Loesberg, Jonathan - Bourdieu’s Derrida’s Kant

8/13/2019 Loesberg, Jonathan - Bourdieus Derridas Kant

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Bourdieus DerridasKant:The Aesthetics of Refusing AestheticsJonathan Loesberg

n the closing pages of Distinction, a sociological analysis of the way inI hich class membership constitutes both physiological and aesthetictaste and an argument that the two kinds of taste are coextensive,Bourdieu returns to a confrontation with Kants Critique of Judgment,the exemplar of the pure, philosophical aesthetics his sociology meansto counter. As he recognizes, the return is necessary, since without ithis argument and its close attention to social detail and such possiblymarginal topics as taste in food, fashion, and furniture may seem sim-ply to run parallel to more abstract discussions of aesthetics: If wemust now allow the return of the repressed, having produced thetruth of the taste against which, by an immense repression, the wholeof legitimate aesthetics has been constructed, this is . . . in order toprevent the absence of direct confrontation from allowing the two dis-courses to coexist peacefully as parallel alternatives, in two carefullyseparated universes of thought and discourse.l Bourdieu ends withan extremely harsh critique of Derridas deconstruction of Kants aes-thetics-surprisingly, since by Bourdieus description of the decon-struction, Derridas argument hardly differs from his own except that i tremains in form a philosophical analysis rather than a sociologicalsurvey. The exception is no minor detail: Bourdieu wants centrally toargue that such an analysis, regardless of its explicit purpose, repro-duces the abstraction of Kantian disinterest that allows aesthetics to

Bourdieu, Distinction: .4Social Critiqw o the Judgement o Taste, trans. RichardNice Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984 , 485-6. Distinction was firstpublished in French in 1979.Modern Language Quarterly 58:4 December 1997. 997 University of Washington.


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function as a mode of class distinction. Still, since his criticism of Der-rida takes the form of a rather abstract complaint at the end of a ratherabstract philosophical analysis of Kant, one wonders why Bourdieuwould end his plea for material detail with a philosophical analysis of aphilosophical analysis.Why must he dispense with Derrida to put Kantin his place, and what does this tell us about the place of Kantian dis-interest in Bourdieus own attack on it?

I mean to answer these questions by ratifying Bourdieus critiqueof Derrida and then, by turning it back on him, suggesting that Kant-ian disinterest is necessary to both the poststructural and the sociolog-ical skepticism about classical aesthetics. But by taking this tack to dis-cuss Bourdieu, I raise a deeper version of the issues: can I desiring acertain deconstructive irreverence, have become instead irrelevant?Bourdieu offers five hundred densely researched pages on the mate-rial manifestations of aesthetic claims and distinctions, and in a discus-sion of his books limitations I respond with a return to Kant at threeremoves: through Bourdieus version of Derridas version of disinter-est. Surely Foucault had the same kind of evasion in mind when hefamously accused Derrida of producing a historically well-determinedlittle pedagogy. I want to meet at its most general level this claim thataesthetics, by evading the material, enacts not disinterest but elitism,and philosophical and academic analysis reproduces that well-deter-mined little evasion.3 Rather than return to the notions of disinter-ested formalism that buttressed a disguised humanism both Bourdieuand Derrida assail, however, I want to show that their attacks and theanalytic and political benefits we desire from them depend on a formof Kantian disinterest they both repress and reproduce.

To grasp the basis of Bourdieus reference to and rejection of Der-Foucault, My Body, This Paper, This Fire, trans. GeofT Bennington, Oxfwd

Litwary h i n u 1979):27.:


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Loesberg BourdieusDerridas Kant 419rida, one must start with his rejection of Kant. Distinction outlines aquite complex structure of class groups an d consequent aesthetic atti-tudes, but in the two moments in which Bourdieu addresses Kantdirectly, he contrasts his theories only with popular tastes, that is, thetastes of the working classes, the most economically and culturally dom-inated segments of society. Thus at the outset Bourdieu titles the pop-ular taste An Anti-Kantian Aesthetic and remarks, I t is no accidentthat, when one sets about reconstructing its logic, the popular aes-thetic appears as the negative opposite of the Kantian aesthetic, andthat the popular ethos implicitly answers each proposition of the Ana-lytic of the Beautiful with a thesis contradicting it 41). He then con-trasts Kants distinction between aesthetic pleasure and pleasure that ismerely physically gratifying or dependent o n physical charm with theworking classes praise of the physically gratifying or pleasing; contrastsKants universalism with a working-class sense of relative value; and con-trasts his formalism with a working-class utilitarian evaluation of art41-2). At the end of the book he shows Kant returning the favor,

defining his aesthetic in terms of a repulsion from popular values:Kants principle of pu re taste is nothing other than a refusal, a dis-gust-a disgust for objects which impose enjoyment and a disgust forthe c rude , vulgar taste which revels in this imposed enjoyment 48 8) .

