Re: Social Status Tends to Seal One's Fate, Says France's Master Thinker

[Jim Farmelant <farmelantj@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 06 Jan 2001 11:22:22 -0500 Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
> Boy, did I ever have Bourdieu wrong. I just assumed that because he
> was a
> French professor who published in New Left Review and who was
> championed by
> Doug Henwood, he was to be shunned. In my muzhik mind, Zizek,
> Bourdieu and
> Butler formed some kind of unholy trinity.

You always got to watch out for that "guilt by association" thing, Lou.

>This Times article seems
> to
> indicate that he has nothing in common with the typical trendy
> post-Marxist. I will now go lash myself with a cat-o'nine-tails that
> I keep
> in the bedroom for special occasions and order one of his books from
> amazon.com

As I recall Bourdieu played a key role in organizing intellectual
support for the wave of public employee strikes in France in 1995.

His attack on what he calls "total intellectuals" is spot on, since
In France, these folk are often major media stars, and at
the same time they play roles which back here in the US are
more associated with our punditocracy.  However, in the
final analysis, while they may well exceed their US conterparts
in their verbal eloquence and in their intellectual pretensions
they are probably about as corrupt as the American punditocracy.
Both groups are very much subservient to the ruling classes.

>
>
>
> Louis Proyect
> Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/

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