Lantoine, Jacques-Louis:
Spinoza après Bourdieu : L'agent automate ; politique des dispositions

Paris : Publications de la Sorbonne, 2018. - 138 pp.

Contains bibliography: [125]-133

Literature type: Monographs
Language: French
Thematic areas: Anthropology / psychology / doctrine of affections / body and mind, Philosophy of politics and law, Comparison of theories
Subject (individuals): Bourdieu, Pierre

English commentary: "Spinoza’s dispositional anthropology allows us to think in a realistic way the mechanisms and the finality of the State and other political institutions. Besides what Bourdieu called the “symbolic violence”, which works by the incorporation of signs of power and refers to the habitus as a system of durable dispositions to recognize and reproduce the established order, we must consider the role of the affects, which dispose ourselves sometimes to support any power that oppresses us, sometimes to throw ourselves with all our heart in a sedition, occasionally against that which we once revered. In a Spinozist point of view, plasticity of dispositions must be considered: the instability of the human automaton governed by passions, exposed to fortune and fluctuating between one affect and one other, explains the easiness with which he allows himself to be dominated, but also his tendency to rebel, for better or for worse. However, if humans all have a common nature, elites and rulers are as capable of inconstancy and inconsistency as common people. That is why the State that Spinoza conceives in the Political treatise, and which finds an equivalent in Bourdieu’s concept of Realpolitik, consists in an automatized machinery which works by the support of all – the power of the multitude affectively disposed to obey by the sole and anonymous mechanism of the institutions – but, paradoxically, thanks to the loyalty of no one. After all, how could we trust indeed those individuals - philosophers included - whose behavior is so absurd?" (abstract)

Link to this page: http://spinoza.hab.de/detail.php?id=20019&LANG=EN