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Marcel Proust as Successor and Precursor to Pierre Bourdieu: A Fragment

Yale University and Yale Center for Cultural Sociology, philip.smith{at}yale.edu

Commentators are in general agreement that Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of habitus and practice is too deterministic, but they have failed to provide a workable template for revisions. Here the French novelist Marcel Proust is proposed as a phenomenological corrective. There are strong family resemblances between his approach to social life and that of Bourdieu. In Remembrance of Things Past, however, Proust offers an understanding of action that is more sensitive to contingency, self-reflexivity, change, desire and the layering of the self. Attention to this will pay dividends for those seeking to creatively reconstruct Bourdieu’s project.

Key Words: Bourdieu • habitus • Proust • self • time

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