D1st1nct1on

A Social Critique of tbe

Judgement of Taste
Pierre Bourdieu
Translated by Richard Nice
Harvard University Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts \
~ ' \ ~ 1 - 4 )
autonomy. Position in the
the class structure; and so-
e 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
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 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 culti-
vated discourse on culture, which implies renouncing not only the prof-
its 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, endeav-
ouring to push intellectual honesry to its ultimate, cruellest limits'-
without being able to ignore that the pleasures of 'lucid vision' may rep-
resent 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 pre-
vent rhe absence of direct confrontation from allowing the two dis-
courses 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 imme-
diate 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'-fac-
ile 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 acces-
sible and so discredited -as 'childish' or 'primitive' (as opposed to the de-
ferred pleasures of legitimate art). Thus people spealc of 'facile effects' to
characterize the obtrusive elegance of a certain style of journalistic writ-
ing or the roo insistent, roo predictable charm of what is called 'light'
music (a word whose connotations virtually correspond to those of 'fac-
ile'-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' offer-
ings (it is a compliment to an artist, especially a conductor, to say he 're-
spects 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 ~ a n t 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 Schopen-
hauer 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 beau-
tiful, because it necessarily excites this will, by objects which directly ap-
peal 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 con-
templation 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 fig-
ures, whose position, drapery, and general treatment are calculated to ex-
cite 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 im-
pure desires' to a 'willing subject, subject to every desire, every servitude',
exerts real violence on the beholder. Indecent and exhibitionist, it cap-
tures 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 a w a ~ 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 cin-
ema, to soccer marches-and bourgeois entertainmencs is found in audience
participation. In one case it is constant, manifest (boos, whistles), some-
rimes direct (pitch or playing field, invasions); in the other it is intermit-
of 'comparing, and contrasting' rival theories), bur also in order ro pre-
vent rhe absence of direct confrontation from allowing the two dis-
courses 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 imme-
diate 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'-fac-
ile 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 acces-
sible and so discredited -as 'childish' or 'primitive' (as opposed to the de-
ferred pleasures of legitimate art). Thus people spealc of 'facile effects' to
characterize the obtrusive elegance of a certain style of journalistic writ-
ing or the roo insistent, roo predictable charm of what is called 'light'
music (a word whose connotations virtually correspond to those of 'fac-
ile'-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' offer-
ings (it is a compliment to an artist, especially a conductor, to say he 're-
spects 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 ~ a n t 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 Schopen-
hauer 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 beau-
tiful, because it necessarily excites this will, by objects which directly ap-
peal 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 con-
templation 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 fig-
ures, whose position, drapery, and general treatment are calculated to ex-
cite 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 im-
pure desires' to a 'willing subject, subject to every desire, every servitude',
exerts real violence on the beholder. Indecent and exhibitionist, it cap-
tures 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 a w a ~ 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 cin-
ema, to soccer marches-and bourgeois entertainmencs is found in audience
participation. In one case it is constant, manifest (boos, whistles), some-
rimes direct (pitch or playing field, invasions); in the other it is intermit-
I
\
... , u.uuuu, mgru.y nruauzeo, wttn Obligatory applause, md even shouts of
enthllSWm, at the end, or evm silent {concertS in churchos). ]222,
a bourgeois entertainment which mimics popular entertainment, is only
an apparent exception: the signs of participation {hanc:klapping or foot-
tapping) 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 spec-
tator 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 it-
self, 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 for objects which im-
pose 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 diJ-
igust. 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 vio-
lence, 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 sub-
ject in the object, immediate submission to the immediate present under
the enslaving violence of the 'agreeable'. Thus, in contrast to the inclina-
tion 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 ex-
istence 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.
The object which 'insists on being enjoyed', as an image and in reality,
in flesh and blood, neutralizes both ethical resistance and aesthetic neu-
tralization; 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 aisth-
esis. In the face of this twofold challenge to human freedom and to cul-
ture (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 Vul-
gare)-what is everywhere to be met quality which by no means
confers credit or distinction upon its possessor' (p. 151). Nature under-
stood 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 con-
structed: '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 rela-
tion of the latter to the organs of digestion; in short an ability, perceiv-
able even now, to sense, prior to the consumption of a cenain foodstuff,
I
I
\
... , u.uuuu, mgru.y nruauzeo, wttn Obligatory applause, md even shouts of
enthllSWm, at the end, or evm silent {concertS in churchos). ]222,
a bourgeois entertainment which mimics popular entertainment, is only
an apparent exception: the signs of participation {hanc:klapping or foot-
tapping) 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 spec-
tator 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 it-
self, 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 for objects which im-
pose 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 diJ-
igust. 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 vio-
lence, 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 sub-
ject in the object, immediate submission to the immediate present under
the enslaving violence of the 'agreeable'. Thus, in contrast to the inclina-
tion 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 ex-
istence 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.
