Full Description
The Durkheimians have traditionally been understood as positivist, secular thinkers, fully within the Enlightenment project of limitless reason and progress. In a radical revision of this view, this book persuasively argues that the core members of the Durkheimian circle (Durkheim himself, Marcel Mauss, Henri Hubert and Robert Hertz) are significantly more complicated than this. Through his extensive analysis of large volumes of correspondence as well as historical and macro-sociological mappings of the intellectual and social worlds in which the Durkheimian project emerged, the author shows the Durkheimian project to have constituted a quasi-religious quest in ways much deeper than most interpreters have thought. Their fascination, both personal and intellectual, with the sacred is the basis on which the author reconstructs some important components of modern French intellectual history, connecting Durkheimian thought to key representatives of French poststructuralism and postmodernism: Bataille, Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, and Deleuze.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1. The Intellectual Pursuit of the Sacred
Chapter 2. Intellectual Production and Interpretation: The Intellectual Habitus
Chapter 3. The Scene of Durkheimian Sociology: A View of the Parisian Intellectual Field at the Turn of the 19th century
Chapter 4. Écoles, Masters, and The Dreyfus Affair : Institutions and Networks that Shaped the Durkheimians and the Political Affair that Positioned Them
Chapter 5. The Scene of Poststructuralism: A View of the Parisian Intellectual Field from the End of WWII to the 1960s
Chapter 6. Écoles, Masters, and May '68: Institutions and Networks that Shaped the Poststructuralists and the Political Affair that Positioned Them
Chapter 7. Being a Durkheimian Intellectual
Chapter 8. The Sacred in Durkheimian Thought I
Chapter 9. The Sacred in Durkheimian Thought II: Ascetic and Mystic Durkheimianisms
Chapter 10. The Descent of the Mystics: The Collège de Sociologie and Critique as the Conduits to Poststructuralism
Chapter 11. Being a Poststructuralist Intellectual
Chapter 12. The Sacred in Poststructuralist Thought
Chapter 13. Godless Intellectuals, then? Or...Something Else?