This suddenly compressed distinction, ignoring the connectionbetween Kantian taste and all other class tastes, derives from the factthat the popular taste alone, in Bourdieus system, exists in completecontrast not only to Kantian aesthetics but to all othe r dominant tastesan d preferences. Th e dominant class wealthy industrialists, seniorexecutives, etc.) and the dominated segment of the dominant classuniversity teachers, adolescents and women, artistic producers, etc.)

share basic aesthetic values that Bourdieu roots in Kant. Indeed theaestheticism of the domina nt classs dominated segment takes itspower as resistance frorn a more educated possession and articulationof the Kantian values shared with their classs dominating segment 55,287, 29 . Bourdieu defines the pe tit bourgeoisie in terms of an alien-ation of self arising from its attempts to enact cultural preferences for-eign to its class-based upbringing and experiences 319-23). But theseattempts implicitly recognize the aesthetic and taste values of the Kant-ian upper classes. Only the working classes, in Bourdieus scheme, rep-resent a complete rejection of this system of tastes.


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In fact, working-class tastes and preferences might representmerely an alternative aesthetic theory, in the manner of the most elit-ist academic aesthetic relativism, were it not for two positive marks oftheir dominated quality.4 First, the working classes material prefer-ences, such as their tastes in food and possessions, are in part deter-mined by what Bourdieu labels the Choice of the Necessary: Thefundamental proposition that the habitus is a virtue made of necessityis never more clearly illustrated than in the case of the working classes,since necessity includes for them all that is usually meant by the word,that is, an inescapable deprivation of necessary goods. Necessityimposes a taste for necessity which implies a form of adaptation to andconsequently acceptance of the necessary, a resignation to the inevitable372). n other words, we know the tastes of the working classes to be

marks of their domination because they tend to reject what they can-not have and to choose what is economically feasible for them to want.But even as far as material necessity is concerned, the correspondencebetween preference and want is not perfect, which leads to one ofthose fascinating insights in Bourdieu that at once confirm and chal-lenge his theories:

When one moves from the manual workers to the industrial and com-mercial employers, through foremen, craftsmen and small shopkeep-ers, economic constraints tend to relax without any fundamentalchange in the pattern of spending. . . . the food consumed is increas-ingly rich both in cost and in calories) and increasingly heavy game,foie gras). By contrast, the taste of the professionals or senior executivesdefines the popular taste by negation, as the taste for the heavy, the fat

4 One would think that Bourdieu had as little sympathy for Stanley Fishs attackson objective aesthetic values I s 7hpre a Text in This Class? 7hp Autho rity o IntopretiupCommunities [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 19801 ) or for BarbaraHerrnstein Smiths defense of an aesthetics that accommodates relative value andinterested gratification Contingencies o Valup: A ltP ma tiv e PPrspPctivPs for Critical 7hmry[Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard LJniversity Press, 19881) as he does for Derridas decon-structions of Kant. In fact, Bourdieu has written a complimentary sentence printedon the back of Smiths book. But then, so has Richard Rorty, and presumably hedoes not agree with Smiths criticisms of him. Smith discusses Kants theory fromthe viewpoint of an abstract relativism 64-72). She also discusses Distinction brieflyand proposes that it offers evidence for h er position. In effect this coincidence willbe only as good as the one I will work o ut for Derrida, since Smiths argument wouldcertainly run afoul of his skeptical analysis of traditional academic discourse.


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Loesberg Bourdieus Derridas Kant 42and the coarse, by tending towards the light, the refined and the deli-cate. . . . The taste for rare, aristocratic foods points to a traditional cui-sine, rich in expensive or rare products fresh vegetables, meat). 185)

Foie gras may be more expensive than fresh vegetables, but it exists ona continuum with calorically rich and heavy foods that begins withbeans and starch, for which the working classes develop the taste ofnecessity, whereas vegetables are lighter and also rarer than the basicpopular diet . While this insight shows how the categories of necessitymay become the choices of popular luxury, it also calls into questionnecessity as the grounding definition of choice. The question becomesmore pointed as on e moves to less material preferences. Since variousaspects of the dominant culture, such as museums, high-culture films,and books, are economically inexpensive allowing the less wealthy butbetter-educated dominated segment of the dominant class access tothem ), the popular distaste for them is not economically necessary atall. I t may be explained by the lack of what Bourdieu calls educationalcapital. Th e explanation is highly ambiguous, since the concept ofeducational capital coincides too well with extremely elitist ideas ofabsolute aesthetic value.) But it may simply be an alternative taste, pos-sessed by the working classes by chance rather than forced on them bysome extra-economic disability.

The second mark that identifies working-class tastes as dominatedrather than relative, however, is precisely the Kantian disgust for them.One might think that Kantian disinterest extended to tastes for physi-cal gratification that as such, while not pure aesthetic tastes, were with-ou t other valence. But Bourdieu notes that in Kants text, disgust dis-covers with horror the common animality on which and against whichmoral distinction is constructed: We regard as coarse and low thehabits of thought of those who have no feeling for beautiful nature . . .and who devote themselves to the mere enjoyments of sense found ineating and drinking 489). One might add, since it occurs with thevery definition of disinterest, Kants lugubrious joke about that Iro-quois Sachem, who was pleased in Paris by nothing more than by thecook shops.5 Whether or not Kants remarks reflect a class judgment

Kant, Crztique o f J u d p e n t , trans.J. H. Bernard NewYork: Hafner, i c y j i ) , 3; 6.


