• • • D1st1nct1on A Social Critique of tbe

Judgement of Taste

Pierre Bourdieu Translated by Richard Nice

Harvard University Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts \

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autonomy. Position in the the class structure; and so­e not those best placed to •ought of the social world ~ perhaps never less like!; m the representation they

s those limits.

Postscript: Towards a

'vu[gar' Critique of (. ) . . Pure CrJtJques

The reader may have wondered why, in a text devoted to taste and art, no appeal is made to the tradition of philosophical or literary aesthetics; and he or she will no doubt have realized that this is a deliberate refusal.

It is certain that the 'high' aesthetlc, both that which is engaged in a practical form in legitimate works and that which is expressed in wr~· ings intended to _make it explicit and present it formally, is fundamen tally constituted, whatever the variants, against all that this research rna have established-namely, the indivisibiliry of taste, the unity of th most 'pure' and most purified, the most sublime and most sublimat tastes, and the most ~impure' and 'coarse', ordinary and primitive tastes. This means, conversely, that this project has required, above all, a sort of deliberate amnesia, a readiness to renounce the whole corpus of culti­vated discourse on culture, which implies renouncing not only the prof­its secured by exhibiting signs of recognition but also the more intimate profits of erudite gratification, those Proust refers to when he indicates how much his lucid vision of the pleasures of reading has cost him: 'I have had to struggle here with my dearest aesthetic impressions, endeav­ouring to push intellectual honesry to its ultimate, cruellest limits'­without being able to ignore that the pleasures of 'lucid vision' may rep­resent the 'purest' and most refined, albeit often somewhat morose, form f . 1

o enJoyment. And if we must now allow the 'return of the repressed', having pro­

duced the truth of the taste against which, by an immense repression, the whole of legitimate aesthetics has been constructed, this is not only in order to subject the truths won to a final test (though it is not a question ·

of 'comparing, and contrasting' rival theories), bur also in order ro pre­vent rhe absence of direct confrontation from allowing the two dis­courses to coexist peacefully as parallel alternatives, in two carefully separared universes of thought and discourse.

Disgust at the 'Fadle'

'Pure' tasre and the aesthetics which provides its theory are founded on a refusal of'impui:e' taste and of aiJtheJiJ (sensation), the simple, primitive form of pleasure reduced to a pleasure of the senses, as in what Kant calls 'the taste of the tongue, the palate and the throat', a surrender to imme­diate sensation which in another order looks like imprudence. At the risk of seeming to indulge in the 'facile effects' which 'pure taste' stigmatizes, it could be shown that the whole language of aesthetics is contained in a 1 fundamental refusal of the facile, in all the meanings which bourgeois( ethics and aesthetics give to the word;' that 'pure taste', purely negative in its essence, is based on the disgust that is often called 'visceral' (it 'malces one sick' or 'malces one vomit') for everyrhing.rhat is 'facile'-fac­ile music, or a facile stylistic effect, but also 'easy virtue' or an 'easy lay'. The refusal of what is easy in the sense of simple, and therefore shallow, and 'cheap', because it is easily decoded and culturally 'undemanding', narurally leads to the refusal of what is facile in the ethical or aesthetic sense, of everything which offers pleasures that are too immediately acces­sible and so discredited -as 'childish' or 'primitive' (as opposed to the de­ferred pleasures of legitimate art). Thus people spealc of 'facile effects' to characterize the obtrusive elegance of a certain style of journalistic writ­ing or the roo insistent, roo predictable charm of what is called 'light' music (a word whose connotations virtually correspond to those of 'fac­ile'-consider 'easy listening') or certain performances of classical music; rhus a critic denounces the 'vulgar sensuality' or 'Casbab orientalism' which reduces one interpretation of the 'Dance of the Seven Veils' in· Strauss's Salome to 'cabaret music'. 'Vulgar' works, as the words used to describe them indicare-'facile' or 'light', of course, but also 'frivolous', 'futile', 'shallow', 'superficial', 'Showy', 'flashy', 'meretricious'/ or, in the register of oral satisfactions, 'syrupy', 'sugary', 'rose-water', 'schmaltzy', 'cloying' -are nor only a sort of insult to refinement, a slap in the face to a 'demanding' (difficile) audience which will not stand for 'facile' offer­ings (it is a compliment to an artist, especially a conductor, to say he 're­spects his audience'); they arouse distaste and disgust by the methods of seduction, usUally denounced as 'low', 'degrading', 'demeaning', which they try to use, giving the spectator the sense of being treated like any Tom, Dick or Harry who can be seduced by tawdry charms which invite him to regress to the most primitive and elementary forms of pleasure, whether they be the passive satisfactions of the infantile taste for sweet liquids ('syrupy') or the quasi-animal gratifications of sexual desire. 4 One might evoke the Platonic prejudice, endlessly reaffirmed, in favour of the

'noble senses', vision and hearing, or the pnmacy ~ant gtves to rorm, which is more 'pure', over colour and its quasi-carnal seduction.

But it will suffice to quote a quire exemplary text in which Schopen­hauer establishes an opposition between the 'sublime' and the 'charming' identical to the one Kant .malces in the Critique of judgement between 'pleasure' and 'enjoyment', the 'beautiful' and the 'agreeable', 'that which pleases' and 'that which gratifies'. Schopenhauer defines the 'charming or attractive' as that which 'excites the will by presenting to it directly irs fulfilment, irs satisfaction', that which 'draws the beholder away from the pure contemplation which is demanded by all apprehension of the beau­tiful, because it necessarily excites this will, by objects which directly ap­peal to it'; and, significantly, he condemns simultaneously the two forms of satisfaction, oral and sexual, against which the satisfaction recognized as_ specifically aesthetic is to be constituted: 'The one species (of the charming), a very low one, is found in Dutch paintings of still life, when they err by representing articles of food, which by their deceptive likeness necessarily excite the appetite for the things they represent, and this is just an excitement of the will, which puts an end to all aesthetic con­templation of the object. Painted fruit is yet admissible, because we may regard it as the further development of the flower, and as a beautiful product of nature in form and colour, without being obliged to think of it as eatable; but unfortunately we often find, represenred with deceptive naturalness, prepared and served dishes, oysters, herrings, crabs, bread and butter, beer, wine, and so forth, which is altogether to be condemned. In historical painting and in sculpture the charming consists in. nalced fig­ures, whose position, drapery, and general treatment are calculated to ex­cite the passions of the beholder, and thus pure aesthetical contemplation is at once annihilated, and the aim of art is defeated.''

Schopenhauer is here very close to Kane! and to all aesthetics in which, in a rationalized form, the ethos of the dominared fraction of the dominant class is expressed; as he so well puts it, the 'charming', which reduces the 'pure knowing subject', 'freed from subjectivity and its im­pure desires' to a 'willing subject, subject to every desire, every servitude', exerts real violence on the beholder. Indecent and exhibitionist, it cap­tures the body by irs rhythm, which is attuned to bodily rhythms, and captivates the mind by the deceptions of irs plots, suspense and surprises, forcing on it a real participation which is quite opposed to the 'distance' and 'disinterestedness' of pure taste, and bound to appear as out of place as Don Quixote when, carried awa~ by real anger at a fictitious scandal, he assaults Master Pedro's puppets.

The most radical difference between popular entertainments-from Punch and Judy shows, wrestling or circuses, or even the old neighbourhood cin­ema, to soccer marches-and bourgeois entertainmencs is found in audience participation. In one case it is constant, manifest (boos, whistles), some­rimes direct (pitch or playing· field, invasions); in the other it is intermit-

of 'comparing, and contrasting' rival theories), bur also in order ro pre­vent rhe absence of direct confrontation from allowing the two dis­courses to coexist peacefully as parallel alternatives, in two carefully separared universes of thought and discourse.

Disgust at the 'Fadle'

'Pure' tasre and the aesthetics which provides its theory are founded on a refusal of'impui:e' taste and of aiJtheJiJ (sensation), the simple, primitive form of pleasure reduced to a pleasure of the senses, as in what Kant calls 'the taste of the tongue, the palate and the throat', a surrender to imme­diate sensation which in another order looks like imprudence. At the risk of seeming to indulge in the 'facile effects' which 'pure taste' stigmatizes, it could be shown that the whole language of aesthetics is contained in a 1 fundamental refusal of the facile, in all the meanings which bourgeois( ethics and aesthetics give to the word;' that 'pure taste', purely negative in its essence, is based on the disgust that is often called 'visceral' (it 'malces one sick' or 'malces one vomit') for everyrhing.rhat is 'facile'-fac­ile music, or a facile stylistic effect, but also 'easy virtue' or an 'easy lay'. The refusal of what is easy in the sense of simple, and therefore shallow, and 'cheap', because it is easily decoded and culturally 'undemanding', narurally leads to the refusal of what is facile in the ethical or aesthetic sense, of everything which offers pleasures that are too immediately acces­sible and so discredited -as 'childish' or 'primitive' (as opposed to the de­ferred pleasures of legitimate art). Thus people spealc of 'facile effects' to characterize the obtrusive elegance of a certain style of journalistic writ­ing or the roo insistent, roo predictable charm of what is called 'light' music (a word whose connotations virtually correspond to those of 'fac­ile'-consider 'easy listening') or certain performances of classical music; rhus a critic denounces the 'vulgar sensuality' or 'Casbab orientalism' which reduces one interpretation of the 'Dance of the Seven Veils' in· Strauss's Salome to 'cabaret music'. 'Vulgar' works, as the words used to describe them indicare-'facile' or 'light', of course, but also 'frivolous', 'futile', 'shallow', 'superficial', 'Showy', 'flashy', 'meretricious'/ or, in the register of oral satisfactions, 'syrupy', 'sugary', 'rose-water', 'schmaltzy', 'cloying' -are nor only a sort of insult to refinement, a slap in the face to a 'demanding' (difficile) audience which will not stand for 'facile' offer­ings (it is a compliment to an artist, especially a conductor, to say he 're­spects his audience'); they arouse distaste and disgust by the methods of seduction, usUally denounced as 'low', 'degrading', 'demeaning', which they try to use, giving the spectator the sense of being treated like any Tom, Dick or Harry who can be seduced by tawdry charms which invite him to regress to the most primitive and elementary forms of pleasure, whether they be the passive satisfactions of the infantile taste for sweet liquids ('syrupy') or the quasi-animal gratifications of sexual desire. 4 One might evoke the Platonic prejudice, endlessly reaffirmed, in favour of the

'noble senses', vision and hearing, or the pnmacy ~ant gtves to rorm, which is more 'pure', over colour and its quasi-carnal seduction.

