surprise. I could not be
unaware of the more or less wild attempts at objectivation
that my analyses have provoked in response, with no other
justification than the malicious aim of objectivating the
objectivator, along the childish lines of 'if you say it, you
must be it': he denounces glory and honours, but he is avid
for glory and honours; he excoriates the media but he is a
media figure; he attacks the educational system but is
enslaved to academic honours, and so on ad infinitum.
What is certain, in any case, is that if I am not impossible
to situate as an empirical agent, I have always sought to be
so, as much as possible, in my role as a researcher, in par-
ticular by taking account of my position and its evolution
over time, as I have done here, so as to try to control the
effects they could have on my scientific position-takings.
And I have done so not to escape the reduction of my
works to their social conditions, in accordance with the
aspiration to absolute knowledge of a quasi-divine

researcher ('Bourdivine', as some have said), but to prac-
tise a supremely difficult craft as well as I could, the one
that consists in organizing the return of the repressed and
in saying out loud to everyone what no one wants to know.
But I have also and perhaps especially written for the
youngest of my readers, who, I hope, will be able to feel,
through this evocation of the historical conditions in which
my work was developed, and which are no doubt very
remote, in various respects, from the ones in which they
find themselves, what I felt each time that I succeeded to
any degree, in my work, in 'adopting the point of view of
the author', as Flaubert put it, that is, in putting myself, in
thought, in the place that he or she - whether writer or
painter, or factory worker or clerk - occupies in the social
world: the sense of apprehending an oeuvre and a life in the
necessary movement of its realization and, in so doing,
being able fo give myself an active appropriation of it, a
sympraxis more than a sympathy, itself turned towards cre-
ation and action. It is indeed the case that, paradoxically,
historicization, although it sets at a distance, also gives the
means of bringing closer an author embalmed and impris-
oned in layers of academic commentary and converting
him or her into a real alter ego, or, rather, a 'companion' in
the sense of the old guilds, someone who, like everyone
else, has problems that are both trivial and vital (where to
place a manuscript, how to convince a publisher, etc.). I
have never thought that I was committing an act of sacri-
legious arrogance when I posited, without taking myself
for the artist, like so many inspired critics, that Flaubert or
112
Manet was a person like me. And nothing would make me

happier than having made it possible for some of my
readers to recognize their own experiences, difficulties,
questionings, sufferings, and so on, in mine, and to draw
from that realistic identification, which is quite the oppo-
site of an exalted projection, some means of doing what
they do, and living what they live, a little bit better.
Indei
Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Balzac, Honore 66

Sociales 2, 108 Barthes, Roland 108
Alain (mile-Auguste Chartier) 6 Bataille, Georges 2,12, 78
Alexandre, Michel 6 Baudelaire, Charles 25
Algeria 31,46-62 Beam research study 46,59-60,
fieldwork 46-59,60,61 61-5
military service 37-40,95 Beaufret, Jean 5,6
War of Liberation 88-9 Beauvoir, Simone de 25
White Fathers 48-9 Belhaccne, Leila 58
ALN (Algerian National Bensmaine, Mimi 58
Liberation Army) 48-9,52, biographical illusion x, 1
55 Blanchot, Maurice 78
Althusserians 36,103 Blum, Leon 86
Althusser, Louis 8, 11, 87-8 Borne, fetienne 100-1
American sociology 72-5 Boudon, Raymond 31,75
Archives Europeenes de Sociologie Bouhedja, Salah 55
Boukhobza, Mohammed 58
Aron, Raymond 10,18, 29, 30,31, Bourdieu, Pierre
32-4,44,45,60,90 boarding school 90-100
Introduction to the Philosophy of family of origin 84-90
History 14 father 84-6, 89-90,109
and Sartre 23-4, 34 fieldwork in Algeria 46-59,60,
and Weber 72-3 61
Artaud, Antonin 16, 78 inaugural lecture at the College
Audin, Maurice 54 de France 108-10
khdgne at Lycee
Bachelard, Gaston 10,11,12, 26 Louis-le-Grand 98-9,
Bachelard, Suzanne 11 IOO-I
Balandier, Georges 31 military service 37-40,95
Index
mother 849 Darnton, Robert 3