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on his part or a more thoughtless elitism, they surely admit the con-temporary elite marking of working-class tastes as barbarous. ThusKant allows the marking of different class tastes in Bourdieus system asdominating and dominated rather than merely different, even as theungrounded nature of Kants evaluation allows a position from whichto see his aesthetics as the use of taste to create artificial distinction.Since I will contest this view of Kants theory, one should note that it iscommon enough in evaluations of his project to give support to Bour-dieus views of Kants service to contemporary cultural elitism.6 More-over, it makes Bourdieus sociological analysis operate as an anti-Kant-ian theory, not simply as a parallel discourse.

From this perspective, however, one must turn to Bourdieus dis-cussion of Derrida by first asking, Why Derrida? In Economimesisparticularly, Derridas deconstruction of Kant has much in commonnot only with the general basis of Bourdieus critique but with thetheme of disgust he raises and the passages he discusses. But even if weaccept the grounds of Bourdieus criticism of Derrida, regardless ofthe similarities between the two positions, there is a second version ofthe question that we need t address. Since the weakness of Derridascritique, from Bourdieus perspective, is its refusal to escape the pro-

Here and in subsequent citations the first page number refers to this translation andthe second to the 1793 second German edition. On e might label Kants remark anethnocentrism within ostensible disinterest i f the Kantian sin of the Iroquois werenot shared by countless white Western visitors to Paris every year. Indeed many o f umight compliment that sachem on his good taste if doing s o did no t lead to the dan-gerous assumption that pleasure in Parisian cooking was a transcultural, universaljudgment of taste.

0 Eve Shaper, for example, introduces Kants project thus: In much eighteenth-century usage, to be a person of taste was to be a person of independent judgmentbased on individual conviction, n ot o n slavishly following rules. Kant is aware of thisusage, and it is par t of the aim of his analysis to secure a grounding of the judgme ntof taste in something that, as the personal, namely individual feeling, can carry theweight of an implied claim to autonomy Taste, Sublimity, and Genius: Th e Aes-thetics of Nature and Art, in T ~ PnmlrridgP Companion to Kant , ed. Paul Guyer [Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, i y j ] , 3 7 2 ) . One may doubt whether eigh-teenth-century attitudes toward taste generally contrasted individual judgme nt withobedience to rules, since most of Kants predecessors who wrote on aesthetics tried,like him, to articulate universal principles of taste. Still, the contrast between theslavishness of those without taste and the autonomy of those with it marks at least acontemporary attitude toward Kants theory.


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tocols of philosophical analysis set up by Kant even as it deconstructshis theories, on e wonders what the critique of Derrida adds to theprior critique of Kant. Th e discussion of Kant, as w e have seen, bothgave traction to the claim that taste distinctions operated as part ofclass dominat ion and made that sociological analysis aesthetically per-tinent. But once Kant, as the exemplar of what Bourdieu an d Derridaagree in thinking of as classical aesthetics, has been determined towork toward class-based distinctions, why is it necessary to demonstratethat a contemporary Kantians theories will work the same way? Toanswer this question, we will have to see how Bourdieus criticisms ofDerrida may be applied to himself and to see the Kantianism withinboth Derrida an d Bourdieu, which Bourdieu seems to hope to expelby trying to expel Derrida from his own text, as if transferring theKantian disgust with working-class taste a disgust exceeding disinterestand yet marking it off as class-based) to a disgust with Derrida tha tshould also exceed what his theory demands and that is thus equallyindicative of its linkages with what it would vomit up. The mirroring ofdisgust is particularly pointed given its importance as a theme to bothDerrida and Bourdieu.

Bourdieus treatment of Derrida is, as he admits, extremely com-pressed, only four to five pages, of which the summary of Derridasargument and Bourdieus dissent from it- the direct treatment of Der-rida-takes u p the first two:

Derrida does indeed see that what is involved is the opposition betweenlegitimate pleasure and enjoyment or, in terms of objects, betweenthe agreeable arts which seduce by the charm of their sensuous con-tent and the Fine Arts which offer pleasure without enjoyment. He alsosees, without explicitly connecting i t with the previous opposition, theantithesis between the gross tastes of those who are content t enjoythe simple sensations of the senses, at table or over a bottle-con-sumptive orality seen as interested taste-and pure taste. He indi-cates that disgust is perhaps the true origin of pure taste, inasmuch as itabolishes representative distance and, driving one irresistibly towards

Bourdieu connects Kant with high aesthetics and legitimate aesthetics(Distinction,485),while Derrida identifies the elements he discusses in Kant as thosethat have domina ted the philosophy of art since Kant T h p ruth in Painting, trans.Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod [Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 19871,7 3 ) .Th e latter work was first published in French in 1978.


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consumption, annihilates the freedom that is asserted in suspendingimmediate attachment to the sensuous and in neutralizing the affect,that is disinterestedness,a lack of interest as to the existence or non-existence of the thing represented. And one can, no doubt, thoughDerrida avoids doing so explicitly, relate all the foregoing oppositions,which concern the consumers relation to the work of art, to the last ofthe oppositions picked up, the one which Kant establishes, at the levelof production, between free art, involving free will, and mercenaryart, which exchanges the value of its labour for a wage. 494)

If on e wanted to mount a defense of Derrida, one might note a num-ber of things here. For instance, although a prior footnote, and indeedBourdieus attack on Derrida, refers only to The Truth in Painting thispassage directly describes Economimesis. The distinction betweenthe pleasures of fine art and other gratifications is common to bothworks bu t far more explicit in the latter. Th e discussions of disgust andof free and mercenary ar t occur only in Economimesis, which con-centrates on the aesthetic quality of disinterest in Kant and is thesource of the quotations. The section on Kant in The Truth in PaintingParergon,has to do more with seemingly formal themes, the differ-ence between ornament and essence, and Kants definition of purpo-siveness without purpose.