But it will suffice to quote a quire exemplary text in which Schopen­hauer establishes an opposition between the 'sublime' and the 'charming' identical to the one Kant .malces in the Critique of judgement between 'pleasure' and 'enjoyment', the 'beautiful' and the 'agreeable', 'that which pleases' and 'that which gratifies'. Schopenhauer defines the 'charming or attractive' as that which 'excites the will by presenting to it directly irs fulfilment, irs satisfaction', that which 'draws the beholder away from the pure contemplation which is demanded by all apprehension of the beau­tiful, because it necessarily excites this will, by objects which directly ap­peal to it'; and, significantly, he condemns simultaneously the two forms of satisfaction, oral and sexual, against which the satisfaction recognized as_ specifically aesthetic is to be constituted: 'The one species (of the charming), a very low one, is found in Dutch paintings of still life, when they err by representing articles of food, which by their deceptive likeness necessarily excite the appetite for the things they represent, and this is just an excitement of the will, which puts an end to all aesthetic con­templation of the object. Painted fruit is yet admissible, because we may regard it as the further development of the flower, and as a beautiful product of nature in form and colour, without being obliged to think of it as eatable; but unfortunately we often find, represenred with deceptive naturalness, prepared and served dishes, oysters, herrings, crabs, bread and butter, beer, wine, and so forth, which is altogether to be condemned. In historical painting and in sculpture the charming consists in. nalced fig­ures, whose position, drapery, and general treatment are calculated to ex­cite the passions of the beholder, and thus pure aesthetical contemplation is at once annihilated, and the aim of art is defeated.''

Schopenhauer is here very close to Kane! and to all aesthetics in which, in a rationalized form, the ethos of the dominared fraction of the dominant class is expressed; as he so well puts it, the 'charming', which reduces the 'pure knowing subject', 'freed from subjectivity and its im­pure desires' to a 'willing subject, subject to every desire, every servitude', exerts real violence on the beholder. Indecent and exhibitionist, it cap­tures the body by irs rhythm, which is attuned to bodily rhythms, and captivates the mind by the deceptions of irs plots, suspense and surprises, forcing on it a real participation which is quite opposed to the 'distance' and 'disinterestedness' of pure taste, and bound to appear as out of place as Don Quixote when, carried awa~ by real anger at a fictitious scandal, he assaults Master Pedro's puppets.

The most radical difference between popular entertainments-from Punch and Judy shows, wrestling or circuses, or even the old neighbourhood cin­ema, to soccer marches-and bourgeois entertainmencs is found in audience participation. In one case it is constant, manifest (boos, whistles), some­rimes direct (pitch or playing· field, invasions); in the other it is intermit-

I

\

~.c. ... , u.uuuu, mgru.y nruauzeo, wttn Obligatory applause, md even shouts of enthllSWm, at the end, or evm ~tly silent {concertS in churchos). ]222, a bourgeois entertainment which mimics popular entertainment, is only an apparent exception: the signs of participation {hanc:klapping or foot­tapping) ate limited to a silent sketch of the gesture {at least in free jazz).

The 'Taste of Reflection' and the 'Taste of Sense'

What pure taste refuses is indeed the 'tiolence to which the popular spec­tator consents {one thinks of Adorno's description of popular music and its dkcts); it demands respect, the distance which allows it to keep its distance. It expects the work of art, a finality with no other end than it­self, to treat the spectator in accordance with the Kantian imperative, that is, as an end, not a means .. Thus, Kant's principle of pure taste is nothing other than a refusal, 8 a disgust~ disgust for objects which im­pose enjoyment and a disgust for the crude, vulgar taste which revels in this imposed enjoyment: 'One kind of ugliness alone is incapable of being represented conformably to nature without destroying all aesthetic

1.ddight, and consequently artistic beauty, namely, that which excires diJ­igust. For, as in this strange sensation, which depends purely on the imagi­~ nation, the object is represerited as insisting, as it were_, on our enjoying )-it, while we still set out face against it, the artificial representation of the r object is no longer distinguishable from the nature of the object itself in our sensation, and so it cannot possibly be regarded as beautiful' {pp. 174-175)!

Disgust is the paradoxical experience of enjoyment extorted by vio­lence, an enjoyment which arouses horror. This horror, unknown to those who surrender to sensation, results fundamentally from removal of the distance, in which freedom is asserted, between- the representation and the thing represented, in short, from alienation, the loss of the sub­ject in the object, immediate submission to the immediate present under the enslaving violence of the 'agreeable'. Thus, in contrast to the inclina­tion aroused by the 'agreeable', which, unlike beauty, is common to humans and animals {p. 49), is capable of seducing 'those who are always intent only on enjoyment' (p. 45; also 47, 117) and 'immediately satisfies the senses' -whereas it is 'mediately displeasing' to reason (p. 47) 10

-

'pure taste', the 'taste of reflection' (p. 54) which is opposed to the 'tasre of sense' as 'charms' ate opposed to 'form' (pp. 65, 67), must exclude in­~ and must not 'be in the least prepossessed in favour of the real ex­istence of the object' (p. 43 ).

Simple grammatical analysis bears out Hegel's complaint that Kant's third Critique remains in the register of So/len, 'ought'. The statements on-taste are written in the imperative, or rather in that sort of spurious consrative

which allows the author to remain silent as to the conditions of realization of what is in fact a performative 'utterance. Some typical examples: 'We say of a man who remains unaffected in the presence of what we consider sublime, that he has no feeling. We demand both taste and feeling of every man, and, granted some degree of culture, we give him credit for both' (p. 116); 'Every judgementwhich is to show the taste of the individual is required to he an independent judgement of the individual himself' (p. 137); 'I take my stand on the ground that my judgement i.r to be one of taste, and not one of understanding or reason' (p. 140 L 'fine art must be free art in a double sense.' (p. 18~).

The object which 'insists on being enjoyed', as an image and in reality, in flesh and blood, neutralizes both ethical resistance and aesthetic neu­tralization; it annihilates the distanciating power of representation, the essentially human power of suspending immediate, animal attachment to the sensible and refusing submission to the pure affi:ct, to simple aisth­esis. In the face of this twofold challenge to human freedom and to cul­ture (the anti-nature), disgust is the ambivalent experience of the horrible seduction of the disgusting and of enjoyment, which performs a sort of reduction to animality, corporeality, the belly and sex, thar is, to

what is common and therefore vulgar, removing any difference between those who resist with all their might and those who wallow in pleasure, who enjoy enjoyment: 'Common human understanding ... has the doubtful honour of having the name of common sense ... bestowed upon it; and bestowed, too, in an acceptation of the word common (not merely in our language, where it actually lias a double meaning, but also in many others) which makes it amount to what is vulgar (das Vul­gare)-what is everywhere to be met with~ quality which by no means confers credit or distinction upon its possessor' (p. 151). Nature under­stood as sense equalizes, but at the lowest level (an early version of the 'levelling-down' abhorred by the Heideggerians). Aristotle taught that different things differentiate themselves by what makes them similar, i.e., a cOmmon character; in Kant's text, disgust discovers with horror the common animality on which and against which moral distinction is con­structed: 'We regard as coarse and low the habits of thought of those who have no feeling for beautiful nature ... and who devote themselves to the mere enjoyments of sense found in eating and drinking' (p. 162).

Elsewhere. Kant quite directly states the social basis of the opposition between the 'taste of reflection' and the 'taste of sense': 'In the beginning, the novice must have been guided by instinct alone, that voice of God which is obeyed by all animals. This permitted some things to be used for nourishment, while forbidding others. Here it is not necessary to assume a special instinct which is now lost. It could simply have been the sense of smell, plus its affinity with the organ of taste and the well-known rela­tion of the latter to the organs of digestion; in short an ability, perceiv­able even now, to sense, prior to the consumption of a cenain foodstuff,

I

I

\

~.c. ... , u.uuuu, mgru.y nruauzeo, wttn Obligatory applause, md even shouts of enthllSWm, at the end, or evm ~tly silent {concertS in churchos). ]222, a bourgeois entertainment which mimics popular entertainment, is only an apparent exception: the signs of participation {hanc:klapping or foot­tapping) ate limited to a silent sketch of the gesture {at least in free jazz).