The object which 'insists on being enjoyed', as an image and in reality,
in flesh and blood, neutralizes both ethical resistance and aesthetic neu-
tralization; 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 aisth-
esis. In the face of this twofold challenge to human freedom and to cul-
ture (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 Vul-
gare)-what is everywhere to be met quality which by no means
confers credit or distinction upon its possessor' (p. 151). Nature under-
stood 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 con-
structed: '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 rela-
tion of the latter to the organs of digestion; in short an ability, perceiv-
able even now, to sense, prior to the consumption of a cenain foodstuff,
I
\_
)
490 I Posncript
whether or nor it is fir for consumption. It is nor even necessary ro as-
sume 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 sen-
suous.'
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 empiri-
cal 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 re-
lation, as is shown by the opposition it makes between the agreeable
(which 'does not cultivate' and is only an enjoyment-p. 165{ and cul-
ture,'' or its allusions to the teaching and educability of taste.
4
The an-
tithesis 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 en-
joyment: '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 accord-
ance with the logic of Kant's 'Essay on Negative Magnitudes', has to mea-
sure 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 'mourn-
ing', 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 superior-
ity, an indisputable measure of the capaciry for sublimation which de-
fines 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 na-
turata 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 'an-
other 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 le-
gitimatiOn. The negation of enjoyment-inferior, coarse, vulgar, merce-
nary, venal, servile, in a word, natural-implies affirmation of the
sublimiry of those who can be satisfied with sublimated, refined, distin-
guished, 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 natu-
ral' and those whose capaciry to dominate their own biological nature af-
firms their legitimate claim to dominate social nature. No wonder, then,
that, as Mikhail Bakh_tin has pointed out apropos of Rabelais, the popu-
lar imagination can ~ 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 obscen-
iry 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'saris-
factions 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
\_
)
490 I Posncript
whether or nor it is fir for consumption. It is nor even necessary ro as-
sume 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 sen-
suous.'
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 empiri-
cal 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 re-
lation, as is shown by the opposition it makes between the agreeable
(which 'does not cultivate' and is only an enjoyment-p. 165{ and cul-
ture,'' or its allusions to the teaching and educability of taste.
4
The an-
tithesis 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 en-
joyment: '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 accord-
ance with the logic of Kant's 'Essay on Negative Magnitudes', has to mea-
sure 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 'mourn-
ing', 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 superior-
ity, an indisputable measure of the capaciry for sublimation which de-
fines 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 na-
turata 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 'an-
other 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 le-
gitimatiOn. The negation of enjoyment-inferior, coarse, vulgar, merce-
nary, venal, servile, in a word, natural-implies affirmation of the
sublimiry of those who can be satisfied with sublimated, refined, distin-
guished, 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 natu-
ral' and those whose capaciry to dominate their own biological nature af-
firms their legitimate claim to dominate social nature. No wonder, then,
that, as Mikhail Bakh_tin has pointed out apropos of Rabelais, the popu-
lar imagination can ~ 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 obscen-
iry 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'saris-
factions 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 be-
tween free art', 'which is agreeable on its own account' and whose prod-
uct 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'sconception 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 intd-
ligentsia; 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 con-
sider ourselves as having reached morality--foe that, much is lacking. The
ideal of morality belongs to culture; its use for some simulacrum of mo-
rality in the love of honour and outward decorum constitutes mere civili-
zarion.'23
Kant casts into the darkness of the 'empirical' 'the interest indirectly
attached ro the beautiful by the inclination towards society' that is pro-
duced by the process of Civilization, although this 'refined inclination'
giving no satisfaction of enjoyment is as close as possible to pure plea-
sure. The negation of nature leads as much to rhe perversion of 'unneces-
saty 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, grad-
ually generate a whole host of unnecessary and indeed unn;trutal inclina-
tions 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 determi-
nants 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 enjoy-
ment of rhe people
26
N orbing in the content of this typically profes-
sorial 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 his-
torical and social coincidence which, here as in so many cases, is the basis
of their illusion of universality
28
And the formalization which is re-
quired 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 misrecog-
nized 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 aes-
thetic 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 be-
tween free art', 'which is agreeable on its own account' and whose prod-
uct 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'sconception 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 intd-
ligentsia; 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 con-
sider ourselves as having reached morality--foe that, much is lacking. The
ideal of morality belongs to culture; its use for some simulacrum of mo-
rality in the love of honour and outward decorum constitutes mere civili-
zarion.'23
Kant casts into the darkness of the 'empirical' 'the interest indirectly
attached ro the beautiful by the inclination towards society' that is pro-
duced by the process of Civilization, although this 'refined inclination'
giving no satisfaction of enjoyment is as close as possible to pure plea-
sure. The negation of nature leads as much to rhe perversion of 'unneces-
saty 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, grad-
ually generate a whole host of unnecessary and indeed unn;trutal inclina-
tions 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 determi-
nants 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 enjoy-
ment of rhe people
26
N orbing in the content of this typically profes-
sorial 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 his-
torical and social coincidence which, here as in so many cases, is the basis
of their illusion of universality
28
And the formalization which is re-
quired 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 misrecog-
nized 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 aes-
thetic judgement can only function, for Kant himself and for his readers,
in the form of highly sublimated categories, such as the oppositions
_ ----' r4 ... -.. ........ .. .uu or culture and civili-
zation, which, without any conscious of dissimu-
lating, social oppositions to be and in a \
fonn conforming to the nonns of 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 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 mecha-
nisms which lead to the denial of the real principles of the judgement of
taste (and 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 by Jacques Der-
rida.
