講者 Speaker
Ghassan Hage, FAHA, FASSA, Professor of Anthropology and Social Theory University of Melbourne, Australia
講題 Title
Pierre Bourdieu and the Politics of Symbolic Violence
摘要 Abstract
Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence is part of a long genealogy of theories of domination that aim to think through the way power dissimulates its coercive backbone, and the way the dominated come to acquiesce to and participate in their own domination without the need for visible, physical or violent coercion. In French political theory, it perhaps begins with Rousseau’s famous pronouncement that ‘Nothing can be more certain than that every man born in slavery is born for slavery. Slaves lose everything in their chains, even the desire of escaping from them: they love their servitude, as the comrades of Ulysses loved their brutish condition.’
But does a slave ever completely lose the desire to escape from his or her chains? In the first part of the presentation I will explore the way Bourdieu sees the working of symbolic power, and argue that rather than a description of an actual state of domination, the theory offers us a glimpse of the dominants’ own fantasies of power: the ultimate state of domination that they aspire to achieve. In fact, Bourdieu often conceives of symbolic violence in conjunction with the less absolute form of domination that he refers to as ‘orthodoxy.’ Bourdieu saw power as continuously fluctuating between the two. I investigate the way such fluctuation can help us make better sense of the way domination is usually enacted and institutionalised.
In the second part of the presentation, I reflect on current configurations of power and domination. Essential to Bourdieu’s analysis of ‘orthodoxy’ is that while it is a lesser form of domination, it always aspires to become symbolic violence. This is also part of a general belief in western radical political theory that power always aims to dissimulate its own truth (thus the need to ‘speak truth to power’). However, as I will argue, today, we are facing a type of power that is not so much new, as new to western democracies, it is what I call ‘naked power’: it is a power that does not need nor desire to dissimulate itself in the process of its deployment. What is the analytical value of ‘symbolic violence’ in the face of such power?
時間 Time
2020年 12月 7日（星期一）13:00~15:00 PM
Monday, December 7, 2020, 13:00~15:00 PM
場地 Venue
民族所舊大樓三樓會議室
R323, The Old Wing, IOE
主辦單位 Organizer
中央研究院民族學研究所
Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica
連絡人 Contact Persons
林音秀小姐 02-2652-3484 world66@gate.sinica.edu.tw
林芬安小姐 02-2652-3303 falin@gate.sinica.edu.tw
影音連結 Lecture Recording
相關連結：外部資源8(開新視窗)