The 'Taste of Reflection' and the 'Taste of Sense'

What pure taste refuses is indeed the 'tiolence to which the popular spec­tator consents {one thinks of Adorno's description of popular music and its dkcts); it demands respect, the distance which allows it to keep its distance. It expects the work of art, a finality with no other end than it­self, to treat the spectator in accordance with the Kantian imperative, that is, as an end, not a means .. Thus, Kant's principle of pure taste is nothing other than a refusal, 8 a disgust~ disgust for objects which im­pose enjoyment and a disgust for the crude, vulgar taste which revels in this imposed enjoyment: 'One kind of ugliness alone is incapable of being represented conformably to nature without destroying all aesthetic

1.ddight, and consequently artistic beauty, namely, that which excires diJ­igust. For, as in this strange sensation, which depends purely on the imagi­~ nation, the object is represerited as insisting, as it were_, on our enjoying )-it, while we still set out face against it, the artificial representation of the r object is no longer distinguishable from the nature of the object itself in our sensation, and so it cannot possibly be regarded as beautiful' {pp. 174-175)!

Disgust is the paradoxical experience of enjoyment extorted by vio­lence, an enjoyment which arouses horror. This horror, unknown to those who surrender to sensation, results fundamentally from removal of the distance, in which freedom is asserted, between- the representation and the thing represented, in short, from alienation, the loss of the sub­ject in the object, immediate submission to the immediate present under the enslaving violence of the 'agreeable'. Thus, in contrast to the inclina­tion aroused by the 'agreeable', which, unlike beauty, is common to humans and animals {p. 49), is capable of seducing 'those who are always intent only on enjoyment' (p. 45; also 47, 117) and 'immediately satisfies the senses' -whereas it is 'mediately displeasing' to reason (p. 47) 10

-

'pure taste', the 'taste of reflection' (p. 54) which is opposed to the 'tasre of sense' as 'charms' ate opposed to 'form' (pp. 65, 67), must exclude in­~ and must not 'be in the least prepossessed in favour of the real ex­istence of the object' (p. 43 ).

Simple grammatical analysis bears out Hegel's complaint that Kant's third Critique remains in the register of So/len, 'ought'. The statements on-taste are written in the imperative, or rather in that sort of spurious consrative

which allows the author to remain silent as to the conditions of realization of what is in fact a performative 'utterance. Some typical examples: 'We say of a man who remains unaffected in the presence of what we consider sublime, that he has no feeling. We demand both taste and feeling of every man, and, granted some degree of culture, we give him credit for both' (p. 116); 'Every judgementwhich is to show the taste of the individual is required to he an independent judgement of the individual himself' (p. 137); 'I take my stand on the ground that my judgement i.r to be one of taste, and not one of understanding or reason' (p. 140 L 'fine art must be free art in a double sense.' (p. 18~).

The object which 'insists on being enjoyed', as an image and in reality, in flesh and blood, neutralizes both ethical resistance and aesthetic neu­tralization; it annihilates the distanciating power of representation, the essentially human power of suspending immediate, animal attachment to the sensible and refusing submission to the pure affi:ct, to simple aisth­esis. In the face of this twofold challenge to human freedom and to cul­ture (the anti-nature), disgust is the ambivalent experience of the horrible seduction of the disgusting and of enjoyment, which performs a sort of reduction to animality, corporeality, the belly and sex, thar is, to

what is common and therefore vulgar, removing any difference between those who resist with all their might and those who wallow in pleasure, who enjoy enjoyment: 'Common human understanding ... has the doubtful honour of having the name of common sense ... bestowed upon it; and bestowed, too, in an acceptation of the word common (not merely in our language, where it actually lias a double meaning, but also in many others) which makes it amount to what is vulgar (das Vul­gare)-what is everywhere to be met with~ quality which by no means confers credit or distinction upon its possessor' (p. 151). Nature under­stood as sense equalizes, but at the lowest level (an early version of the 'levelling-down' abhorred by the Heideggerians). Aristotle taught that different things differentiate themselves by what makes them similar, i.e., a cOmmon character; in Kant's text, disgust discovers with horror the common animality on which and against which moral distinction is con­structed: 'We regard as coarse and low the habits of thought of those who have no feeling for beautiful nature ... and who devote themselves to the mere enjoyments of sense found in eating and drinking' (p. 162).

Elsewhere. Kant quite directly states the social basis of the opposition between the 'taste of reflection' and the 'taste of sense': 'In the beginning, the novice must have been guided by instinct alone, that voice of God which is obeyed by all animals. This permitted some things to be used for nourishment, while forbidding others. Here it is not necessary to assume a special instinct which is now lost. It could simply have been the sense of smell, plus its affinity with the organ of taste and the well-known rela­tion of the latter to the organs of digestion; in short an ability, perceiv­able even now, to sense, prior to the consumption of a cenain foodstuff,

I

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490 I Posncript

whether or nor it is fir for consumption. It is nor even necessary ro as­sume that this sensitivity was keener in the first pair than it is now. For it is a familiar enough fact that men wholly absorbed by their senses have much greater perceptive powers than those who, occupied with thoughts as well as with the senses, are to a degree turned away from the sen­suous.' 11 We recognize here the ideological mechanism which works by deseribing the terms of the opposition one establishes between the social classes as stages in an evolution (here, the progress from nature to cul-ture). 0

Thus, although it consistently refuses anything resembling an empiri­cal psychological or sociological genesis of taste (e.g., pp. 89, 116), each time invoking the magical division between the transcendental and the empirical, 12 the theory of pure taste is grounded in an empirical social re­lation, as is shown by the opposition it makes between the agreeable (which 'does not cultivate' and is only an enjoyment-p. 165{ and cul­ture,'' or its allusions to the teaching and educability of taste. 4 The an­tithesis between culture and bodily pleasure (or nature) is.rooted in the opposition between the cultivated bourgeoisie and the people," the imaginary site of uncultivared nature, barbarously wallowing in pure en­joyment: 'Taste that requires an added element of charm and emotion for its delight, nor to speak of adopting this as the measure of its approval, has not yet emerged from barbarism' (p. 65).

If one follows through all the implications of an aesthetic which, in accord­ance with the logic of Kant's 'Essay on Negative Magnitudes', has to mea­sure virtue by the magnitude of the vices overcome and pure taste by the intensiry of the impulse denied and the vulgariry refused, then the most accomplished art has to be recognized in those works which carry the anti· thesis of civilized barbarism, contained impulse, sublimated coarseness, to the highest degree of tension. This criterion would point to Mahler, who went further than any other composer in the dangerous game of faciliry and every form of high-cultural recuperation of the 'popular arts' or even 'schmaltz'; and, earlier, Beethoven, whose recognized greatness is measured by rhe negative magnitude of the violences, extravagances and excesses, often celebrated by hagiography, which arristic restraint, a kind of 'mourn­ing', has had to overcome. The inhibition of too immediately accessible pleasure, initially the pre-condition for the experience of 'pure' pleasure, can even become a source of pleasure in itself; refinement can lead ro a culciva· cion, for irs own sake, of Freud's 'preliminary pleasure', an ever increasing deferment of the resolution of tension, with, for example, a growing dis· ranee between the dissonant chord and irs full or conventional resolution. Thus rhe 'purest' form of the aesthete's pleasure, aisthesis purified, subli· mated and denied, may, paradoxically, consist in an asceticism, askaiJ, a trained, sustained tension, which is the very opposite of primary, primitive aisthesis.

TowardJ a 'Vulgar' Critiqta of 'Pun' Critiques /491

Pure pleasure--<iScetic, empty pleasure which implies the renunciation of pleasure, pleasure purified of pleasure-is predisposed to become a symbol of moral excellence, and the work of art a test of ethical superior­ity, an indisputable measure of the capaciry for sublimation which de­fines the truly human man. 16 What is at stake in aesthetic discourse, and in the arrempted imposition of a definition of the genuinely human, is nothing less than the monopoly of humanity. 17 Art is called upon to mark the difference between humans and non-humans: artistic experience, a free imitation of natural creations, natura naturans, whereby the anist (and through him, the beholder) affirms his transcendence of natura na­turata by producing 'a second nature' (p. 176) subject only to the laws of creative genius (p. 171), is the closest approach to the divine experience of intuituJ originariuJ, the creative perception which freely engenders its own object without recognizing any rules or constraints other than its own (p. 168). The world produced by artistic 'creation' is not only 'an­other nature' but a 'counter-nature', a world produced in the manner of nature but against the ordinary laws of nature--those of gravity in dance, those of desire and pleasure in painting and sculpture etc.--by an act of artistic sublimation which is predisposed to fulfil a function of social le­gitimatiOn. The negation of enjoyment-inferior, coarse, vulgar, merce­nary, venal, servile, in a word, natural-implies affirmation of the sublimiry of those who can be satisfied with sublimated, refined, distin­guished, disinterested, gratuitous, free pleasures. The opposition between the tastes of nature and the tastes of freedom introduces a relationship which is that of the body to the soul, between those who are 'only natu­ral' and those whose capaciry to dominate their own biological nature af­firms their legitimate claim to dominate social nature. No wonder, then, that, as Mikhail Bakh_tin has pointed out apropos of Rabelais, the popu­lar imagination can 6~y invert the relationship which iS't!ie basis of the aesthetic sociodicy: responding to sublimation by a strategy of reduction or degradation, as in slang, parody, burlesque or caricature, using obscen­iry or scatology to turn arsy-versy, head over heels, all the 'values' in i

which the dominant groups project and recognize their sublimity. , it Q rides roughshod over diffi:rence, flouts distinction, and, like the Carnival games, reduces the distinctive pleasures of the soul to the commoii'saris­factions of food and sex. 18