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 be-
tween legitimate 'pleasure' and 'enjoymrot' or, in renns of objects, be-
tween 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'-'consump-
tive 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 consump-
tion, annihilates the freedom rhar is asserted in suspeoding immediate
attachment ro the sensuous and in neutralizing the affect, that is, 'disin-
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 con-
sumer'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 transcen-
dental 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 free-
dom, 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
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 gen-
erally, 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 or culture and civili-
zation, which, without any conscious of dissimu-
lating, social oppositions to be and in a \
fonn conforming to the nonns of 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 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 mecha-
nisms which lead to the denial of the real principles of the judgement of
taste (and 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 by Jacques Der-
rida.
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 be-
tween legitimate 'pleasure' and 'enjoymrot' or, in renns of objects, be-
tween 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'-'consump-
tive 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 consump-
tion, annihilates the freedom rhar is asserted in suspeoding immediate
attachment ro the sensuous and in neutralizing the affect, that is, 'disin-
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 con-
sumer'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 transcen-
dental 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 free-
dom, 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
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 gen-
erally, 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
by inrmsrs linked [0 in philosophical field,
that is, to of this field and the corresponding censor-
ships. 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 prob-
lems, theories, themes or concepts which are deposited in writings con-
sidered 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 philosophers, who must not only
know them, as irems of culrure, bur recognize them, as objects of (pre-
reflexive) 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 cady through the breaks
which imply a practical epoche of the thesis of the existence of philoso-
phy, 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, ohJe-
respect for convention in their outrages-in short, every-
thing 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 intellec-
tual 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 exis-
tence 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 re-
n=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 'de-
construction' of philosophy is indeed, when the very hope of radical re-
construction has 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 turn-
ing commentary, a typically scholastic genre, both in its conditions of pro-
duction (lectures, especially in agregation classes) and in the docile yet
rigorous dispositions it demands, imo a personal work suitable for publica-
tion in avanr-garde by a further transgression, scandalizing the or-
thodox, of the sacred frontier between the academic field and the literary
fidd, i.e., between the 'serious' and the 'frivolous'. This entails a dramatiza-
tion (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 en-
counters 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 philosophi-
cal 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 decoding-
the 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 archi-
tectonics 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 understand-
ing 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, de-
centred, liberated and even subversive, which ignores the signposts and re-
fuses 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
by inrmsrs linked [0 in philosophical field,
that is, to of this field and the corresponding censor-
ships. 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 prob-
lems, theories, themes or concepts which are deposited in writings con-
sidered 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 philosophers, who must not only
know them, as irems of culrure, bur recognize them, as objects of (pre-
reflexive) 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 cady through the breaks
which imply a practical epoche of the thesis of the existence of philoso-
phy, 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, ohJe-
respect for convention in their outrages-in short, every-
thing 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 intellec-
tual 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 exis-
tence 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 re-
n=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 'de-
construction' of philosophy is indeed, when the very hope of radical re-
construction has 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 turn-
ing commentary, a typically scholastic genre, both in its conditions of pro-
duction (lectures, especially in agregation classes) and in the docile yet
rigorous dispositions it demands, imo a personal work suitable for publica-
tion in avanr-garde by a further transgression, scandalizing the or-
thodox, of the sacred frontier between the academic field and the literary
fidd, i.e., between the 'serious' and the 'frivolous'. This entails a dramatiza-
tion (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 en-
counters 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 philosophi-
cal 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 decoding-
the 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 archi-
tectonics 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 understand-
ing 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, de-
centred, liberated and even subversive, which ignores the signposts and re-
fuses the imposed order, fastens on the details neglected by ordinary
commentators, notes, examples, parentheses, and thus finds itself obliged--
. _ ------............... uuuo.:s or rne
orthodox reading and even of the oV<:rt logic of th<: 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 philo-
sophical 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 plea-
sure, 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 pur-
suit 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 plea-
sure, 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 experi-
ences 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 eX-
perience 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 Testa-
ments 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 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 understmd-
ing the texts inscribed in Byzantine characters beside their haloed fore-
heads, 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 rein-
force 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 incompara-
ble 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 inter-
locutors) 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 in-
numerable 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[.
. _ ------............... uuuo.:s or rne
orthodox reading and even of the oV<:rt logic of th<: 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 philo-
sophical 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 plea-
sure, 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 pur-
suit 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 plea-
sure, 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 experi-
ences 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 eX-
perience 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 Testa-
ments 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 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 understmd-
ing the texts inscribed in Byzantine characters beside their haloed fore-
heads, 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 rein-
force 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 incompara-
ble 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 inter-
locutors) 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 in-
numerable 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 relation-
ship 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 relation-
ship of distinction at the heart of a work that is rightly tegardoo as the
very symbol of philosophical distinction.
G
Appendices
Notes
Index