Bourdieus Derridas Kant: The Aesthetics of Refusing Aesthetics

Jonathan Loesberg

n the closing pages of Distinction, a sociological analysis of the way in which class membership constitutes both physiological and aesthetic taste and an argument that the two kinds of taste are coextensive, Bourdieu returns to a confrontation with Kants Critique of Judgment, the exemplar of the pure, philosophical aesthetics his sociology means to counter. As he recognizes, the return is necessary, since without it his argument and its close attention to social detail and such possibly marginal topics as taste in food, fashion, and furniture may seem simply to run parallel to more abstract discussions of aesthetics: If we must now allow the return of the repressed, having produced the truth of the taste against which, by an immense repression, the whole of legitimate aesthetics has been constructed, this is . . . in order to prevent the absence of direct confrontation from allowing the two discourses to coexist peacefully as parallel alternatives, in two carefully separated universes of thought and discourse.l Bourdieu ends with an extremely harsh critique of Derridas deconstruction of Kants aesthetics-surprisingly, since by Bourdieus description of the deconstruction, Derridas argument hardly differs from his own except that it remains in form a philosophical analysis rather than a sociological survey. The exception is no minor detail: Bourdieu wants centrally to argue that such an analysis, regardless of its explicit purpose, reproduces the abstraction of Kantian disinterest that allows aesthetics to

1 Bourdieu, Distinction: . 4 Social Critiqw! of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 485-6. Distinction was first published in French in 1979.

Modern Language Quarterly 58:4, December 1997. 0 1997 University of Washington.

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function as a mode of class distinction. Still, since his criticism of Derrida takes the form of a rather abstract complaint at the end of a rather abstract philosophical analysis of Kant, one wonders why Bourdieu would end his plea for material detail with a philosophical analysis of a philosophical analysis. W h y must he dispense with Derrida to put Kant in his place, and what does this tell us about the place of Kantian disinterest in Bourdieus own attack on it? I mean to answer these questions by ratifying Bourdieus critique of Derrida and then, by turning it back on him, suggesting that Kantian disinterest is necessary to both the poststructural and the sociological skepticism about classical aesthetics. But by taking this tack to discuss Bourdieu, I raise a deeper version of the issues: can I, desiring a certain deconstructive irreverence, have become instead irrelevant? Bourdieu offers five hundred densely researched pages on the material manifestations of aesthetic claims and distinctions, and in a discussion of his books limitations I respond with a return to Kant at three removes: through Bourdieus version of Derridas version of disinterest. Surely Foucault had the same kind of evasion in mind when he famously accused Derrida of producing a historically well-determined little pedagogy. I want to meet at its most general level this claim that aesthetics, by evading the material, enacts not disinterest but elitism, and philosophical and academic analysis reproduces that well-determined little evasion.3 Rather than return to the notions of disinterested formalism that buttressed a disguised humanism both Bourdieu and Derrida assail, however, I want to show that their attacks and the analytic and political benefits we desire from them depend on a form of Kantian disinterest they both repress and reproduce. To grasp the basis of Bourdieus reference to and rejection of Der2 Foucault, My Body, This Paper, This Fire, trans. GeofT Bennington, Oxfwd Litwary h i n u 4 ( 1979): 27. :<Bourdieu connects philosophical and academic discourse as politically motivated in a discussion of Heidegger in Language and Symbolic Poruw, ed. .John B. Thompson, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvdrd University Press, icy) 1 ), 157-8.

Jonathan Loesberg is professor of literature at American University. He is author of Aestheticism and Deconstruction: P a t q Derrida, and de Man (1991). He is currently at work on a book about the relevance of aesthetics for contemporary literary theory.

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rida, one must start with his rejection of Kant. Distinction outlines a quite complex structure of class groups and consequent aesthetic attitudes, but in the two moments in which Bourdieu addresses Kant directly, he contrasts his theories only with popular tastes, that is, the tastes of the working classes, the most economically and culturally dominated segments of society. Thus at the outset Bourdieu titles the popular taste An Anti-Kantian Aesthetic and remarks, It is no accident that, when one sets about reconstructing its logic, the popular aesthetic appears as the negative opposite of the Kantian aesthetic, and that the popular ethos implicitly answers each proposition of the Analytic of the Beautiful with a thesis contradicting it (41). He then contrasts Kants distinction between aesthetic pleasure and pleasure that is merely physically gratifying or dependent on physical charm with the working classes praise of the physically gratifying or pleasing; contrasts Kants universalism with a working-class sense of relative value; and contrasts his formalism with a working-class utilitarian evaluation of art (41-2). At the e n d of the book he shows Kant returning the favor, defining his aesthetic in terms of a repulsion from popular values: Kants principle of pure taste is nothing other than a refusal, a disgust-a disgust for objects which impose enjoyment and a disgust for the crude, vulgar taste which revels in this imposed enjoyment (488). This suddenly compressed distinction, ignoring the connection between Kantian taste and all other class tastes, derives from the fact that the popular taste alone, in Bourdieus system, exists in complete contrast not only to Kantian aesthetics but to all other dominant tastes and preferences. T h e dominant class (wealthy industrialists, senior executives, etc.) and the dominated segment of the dominant class (university teachers, adolescents and women, artistic producers, etc.) share basic aesthetic values that Bourdieu roots in Kant. Indeed the aestheticism of the dominant classs dominated segment takes its power as resistance frorn a more educated possession and articulation of the Kantian values shared with their classs dominating segment (55, 287, 29 1 ). Bourdieu defines the petit bourgeoisie in terms of an alienation of self arising from its attempts to enact cultural preferences foreign to its class-based upbringing and experiences (319-23). But these attempts implicitly recognize the aesthetic and taste values of the Kantian upper classes. Only the working classes, in Bourdieus scheme, represent a complete rejection of this system of tastes.