To be sure, Derridas two essays refer to each other explicitly moreor less as if they were parts of a single project. Moreover, since Der-ridas themes are more formal, at least superficially, in Parergon,andsince Bourdieu clearly wants to recognize openly the elements com-mon to his analysis and Derridas, the discussions of margins and purecuts in Parergon are less amenable to assimilation with a sociologi-cal project without some analysis than are the themes of Economime-sis. Still, since Bourdieus critiques are limited to the aspects of formalplay in Parergon,not merely the play of typography but the claim totreat the Critiqueof Judgment as a work of art, with complete disinteresteven in its existence, one may question whether those formalist flawsapply to the more material themes of the earlier essay or whether, ifthey do, the formal play might not also be analyzed back into the polit-ical analysis of which Bourdieu criticizes the lack: Failing to be, at thesame time, social breaks which truly renounce the gratifications asso-ciated with membership, the most audacious intellectual breaks ofpure reading still help to preserve the stock of consecrated texts from


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becoming dead letters, mere archive material, fit at best for the his-tory of ideas or the sociology of knowledge 496).But this problem is augmented by the occlusions even in the posi-tive summary quoted above. Bourdieu suggests that the political impli-cations of Derridas discussion are unrealized because Derrida doesnot explicitly connect the themes toward that end. But whatever theweaknesses of its analytic connections, the primary argument ofEconomimesis,as its title indicates, is that Kants seemingly disinter-ested aesthetics participates in an enlightenment humanist economy.Derrida opens with the claim that a politics, . . . although it neveroccupies the center of the stage, acts upon this discourse. It ought tobe possible to read it. Politics and political economy, to be sure, areimplicated in every discourse on ar t and on the beautiful.s Moreover,Derrida quite explicitly argues that aesthetic disinterest operates as i t sown economy, distinguishing the purely human from lower orders: Adivine teleology secures the political economy of the Fine-Arts, thehierarchical opposition of free art and mercenary art. Economimesisputs everything in its place, starting with the instinctual work of ani-mals without language and ending with God, passing by the way of themechanical arts, mercenary art, liberal arts, aesthetic arts and the Fine-Arts 9).Bourdieu might object that the themes are classically philo-sophical rather than political, but he would do so at the cost of his owninsight that the seemingly abstractly classical takes on its political effectby offering a structure of distinctions for the class system to use, whichis essentially Derridas point. On the issue of disgust, if Derridas dis-cussion is more complex in its itinerary and abstract in its formula-tions, again its point is precisely and manifestly Bourdieus; one mighteven argue that Derridas more formal discussion adds considerableforce to Bourdieus political claims. Indeed, if the end of the essay didnot turn so explicitly to Derrida, one might have expected compli-

Derrida, Economimesis, trans. Richard Klein, Diacritirs 11 198 1 ) : 3. Thisarticle was first published in French in 1975. Although Parergon is rarely asexplicit in it political themes and is therefore more open to Bourdieus criticism,Derrida himself thinks that it too has more than formal significance: It is becausedeconstruction interferes with solid structures , material institutions, an d not onlywith discourses or signifying representations, that it is always distinct from an analy-sis or a critique Truth in Painting 19).


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mentary references to Economimesis earlier in Distinction, so muchdoes Derrida offer extended arguments for Bourdieus points aboutKant.

I register these objections to Bourdieus handling of Derridalargely to argue that his treatment might have been more positive,indeed sympathetic, without imperiling his own case. In the main,however, Bourdieus reservation about Derrida is accurate, no t merelyfor Derrida himself but for my perhaps overly formal analysis, andfinally for Bourdieu. But let us start with Derrida. For Bourdieu, theproblem with avoiding social breaks, with treating Kants text on aes-thetics as if it were an aesthetic object to be analyzed, is that it repro-duces the philosophical forms and beliefs it seeks to deconstruct:

But Derridas supremely intellectual game presupposes lucidity in com-mitment to the game. . . .Thus Derrida tells us the truth of his text andhis reading a particular case of the experience of pure pleasure), thatis, that i t implies the epoche of any thesis of existence or, more simply,indifference to the existence of the object in question, but he does soi n a text which itself implies that epoche and that indifference. . . .Because he never withdraws from the philosophical game, whose con-ventions he respects, even in the ritual transgressions at which onlytraditionalists could be shocked, he can only philosophically tell thetruth about the philosophical text and its philosophical reading.Distinction, 95)

Posed in this way, the accusation is one made commonly enough aboutDerrida, one indeed tha t he asks for, since he regularly asserts that hisdeparture from traditional philosophy takes its strength from itsrespect for philosophys protocols and from its retracing of traditionalreadings and defin itions9 With the charge left in this condition, ignor-ing the details of any specific argument, the answer is equally expectable.Derrida argues that one cannot show the limits of philosophical dis-course from outside its boundaries precisely because it is a discoursethat claims to be without boundaries. Only an analysis from withinthem can delineate them despite philosophys claims; hence the rele-

J Derridas best statement of his procedure and its relation t o traditional read-ing remains The Exorbitant: Question of Method, in f C;mmmntology, trans. Gaya-tri Chakravortv Spivak Balt imore, M d . : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1 9 7 6 ) ,157-64.