A Denied Social Relationship

The theory of beauty as the absolute creation of artifex deus, enabling every man (worthy of the name)to mimic the divine act of creation, is no doubt the 'natural' expression of the occupational ideology of those who like to call themselves 'creators', which explains why, even without any direct influence, it has constantly been reinvented by artists, from Leonardo da Vinci, who made the artist 'the master of all things', to Paul

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490 I Posncript

whether or nor it is fir for consumption. It is nor even necessary ro as­sume that this sensitivity was keener in the first pair than it is now. For it is a familiar enough fact that men wholly absorbed by their senses have much greater perceptive powers than those who, occupied with thoughts as well as with the senses, are to a degree turned away from the sen­suous.' 11 We recognize here the ideological mechanism which works by deseribing the terms of the opposition one establishes between the social classes as stages in an evolution (here, the progress from nature to cul-ture). 0

Thus, although it consistently refuses anything resembling an empiri­cal psychological or sociological genesis of taste (e.g., pp. 89, 116), each time invoking the magical division between the transcendental and the empirical, 12 the theory of pure taste is grounded in an empirical social re­lation, as is shown by the opposition it makes between the agreeable (which 'does not cultivate' and is only an enjoyment-p. 165{ and cul­ture,'' or its allusions to the teaching and educability of taste. 4 The an­tithesis between culture and bodily pleasure (or nature) is.rooted in the opposition between the cultivated bourgeoisie and the people," the imaginary site of uncultivared nature, barbarously wallowing in pure en­joyment: 'Taste that requires an added element of charm and emotion for its delight, nor to speak of adopting this as the measure of its approval, has not yet emerged from barbarism' (p. 65).

If one follows through all the implications of an aesthetic which, in accord­ance with the logic of Kant's 'Essay on Negative Magnitudes', has to mea­sure virtue by the magnitude of the vices overcome and pure taste by the intensiry of the impulse denied and the vulgariry refused, then the most accomplished art has to be recognized in those works which carry the anti· thesis of civilized barbarism, contained impulse, sublimated coarseness, to the highest degree of tension. This criterion would point to Mahler, who went further than any other composer in the dangerous game of faciliry and every form of high-cultural recuperation of the 'popular arts' or even 'schmaltz'; and, earlier, Beethoven, whose recognized greatness is measured by rhe negative magnitude of the violences, extravagances and excesses, often celebrated by hagiography, which arristic restraint, a kind of 'mourn­ing', has had to overcome. The inhibition of too immediately accessible pleasure, initially the pre-condition for the experience of 'pure' pleasure, can even become a source of pleasure in itself; refinement can lead ro a culciva· cion, for irs own sake, of Freud's 'preliminary pleasure', an ever increasing deferment of the resolution of tension, with, for example, a growing dis· ranee between the dissonant chord and irs full or conventional resolution. Thus rhe 'purest' form of the aesthete's pleasure, aisthesis purified, subli· mated and denied, may, paradoxically, consist in an asceticism, askaiJ, a trained, sustained tension, which is the very opposite of primary, primitive aisthesis.

TowardJ a 'Vulgar' Critiqta of 'Pun' Critiques /491

Pure pleasure--<iScetic, empty pleasure which implies the renunciation of pleasure, pleasure purified of pleasure-is predisposed to become a symbol of moral excellence, and the work of art a test of ethical superior­ity, an indisputable measure of the capaciry for sublimation which de­fines the truly human man. 16 What is at stake in aesthetic discourse, and in the arrempted imposition of a definition of the genuinely human, is nothing less than the monopoly of humanity. 17 Art is called upon to mark the difference between humans and non-humans: artistic experience, a free imitation of natural creations, natura naturans, whereby the anist (and through him, the beholder) affirms his transcendence of natura na­turata by producing 'a second nature' (p. 176) subject only to the laws of creative genius (p. 171), is the closest approach to the divine experience of intuituJ originariuJ, the creative perception which freely engenders its own object without recognizing any rules or constraints other than its own (p. 168). The world produced by artistic 'creation' is not only 'an­other nature' but a 'counter-nature', a world produced in the manner of nature but against the ordinary laws of nature--those of gravity in dance, those of desire and pleasure in painting and sculpture etc.--by an act of artistic sublimation which is predisposed to fulfil a function of social le­gitimatiOn. The negation of enjoyment-inferior, coarse, vulgar, merce­nary, venal, servile, in a word, natural-implies affirmation of the sublimiry of those who can be satisfied with sublimated, refined, distin­guished, disinterested, gratuitous, free pleasures. The opposition between the tastes of nature and the tastes of freedom introduces a relationship which is that of the body to the soul, between those who are 'only natu­ral' and those whose capaciry to dominate their own biological nature af­firms their legitimate claim to dominate social nature. No wonder, then, that, as Mikhail Bakh_tin has pointed out apropos of Rabelais, the popu­lar imagination can 6~y invert the relationship which iS't!ie basis of the aesthetic sociodicy: responding to sublimation by a strategy of reduction or degradation, as in slang, parody, burlesque or caricature, using obscen­iry or scatology to turn arsy-versy, head over heels, all the 'values' in i

which the dominant groups project and recognize their sublimity. , it Q rides roughshod over diffi:rence, flouts distinction, and, like the Carnival games, reduces the distinctive pleasures of the soul to the commoii'saris­factions of food and sex. 18

A Denied Social Relationship

The theory of beauty as the absolute creation of artifex deus, enabling every man (worthy of the name)to mimic the divine act of creation, is no doubt the 'natural' expression of the occupational ideology of those who like to call themselves 'creators', which explains why, even without any direct influence, it has constantly been reinvented by artists, from Leonardo da Vinci, who made the artist 'the master of all things', to Paul

Klo; who aimed to create as nature does. •Y And--quire apart from its c:k2r relationship with the antithesis between the two fonns of aesthetic pleasure, and through this, with the opposition between the cultured 'elite' and the barbarous masses-the opposition Kant establishes be­tween •free art', 'which is agreeable on its own account' and whose prod­uct is freedom--since it is agreeable on its own account and in no way constrains the beholder'0--and 'mercenary art', a servile activity 'only attractive by means of what it results in (e.g., the pay), which is consequently capable of being a compulsoty imposition' (p. 164), whose product forces itself on the beholder with the enslaving violence of its sensible charms, vety directly expressesoKant's·conception of the position of 'pure' or 'autonomous' intdlectuals in the division of labour, and more precisely in the division of intellectual labour. These 'pure' intdlectuals are, according to The Conflict of the Facultin, none other than philosophy professors, 21 but artists and writers would no doubt be the purest of all. The Critique of judgement is less remote than it seems from the 'Idea for a Universal History', which has rightly been seen as the expression of the sublimated interests of the bourgeois intd­ligentsia; this intellectual bourgeoisie, 'whose legitimation', as Norbert Elias puts it, 'consists primarily in its intellectual, scientific or artistic accomplishments', occupies an uncomfortable position in social space, entirely homologous to that of the modem intdligentsia: 'an elite in the eyes of the people, it has a lower rank in the eyes of the courtly atistoc-

•'' racy. , A number of the oddities of Kant's text are explained-once it is seen

that the second renn of the fundamental opposition between pleasure and enjoyment is twofold; the ethical purity of the pleasure of culture is defined not only against the barbarism of enjoyment but also against the heteronomous enjoyment of Civilization: 'To a high degree we are, through art and science, cultured. We are civilized-perhaps too much for our own good-in all sons of social grace and decorum. But to con­sider ourselves as having reached morality--foe that, much is lacking. The ideal of morality belongs to culture; its use for some simulacrum of mo­rality in the love of honour and outward decorum constitutes mere civili­zarion.'23

Kant casts into the darkness of the 'empirical' 'the interest indirectly attached ro the beautiful by the inclination towards society' that is pro­duced by the process of Civilization, although this 'refined inclination' giving no satisfaction of enjoyment is as close as possible to pure plea­sure. The negation of nature leads as much to rhe perversion of 'unneces­saty inclinations' as ro the pure morality of aesthetic pleasure: 'Reason has this peculiarity that, aided by the imagination, it can create artificial desires which are nor only unsupporred by natural instinct but actually contraty to it. These desires, in the beginning called concupiscence, grad­ually generate a whole host of unnecessary and indeed unn;trutal inclina­tions called luxuriousness.'24

The 'counrer-natun:' proves ambiguous: civilization is bad, culture good. The difference between heteronomous, external, civilized pleasure and cultivared pleasure, which presupposes 'slow elfons to improve the mind' ( langsame Bemiihtmg de.- inneren Bildtmg de.- Denktmgsart) ," can only be resolved, for Kant, on the terrain of ethics, i.e., of the determi­nants of aesthetic pleasure, external and pathological on one side, purdy

' internal on the other. This pure aesthetic is indeed the rationalization of an ethos: pure plea­

sure, pleasure totally purified of all sensuous or sensible inreresr, perfectly free of all social or fashionable interest, as remote from concupiscence as it is from conspicuous consumption, is opposed as much ro the refined, altruistic enjoyment of the courtier as it is to the crude, animal enjoy­ment of rhe people26 N orbing in the content of this typically profes­sorial aesthetic could stand in the way of irs being recognized as universal by irs sole ordinaty readers, the professors of philosophy, 27 who were roo concerned with hunting down historicism and sociologism to see the his­torical and social coincidence which, here as in so many cases, is the basis of their illusion of universality28 And the formalization which is re­quired in order for social impulses and interests to be expressed within the limits of the censorship of a particular fonn of social propriety can only hdp ro encourage this illusion, so that a discourse which makes arr a criterion of an ethical and aesthetic distinction which is a misrecog­nized fonn of social difference can be read as a universal expression of the universality of art and aesthetic experience.