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In fact, working-class tastes and preferences might represent merely an alternative aesthetic theory, in the manner of the most elitist academic aesthetic relativism, were it not for two positive marks of their dominated quality.4 First, the working classes material preferences, such as their tastes in food and possessions, are in part determined by what Bourdieu labels the Choice of the Necessary: The fundamental proposition that the habitus is a virtue made of necessity is never more clearly illustrated than in the case of the working classes, since necessity includes for them all that is usually meant by the word, that is, an inescapable deprivation of necessary goods. Necessity imposes a taste for necessity which implies a form of adaptation to and consequently acceptance of the necessary, a resignation to the inevitable (372).In other words, we know the tastes of the working classes to be marks of their domination because they tend to reject what they cannot have and to choose what is economically feasible for them to want. But even as far as material necessity is concerned, the correspondence between preference and want is not perfect, which leads to one of those fascinating insights in Bourdieu that at once confirm and challenge his theories:
When one moves from the manual workers to the industrial and commercial employers, through foremen, craftsmen and small shopkeepers, economic constraints tend to relax without any fundamental change in the pattern of spending. . . . the food consumed is increasingly rich (both in cost and in calories) and increasingly heavy (game, foie gras). By contrast, the taste of the professionals or senior executives defines the popular taste by negation, as the taste for the heavy, the fat

4 One would think that Bourdieu had as little sympathy for Stanley Fishs attacks on objective aesthetic values ( I s 7hpre a Text in This Class? 7hp Authority o f Intopretiup Communities [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 19801 ) or for Barbara Herrnstein Smiths defense of an aesthetics that accommodates relative value and interested gratification (Contingencies o f Valup: AltPmative PPrspPctivPs for Critical 7hmry [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard LJniversity Press, 19881) as he does for Derridas deconstructions of Kant. In fact, Bourdieu has written a complimentary sentence printed on the back of Smiths book. But then, so has Richard Rorty, and presumably he does not agree with Smiths criticisms of him. Smith discusses Kants theory from the viewpoint of an abstract relativism (64-72). She also discusses Distinction briefly and proposes that it offers evidence for her position. In effect this coincidence will be only as good as the one I will work out for Derrida, since Smiths argument would certainly run afoul of his skeptical analysis of traditional academic discourse.

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and the coarse, by tending towards the light, the refined and the delicate. . . . The taste for rare, aristocratic foods points to a traditional cuisine, rich in expensive or rare products (fresh vegetables, meat). (185) Foie gras may be more expensive than fresh vegetables, but it exists on a continuum with calorically rich and heavy foods that begins with beans and starch, for which the working classes develop the taste of necessity, whereas vegetables are lighter and also rarer than the basic popular diet. While this insight shows how the categories of necessity may become the choices of popular luxury, it also calls into question necessity as the grounding definition of choice. The question becomes more pointed as one moves to less material preferences. Since various aspects of the dominant culture, such as museums, high-culture films, and books, are economically inexpensive (allowing the less wealthy but better-educated dominated segment of the dominant class access to them), the popular distaste for them is not economically necessary at all. It may be explained by the lack of what Bourdieu calls educational capital. (The explanation is highly ambiguous, since the concept of educational capital coincides too well with extremely elitist ideas of absolute aesthetic value.) But it may simply be an alternative taste, possessed by the working classes by chance rather than forced on them by some extra-economic disability. The second mark that identifies working-class tastes as dominated rather than relative, however, is precisely the Kantian disgust for them. One might think that Kantian disinterest extended to tastes for physical gratification that as such, while not pure aesthetic tastes, were without other valence. But Bourdieu notes that in Kants 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 (489). One might add, since it occurs with the very definition of disinterest, Kants lugubrious joke about that Iroquois Sachem, who was pleased in Paris by nothing more than by the cook shops.5 Whether or not Kants remarks reflect a class judgment

Kant, Crztique ofJudpent, trans. J. H. Bernard (NewYork: Hafner,

icyji),

$3; 6.