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Loesberg Bourdieus DerridasKant 427vance of Bourdieus sociological questioning. Thus, according to Der-rida, rather than failing to be material, his presentation of the depar-tures his argument shares with Bourdieu, in a pointedly traditionalmode of analysis, enables Bourdieus subsequent departures from Der-ridas stylistic traditionalism. At this level of generality, the argumentover whose analysis represents the originating and effective break fromtradition can go on forever: each position bases its case on an equallylogical, purely abstract and formal position.

To give Bourdieus accusation a more specific defense, albeit onewith certain implications that he would not accept, I want to look moreclosely at Derridas use of the concept of disgust to deconstruct thatof pure taste. Derrida begins with the opposition Bourdieu notesbetween pure taste and the barbarism of physical pleasure, mere eat-ing and drinking, which pure taste would raise and expel: What isalready announced here is a certain allergy in the mouth betweenpure taste and actual tasting [digustat ion].We still have before us thequestion of where to inscribe disgust. Would not disgust, by turningitself back against actual tasting, also be the origin of pure taste, in thewake of a sor t of catastrophe? Economimesis, 16) . By making dis-gust, in all of its physicality, the origin of pure tastes expulsion of oral-ity, Derrida, even more than Bourdieu, inscribes in the very workingsof the theory the classjudgments Bourdieu finds implicit in Kant. Der-ridas analysis of disgust goes further still, since he argues the necessityof a vicariousness inscribed in its involuntariness that makes disgustsimultaneously an expelled negative of taste and a negative reflectionof the distance that defines pure taste. Because neither its orality norits vicariousness can be escaped, disgust forces the structure of puretaste on us, even more than pure taste itself does, in both a highly phys-ical and a highly negative form: The word vomit arrests the vicarious-ness of disgust; it puts the thing in the mouth ; it substitutes, but onlyfor example, oral for anal. It is dete rmined by the system of the beau-tiful, the symbol of morality, as its other; it is then for philosophy, still,an elixir, even in the very quintessence of bad taste 25).

Rather than lay out in detail the steps by which Derrida reachessuch a conclusion, I ask that its accuracy as a deconstruction of Kantsuse of aesthetics to make a certain moral judgment be assumed, for themoment, if only within brackets. The moral interest Derrida notes is


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one that we have in the very possibility of aesthetic judgments, not inany specific udgment.) Those concerned to support Bourdieus analy-sis of disgust, at least, should have no trouble in accepting Derridasconclusion, since i t deepens the analytic content of Bourdieus claimthat class disgust works within Kants aesthetic theory necessarily,rather than just in its specific contemporary upper-class embodiment.

But does Derrida effectively deconstruct disinterest as Kant definesit, as opposed to questioning its moral ties, and does his analysis expeldisinterest or, as Bourdieu claims, enact it? To answer these questions,we must return to the Kantian discussion that culminates in a declara-tion of the barbarism of the pleasure of mere eating and drinking andrestore some elisions that Bourdieu and Derrida both make. In estab-lishing a moral interest in aesthetic taste, Kant originally makes a dis-tinction not between pure taste and physical enjoyment but between ataste for the beautiful in nature and a taste for the beautiful in art. In apassage constructed out of explicit contradiction, he maintains that wehave a moral interest in the ability to take pleasure in the beauty ofnature but not one in the ability to take pleasure in the beauty of art,because only the former can be truly disinterested:

It is easy to explain why the satisfaction in the pure aesthetical judg-ment in the case of beautiful art is not combined with an immediateinterest, as it is in the case of beautiful nature. For the former is eithersuch an imitation of the latter that it reaches the point of deceptionand then produces the same effect as natural beauty for which i t istaken), or it is an ar t obviously directed designedly to our satisfaction.In the latter case the satisfaction in the product would, it is true, bebrought about immediately by taste, but it would be only a mediateinterest in the cause lying at its root, viz. an ar t that can only interest bymeans of i t s purpose and never in itself. 144; 17 1 )

Kant then asserts that the song of a bird in nature is beautiful because,in hearing it, we interpret it as natures proclamation of gladsomenessand contentment with existence 144; 1 7 2 ) , and this interpretationgives us pleasure whether nature have this design or not 145; 172).If we found the song to be a human imitation, we would cease to thinkit inherently beautiful, because we could construe i ts beauty only asdependent on an extra-aesthetic, intended purpose. I t is the inabilityto feel unintended beauty, a beauty perhaps even proceeding from aninaccurate interpretation of nature, that Kant finds morally wanting.


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Loesberg Bourdieus DerridasKant 429Furthermore, he does not compare disinterested pleasure with thepleasures of eating and drinking but compares the inability to feel anypleasure in nature with the inability to experience any pleasure buteating and drinking: We regard as coarse and ignoble the mental atti-tude of those persons who have no feelingfor beautiful nature for thuswe describe a susceptibility to interest in its contemplation) and whoconfine themselves to eating and drinking 145; 173) . Both Bourdieuand Derrida forget that a pure taste for beautiful art that does not alsoextend to a taste for beautiful nature is precisely as coarse and igno-ble. Both the disinterest that even an interest in the contemplation ofnature evidently has and our moral interest in the ability to have thatdisinterested interest accrue as little to a pure taste for art as to a phys-ical pleasure in eating and drinking. Indeed, the distinction between amoral interest consequent on the appreciation of natural beauty andnot consequent on that of fine art is the theme of section 42.