Totally ahistorical, like all philosophical thought that is worthy of the name ( evety philosophia wotth irs salt is perennis )-perkcrly ethnocentric, since it takes for its sole datum the lived experience of a homo aestheticus who is none other than the subject of aesthetic discourse constitured as rhe universal subject of aesthetic experience-Kant's analysis of rhe judgement of taste finds its real basis in a set of aesthetic principles which are the universalization of the dispositions associated with a particular social and economic condition. But it would be a mistake to see only a formal mask in all rhe features which rhe formalized discourse owes to the effort to resolve the problems raised by the theoretical division and conceptual distinctions worked out in the other Critiqun and to express 'the thinking of Immanuel Kant' in accordance with the discursive schemes constituting what is called 'Kantian thought'.29 Since we know that the vety principle of the symbolic efficacy of philosophical discourse lies in the play between two structures of discourse which rhe work of formalization seeks to integrate without entirely succeeding, it would be naive to reduce the truth of this double discourse to the subterranean discourse in which the Kantian ideology of the beautiful is expressed and which analysis reconstirures by reconnecting the web of notarions blurred by the interferences of the structures. The social categorin of aes­thetic judgement can only function, for Kant himself and for his readers, in the form of highly sublimated categories, such as the oppositions

Klo; who aimed to create as nature does. •Y And--quire apart from its c:k2r relationship with the antithesis between the two fonns of aesthetic pleasure, and through this, with the opposition between the cultured 'elite' and the barbarous masses-the opposition Kant establishes be­tween •free art', 'which is agreeable on its own account' and whose prod­uct is freedom--since it is agreeable on its own account and in no way constrains the beholder'0--and 'mercenary art', a servile activity 'only attractive by means of what it results in (e.g., the pay), which is consequently capable of being a compulsoty imposition' (p. 164), whose product forces itself on the beholder with the enslaving violence of its sensible charms, vety directly expressesoKant's·conception of the position of 'pure' or 'autonomous' intdlectuals in the division of labour, and more precisely in the division of intellectual labour. These 'pure' intdlectuals are, according to The Conflict of the Facultin, none other than philosophy professors, 21 but artists and writers would no doubt be the purest of all. The Critique of judgement is less remote than it seems from the 'Idea for a Universal History', which has rightly been seen as the expression of the sublimated interests of the bourgeois intd­ligentsia; this intellectual bourgeoisie, 'whose legitimation', as Norbert Elias puts it, 'consists primarily in its intellectual, scientific or artistic accomplishments', occupies an uncomfortable position in social space, entirely homologous to that of the modem intdligentsia: 'an elite in the eyes of the people, it has a lower rank in the eyes of the courtly atistoc-

•'' racy. , A number of the oddities of Kant's text are explained-once it is seen

that the second renn of the fundamental opposition between pleasure and enjoyment is twofold; the ethical purity of the pleasure of culture is defined not only against the barbarism of enjoyment but also against the heteronomous enjoyment of Civilization: 'To a high degree we are, through art and science, cultured. We are civilized-perhaps too much for our own good-in all sons of social grace and decorum. But to con­sider ourselves as having reached morality--foe that, much is lacking. The ideal of morality belongs to culture; its use for some simulacrum of mo­rality in the love of honour and outward decorum constitutes mere civili­zarion.'23

Kant casts into the darkness of the 'empirical' 'the interest indirectly attached ro the beautiful by the inclination towards society' that is pro­duced by the process of Civilization, although this 'refined inclination' giving no satisfaction of enjoyment is as close as possible to pure plea­sure. The negation of nature leads as much to rhe perversion of 'unneces­saty inclinations' as ro the pure morality of aesthetic pleasure: 'Reason has this peculiarity that, aided by the imagination, it can create artificial desires which are nor only unsupporred by natural instinct but actually contraty to it. These desires, in the beginning called concupiscence, grad­ually generate a whole host of unnecessary and indeed unn;trutal inclina­tions called luxuriousness.'24

The 'counrer-natun:' proves ambiguous: civilization is bad, culture good. The difference between heteronomous, external, civilized pleasure and cultivared pleasure, which presupposes 'slow elfons to improve the mind' ( langsame Bemiihtmg de.- inneren Bildtmg de.- Denktmgsart) ," can only be resolved, for Kant, on the terrain of ethics, i.e., of the determi­nants of aesthetic pleasure, external and pathological on one side, purdy

' internal on the other. This pure aesthetic is indeed the rationalization of an ethos: pure plea­

sure, pleasure totally purified of all sensuous or sensible inreresr, perfectly free of all social or fashionable interest, as remote from concupiscence as it is from conspicuous consumption, is opposed as much ro the refined, altruistic enjoyment of the courtier as it is to the crude, animal enjoy­ment of rhe people26 N orbing in the content of this typically profes­sorial aesthetic could stand in the way of irs being recognized as universal by irs sole ordinaty readers, the professors of philosophy, 27 who were roo concerned with hunting down historicism and sociologism to see the his­torical and social coincidence which, here as in so many cases, is the basis of their illusion of universality28 And the formalization which is re­quired in order for social impulses and interests to be expressed within the limits of the censorship of a particular fonn of social propriety can only hdp ro encourage this illusion, so that a discourse which makes arr a criterion of an ethical and aesthetic distinction which is a misrecog­nized fonn of social difference can be read as a universal expression of the universality of art and aesthetic experience.

Totally ahistorical, like all philosophical thought that is worthy of the name ( evety philosophia wotth irs salt is perennis )-perkcrly ethnocentric, since it takes for its sole datum the lived experience of a homo aestheticus who is none other than the subject of aesthetic discourse constitured as rhe universal subject of aesthetic experience-Kant's analysis of rhe judgement of taste finds its real basis in a set of aesthetic principles which are the universalization of the dispositions associated with a particular social and economic condition. But it would be a mistake to see only a formal mask in all rhe features which rhe formalized discourse owes to the effort to resolve the problems raised by the theoretical division and conceptual distinctions worked out in the other Critiqun and to express 'the thinking of Immanuel Kant' in accordance with the discursive schemes constituting what is called 'Kantian thought'.29 Since we know that the vety principle of the symbolic efficacy of philosophical discourse lies in the play between two structures of discourse which rhe work of formalization seeks to integrate without entirely succeeding, it would be naive to reduce the truth of this double discourse to the subterranean discourse in which the Kantian ideology of the beautiful is expressed and which analysis reconstirures by reconnecting the web of notarions blurred by the interferences of the structures. The social categorin of aes­thetic judgement can only function, for Kant himself and for his readers, in the form of highly sublimated categories, such as the oppositions

~ _ ----···' r4 ... -.. ........ .. .uu ~~;;u,uyrncu or culture and civili-zation, ~uphemisms which, without any conscious in~ntion of dissimu­lating, roahl~ social oppositions to be ~xp~ and experi~nced in a \ fonn conforming to the nonns of exp~ion of a specific field. What is 1

hiddro, rhar is, rhe double social relationship-to rhe court (the sire of civilization as opposed ro culture) and to the people (the site of nature and sense)-is bo~resent and absenr; it presents itself in the text in such a guise that one can m all good faith nor see it there and that th naively reductive reading, which would reduce Kant's text to the social relationship that is disguised and transfigured within it, would be no less false than the ordinary reading which would reduce ir to the phenomenal truth in which it appears only in disguise.

Parerga and Paralipomena

There is perhaps no more decisive way of manifesting rhe social mecha­nisms which lead to the denial of the real principles of the judgement of taste (and rh~ir re-droial in all faithful readings) than ro see rhem at work in a commentary intended (apparently, at least) to manifest them, i.e., in the reading of the Critique of judgernenr off~ by Jacques Der­rida.

30 Although this reading brings to light some of rhe hidden presup­

positions of Kanr's approach to taste by transgressing the most binding rules of orthodox commentary, it remains subject ro rhe censorships of the pure reading.

Derrida does indeed see that what is involved is the opposition be­tween legitimate 'pleasure' and 'enjoymrot' or, in renns of objects, be­tween the agreeable arts which seduce by the 'charm' of their sensuous content and the Fine Arcs which offer pleasure wirhour enjoyment. He also sees, without explicitly connecting it with the previous opposition, rhe antithesis between the gross tastes of those who 'are content ro enjoy the simple sensations of rhe senses, ar table or over a borde'-'consump­tive oraliry' seen as 'interested rasre'-'Mld pure taste. He indicates that disgust is perhaps the true origin of pure taste, inasmuch as it 'abolishes representative distance' and, driving one irresistibly towards consump­tion, annihilates the freedom rhar is asserted in suspeoding immediate attachment ro the sensuous and in neutralizing the affect, that is, 'disin­reres~ess', a Jack of interest as to the existence or non-existence of the thing represented. And one can, no doubt, though Derrida avoids doing so explicitly, relate all the foregoing oppositions, which concern the con­sumer's relation to the work of art, to the last of the oppositions picked up, the one which Kan r establishes, at the level of production, between 'free an', involving free will, and 'mercenary an', which exchanges rhe value of irs labour for a wage.