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on his part or a more thoughtless elitism, they surely admit the contemporary elite marking of working-class tastes as barbarous. Thus Kant allows the marking of different class tastes in Bourdieus system as dominating and dominated rather than merely different, even as the ungrounded nature of Kants evaluation allows a position from which to see his aesthetics as the use of taste to create artificial distinction. Since I will contest this view of Kants theory, one should note that it is common enough in evaluations of his project to give support to Bourdieus views of Kants service to contemporary cultural elitism.6 Moreover, it makes Bourdieus sociological analysis operate as an anti-Kantian theory, not simply as a parallel discourse. From this perspective, however, one must turn to Bourdieus discussion of Derrida by first asking, Why Derrida? In Economimesis particularly, Derridas deconstruction of Kant has much in common not only with the general basis of Bourdieus critique but with the theme of disgust he raises and the passages he discusses. But even if we accept the grounds of Bourdieus criticism of Derrida, regardless of the similarities between the two positions, there is a second version of the question that we need to address. Since the weakness of Derridas critique, from Bourdieus perspective, is its refusal to escape the pro-

Here and in subsequent citations the first page number refers to this translation and the second to the 1793 second German edition. One might label Kants remark an ethnocentrism within ostensible disinterest if the Kantian sin of the Iroquois were not shared by countless white Western visitors to Paris every year. Indeed many of u s might compliment that sachem on his good taste if doing s o did not lead to the dangerous assumption that pleasure in Parisian cooking was a transcultural, universal judgment of taste. 0 Eve Shaper, for example, introduces Kants project thus: In much eighteenthcentury usage, to be a person of taste was to be a person of independent judgment based on individual conviction, not on slavishly following rules. Kant is aware of this usage, and it is part of the aim of his analysis to secure a grounding of the judgment of taste in something that, as the personal, namely individual feeling, can carry the weight of an implied claim to autonomy (Taste, Sublimity, and Genius: The Aesthetics of Nature and Art, in T ~CnmlrridgP P Companion to Kant, ed. Paul Guyer [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, i y j ] , 3 7 2 ) . One may doubt whether eighteenth-century attitudes toward taste generally contrasted individual judgment with obedience to rules, since most of Kants predecessors who wrote on aesthetics tried, like him, to articulate universal principles of taste. Still, the contrast between the slavishness of those without taste and the autonomy of those with it marks at least a contemporary attitude toward Kants theory.

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tocols of philosophical analysis set u p by Kant even as it deconstructs his theories, o n e wonders what the critique of Derrida adds to the prior critique of Kant. T h e discussion of Kant, as we have seen, both gave traction to the claim that taste distinctions operated as part of class domination and made that sociological analysis aesthetically pertinent. But once Kant, as the exemplar of what Bourdieu and Derrida agree in thinking of as classical aesthetics, has been determined to work toward class-based distinctions, why is it necessary to demonstrate that a contemporary Kantians theories will work the same way? To answer this question, we will have to see how Bourdieus criticisms of Derrida may be applied to himself and to see the Kantianism within both Derrida and Bourdieu, which Bourdieu seems to hope to expel by trying to expel Derrida from his own text, as if transferring the Kantian disgust with working-class taste (a disgust exceeding disinterest a n d yet marking it off as class-based) to a disgust with Derrida that should also exceed what his theory demands and that is thus equally indicative of its linkages with what it would vomit up. T h e mirroring of disgust is particularly pointed given its importance as a theme to both Derrida and Bourdieu. Bourdieus treatment of Derrida is, as h e admits, extremely compressed, only four to five pages, of which the summary of Derridas argument and Bourdieus dissent from it- the direct treatment of Derrida-takes u p the first two: Derrida does indeed see that what is involved is the opposition between legitimate pleasureand enjoyment or, in terms of objects, between the agreeable arts which seduce by the charm of their sensuous content and the Fine Arts which offer pleasure without enjoyment. He also sees, without explicitly connecting it with the previous opposition, the antithesis between the gross tastes of those who are content to enjoy the simple sensations of the senses, at table or over a bottle-consumptive orality seen as interested taste-and 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
Bourdieu connects Kant with high aesthetics and legitimate aesthetics

(Distinction,485), while Derrida identifies the elements he discusses in Kant as those that have dominated the philosophy of art since Kant (Thp Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 19871, 7 3 ) .The latter work was first published in French in 1978.

