Heidegger Aff air to the de Man Aff air 1987–1988 387
institutions. Originally, Bourdieu had aimed to be a philo sopher,
like Derrida, but he very quickly changed tack, moving from
Husserl to Kabylia, then to sociology, without ever quite bidding
farewell to philosophy. As Didier Eribon, who managed to stay
friends with both men, illuminatingly puts it:
Bourdieu was haunted by the fi gure of Derrida, and many of his
remarks on philosophy and his apparent choices in this domain
can be explained only by this relationship, more subterranean
but more fundamental than those he tried to evince so as better
to mask the truth – a relationship with a man whom, deep
down, he doubtless considered to be his only equal and his only
rival, and who was in any case his interlocutor both privileged
and denied (one day he told me: ‘There’s always someone in
your own generation whom you consider right from the start as
your rival’... before naming his own rival, who, of course, was
Derrida... You need merely read the postscript to Distinction
on Kant’s aesthetics to realize this!)^19As so often, it was Heidegger who acted as a catalyst, rekindling
old quarrels that concerned him only indirectly. On 10 March
1988, Libération had a double-page spread headlined by the words:
‘Heidegger by Pierre Bourdieu: the great crash in philosophy’.
This was actually an interview with Bourdieu about his book The
Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, a slightly revised version of
a text from 1975. Right from the start, Bourdieu’s allusions seemed
to target Derrida: ‘Farías’s book has had the merit of forcing
Heideggereans to emerge from the lofty reserve into which they had
withdrawn.’ Philosophy was used to ‘abusing its symbolic powers’
and treating history and the human sciences with disdain, but here it
was forced to face up to positive knowledge. And Bourdieu went so
far as to claim that ‘if that philosophy, and those philosophers, were
dragged under by the great crash of Heideggerean thought, it would
not be a loss in [his] eyes’.
Then the attack became head-on, as Bourdieu turned to Derrida’s
interview in Le Nouvel Observateur a few months earlier:
I found it rather funny that Derrida, who was well acquainted
with my 1975 text – he’d read it and I gave an account of it in
his seminar without arousing the least objection –, should, in his
attempted rebuttal of the sociological analysis, call for a form
of analysis able to go beyond the contrast between understand-
ing from within and explaining from without, a programme
that I had been proposing for some time, and one which I
had, in my view, realized. It has to be said that the debate on
Heidegger had placed him in a very diffi cult situation.^20