It goes without saying that such a transcription of Derrida's text, which condenses and tightens, rhus making connections excluded from the original, which, by instituting an 'order of reasons', produces links

that are only suggesred and which, above all, gives to the whole rorer-prise rhe air of a demonstration directed towards establishing a rrurh, constitutes a transformation or distortion. To summarize a discourse which, as is shown by the attention Derrida devotes to the writing and typography, is rhe product of the inrrotion of putting content into fonn, and which rejects in advance any summary aiming to separate content from form, to reduce the text to irs simplest expression, is in fact to deny rhe most fundamental intention of the work and, by a sort of transcen­dental reduction which no critique has any thought of carrying our, to perform the epochi of everything by which the philosophical text affirms its existence as a philosophical text, i.e., its 'disinterestedness', its free­dom, and hence its elevation, its distinction, its distance from all 'vulgar'

disEes. ur rrida's supremely intellectual game presupposes lucidity in

co mitment to the game: 'It is a question of pleasure. Of thinking pure pleasure, rhe being-pleasure of pleasure. Starting our from pleasure, rhe third Critique was written for it, and must be read for it. A somewhat arid pleasure--without concepts and without enjoyment-a somewhat strict pleasure, but we learn here, once again, that there is no pleasure without stricture. Letting myself be led by pleasure, I recognize and, at the same time, I pervert an injunction. I follow it: the roigma of pleasure sets the whole book in motion. I seduce it: in treating the third Critique as a work of art or a beautiful object, which it was nor meant simply to be, I act as if the existence of the book were indifferent to me (which, Kant explains, is required by every aesthetic experience) and could be considered with imperturbable detachment'.31

Thus, Derrida tells us the truth of his text and his reading (a particular case of the experience of pure pleasure), that is, that it implies the epoche of any thesis of existence or, more simply, indifference to the existence of rhe object in question, bur he does so in a text which itself implies that epoche and that indifference. It is an exemplary form of denegation-you tell (yourself) the truth bur in such a way that you don't tell it-which defines the objective truth of the philosophical text in its social use; which confers on the philosophical text a social acceptability proportion-ate to its unreality, its gratuitousness, its sovereign indi1ference.32 Because he never withdraws from the philosophical game, whose conventions he respects, even in the rirual transgressions at which only traditionalists could be shocked, he can only philosophically tell the truth about the~! philosophical text and irs philosophical reading, which (apart from the \ silence of orthodoxy) is the best way of nor telling it, and he cannot · / truly tell the truth about the Kanrian philosophy of art and, more gen­erally, about philosophy itself, which his own discourse has helped to produce. Just as the pictorial rhetoric which continues to foist itself on every artist produces an inevitable aestheticization, so the philosophical way of talking about philosophy de-realizes everything that can be said about philosophy.

~ _ ----···' r4 ... -.. ........ .. .uu ~~;;u,uyrncu or culture and civili-zation, ~uphemisms which, without any conscious in~ntion of dissimu­lating, roahl~ social oppositions to be ~xp~ and experi~nced in a \ fonn conforming to the nonns of exp~ion of a specific field. What is 1

hiddro, rhar is, rhe double social relationship-to rhe court (the sire of civilization as opposed ro culture) and to the people (the site of nature and sense)-is bo~resent and absenr; it presents itself in the text in such a guise that one can m all good faith nor see it there and that th naively reductive reading, which would reduce Kant's text to the social relationship that is disguised and transfigured within it, would be no less false than the ordinary reading which would reduce ir to the phenomenal truth in which it appears only in disguise.

Parerga and Paralipomena

There is perhaps no more decisive way of manifesting rhe social mecha­nisms which lead to the denial of the real principles of the judgement of taste (and rh~ir re-droial in all faithful readings) than ro see rhem at work in a commentary intended (apparently, at least) to manifest them, i.e., in the reading of the Critique of judgernenr off~ by Jacques Der­rida.

30 Although this reading brings to light some of rhe hidden presup­

positions of Kanr's approach to taste by transgressing the most binding rules of orthodox commentary, it remains subject ro rhe censorships of the pure reading.

Derrida does indeed see that what is involved is the opposition be­tween legitimate 'pleasure' and 'enjoymrot' or, in renns of objects, be­tween the agreeable arts which seduce by the 'charm' of their sensuous content and the Fine Arcs which offer pleasure wirhour enjoyment. He also sees, without explicitly connecting it with the previous opposition, rhe antithesis between the gross tastes of those who 'are content ro enjoy the simple sensations of rhe senses, ar table or over a borde'-'consump­tive oraliry' seen as 'interested rasre'-'Mld pure taste. He indicates that disgust is perhaps the true origin of pure taste, inasmuch as it 'abolishes representative distance' and, driving one irresistibly towards consump­tion, annihilates the freedom rhar is asserted in suspeoding immediate attachment ro the sensuous and in neutralizing the affect, that is, 'disin­reres~ess', a Jack of interest as to the existence or non-existence of the thing represented. And one can, no doubt, though Derrida avoids doing so explicitly, relate all the foregoing oppositions, which concern the con­sumer's relation to the work of art, to the last of the oppositions picked up, the one which Kan r establishes, at the level of production, between 'free an', involving free will, and 'mercenary an', which exchanges rhe value of irs labour for a wage.

It goes without saying that such a transcription of Derrida's text, which condenses and tightens, rhus making connections excluded from the original, which, by instituting an 'order of reasons', produces links

that are only suggesred and which, above all, gives to the whole rorer-prise rhe air of a demonstration directed towards establishing a rrurh, constitutes a transformation or distortion. To summarize a discourse which, as is shown by the attention Derrida devotes to the writing and typography, is rhe product of the inrrotion of putting content into fonn, and which rejects in advance any summary aiming to separate content from form, to reduce the text to irs simplest expression, is in fact to deny rhe most fundamental intention of the work and, by a sort of transcen­dental reduction which no critique has any thought of carrying our, to perform the epochi of everything by which the philosophical text affirms its existence as a philosophical text, i.e., its 'disinterestedness', its free­dom, and hence its elevation, its distinction, its distance from all 'vulgar'

disEes. ur rrida's supremely intellectual game presupposes lucidity in

co mitment to the game: 'It is a question of pleasure. Of thinking pure pleasure, rhe being-pleasure of pleasure. Starting our from pleasure, rhe third Critique was written for it, and must be read for it. A somewhat arid pleasure--without concepts and without enjoyment-a somewhat strict pleasure, but we learn here, once again, that there is no pleasure without stricture. Letting myself be led by pleasure, I recognize and, at the same time, I pervert an injunction. I follow it: the roigma of pleasure sets the whole book in motion. I seduce it: in treating the third Critique as a work of art or a beautiful object, which it was nor meant simply to be, I act as if the existence of the book were indifferent to me (which, Kant explains, is required by every aesthetic experience) and could be considered with imperturbable detachment'.31

Thus, Derrida tells us the truth of his text and his reading (a particular case of the experience of pure pleasure), that is, that it implies the epoche of any thesis of existence or, more simply, indifference to the existence of rhe object in question, bur he does so in a text which itself implies that epoche and that indifference. It is an exemplary form of denegation-you tell (yourself) the truth bur in such a way that you don't tell it-which defines the objective truth of the philosophical text in its social use; which confers on the philosophical text a social acceptability proportion-ate to its unreality, its gratuitousness, its sovereign indi1ference.32 Because he never withdraws from the philosophical game, whose conventions he respects, even in the rirual transgressions at which only traditionalists could be shocked, he can only philosophically tell the truth about the~! philosophical text and irs philosophical reading, which (apart from the \ silence of orthodoxy) is the best way of nor telling it, and he cannot · / truly tell the truth about the Kanrian philosophy of art and, more gen­erally, about philosophy itself, which his own discourse has helped to produce. Just as the pictorial rhetoric which continues to foist itself on every artist produces an inevitable aestheticization, so the philosophical way of talking about philosophy de-realizes everything that can be said about philosophy.

___ ------ ,--.. .-... uua6 .. &I..IIIVUIU.CU uy pnuosopny afe lfl tact CitcUM•

scri~ by th~ inrmsrs linked [0 m~m~rship in th~ philosophical field, that is, to th~ ~ existenc~ of this field and the corresponding censor­ships. The field is the historical product of the labour of the successive philosophers who have defined certain topics as philosophical by forcing them on commentary, discussion, critique and polemic; but the prob­lems, theories, themes or concepts which are deposited in writings con­sidered at a given moment as philosophical (books, articles, essay topics etc.) and which consiirute objectified philosophy impose themselves as a sort of autonomous world on would-~ philosophers, who must not only know them, as irems of culrure, bur recognize them, as objects of (pre­reflexive) ~lief, failing which they disqualifY themselves as philosophers. All those who profess to be philosophers have a life-or-death interest, qua philosophers, in the existence of this repository of consecrated texts, a masrery of which constirures the core of their specific capital. Thus, short of jeopardizing their own existence as philosophers and the symbolic powers ensuing from this title, they can n~er cady through the breaks which imply a practical epoche of the thesis of the existence of philoso­phy, that is, a denouncement of the tacit contract defining the conditions of membership in the field, a repudiation of the fundamental belief in the conventions of the game and the value of the stakes, a refusal to grant the indisputable signs of recognition--references and reverence, ohJe­qui~~m, respect for convention ~en in their outrages-in short, every­thing which secures recognition of membership."

Failing to be, at the same rime, social breaks which truly renounce rhe gratifications associated with membership, the most audacious intellec­tual breaks of pure readirrg still help to preserve the stock of consecrated rexrs from becoming dead letters, mere archive material, lit at best for the history of ideas or the sociology of knowledge, and to perpetuate irs exis­tence and irs specifically philosophical powers by using it as an emblem or as a matrix- for discourses which, whatever their stated intention, are always, also, symbolic strategies deriving their power essentially from the consecrated rexrs. Like the religious nihilism of some mystic heresies," philosophical nihilism too can find an ultimate path of salvation in the rituals of liberatory transgression. Just as, by a miraculous dialectical re­n=al, the countless acts of derision and desacralization which modem art has perpetrated against art have always turned, insofar as these are still artistic acts, to the glory of art and the artist, so the philosophical 'de­construction' of philosophy is indeed, when the very hope of radical re­construction has ~aporated, the only philosophical answer to the destruction of philosophy.