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consumption, annihilates the freedom that is asserted in suspending immediate attachment to the sensuous and in neutralizing the affect, that is, disinterestedness,a lack of interest as to the existence or nonexistence of the thing represented. And one can, no doubt, though Derrida avoids doing so explicitly, relate all the foregoing oppositions, which concern the consumers relation to the work of art, to the last of the oppositions picked up, the one which Kant establishes, at the level of production, between free art, involving free will, and mercenary art, which exchanges the value of its labour for a wage. (494) If one wanted to mount a defense of Derrida, one might note a number of things here. For instance, although a prior footnote, and indeed Bourdieus attack on Derrida, refers only to The T r u t h in Painting, this passage directly describes Economimesis. The distinction between the pleasures of fine art and other gratifications is common to both works but far more explicit in the latter. The discussions of disgust and of free and mercenary art occur only in Economimesis, which concentrates on the aesthetic quality of disinterest in Kant and is the source of the quotations. The section on Kant in The Truth in Painting, Parergon,has to do more with seemingly formal themes, the difference between ornament and essence, and Kants definition of purposiveness without purpose. To be sure, Derridas two essays refer to each other explicitly more or less as if they were parts of a single project. Moreover, since Derridas themes are more formal, at least superficially, in Parergon,and since Bourdieu clearly wants to recognize openly the elements common to his analysis and Derridas, the discussions of margins and pure cuts in Parergon are less amenable to assimilation with a sociological project without some analysis than are the themes of Economimesis. Still, since Bourdieus critiques are limited to the aspects of formal play in Parergon,not merely the play of typography but the claim to treat the Critique of Judgment as a work of art, with complete disinterest even in its existence, one may question whether those formalist flaws apply to the more material themes of the earlier essay or whether, if they do, the formal play might not also be analyzed back into the political analysis of which Bourdieu criticizes the lack: Failing to be, at the same time, social breaks which truly renounce the gratifications associated with membership, the most audacious intellectual breaks of pure reading still help to preserve the stock of consecrated texts from

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becoming dead letters, mere archive material, fit at best for the history of ideas or the sociology of knowledge (496). But this problem is augmented by the occlusions even in the positive summary quoted above. Bourdieu suggests that the political implications of Derridas discussion are unrealized because Derrida does not explicitly connect the themes toward that end. But whatever the weaknesses of its analytic connections, the primary argument of Economimesis,as its title indicates, is that Kants seemingly disinterested aesthetics participates in an enlightenment humanist economy. Derrida opens with the claim that a politics, . . . although it never occupies the center of the stage, acts upon this discourse. It ought to be possible to read it. Politics and political economy, to be sure, are implicated in every discourse on art and on the beautiful.s Moreover, Derrida quite explicitly argues that aesthetic disinterest operates as its own economy, distinguishing the purely human from lower orders: A divine teleology secures the political economy of the Fine-Arts, the hierarchical opposition of free art and mercenary art. Economimesis puts everything in its place, starting with the instinctual work of animals without language and ending with God, passing by the way of the mechanical arts, mercenary art, liberal arts, aesthetic arts and the FineArts (9). Bourdieu might object that the themes are classically philosophical rather than political, but he would do so at the cost of his own insight that the seemingly abstractly classical takes on its political effect by offering a structure of distinctions for the class system to use, which is essentially Derridas point. On the issue of disgust, if Derridas discussion is more complex in its itinerary and abstract in its formulations, again its point is precisely and manifestly Bourdieus; one might even argue that Derridas more formal discussion adds considerable force to Bourdieus political claims. Indeed, if the end of the essay did not turn so explicitly to Derrida, one might have expected compli-

8 Derrida, Economimesis, trans. Richard Klein, Diacritirs 11 ( 198 1 ): 3. This article was first published in French in 1975. Although Parergon is rarely as explicit in it$ political themes and is therefore more open to Bourdieus criticism, Derrida himself thinks that it too has more than formal significance: It is because deconstruction interferes with solid structures, material institutions, and not only with discourses or signifying representations, that it is always distinct from an analysis or a critique (Truth in Painting, 19).

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mentary references to Economimesis earlier in Distinction, so much does Derrida offer extended arguments for Bourdieus points about Kant. I register these objections to Bourdieus handling of Derrida largely to argue that his treatment might have been more positive, indeed sympathetic, without imperiling his own case. In the main, however, Bourdieus reservation about Derrida is accurate, not merely for Derrida himself but for my perhaps overly formal analysis, and finally for Bourdieu. But let us start with Derrida. For Bourdieu, the problem with avoiding social breaks, with treating Kants text on aesthetics as if it were an aesthetic object to be analyzed, is that it reproduces the philosophical forms and beliefs it seeks to deconstruct:
But Derridas supremely intellectual game presupposes lucidity in commitment to the game. . . . 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 the object in question, but he does so in a text which itself implies that epoche and that indifference. . . . Because he never withdraws from the philosophical game, whose conventions h e respects, even in the ritual transgressions at which only traditionalists could be shocked, he can only philosophically tell the truth about the philosophical text a n d its philosophical reading. (Distinction, 495)

Posed in this way, the accusation is one made commonly enough about Derrida, one indeed that he asks for, since he regularly asserts that his departure from traditional philosophy takes its strength from its respect for philosophys protocols and from its retracing of traditional readings and definitions9 With the charge left in this condition, ignoring the details of any specific argument, the answer is equally expectable. Derrida argues that one cannot show the limits of philosophical discourse from outside its boundaries precisely because it is a discourse that claims to be without boundaries. Only an analysis from within them can delineate them despite philosophys claims; hence the rele-

