386 Jacques Derrida 1984–2004
The Heidegger aff air also rekindled older quarrels, starting with
the one which had long been brewing with Pierre Bourdieu. While he
had greeted Glas with an enthusiastic letter, fi ve years later Bourdieu
laid into Derrida in no uncertain terms, in the last pages of one of
his main works, Distinction. Admittedly, this postscript – ‘Towards
a “vulgar” critique of “pure” critiques’ – was offi cially devoted to
Kant’s Critique of Judgment and the denial of ‘the social categor-
ies of aesthetic judgement’ that could be read in it.^15 But behind
Kant, it is undeniable that Bourdieu was attacking Derrida and
his reading of Kant in the text ‘Parergon’ (reprinted in 1978 in The
Truth in Painting). In his view, although it did bring out some of the
hidden presuppositions of Kant’s philosophy of the judgment of
taste, Derrida’s reading is still ‘subject to the censorships of the pure
reading’. Despite ‘transgressing the most binding rules of orthodox
commentary’, any questioning of the philosophical postulates was,
in his view, more apparent than real. ‘The supremely skilful game’ in
which Derrida indulges is merely an apparent transgression; it in fact
perpetuates ‘the existence and the powers of philosophical reading’.^16
All things considered, Bourdieu’s attack was not unrelated to the
one launched by Michel Foucault seven years earlier in the fi nal
pages of another postscript, namely the republication of his History
of Madness. For the author of Distinction, it was also a matter of
dislodging philosophy from its domineering position. If we are to
believe Bourdieu, deconstruction is merely a very sophisticated lure.
As he puts it, ‘the philosophical way of talking about philosophy
de-realizes everything that can be said about philosophy’. However
subtle they may be, or precisely because of their subtlety, ‘the most
audacious intellectual breaks of pure reading’ are merely ‘an ulti-
mate path of salvation’ for a discipline that in his view is threatened
with pure and simple destruction.^17
Derrida did not immediately reply to this critique. But, focus-
ing on the Kantian problematic of the Confl ict of Faculties, he
devoted several sessions in his 1983–4 seminar to the postscript
of Distinction before returning to it in ‘Privilege’, the text which
opens Who’s Afraid of Philosophy? Derrida endeavours to demon-
strate that Bourdieu is doing exactly the same as he had criticized
Derrida for doing: he wanted to give sociology an ‘absolute, that is,
philosophical, hegemony over the multiplicity of the other regions of
knowledge, of which sociology would no longer simply be a part’.^18
In a spectacular coup de force, Bourdieu thus overturns the ancient
hierarchy of the branches of knowledge by turning sociology into
the new queen of the disciplines, able to lord it over all the others
and reveal what they have left unsaid. Far from being the promised
revolution, it was merely an attempted putsch.
This confl ict between two disciplines was also a metaphor for the
rivalry between two men of the same generation, trained in the same