The strategy of taking as one's object the very tradition one belongs to and one's own activity in order to make them undergo a quasi objectification-

a common practice among artists, since Duchamp-has the dfecr of turn­ing commentary, a typically scholastic genre, both in its conditions of pro­duction (lectures, especially in agregation classes) and in the docile yet rigorous dispositions it demands, imo a personal work suitable for publica­tion in avanr-garde r~iews, by a further transgression, scandalizing the or­thodox, of the sacred frontier between the academic field and the literary fidd, i.e., between the 'serious' and the 'frivolous'. This entails a dramatiza­tion (mise en scene), particularly visible in 'parallel-column' production, which aims to draw attrotion to the philosophical 'gesture', making the very utterance of discourse an 'act' in the sense which avant-garde painters give to the word and placing the person of the philosopher at the cmtre of the philosophical stage.

Philosophical objectification of the truth of philosophical discourse en­counters its limits in the objective conditions of its own existence as an activity aspiring to philosophical legitimacy, that is, in the existence of a philosophical field demanding recognition of the principles which are the very basis of irs existence. By means of this semi-objectification one can situate oneself simultaneously inside and outside, in the game and on the touchline, i.e., on the margin, at the frontier, in regions which, like the 'frame',parergon, are so many limits, the beginning of the end, the end of the beginning, points from which one can be as distant as possible from the interior without falling into the exterior, into outer darkness, that is, into the vulgarity of the non-philosophical, the coarseness of 'empirical', 'on tic', 'positivist' discourse, and where one can combine the profits of transgression with the profits of membership by producing the discourse that is simulranemisly closest to an exemplary performance of philosophi­cal discourse and to an exposure of the objective truth of this discourse."

Whereas the orthodox reading rakes literally the ovett logic of the sacred text-the 'order of reasons' it puts forward, the plan which it announces and through which it continues to impose its order on its own decoding­the heretical reading rakes liberties with the norms and forms imposed by the guardians of the text. On one side, there is the 'right' reading, the one which Kant has designated in advance, by manifesting the apparent archi­tectonics and logic of his discourse, with a whole apparatus of skilfully aniculated titles and sub-titles and a permanent display of the external signs of deductive rigour; by basing on his previous writings (with a neat effect of circular self-legitimation) a problematic which is, to a large extent, the artificial product of the divisions and oppositions (between understand­ing and reason, theory and practice ere.) produced precisely by his own writings, and which have to be known and recognized by anyone (after Hegel and so many others) who seeks to be known and recogoized as a philosopher. On the other side, there is a deliberately skewed approach, de­centred, liberated and even subversive, which ignores the signposts and re­fuses the imposed order, fastens on the details neglected by ordinary commentators, notes, examples, parentheses, and thus finds itself obliged--

___ ------ ,--.. .-... uua6 .. &I..IIIVUIU.CU uy pnuosopny afe lfl tact CitcUM•

scri~ by th~ inrmsrs linked [0 m~m~rship in th~ philosophical field, that is, to th~ ~ existenc~ of this field and the corresponding censor­ships. The field is the historical product of the labour of the successive philosophers who have defined certain topics as philosophical by forcing them on commentary, discussion, critique and polemic; but the prob­lems, theories, themes or concepts which are deposited in writings con­sidered at a given moment as philosophical (books, articles, essay topics etc.) and which consiirute objectified philosophy impose themselves as a sort of autonomous world on would-~ philosophers, who must not only know them, as irems of culrure, bur recognize them, as objects of (pre­reflexive) ~lief, failing which they disqualifY themselves as philosophers. All those who profess to be philosophers have a life-or-death interest, qua philosophers, in the existence of this repository of consecrated texts, a masrery of which constirures the core of their specific capital. Thus, short of jeopardizing their own existence as philosophers and the symbolic powers ensuing from this title, they can n~er cady through the breaks which imply a practical epoche of the thesis of the existence of philoso­phy, that is, a denouncement of the tacit contract defining the conditions of membership in the field, a repudiation of the fundamental belief in the conventions of the game and the value of the stakes, a refusal to grant the indisputable signs of recognition--references and reverence, ohJe­qui~~m, respect for convention ~en in their outrages-in short, every­thing which secures recognition of membership."

Failing to be, at the same rime, social breaks which truly renounce rhe gratifications associated with membership, the most audacious intellec­tual breaks of pure readirrg still help to preserve the stock of consecrated rexrs from becoming dead letters, mere archive material, lit at best for the history of ideas or the sociology of knowledge, and to perpetuate irs exis­tence and irs specifically philosophical powers by using it as an emblem or as a matrix- for discourses which, whatever their stated intention, are always, also, symbolic strategies deriving their power essentially from the consecrated rexrs. Like the religious nihilism of some mystic heresies," philosophical nihilism too can find an ultimate path of salvation in the rituals of liberatory transgression. Just as, by a miraculous dialectical re­n=al, the countless acts of derision and desacralization which modem art has perpetrated against art have always turned, insofar as these are still artistic acts, to the glory of art and the artist, so the philosophical 'de­construction' of philosophy is indeed, when the very hope of radical re­construction has ~aporated, the only philosophical answer to the destruction of philosophy.

The strategy of taking as one's object the very tradition one belongs to and one's own activity in order to make them undergo a quasi objectification-

a common practice among artists, since Duchamp-has the dfecr of turn­ing commentary, a typically scholastic genre, both in its conditions of pro­duction (lectures, especially in agregation classes) and in the docile yet rigorous dispositions it demands, imo a personal work suitable for publica­tion in avanr-garde r~iews, by a further transgression, scandalizing the or­thodox, of the sacred frontier between the academic field and the literary fidd, i.e., between the 'serious' and the 'frivolous'. This entails a dramatiza­tion (mise en scene), particularly visible in 'parallel-column' production, which aims to draw attrotion to the philosophical 'gesture', making the very utterance of discourse an 'act' in the sense which avant-garde painters give to the word and placing the person of the philosopher at the cmtre of the philosophical stage.

Philosophical objectification of the truth of philosophical discourse en­counters its limits in the objective conditions of its own existence as an activity aspiring to philosophical legitimacy, that is, in the existence of a philosophical field demanding recognition of the principles which are the very basis of irs existence. By means of this semi-objectification one can situate oneself simultaneously inside and outside, in the game and on the touchline, i.e., on the margin, at the frontier, in regions which, like the 'frame',parergon, are so many limits, the beginning of the end, the end of the beginning, points from which one can be as distant as possible from the interior without falling into the exterior, into outer darkness, that is, into the vulgarity of the non-philosophical, the coarseness of 'empirical', 'on tic', 'positivist' discourse, and where one can combine the profits of transgression with the profits of membership by producing the discourse that is simulranemisly closest to an exemplary performance of philosophi­cal discourse and to an exposure of the objective truth of this discourse."

Whereas the orthodox reading rakes literally the ovett logic of the sacred text-the 'order of reasons' it puts forward, the plan which it announces and through which it continues to impose its order on its own decoding­the heretical reading rakes liberties with the norms and forms imposed by the guardians of the text. On one side, there is the 'right' reading, the one which Kant has designated in advance, by manifesting the apparent archi­tectonics and logic of his discourse, with a whole apparatus of skilfully aniculated titles and sub-titles and a permanent display of the external signs of deductive rigour; by basing on his previous writings (with a neat effect of circular self-legitimation) a problematic which is, to a large extent, the artificial product of the divisions and oppositions (between understand­ing and reason, theory and practice ere.) produced precisely by his own writings, and which have to be known and recognized by anyone (after Hegel and so many others) who seeks to be known and recogoized as a philosopher. On the other side, there is a deliberately skewed approach, de­centred, liberated and even subversive, which ignores the signposts and re­fuses the imposed order, fastens on the details neglected by ordinary commentators, notes, examples, parentheses, and thus finds itself obliged--

. _ ------............... ••u•u••u•o.:s or rne orthodox reading and even of the oV<:rt logic of th<: discou~ an•l~, to raise difficulti"" and even ro bring to light some of the social slips which, despite 211 the effOrt 2t rationalization md euphemization, betray the denied intentions which ordinary commentary, by definition, overlooks.36

The Pleasure of the Text

Although it marks a sharp break with the ordinary ritual of idolatrous reading, this pure re>ding still conced"" the g.sential point to the philo­sophical work.

37 Asking to be treated as it tre>ts its object, i.e., as a work

of art, making Kmt's object irs own objective, i.e., cultivated pleasure, cultivating cultivated pleasure, artificially exalting this artificial pleasure by a roue's ultimate refinement which implies a lucid view on this plea­sure, it oflers above all an exemplary specimen of the pleasure of art, the pleasure of the love of art, of which, like all pleasure, it is not easy to speak. It is a pure pleasure, in the sense that it is irreducible to the pur­suit of the profits of distinction and is felt as the simple pleasure of play, of playing the cultural game well, of playing on one's skill at playing, of cultivating a pleasure which 'cultivates' and of thus producing, like a kind of endless fire, its ever renewed sustenance of subtle allusions, clef. erent or irreverent references, expected or unusual associations.