But since the taste for an object of fine ar t can be nonphysical-indeed, by Kants own admission, a pure aesthetical judgment-whywould one who could experience this taste, as well as the physical grat-ification of eating and drinking, but not the taste for beautiful naturealso be coarse and ignoble? To answer this question, we must firsttake seriously Kants claim that aesthetic satisfaction is disinterested inthe sense that it is indifferent as regards the existence of an object43-4; i 7 ) . 1 0 If one considers disinterest as occurring if one desires

neither gratification nor moral benefit from the object but only theaesthetic pleasure that Derrida describes as arid, then the claim thatone needs to be indifferent to the objects very existence goes too far.We might value an object only because it gave us that arid pleasureand still take measures to preserve it if it were a painting, by putting itin a museum; if i t were a poem, by disseminating knowledge ofit through education and canonization) I1 But for us reasonably toundertake such an act of preservation, we would have to know that our

10 I follow the pattern in Kantian criticism of using indifferenceand disinter-est as synonyms, but one should note that the use of indifference uggests notneutrality or open-mindedness but a complete lack of interest, perhaps even arefusal to attend to the issue. This distinction becomes significant below.

On Kants claim about indifference as to existence see Paul Guyer, Kant a n dthe Claims of Tuste Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979 , 191-202. In a


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pleasure came from the object of our perception as an effect of theobjects existence. In the case of an aesthetic pleasure, that is exactlywhat we cannot know. Since the pleasure is one of experiencing theobject as purposive, as having the form of an object made, s to speak,on purpose, while knowing that that purposiveness is without purpose,the purposiveness we experience does not necessarily correspond to apurpose whose achievement the object was designed to enact 55;33-4).Kant calls this attribute subjective purposiveness and thusnotes that our interpretation of the significance of a birds song maynot correspond to any real design in nature. In such a situation, wemay well have no interest, not merely in gratification but in the objectsvery existence. The perception of purposiveness can come only froman object, but it may not necessarily come from any one object or fromthe same object reliably, since i t cannot be imputed to that object withany cognitive certainty hence Kants insistence that while we cannotjustifiably claim that the judgment that a specific object is beautiful isuniversal, we can claim that the judgment itself is universal).

Once we recognize that the judgment of beauty can be completelydisinterested in the way Kant means-without interest in the objectsexistence or in gratification-only in the face of an object that maywell not reliably give and was not designed to give the pleasureafforded by the beautiful, we can see the distinction he wants to drawbetween the beautiful in nature and in fine art and why a moral inter-est accrues only to the ability to experience the former. Unlike anobject of nature, a work of art, even a work of free, nonmercenary, fineart, has been designed to give us an experience of the beautiful. It isdirected designedly to our satisfaction 144; 7 ). Thus, while we canin a certain sense make a pure aesthetic judgment of it independentof its ability to gratify a desire o r to fulfill a moral interest, we do havean interest ultimately in the existence of the object as one designed tofulfill the purpose of giving us pure aesthetic pleasure. Thus Kantclaims that our satisfaction in such an object would . . . be broughtabout immediately by taste. The immediate judgment of it is purely

~slightly different context Guyer points out that even if the pleasure of art were non-physical and void of interest relating to desire, we might have interested expecta-tions about paintings in museums that were comparable to our expectations aboutchocolate that resulted from our physical taste for i t 190) .


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Loesberg BourdieusDerridas Kant 43 1

aesthetic. But i t would be only a mediate interest in the cause lying atits root, viz. an ar t that can only interest by means of its purpose andnever in itself 144; 17 1 ). Since the object was designed to give us animmediate satisfaction, its design becomes a purpose in excess of andleading up to that satisfaction, thus creating a mediate interest in theobjects existence. Only by eliding this distinction between a disinterestin an object of fine art and a disinterest in the beautiful in nature,which extends even to a lack of interest in the objects existence, canDerrida get to the opposition between a physical and an abstract plea-sure on which his deconstruction of disgust is based.

That Kantian disinterest goes beyond mere disinterest in physicalgratification does not imply that the distinction between a desire forphysical gratification and a more arid pleasure does not also exist. Itclearly does, and in Kant i t carries all the moral weight and sociologicalbias that Derrida deconstructs and that Bourdieu objects to in theirdiscussions of disgust and coarse, physical pleasures. Within the termsof his deconstruction of the disinterest merely in physical gratification,Derridas elision of Kants opposition into one of aesthetic taste tophysical pleasure may be taken as a convenient compression. But Bour-dieus accusation is that Derridas supremely intellectual game ofdeconstructing philosophy on its own terms presupposes lucidity incommitment to the game Distinction, 95) and that therefore even asuccessful deconstruction will merely repeat not only the game of phi-losophy but also, to the extent that lucidity is as Bourdieu claims, themost refined Kantian aesthetic pleasure 485) he game of aesthetics.In the support of this charge, the Kantian disinterest that is withoutinterest even in the existence of the object it judges-the disinterestthat Derrida and Bourdieu mention but elide into the larger categoryof disinterest in gratification-does have a role to play. That disinterestarises from Kants separation of a purposiveness that the judgmentimputes to the object from any claim that that purposiveness matchesup with a purpose, design, or intent that produced the object. Giventhe separation, the judgment has no reason to attend to the existenceof any particular object, as opposed to the perception of formal pur-posiveness, which is the subject of aesthetic judgment.