philosophy student at the Ecole deconstniction 8
Normale Superieure 4-9 Deleuze, Gilles 7
primary school 84-5 Delsaut, Yvette 35
teaching at Ecole des Hautes Derrida, Jacques 3,8,104
Etudes 105-6 Distinction 67, 70, 74, 104
Bourgois, Philippe 51 Dreyfus Affair 3
Braudel, Fernand 31,44,45 Dumazedier, JofTre 31
Dumezil, Georges n o
Cakiers Internationaux de Durkheim, femile 6, 72
Sociologie 31 Durkheimianism 14, 18-19,
Canguilhem, Georges 10-11, 1067
KMo* 33,4i, 45>7i,79
Cannon, Annie Jump 28 fecole des Hautes fetudes 10,45,
Catholicism 17 1056
Centre de Sociologie Europeenne Ecole Normale Superieure 4-9,
20,30,31,66,83 10,28-9,32,36,38,39,43,
Chardin, Teilhard de 45 71,79,9
Chastel, Andre 1089 Newsletter of the Alumni 43
Chombard de Lauwe, Paul-Henri fecole Pratique des Hautes ktudes
3i 3i,32,44
Cicourel, Aaron 3,18 Elle 108
clarity, principle of 1-2 EOR (cole des Officiers de
CNRS (French national science Reserve) 37
research council) 30, 35 Esprit 14
College de France ix, 10,12, 33, Esquisse d'une theorie de la pratique
42,43,44,83 {Outline of a Theory of
inaugural lecture 108-10 Practice) 33, 44
Coluche 108 ethnology 34-5,37,40,41-5,82
Communist Party 35,42,107 fieldwork in Algeria 46-59, 60,
critical reflexivity 23 61
Critique 12 Etudes Rurales 31
cultural studies 9 existentialism 9,11-12
Dagonet, Francois 11 Feranoun, Mouloud 58

Dampierre, Eric de 31 Ferry, Luc 14
Darbel, Alain 52, 74-5 Feyerabend, Paul 76
115
Index
Flaubert, Gustave 66,112-13 Homo Academicus 83

Memoires d'unfou 97 humanist culture 17,18
Ford Foundation 73, 74-5 Husserl, E. 11,20,40,41,72
Foucault, Michel 3,7,11,15,
7982,104,110 IFOP (French Institute of Public
Fourier, Francois 68 Opinion) 30
Frankfurt School 74 Isambert, Viviane 31
Freud, Sigmund 17,42
Friedman, Georges 31 Jacob, Francois 108
Furet, Francois 14 Jaures, Jean 86
Joly, Henri 30
Garese, Rolande 58 journals, sociological 31
Gauchet, Marcel 14
Genet, Jean, Miracle of the Rose Kafka, F. 101
93 Kant, Immanuel 28
GofFman, E., Asylums 93 Anthropologic 40
Gothic Architecture and Klossowski, Pierre 2
Scholasticism (translation) Koyre, Alexandre 10, 26
42 Kraus, Karl 23
Guenon, Rene 56 Kuhn, Thomas 26,76
Gueroult, Martial, Dynamique et
metaphysique leibnifiennes 10 Labov, William 3
Gurvitch, Georges 30,31 Lacan, Jacques 17
La Depeche de Toulouse 29
Habermas, Jiirgen 3, 103 Lagneau 6
habitus 22, 27,45, 64, 89,104 Lamicq, Bernard 90
Halperin, David 80 La Misere du monde 51, 97
Hegel, G.W.F. 10 L'Amour de Tart 15-16,75
Heidegger, Martin 6,17, 77,102, La Nouvelle Critique 36
103 La Souterraine church 70
Letter on Humanism 5 Lazarsfeld, Paul 72, 73, 74-5
Heller, Clemens 31 Lebrun, Gerard 54
Hennine, Moulah 58 'Lecture on the Lecture' ix
Herriot, Edouard 86 LeDebat 14
Hippolyte, Jean 27,41 Le Deracinement 33
historical epistemology 26 Leibniz, Gottfried,
historicism 77 Animadversiones 41
n6
Index
Leiris, Michel 44 Nechem, Mahfoud 58

Le Metier de socwlogue 8 Nietzsche, F. 15
Le Monde 42, 108 Ecce Homo 102
Le Nouvel Observateur 14, 77 nihilism 79
Les He'ritiers 33,90 Nizan, Paul, Aden Arabie 84
Les Regies de I art 1078 Nora, Pierre 14
Les Temps Modernes 10, 59,
77-8 Outline of a Theory of Practice
Levi-Strauss, Claude 14, 35,40, 33>34
42,44-5,61,110
Tristes Tropiques 44 Panofsky, Erwin 42,104
The View from Afar 45 Pariente, Jean-Claude 30
LExpress 38 Parsons, Talcott 72
VHomme 34-5 Pascalian Meditations 104
Liberation 19 Passeron, Jean-Claude 14
linguistics 14, 77 philosophy 7 , 4 0 - 1 , 6 8 , 7 5 - 6 ,
The Logic of Practice 44 78-9,80
'philosophy without subject*
Maget, Marcel, Guide d'e'tude 14
directe des comportements Pinto, Louis 15
culturels 61 postmodernism 79
Malebrache, Nicholas 28 Pouillon, Jean 78
Mallarme, Stephane 17,108 psychoanalysis 1617
Manet, douard 76, 113
Maoism 9,107 Rabinow, Paul 3
Marin, Louis 30 Ramnoux, Clemence 32
Marxism 36,45, 69, 75, 107 reflexivity ix-x, 51,63-5, 74
mathematics 41 Renaut, Alain 14
Matonti, Frederique 36 'return of the subject* 15
Mauss, Marcel 12 Revue Francaise de Sociologie
Mendras, Henri 31 31
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 12, 43, Reynaud, Jean-Daniel 31
77 Ricceur, Paul 11,14
Merton, Robert K. 72 Robespierre, M. 86
Metraux, Alfred 44 Rodinson, Maxime 45
Miquel, Andre 108 Roussel, Raymond 16
Misraoui, Ahmed 58 rural sociology 60-1
117
Index
Sade, cult of 2,78 Stoetzel, Jean 30, 31