Proust, who never ceased to cultivate and also analyse cultivated plea­sure, is as lucid as ever in· describing this. Endeavouring to understand and communicate the idolatrous pleasure he takes in re>ding a famous page (a passage from Ruskin's Stones of Venice), he has to evoke not only the properties of the work itself, but the whole network of criss-crossing references woven around it-reference of the work to the personal experi­ences it has accompanied, facilitated or produced in the reader, reference of personal experience to the works it has insidiously coloured with its connotations, and references of experience of the work tO a previous eX­perience of the same work or experience of other works, each of them enriched with all the associations and resonances it carries with it: 'It is itself mysterious, full of images both of beaury and religion like that same church of St. Mark where all the figures of the Old and New Testa­ments appear againsnhe background of a sort of splendid obscutiry and changing brilliance. I remember having read it for· the first time in St. Mark's itself, during an hour of storm and darkness when the mosaics shone only with their own material light and with an inner gold, earthy and ancient, to which the Venetian sun, which sets ablaze even the angels on the campaniles, added nothing of itself; the emotion I felt in re>ding that page there, among all the angels which drew thei~ light from the surrounding shadows, was very gre>t and perhaps not very pure.

As the joy ot seeing those beautiful, mysterious figures incre>sed, but was altered by the pleasure, so to speak, of erudition which I felt in understmd­ing the texts inscribed in Byzantine characters beside their haloed fore­heads, so the beaury of Ruskin's images was intensified and corrupted by the pride of referring to the sacred text. A sort of egoistic self-regard is inevitable in these mingled joys of art and erudition in which aesthetic plea-

be b . >38 sure may come more acute ut not rematn so pure.

Cultivated pleasure feeds on these intertwined references, which rein­force and legitimate each other, producing, inseparably, belief in the value of works of art, the 'idolatry' which is the very basis of cultivated pleasure, and the inimitable charm they objectively exert on all who are qualified to enter the game, possessed by their possession. Even in its purest form, when it seems most free of 'worlrlly' interest, this game is always a 'sociery' game, based, as Proust again says, on a 'freemasonry of customs and a heritage of traditions': 'True distinction, besides, always af. fects to address only distinguished persons who know the same customs, and it does not "explain". A book of Anatole France implies a host of learned knowledge, includes unending allusions that the vulgar do not perceive there, and these, its other beauties apart, make up its incompara­ble nobiliry .'39 Those whom Proust calls 'the aristocracy of intellect' know how to mark their distinction in the most peremptory fashion by addressing to the 'elite', made up of those who can decipher them, the discreet but irrefutable signs of their membership of the 'elite' (like the loftiness of emblematic references, which desigoate not so much sources or authorities as the very exclusive, very select circle of recognized inter­locutors) and of the discretion with which they are able to affirm their

'Empirical• interest enters into the composition of the most disin-membership. t terested pleasures of pure taste, because the principle of the pleasure ~!..-derived from these refined games for refined players lies, in the last analy-sis, in the denied experience of a social relationship of membership and exclusion. The sense of distinction, an acquired disposition which func-tions with the obscure necessiry of instinct, is affirmed not so much in the manifestos and positive manifestations of self-confidence as in the in­numerable stylistic or thematic choices which, being based on the con-cern to underline difference, exclude all the forms of intellectual (or artistic) activiry regarded at a given moment as inferior-vulgar objects, unworthy references, simple didactic exposition, 'naive' problems (naive essentially because they lack philosophical pedigree), 'trivial' questions (Does the Critique of judgement get it right? Is the aim of a re>ding of the Critique to give a true account of what Kant says?), positions stigmatized as 'empiricism' or 'historicism' (no doubt because they thre>ten the very existence of philosophical activiry) and so on. In short, the philosophical sense of distinction is another form of the visceral disgust at vulgatiry

I i

1[.

. _ ------............... ••u•u••u•o.:s or rne orthodox reading and even of the oV<:rt logic of th<: discou~ an•l~, to raise difficulti"" and even ro bring to light some of the social slips which, despite 211 the effOrt 2t rationalization md euphemization, betray the denied intentions which ordinary commentary, by definition, overlooks.36

The Pleasure of the Text

Although it marks a sharp break with the ordinary ritual of idolatrous reading, this pure re>ding still conced"" the g.sential point to the philo­sophical work.

37 Asking to be treated as it tre>ts its object, i.e., as a work

of art, making Kmt's object irs own objective, i.e., cultivated pleasure, cultivating cultivated pleasure, artificially exalting this artificial pleasure by a roue's ultimate refinement which implies a lucid view on this plea­sure, it oflers above all an exemplary specimen of the pleasure of art, the pleasure of the love of art, of which, like all pleasure, it is not easy to speak. It is a pure pleasure, in the sense that it is irreducible to the pur­suit of the profits of distinction and is felt as the simple pleasure of play, of playing the cultural game well, of playing on one's skill at playing, of cultivating a pleasure which 'cultivates' and of thus producing, like a kind of endless fire, its ever renewed sustenance of subtle allusions, clef. erent or irreverent references, expected or unusual associations.

Proust, who never ceased to cultivate and also analyse cultivated plea­sure, is as lucid as ever in· describing this. Endeavouring to understand and communicate the idolatrous pleasure he takes in re>ding a famous page (a passage from Ruskin's Stones of Venice), he has to evoke not only the properties of the work itself, but the whole network of criss-crossing references woven around it-reference of the work to the personal experi­ences it has accompanied, facilitated or produced in the reader, reference of personal experience to the works it has insidiously coloured with its connotations, and references of experience of the work tO a previous eX­perience of the same work or experience of other works, each of them enriched with all the associations and resonances it carries with it: 'It is itself mysterious, full of images both of beaury and religion like that same church of St. Mark where all the figures of the Old and New Testa­ments appear againsnhe background of a sort of splendid obscutiry and changing brilliance. I remember having read it for· the first time in St. Mark's itself, during an hour of storm and darkness when the mosaics shone only with their own material light and with an inner gold, earthy and ancient, to which the Venetian sun, which sets ablaze even the angels on the campaniles, added nothing of itself; the emotion I felt in re>ding that page there, among all the angels which drew thei~ light from the surrounding shadows, was very gre>t and perhaps not very pure.

As the joy ot seeing those beautiful, mysterious figures incre>sed, but was altered by the pleasure, so to speak, of erudition which I felt in understmd­ing the texts inscribed in Byzantine characters beside their haloed fore­heads, so the beaury of Ruskin's images was intensified and corrupted by the pride of referring to the sacred text. A sort of egoistic self-regard is inevitable in these mingled joys of art and erudition in which aesthetic plea-

be b . >38 sure may come more acute ut not rematn so pure.

Cultivated pleasure feeds on these intertwined references, which rein­force and legitimate each other, producing, inseparably, belief in the value of works of art, the 'idolatry' which is the very basis of cultivated pleasure, and the inimitable charm they objectively exert on all who are qualified to enter the game, possessed by their possession. Even in its purest form, when it seems most free of 'worlrlly' interest, this game is always a 'sociery' game, based, as Proust again says, on a 'freemasonry of customs and a heritage of traditions': 'True distinction, besides, always af. fects to address only distinguished persons who know the same customs, and it does not "explain". A book of Anatole France implies a host of learned knowledge, includes unending allusions that the vulgar do not perceive there, and these, its other beauties apart, make up its incompara­ble nobiliry .'39 Those whom Proust calls 'the aristocracy of intellect' know how to mark their distinction in the most peremptory fashion by addressing to the 'elite', made up of those who can decipher them, the discreet but irrefutable signs of their membership of the 'elite' (like the loftiness of emblematic references, which desigoate not so much sources or authorities as the very exclusive, very select circle of recognized inter­locutors) and of the discretion with which they are able to affirm their

'Empirical• interest enters into the composition of the most disin-membership. t terested pleasures of pure taste, because the principle of the pleasure ~!..-derived from these refined games for refined players lies, in the last analy-sis, in the denied experience of a social relationship of membership and exclusion. The sense of distinction, an acquired disposition which func-tions with the obscure necessiry of instinct, is affirmed not so much in the manifestos and positive manifestations of self-confidence as in the in­numerable stylistic or thematic choices which, being based on the con-cern to underline difference, exclude all the forms of intellectual (or artistic) activiry regarded at a given moment as inferior-vulgar objects, unworthy references, simple didactic exposition, 'naive' problems (naive essentially because they lack philosophical pedigree), 'trivial' questions (Does the Critique of judgement get it right? Is the aim of a re>ding of the Critique to give a true account of what Kant says?), positions stigmatized as 'empiricism' or 'historicism' (no doubt because they thre>ten the very existence of philosophical activiry) and so on. In short, the philosophical sense of distinction is another form of the visceral disgust at vulgatiry

I i

1[.

~ ................. ".- yuu; t.alc u an mtemattzed SOCial .re.lationship, a social ~ lationship made fksh; 211d a philosophically distinguishttl =ding of the Criti<pu of jfltlgtmmt cannot be expectttl to uncover the social relation­ship of distinction at the heart of a work that is rightly tegardoo as the very symbol of philosophical distinction.

G

Appendices

Notes

Index

~ ................. ".- yuu; t.alc u an mtemattzed SOCial .re.lationship, a social ~ lationship made fksh; 211d a philosophically distinguishttl =ding of the Criti<pu of jfltlgtmmt cannot be expectttl to uncover the social relation­ship of distinction at the heart of a work that is rightly tegardoo as the very symbol of philosophical distinction.

G

Appendices

Notes

Index