But this handling of an object to find forms and effects thatexceed its own ends applies as well to deconstructive analysis as to aes-


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432 M I Q December 1997

thetic judgment. In discussing his treatment of Kant in The Truth inPainting, Derrida makes the comparison explicit in a passage Bourdieuquotes:

Starting out from pleasure, it was for pleasure that the third Critiquewas written, for pleasure that it should be read. . . . In letting myself beguided by pleasure I recognize and simultaneously put astray an injunc-tion. I follow it [ j e b su i s ] :the enigma of pleasure puts the whole bookin movement. I seduce it [ j e l s idu is ] : n treating the third Critique as awork of art o r a beautiful object, which it was not simply designed to be,I act as if the existence of the book were indifferent to me which, asKant explains, is a requirement of any aesthetic experience) and couldbe considered with an imperturbable detachment. 43)

Few who follow Derridas reading of Kant would confuse it with a judg-ment of an aesthetic object even assuming that such a judgmentcould be extended into an analytic method with more critical contentthan the only kind ofjudgment Kant actually proposes: This is beauti-ful). But Derrida does mean seriously to treat the work with indiffer-ence to its own ends in order to show the elements of its own func-tioning that it cannot recognize. Although he is explicit, in a deceptivelyplayful tone, about the ground he shares with Kant, however, he rarelyallows Kant the full force of his own definition. Following Kants for-mulation, Derrida calls this disinterest indifference to the objectsexistence, which suggests not quite detachment but an absolute lack ofcaring o r attention. But following Heideggers critique of Nietzsche, heimmediately withdraws this definition, restoring the disinterest thathe will deconstruct 44). r perhaps it would be more accurate to saythat Derrida does not allow Kant to claim the disinterest that he him-self deploys. Of Kants project, he says: Now you have to know whatyoure talking about, what intrinsically concerns the value beauty andwhat remains external to your immanent sense of beauty. This perma-nent requirement- to distinguish between the internal or propersense and the circumstance of the object being talked about-orga-nizes all philosophical discourses on art 45).Perhaps to write a phi-losophy of art, one has to know what one is talking about. But to havea disinterested judgment, or at least a judgment indifferent to itsobjects existence, that is exactly what one does not have to know. Thedistinction between internal sense and circumstance is just what that


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Loesberg Bourdieus Derridas Kant 433

judgment brackets by separating purposiveness from purpose. Thedeconstruction of ornament and essence that follows this establish-ment of boundaries, then, is already present in the concept of aes-thetic disinterest. So in judging the Critique as a work of art, Derridareproduces, somewhat as Bourdieu describes, a part of the philosophyhe deconstructs.

I say somewhat because my point is significantly different fromBourdieus. Bourdieu suggests that Derrida willingly participates in thegame he deconstructs. He quotes Derrida on following Kants aestheticdisinterest without clarifying that Derrida sees his method as a refusalto participate in Kants game. In contrast, by arguing that both Bour-dieu and Derrida suppress part of Kants game and that Derrida drawson the part they both suppress, I suggest not that Derrida is just dis-guised traditionalism but that Kants seemingly traditional aestheticsfunctions centrally in the most corrosive aspect of Derridas analysis.Rather than apply this aesthetics explicitly, however, Derrida may avoidtracing it out as part of his deconstruction because to do so wouldocclude the analytic departure he wants to claim. In his defense, it is asmuch a question whether Kant is aware of the implications of his ver-sion of aesthetic disinterest as it is whether Derrida is in his silent appli-cation. Kants formulation does not protect him from the hiddenmoralisms and economies that both Derrida and Bourdieu trace. If,moreover, Derrida captures the main elements of Bourdieus critiqueof Kant, even in overly abstract terms, and if his debt to Kant does notundercut his deconstruction but allows it, where does that leave Bour-dieus own critique?

At this point one may turn on Bourdieu the tattered question ofthe problem of his own discourse without, I hope, risking, much lesssettling for, the glib dismissal of contradiction that usually follows onsuch a question. Certainly, the contradictions between the grounds forBourdieus condemnation of Derrida and his own description of hispractices are so obvious that they could only be our starting point:

The style of the book [Distinction], hose long, complex sentences mayoffend-constructed as they are with a view to reconsti tuting the com-plexity of the social world in a language capable of holding togetherthe most diverse things while setting them in rigorous perspective-stems partly from the endeavour to mobilize all the resources of thetraditional modes of expression, literary, philosophical or scientific, so


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as to say things that were d e facto o r de ju re excluded from them, andto prevent the reading from slipping back into the simplicities of thesmart essay or the political polemic. xiii)

This passage from the preface to the English-language edition will, ofcourse, have been written some years after the books concludingpages on Derrida. Still, Bourdieus claim to use the resources of aca-demic expression against themselves is striking in view of his criticizingDerrida for using the same modus operandi. For the moment, let usset aside the question of why he does so and ask it in reverse: assum-ing-as I do- that Bourdieu genuinely suspects academic language ofre-creating the class biases of traditional philosophy, why would he usethis suspect style and method? One may put the question in an evenmore self-referentially specific form. Bourdieu extends his suspicionsof academic discourse fairly enough to the discourses of sociologyitself: The existence of a scientific sociology is as improbable as ever intimes when the position of sociologist is one of the refuges for thoseintent on escaping classification 587). But, of course, either Bour-dieus discourse escapes his own classifications, or it reenacts one ofthe class biases that they reveal. Either he has the inauthentic desire, orhe capitulates to his capture within the class system.