Sanchez-Jankowski, Martin 51 structural anthropology 14,77
Sartre, Jean-Paul 5, 10,14, 22-5, structuralism 77-8,104
28,32,34,84
L'Etre et le Ne'ant 9, 23 Tilly, Charles 3
and Levi-Strauss 45 Touraine, Alain 31
Saussure, Ferdinand de 12 Travail et travailleurs en Algerie
Sayad, Abdelmalek 47,52-3,55, 33,50
5M7 Treanton, Jean-Rene 31
Schiitz, Alfred 60
Science of Science and Reflexivity ix Varna, World Congress of
Sociologie de VAlgerie 40 Sociology 68
Sociologiedu Travail 31 Vaudrey, Colonel 53
sociology 15-16,17, 23,30-1, Vernant, Jean-Pierre 110
34-7,41,66-9 Vilar, Pierre 90
American 72-5 Vuillemin, Jules 27, 30,79
and ethnology 34-5,37,40, Physique et mttaphysiqut
4i-5 kantiennes 10
andFoucault 81-3
rural 60-1 Weberianism 106-7
Sophocles 17 Weber, Max 12,72,75
theSorbonne 30 Weil, Eric 10,12
Spanish Civil War 86 White Fathers missionaries,
Spinoza, B. 101 Algeria 48-9
Stalinism 9 Winter, Sarah 16
Il8

Pierre Bourdieu-Sketch For A Self-Analysis-University of Chicago Press (2008) PDF

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Sketch for a Self-Analysis

The University of Chicago Press

Publisher's Note to the French Edition ix

Sketch for a Self-Analysis i

A sociological analysis excluding psychology,

This text, which Pierre Bourdieu wrote between October

Bourdieu decided to deliver his last lecture by subjecting

accordance with the 'principle of charity', all the moments

ill at ease in intellectual discussions about problems that are

miracules)1 to elect the School that has elected them, to rec-

a curriculum which offered a vast range of disciplines - phi-

intellectual ambitions on every 'philosopher' worthy of the

functions of initiation rites is to create a community of

from the vicissitudes of the real world, which, around the

two major works, Dynamique et metaphysique leibniyennes,

invoked by the occupants of opposite positions in the uni-

phenomenologists who were most inclined to conceive phe-

So it can be seen that it is possible to produce at will the

through to its conclusion the revolution they had under-

break they were making with the pious naiveties of per-

pendulum of fashion by declaring, in a squalid polemic

statistics and its mathematical model, was directly (and

Greek tragic poets, deliberately dehistoricized and univer-

different disciplines, its forms of scientific exchange, at

century earlier, and with analogous difficulties - the rigor-

sterility of solitary labour to what they perceive as the

Centre de Sociologie Europeenne, the research centre within

world of research, affected-lhe-kindof- 'role distance- by-

pinnacle - and in particular the disdain with which, espe-

figures (who, as Aron himself knew, had no common

knowledge - they could confront the most immense intel-

least as references, represent for a new entrant) was a figure

him all the signs of recognition and towards which he

Four, he would set aside whole afternoons for me (he

Aron (the latter played tennis, at a very high level, whereas

Montagne-Sainte-Genevieve, in other words in conditions

Although Georges Canguilhem, and other philosophers,

areas and powers among themselves, in accordance with a

(The passage that Raymond Aron devoted to me in his

Quai de Passy, when he would discuss my sketches in a

ambiguous one too, being the perfect form of the symbolic

position within the university field. (And one sees, if one

had to 'go beyond sociology' or 'transcend [depasser]

My perception of the sociological field also owed much to

fairly tough training in Chartres (every week I had to step

their national service, then been recalled, integrated, and

again, in order to be of some use, and perhaps also to stave

losophy: I was moving towards the philosophy of science,

very quickly that ethnology, or at least the particular way

the secretaire perpetuel of the Academie des Sciences

Levi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques but also a good part of the

his writings, underlay his profoundly dehistoricized vision

With military service over, to be able to continue the

sciendiihax drove me, rooted in a kind of passion for every-

experiences of which I was the unworthy, disarmed witness

come and sleep in the afternoon, and that they hadfireda

To conduct sociological fieldwork in a situation of war

worked on crack dealers, like Philippe Bourgois,40 or on the

the Institut de Statistiques in the Rue Bab Azoun, where

Faculty and himself also involved in the 'liberal student'

which, 'On Algerian culture', was perfectly transparent in

outside the protected zone but in neutral territory (this

down and offered us coffee. (I was often helped in my