Derridas best statement of his procedure and its relation t o traditional reading remains The Exorbitant: Question of Method, in O f C;mmmntology, trans. Gayatri Chakravortv Spivak (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 15 7-64.
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vance of Bourdieus sociological questioning. Thus, according to Derrida, rather than failing to be material, his presentation of the departures his argument shares with Bourdieu, in a pointedly traditional mode of analysis, enables Bourdieus subsequent departures from Derridas stylistic traditionalism. At this level of generality, the argument over whose analysis represents the originating and effective break from tradition can go on forever: each position bases its case on an equally logical, purely abstract and formal position. To give Bourdieus accusation a more specific defense, albeit one with certain implications that he would not accept, I want to look more closely at Derridas use of the concept of disgust to deconstruct that of pure taste. Derrida begins with the opposition Bourdieu notes between pure taste and the barbarism of physical pleasure, mere eating and drinking, which pure taste would raise and expel: What is already announced here is a certain allergy in the mouth between pure taste and actual tasting [ digustation]. We still have before us the question of where to inscribe disgust. Would not disgust, by turning itself back against actual tasting, also be the origin of pure taste, in the wake of a sort of catastrophe? (Economimesis, 16). By making disgust, in all of its physicality, the origin of pure tastes expulsion of orality, Derrida, even more than Bourdieu, inscribes in the very workings of the theory the classjudgments Bourdieu finds implicit in Kant. Derridas analysis of disgust goes further still, since he argues the necessity of a vicariousness inscribed in its involuntariness that makes disgust simultaneously an expelled negative of taste and a negative reflection of the distance that defines pure taste. Because neither its orality nor its vicariousness can be escaped, disgust forces the structure of pure taste on us, even more than pure taste itself does, in both a highly physical and a highly negative form: The word vomit arrests the vicariousness of disgust; it puts the thing in the mouth; it substitutes, but only for example, oral for anal. It is determined by the system of the beautiful, the symbol of morality, as its other; it is then for philosophy, still, an elixir, even in the very quintessence of bad taste (25). Rather than lay out in detail the steps by which Derrida reaches such a conclusion, I ask that its accuracy as a deconstruction of Kants use of aesthetics to make a certain moral judgment be assumed, for the moment, if only within brackets. (The moral interest Derrida notes is

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one that we have in the very possibility of aesthetic judgments, not in any specificjudgment.) Those concerned to support Bourdieus analysis of disgust, at least, should have no trouble in accepting Derridas conclusion, since it deepens the analytic content of Bourdieus claim that class disgust works within Kants aesthetic theory necessarily, rather than just in its specific contemporary upper-class embodiment. But does Derrida effectively deconstruct disinterest as Kant defines it, as opposed to questioning its moral ties, and does his analysis expel disinterest or, as Bourdieu claims, enact it? To answer these questions, we must return to the Kantian discussion that culminates in a declaration of the barbarism of the pleasure of mere eating and drinking and restore some elisions that Bourdieu and Derrida both make. In establishing a moral interest in aesthetic taste, Kant originally makes a distinction not between pure taste and physical enjoyment but between a taste for the beautiful in nature and a taste for the beautiful in art. In a passage constructed out of explicit contradiction, he maintains that we have a moral interest in the ability to take pleasure in the beauty of nature but not one in the ability to take pleasure in the beauty of art, because only the former can be truly disinterested:
It is easy to explain why the satisfaction in the pure aesthetical judgment in the case of beautiful art is not combined with an immediate interest, as it is in the case of beautiful nature. For the former is either such an imitation of the latter that it reaches the point of deception and then produces the same effect as natural beauty (for which it is taken), or it is an art obviously directed designedly to our satisfaction. In the latter case the satisfaction in the product would, it is true, be brought about immediately by taste, but it would be only a mediate interest in the cause lying at its root, viz. an art that can only interest by means of its purpose and never in itself. ( 144; 17 1 )

Kant then asserts that the song of a bird in nature is beautiful because, in hearing it, we interpret it as natures proclamation of gladsomeness and contentment with existence (144; 1 7 2 ) , and this interpretation gives us pleasure whether nature have this design or not (145; 172). If we found the song to be a human imitation, we would cease to think it inherently beautiful, because we could construe its beauty only as dependent on an extra-aesthetic, intended purpose. It is the inability to feel unintended beauty, a beauty perhaps even proceeding from an inaccurate interpretation of nature, that Kant finds morally wanting.