Th e glibness of wanting to catch poststructuralists with the net oftheir own discourse lies in the cheapness of the victory it gains. In theface of the massiveness of Bourdieus analysis, the self-contradictionseems cheap indeed. The value of extricating him from it may beslightly larger, however, in that doing so gives his system a certainwholeness that h e clearly wants. Here Kants indifference as to the exis-tence of the object, the willingness to analyze circumstance withoutregard to propriety or essence, serves him as well as it does Derrida,and in the same way. Both Bourdieu and Derrida engage in an aca-demic or philosophical analysis according to Kants method of aes-thetic judgment: they mix circumstance and essence, accident andintent, to delineate a structure whose significance stands apart from i tsorigin and even from the problem of its own integrity. Once one hasbecome indifferent to existence, ones capture in ones own analysis isequally a matter of indifference. The only question is the status of thepurposiveness on e judges, the sociological system o ne outlines, thephilosophical system one traces and deconstructs. Even if Bourdieu


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Loesberg Bourdieus Derridas Kant 435were the most inauthentic sociologist, the accuracy or inaccuracy ofthe classifications he was trying to evade would remain unchanged.Even if Derrida were the most mystified standard philosopher, repro-ducing in his discourse the limits he hoped to question, the accuracyor inaccuracy of his analysis would also remain unchanged. In effect,the writers status becomes as inconsequential to the discourses exis-tence as the existence of its content has been to the writer.

So we return to the question addressed at the outset: Why Der-rida? Why does Bourdieu proceed from attacking Kant to attackingDerrida for committing transgressions that are his own as well? GivenBourdieus use of the Kantian aesthetics he so unrelentingly combats,one might guess that Derrida was the screen image for the Kantian ele-ments he would not recognize. But like Derrida himself, Bourdieucatches glimpses of the Kantian nature of his project, even if, like Der-rida, he cannot allow himself to hold on to them. Thus he ends hisEnglish-language preface by recognizing the aesthetic quality of hissociological analysis:

At all events, there is nothing more universal than the project of objec-tifying the mental structures associated with the particularity of a socialstructure. Because i t presupposes an epistemological break which isalso a social break, a sort of estrangement from the familiar, domestic,native world, the critique in the Kantian sense) of culture invites eachreader, through the making strange beloved of the Russian formalists,to reproduce on his or her own behalf the critical break of which it isthe product. For this reason i t is perhaps the only rational basis for atruly universal culture. xiv)

Recognizing their participation in the traditions they undercut, espe-cially the Continental aesthetic theories they have all read deeply,comes far more easily to Continental theorists than to their Anglo-American allies. With American literary theories concerning the polit-ical and the historical, separating themselves from every trace of theaesthetic by reducing it to a veil for ideological and market forces hasbecome an obsession. But it may be mirrored in Bourdieus fear ofentrapment in the merely academic that Derrida clearly represents forhim. Derridas problem, for Bourdieu, is too great an abstraction ofthe issues whose basic analysis they both share. But Derridas style, aswe have seen, fails to make a social break 496); t is, in a sense, a ver-


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sion of the refusal to recognize not only ones own Kantianism butones own participation in a project virtually descriptive of the aca-demic culture one seeks to analyze. Thus Bourdieu finds himselfcaught between two nauseas. He wants to avoid the smart essay or thepolitical polemic, which is surely his version of Kants coarse andignoble indulgences, disdained by a higher, more rigorous analysis.But by vomiting out Derridean style, the class markers of whose acade-micism also turn his stomach, perhaps he may expel that academicism.

But if Kantian indifference toward the existence of the object ofjudgment allows the cultural and philosophical analyses of Bourdieuand Derrida their achievements, it may also allow us to take advantageof them, without their anxieties. After all, indifference is in excess ofKants disgust with the physical and thus may also go beyond Bour-dieus and Derridas repulsion from the traditional and the lucid. Atthe opening of this essay I asked if, by analyzing the positions of threetexts on a philosophical question, I had not merely turned decon-structive irreverence into irrelevance. One might almost say that I hadrisked an indifference to the political issues at stake. Of course, this isan accusation that both Bourdieu and Foucault direct at Derrida inthe first instance. Nor is it trivial, since the fear of being guilty of itmotivates Derrida as well: if one is to escape the irrelevant academicdiscourse that maintains the status quo, one ought to worry about whatwould recapture one within that discourse. I have argued here, how-ever, for a common ground among Bourdieu, Derrida, and even oneaspect of Kant that underlies the skeptical analysis at least the first twowant. I have also suggested that the answer to the Bourdieuian andFoucauldian worry is a certain Kantian indifference. We are regularlytold that it leads to quietism or even to a positive defense of the statusquo. But it may equally lead to the corrosive questioning that only acomplete indifference can enable.

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Loesberg, Jonathan - Bourdieu’s Derrida’s Kant