Bourdieu’s Reading of Sartre’s The Family Idiot

Abstract

In his study from 1992 on the genesis and the structure of the literary field (“le champ littéraire”), The Rules of Art, Pierre Bourdieu makes a point of criticizing some ideas put forward by Jean-Paul Sartre in his monograph treating the life and work of Gustave Flaubert, The Family Idiot (1971-1972/1988). Although Bourdieu acknowledges his intellectual heritage from Sartre, he fails to take into account Sartre’s philosophical analysis of Flaubert’s relation to language, especially to speech clichés and to the Other’s language. This part of Sartre’s analysis has interesting parallels to some of the early works of the Russian philosopher, Mikhaël Bakhtin. Bourdieu also puts forward some general, critical views on Sartre’s thinking, and he attacks Sartre’s position as a ‘total’ intellectual, dominating all the various fields composing “le champ intellectuel”, polemic views which fail to hit their target. Bourdieu’s allegations become thus a sort of rhetoric boomerang, finding their way back to the sender of the boomerang, recoiling on their author and hitting his own hubris more accurately than they affect the alleged hubris of the target person.

Keywords: Bourdieu, Sartre, Flaubert, literary field, sociological theory of the novel