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Furthermore, he does not compare disinterested pleasure with the pleasures of eating and drinking but compares the inability to feel any pleasure in nature with the inability to experience any pleasure but eating and drinking: We regard as coarse and ignoble the mental attitude of those persons who have no feelingfor beautiful nature (for thus we describe a susceptibility to interest in its contemplation) and who confine themselves to eating and drinking (145; 173). Both Bourdieu and Derrida forget that a pure taste for beautiful art that does not also extend to a taste for beautiful nature is precisely as coarse and ignoble. Both the disinterest that even an interest in the contemplation of nature evidently has and our moral interest in the ability to have that disinterested interest accrue as little to a pure taste for art as to a physical pleasure in eating and drinking. Indeed, the distinction between a moral interest consequent on the appreciation of natural beauty and not consequent on that of fine art is the theme of section 42. But since the taste for an object of fine art can be nonphysicalindeed, by Kants own admission, a pure aesthetical judgment-why would one who could experience this taste, as well as the physical gratification of eating and drinking, but not the taste for beautiful nature also be coarse and ignoble? To answer this question, we must first take seriously Kants claim that aesthetic satisfaction is disinterested in the sense that it is indifferent as regards the existence of an object (43-4; i 7 ) . 1 0 If one considers disinterest as occurring if one desires neither gratification nor moral benefit from the object but only the aesthetic pleasure that Derrida describes as arid, then the claim that one needs to be indifferent to the objects very existence goes too far. We might value an object only because it gave us that arid pleasure and still take measures to preserve it (if it were a painting, by putting it in a museum; if it were a poem, by disseminating knowledge of it through education and canonization) .I1 But for us reasonably to undertake such an act of preservation, we would have to know that our

10 I follow the pattern in Kantian criticism of using indifferenceand disinterest as synonyms, but one should note that the use of indifference suggests not neutrality or open-mindedness but a complete lack of interest, perhaps even a refusal to attend to the issue. This distinction becomes significant below. I On Kants claim about indifference as to existence see Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims o f Tuste (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 191-202. In a

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pleasure came from the object of our perception as an effect of the objects existence. In the case of an aesthetic pleasure, that is exactly what we cannot know. Since the pleasure is one of experiencing the object as purposive, as having the form of an object made, so to speak, on purpose, while knowing that that purposiveness is without purpose, the purposiveness we experience does not necessarily correspond to a purpose whose achievement the object was designed to enact (55; 33-4).Kant calls this attribute subjective purposiveness and thus notes that our interpretation of the significance of a birds song may not correspond to any real design in nature. In such a situation, we may well have no interest, not merely in gratification but in the objects very existence. The perception of purposiveness can come only from an object, but it may not necessarily come from any one object or from the same object reliably, since it cannot be imputed to that object with any cognitive certainty (hence Kants insistence that while we cannot justifiably claim that the judgment that a specific object is beautiful is universal, we can claim that the judgment itself is universal). Once we recognize that the judgment of beauty can be completely disinterested in the way Kant means-without interest in the objects existence or in gratification-only in the face of an object that may well not reliably give and was not designed to give the pleasure afforded by the beautiful, we can see the distinction he wants to draw between the beautiful in nature and in fine art and why a moral interest accrues only to the ability to experience the former. Unlike an object of nature, a work of art, even a work of free, nonmercenary, fine art, has been designed to give us an experience of the beautiful. It is directed designedly to our satisfaction ( 144;171 ). Thus, while we can in a certain sense make a pure aesthetic judgment of it, independent of its ability to gratify a desire or to fulfill a moral interest, we do have an interest ultimately in the existence of the object as one designed to fulfill the purpose of giving us pure aesthetic pleasure. Thus Kant claims that our satisfaction in such an object would . . . be brought about immediately by taste. The immediate judgment of it is purely
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slightly different context Guyer points out that even if the pleasure of art were nonphysical and void of interest relating to desire, we might have interested expectations about paintings in museums that were comparable to our expectations about chocolate that resulted from our physical taste for it (190).

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aesthetic. But it would be only a mediate interest in the cause lying at its root, viz. an art that can only interest by means of its purpose and never in itself ( 144; 1 7 1 ). Since the object was designed to give us an immediate satisfaction, its design becomes a purpose in excess of and leading up to that satisfaction, thus creating a mediate interest in the objects existence. Only by eliding this distinction between a disinterest in an object of fine art and a disinterest in the beautiful in nature, which extends even to a lack of interest in the objects existence, can Derrida get to the opposition between a physical and an abstract pleasure on which his deconstruction of disgust is based. That Kantian disinterest goes beyond mere disinterest in physical gratification does not imply that the distinction between a desire for physical gratification and a more arid pleasure does not also exist. It clearly does, and in Kant it carries all the moral weight and sociological bias that Derrida deconstructs and that Bourdieu objects to in their discussions of disgust and coarse, physical pleasures. Within the terms of his deconstruction of the disinterest merely in physical gratification, Derridas elision of Kants opposition into one of aesthetic taste to physical pleasure may be taken as a convenient compression. But Bourdieus accusation is that Derridas supremely intellectual game of deconstructing philosophy on its own terms presupposes lucidity in commitment to the game (Distinction, 495) and that therefore even a successful deconstruction will merely repeat not only the game of philosophy but also, to the extent that lucidity is, as Bourdieu claims, the most refined Kantian aesthetic pleasure (485)the game of aesthetics. In the support of this charge, the Kantian disinterest that is without interest even in the existence of the object it judges-the disinterest that Derrida and Bourdieu mention but elide into the larger category of disinterest in gratification-does have a role to play. That disinterest arises from Kants separation of a purposiveness that the judgment imputes to the object from any claim that that purposiveness matches up with a purpose, design, or intent that produced the object. Given the separation, the judgment has no reason to attend to the existence of any particular object, as opposed to the perception of formal purposiveness, which is the subject of aesthetic judgment. But this handling of an object to find forms and effects that exceed its own ends applies as well to deconstructive analysis as to aes-

