Итог полностью

The specific interests of ihe interpreters, and the very logic of the field which conveys the most prestigious works to the readers with the greatest vocation and talent for hermeneutic hagiography, do not explain how, at a certain point. Heideggerian philosophy came to be recognized in the most diverse sectors of the philosophical field as the most distinguished fulfilment of the philosophical ambition. This social destiny could only be realized on the basis of a pre-existing affinity of dispositions, itself deriving from the logic of recruitment and training of the body of philosophy professors and from the position of the philosophical field in the structure of the university field and intellectual field, etc. The petit-bourgeois elitism of this ’cream' of the professorial body constituted by philosophy professors

(who have often come from the lower strata of the petite bourgeoisie and who, by their academic prowess, have conquered the peaks of the hierarchy of humanist disciplines to reach the topmost ivory tower of the educational system, high above the world and any worldly power) could hardly fail to resonate harmoniously with Heidegger’s thought, that exemplary product of an homologous disposition.

All of the effects which appear most specific to Heideggerian language, notably all of the effects which constitute the flabby rhetoric of the homily, a variation on the words of a sacred text which serves as the source of an unending and unremitting commentary, guided by the intention to exhaust a subject which is by definition inexhaustible, represent the exemplary limit and therefore the absolute legitimation of the professional tics and tricks which allow the ’ex-cathedra prophets' (Kathederpropheten), as Weber called them, to re-produce mundanely the illusion of being above the mundane. These effects of priestly prophecy therefore succeed fully only if they rest on the profound complicity that links the author and his interpreters in an acceptance of the presuppositions implied by a sociological definition of the function of ‘the lesser ministerial prophet’, as Weber again put it; and none of these presuppositions serves Heidegger’s interests better than the divinization of the text conferred by any self-respectingly literate reader. It required a transgression of the academic imperative of neutrality as extraordinary’ as enrolment in the Nazi Party for the question of Heidegger’s ’political thought' to be raised, and then it was immediately set aside again, as it seemed an improper suggestion, which is yet another form of neutralization: the definition which excludes any overt reference to politics in philosophy has been so profoundly internalized by professors of philosophy that they have managed to forget that Heidegger’s philosophy is political from beginning to end.

But comprehension within established forms would remain empty and formal if it did not often mask a kind of understanding which is both more profound and more obscure, and which is built on the more or less perfect homology of positions and the affinity of the habitus. To understand also means to understand without having to be told, to read between the lines, by re-enacting in the mode of practice (in most cases unconsciously) the linguistic associations and substitutions initially set up by the producer: this is how a solution is found to the specific contradiction of ideological discourse, which draws its efficacy from its duplicity, and can only legitimately express social interest in forms which dissimulate or betray it. The homology

of positions and the largely successful orchestration of divergent habitus encourage a practical recognition of the interests which the reader represents and the specific form of censorship which prohibits their direct expression, and this recognition gives direct access, independently of any conscious act of decoding, to what discourse means,⁵⁽¹ This pre-verbal understanding is engendered by the encounter between an as yet unspoken, indeed repressed, expressive interest, and its accepted mode of expression, which is already articulated according to the norms of a field.⁵⁷

Part III

Symbolic Power and the Political Field

This text, which was written as part of an attempt to present an assessment of a number of investigations of symbolism in an academic situation of a particular type - that of the lecture in a foreign university (Chicago, April 1973) - must not be read as a history, even an academic history, of theories of symbolism, and especially not as a sort of pseudo-Hegelian reconstruction of a procedure which would have led, by successive acts of dialectical transcendence, to the ‘final theory'.