-
So, only if there were to take the risk of really calling into question the philsophical game to which their existence as philosophers is linked, or their recognized participation in this game - and not simply through the displays of radical subversion in which ‘academic anti-academicism’ has always revelled - would philosophers be able to secure the conditions for a genuine freedom with respect to everything which authorizes and entitles them to call themselves and think themselves philosophers and which, in exchange for this social recognition, confines them in the presuppositions inscribed in the posture and professional position of philosopher. Only a critique aiming to make explicit the social conditions of possibility of what is defined, at each moment, as ‘philosophical’ would be able to make visible the sources of the philosophical effects that are implied in those conditions. This alone would fulfil the intention of liberating philosophical thought from the presuppositions inscribed in the position and dispositions of those who are able to indulge in the intellectual activity designated the term ‘philosophy’. For, while it has to be pointed out that the philosopher, who likes to think of himself as atopos, placeless, unclassifiable is, like everyone, comprehended in the space he seeks to comprehend, this is not done in order to debase him. On the contrary, it is to try to offer him the possibility of some freedom with respect to the constraints and limitations that are inscribed in the fact that he is situated, first, in a place in social space, and also in a place in one of its subspaces, the scholastic fields.
—
Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations
FAO Hollovv: Bourdieu putting what a sociology of philosophy entails a lot better than I probably did.
(via robert-brydie)(Source: thepovertyoftheory)