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thetic judgment. In discussing his treatment of Kant in The Truth in Painting, Derrida makes the comparison explicit in a passage Bourdieu quotes:
Starting out from pleasure, it was for pleasure that the third Critique was written, for pleasure that it should be read. . . . In letting myself be guided by pleasure I recognize and simultaneously put astray an injunction. I follow it [ j e b suis]: the enigma of pleasure puts the whole book in movement. I seduce it [ j e le siduis]: in treating the third Critique as a work of art or a beautiful object, which it was not simply designed to be, I act as if the existence of the book were indifferent to me (which, as Kant explains, is a requirement of any aesthetic experience) and could be considered with an imperturbable detachment. (43)

Few who follow Derridas reading of Kant would confuse it with a judgment of an aesthetic object (even assuming that such a judgment could be extended into an analytic method with more critical content than the only kind ofjudgment Kant actually proposes: This is beautiful). But Derrida does mean seriously to treat the work with indifference to its own ends in order to show the elements of its own functioning that it cannot recognize. Although he is explicit, in a deceptively playful tone, about the ground he shares with Kant, however, he rarely allows Kant the full force of his own definition. Following Kants formulation, Derrida calls this disinterest indifference to the objects existence, which suggests not quite detachment but an absolute lack of caring or attention. But following Heideggers critique of Nietzsche, he immediately withdraws this definition, restoring the disinterest that he will deconstruct (44). Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Derrida does not allow Kant to claim the disinterest that he himself deploys. Of Kants project, he says: Now you have to know what youre talking about, what intrinsically concerns the value beauty and what remains external to your immanent sense of beauty. This permanent requirement- to distinguish between the internal or proper sense and the circumstance of the object being talked about-organizes all philosophical discourses on art (45). Perhaps to write a philosophy of art, one has to know what one is talking about. But to have a disinterested judgment, or at least a judgment indifferent to its objects existence, that is exactly what one does not have to know. The distinction between internal sense and circumstance is just what that

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judgment brackets by separating purposiveness from purpose. The deconstruction of ornament and essence that follows this establishment of boundaries, then, is already present in the concept of aesthetic disinterest. So in judging the Critique as a work of art, Derrida reproduces, somewhat as Bourdieu describes, a part of the philosophy he deconstructs. I say somewhat because my point is significantly different from Bourdieus. Bourdieu suggests that Derrida willingly participates in the game he deconstructs. He quotes Derrida on following Kants aesthetic disinterest without clarifying that Derrida sees his method as a refusal to participate in Kants game. In contrast, by arguing that both Bourdieu and Derrida suppress part of Kants game and that Derrida draws on the part they both suppress, I suggest not that Derrida is just disguised traditionalism but that Kants seemingly traditional aesthetics functions centrally in the most corrosive aspect of Derridas analysis. Rather than apply this aesthetics explicitly, however, Derrida may avoid tracing it out as part of his deconstruction because to do so would occlude the analytic departure he wants to claim. In his defense, it is as much a question whether Kant is aware of the implications of his version of aesthetic disinterest as it is whether Derrida is in his silent application. Kants formulation does not protect him from the hidden moralisms and economies that both Derrida and Bourdieu trace. If, moreover, Derrida captures the main elements of Bourdieus critique of Kant, even in overly abstract terms, and if his debt to Kant does not undercut his deconstruction but allows it, where does that leave Bourdieus own critique? At this point one may turn on Bourdieu the tattered question of the problem of his own discourse without, I hope, risking, much less settling for, the glib dismissal of contradiction that usually follows on such a question. Certainly, the contradictions between the grounds for Bourdieus condemnation of Derrida and his own description of his practices are so obvious that they could only be our starting point:
The style of the book [Distinction], whose long, complex sentences may offend-constructed as they are with a view to reconstituting the complexity of the social world in a language capable of holding together the most diverse things while setting them in rigorous perspectivestems partly from the endeavour to mobilize all the resources of the traditional modes of expression, literary, philosophical or scientific, so

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as to say things that were de facto o r de jure excluded from them, and to prevent the reading from slipping back into the simplicities of the smart essay or the political polemic. (xiii)

This passage from the preface to the English-language edition will, of course, have been written some years after the books concluding pages on Derrida. Still, Bourdieus claim to use the resources of academic expression against themselves is striking in view of his criticizing Derrida for using the same modus operandi. For the moment, let us set aside the question of why he does so and ask it in reverse: assuming-as I do- that Bourdieu genuinely suspects academic language of re-creating the class biases of traditional philosophy, why would he use this suspect style and method? One may put the question in an even more self-referentially specific form. Bourdieu extends his suspicions of academic discourse fairly enough to the discourses of sociology itself: The existence of a scientific sociology is as improbable as ever in times when the position of sociologist is one of the refuges for those intent on escaping classification (587). But, of course, either Bourdieus discourse escapes his own classifications, or it reenacts one of the class biases that they reveal. Either he has the inauthentic desire, or he capitulates to his capture within the class system. The glibness of wanting to catch poststructuralists with the net of their own discourse lies in the cheapness of the victory it gains. In the face of the massiveness of Bourdieus analysis, the self-contradiction seems cheap indeed. The value of extricating him from it may be slightly larger, however, in that doing so gives his system a certain wholeness that he clearly wants. Here Kants indifference as to the existence of the object, the willingness to analyze circumstance without regard to propriety or essence, serves him as well as it does Derrida, and in the same way. Both Bourdieu and Derrida engage in an academic or philosophical analysis according to Kants method of aesthetic judgment: they mix circumstance and essence, accident and intent, to delineate a structure whose significance stands apart from its origin and even from the problem of its own integrity. Once one has become indifferent to existence, ones capture in ones own analysis is equally a matter of indifference. The only question is the status of the purposiveness one judges, the sociological system one outlines, the philosophical system one traces and deconstructs. Even if Bourdieu

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were the most inauthentic sociologist, the accuracy or inaccuracy of the classifications he was trying to evade would remain unchanged. Even if Derrida were the most mystified standard philosopher, reproducing in his discourse the limits he hoped to question, the accuracy or inaccuracy of his analysis would also remain unchanged. In effect, the writers status becomes as inconsequential to the discourses existence as the existence of its content has been to the writer. So we return to the question addressed at the outset: Why Derrida? Why does Bourdieu proceed from attacking Kant to attacking Derrida for committing transgressions that are his own as well? Given Bourdieus use of the Kantian aesthetics he so unrelentingly combats, one might guess that Derrida was the screen image for the Kantian elements he would not recognize. But like Derrida himself, Bourdieu catches glimpses of the Kantian nature of his project, even if, like Derrida, he cannot allow himself to hold on to them. Thus he ends his English-language preface by recognizing the aesthetic quality of his sociological analysis:
At all events, there is nothing more universal than the project of objectifying the mental structures associated with the particularity of a social structure. Because it presupposes an epistemological break which is also a social break, a sort of estrangement from the familiar, domestic, native world, the critique (in the Kantian sense) of culture invites each reader, through the making strange beloved of the Russian formalists, to reproduce on his or her own behalf the critical break of which it is the product. For this reason it is perhaps the only rational basis for a truly universal culture. (xiv)

Recognizing their participation in the traditions they undercut, especially the Continental aesthetic theories they have all read deeply, comes far more easily to Continental theorists than to their AngloAmerican allies. With American literary theories concerning the political and the historical, separating themselves from every trace of the aesthetic by reducing it to a veil for ideological and market forces has become an obsession. But it may be mirrored in Bourdieus fear of entrapment in the merely academic that Derrida clearly represents for him. Derridas problem, for Bourdieu, is too great an abstraction of the issues whose basic analysis they both share. But Derridas style, as we have seen, fails to make a social break (496);it is, in a sense, a ver-

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sion of the refusal to recognize not only ones own Kantianism but ones own participation in a project virtually descriptive of the academic culture one seeks to analyze. Thus Bourdieu finds himself caught between two nauseas. He wants to avoid the smart essay or the political polemic, which is surely his version of Kants coarse and ignoble indulgences, disdained by a higher, more rigorous analysis. But by vomiting out Derridean style, the class markers of whose academicism also turn his stomach, perhaps he may expel that academicism. But if Kantian indifference toward the existence of the object of judgment allows the cultural and philosophical analyses of Bourdieu and Derrida their achievements, it may also allow us to take advantage of them, without their anxieties. After all, indifference is in excess of Kants disgust with the physical and thus may also go beyond Bourdieus and Derridas repulsion from the traditional and the lucid. At the opening of this essay I asked if, by analyzing the positions of three texts on a philosophical question, I had not merely turned deconstructive irreverence into irrelevance. One might almost say that I had risked an indifference to the political issues at stake. Of course, this is an accusation that both Bourdieu and Foucault direct at Derrida in the first instance. Nor is it trivial, since the fear of being guilty of it motivates Derrida as well: if one is to escape the irrelevant academic discourse that maintains the status quo, one ought to worry about what would recapture one within that discourse. I have argued here, however, for a common ground among Bourdieu, Derrida, and even one aspect of Kant that underlies the skeptical analysis at least the first two want. I have also suggested that the answer to the Bourdieuian and Foucauldian worry is a certain Kantian indifference. We are regularly told that it leads to quietism or even to a positive defense of the status quo. But it may equally lead to the corrosive questioning that only a complete indifference can enable.