A Note On Pierre Bourdieu’s Notion of ‘Economy of Symbolic Goods’

Sibaji Bandyopadhyay


The introductory passage of Pierre Bourdieu’s 1977 essay ‘The Production
of belief: contribution to an economy of symbolic goods’ is like an
intimation forewarning the reader that he is about to enter a complex
language-game. The first sentence of the essay—loaded as it is with
expressions, such as, ‘the art business’, ‘a trade in things that have no price’,
‘class of practices’, ‘pre-capitalist economy’, ‘economy of exchange’—
unmistakably reminds one of the set of standard Marxist vocabulary, albeit,
in a slyly sarcastic manner. Bourdieu then, in the next sentence emplaces the
word negation at its centre; and, the translator alerts the reader in his
footnote that the French original dénégation unambiguously echoes the
German word Verneinung, a key Freudian term.[i] The opening gambit of
‘The Production of belief’ is thus akin to the staging of the spectacle of
conjuring up the spirits of the two Fathers of Modern Theory, Karl Marx
and Sigmund Freud. The promise implicit in the gambit is that the essay will
deliberately, even mischievously, conjoin Marxian and Freudian languages
to lay bare the ‘science of belief’ which underpins practices commonly
regarded as ‘Art’. It therefore is profitable to begin by taking stock of the
Freudian terms favoured by Bourdieu before we investigate how he
intertwines them with conceptual categories gathered from the Marxian
arsenal.

It is common knowledge that at the initial stage of his intellectual career, for
example in Studies in Hysteria (1895), Freud was in the habit of using the
words ‘repression’ and ‘defence’ indifferently, even indiscriminately.[ii] But
later he succeeded in endowing a peculiar quality of piquancy to the word
‘repression’. In his 1926 book Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, Freud
chose to reserve the term ‘defence’ as ‘a general designation for all the
techniques which the ego makes use of in conflicts which may lead to a
neurosis’[iii] and designate ‘repression’ as a ‘special method of
defence’[iv]. The remarkable thing was that the more ‘repression’ gained in
specific density, the more it began to converge upon the term Unconscious
and clearer it became that ‘repression’ and the ‘unconscious’ were like
inseparable companions. It however took some years before Freud could
express the relationship between the two in the algebra of formulas. He put
it succinctly in his 1923 opus The Ego and the Id: ‘the repressed is the
prototype of the unconscious’[v]; then again in Inhibitions, Symptoms and
Anxiety: ‘the repressed is ... as it were, an outlaw; it is excluded from the
great organization of the ego and is subject only to laws which govern the
realm of the unconscious’[vi].
But it was in Freud’s short but celebrated essay titled ‘Die Verneinung’ or
‘Negation’ published in 1925 that the camaraderie between ‘repression’ and
the ‘unconscious’ became, to borrow the word from Lewis Carol the author
who pictured the image of the continually fading but perennially lingering
smile of some mysterious Cheshire cat, truly ‘curiouser’. Therein Freud
propounded the thesis: it is not affirmation but negation that holds the key to

the unconscious; and, negation is an Aufhebung of the repression, though
not an acceptance of what is repressed.[vii] Commenting on Freud’s
employment of Aufhebung, a word to which both Hegel and Marx were
particularly attached, a word that combined in one the dual role of
‘annulment’ and ‘preservation’, Jean Hyppolite remarked in a conversation
with Jacques Lacan while participating in one of Lacan’s seminars on 10th
February 1954 that for Freud the function of ‘negation’ was to constitute an
ambivalent form of self-proclamation which could be transcribed as: ‘I am
going to tell you what I am not; pay attention, this is precisely what I
am’[viii]. It is impossible to articulate such a double-edged mode of
judgment unless two distinct operations are assigned to the act of ‘negation’:
one that of disavowal and the other that of denial. According to Hyppolite
(and also Lacan), the masterly achievement of Freud lies in his formulation
that ‘one always finds in the ego, in a negative formulation, the hallmark of
the possibility of having the unconscious at one’s disposal even as one
refuses it’.[ix] The implication is, while disavowal connotes ‘a lifting of the
repression’[x] or a ‘recognition of the unconscious on the part of the
ego’[xi] and denial connotes the ‘persistence of the [same] repression’[xii],
this two-fold negativity is the pre-condition for ‘thinking [to] free itself from
the restrictions of repression [and thereby lay the ground for] creation of
symbol[s] of negation’[xiii].

Pierre Bourdieu, in his turn, banks precisely on ‘disavowal’ and ‘denial’ in
order to penetrate the mystery of production of ‘belief’. His central
proposition in the piece under consideration hinges upon the interplay
between the two. Confident that, treated as analytic categories the two
would yield a rich theoretical dividend, Bourdieu applies them to the
domain of ‘Art’ and proceeds to demonstrate with great élan that the tension
between ‘disavowal’ and ‘denial’ is simply the other name for the
mechanism which allows for the investment of a negative form of capital,
namely, symbolic capital.
Drawing upon Freud’s Negation essay even more than Bourdieu himself
does, Bourdieu’s arguments may be recast in the following manner:

1.To recognize ‘symbolic capital’ is to recognize that its very recognition is
premised on an elaborate system of misrecognition. In truth, ‘symbolic
capital’ is a variant of ‘economic or political capital’. But, a calculated
marshalling of a host of ‘protective screens’ ensures that the artist and the
market remain distanced; and this ‘distancing’ is mystifying enough to make
one oblivious of the profit-motive that underlies every artistic practice.[xiv]

2.Situated at the pole of ‘production’ the artist adorns himself with a mask-
like screen which has the effect of flashing a showy dark crack between
‘price’ and ‘value’. The artistry involved in that masking technique consists
in adopting the famous stance of disinterestedness. Transforming the boast
of aesthetic transcendence, the superior urge for the ‘refusal of the
commercial’ into a permanent feature of artistic persona, authors posit
themselves as ‘anti-economic’ beings. This snooty attitude towards vulgar
money-making and gross material gains combined with spiritual
impeachment of market-driven forces actually gives the game away. It

speaks of the ‘disavowal’ aspect of Freudian negation. But while
‘disavowal’, even if unconsciously, makes space for the ‘lifting of
repression’ associated with economic ends, the consistent ‘denial’ of the
same keeps reproducing the impression that artistic labor is intrinsically
antithetical to profit-oriented enterprises. ‘Disavowal’ framed in terms of
(Kantian or Neo-Kantian) ‘disinterestedness’ turns the favored self-
representation of the artist into a mockery. That representation can then be
re-phrased as: ‘I am telling you I am not interested in money; pay attention,
that is precisely what I am interested in’. On the other hand, by obstinately
‘denying’ the truth that the equally obstinate act of ‘disavowal’ signals, the
artist manages to constantly refurbish his (market-friendly) image of being a
sworn enemy of the institution of market. It is this ‘disavowal-denial’ nexus
which both paves the way for ‘creation of symbol[s] of negation’ in the form
of ‘Art’ and keeps alive the process of accumulation of symbolic
capital.[xv]

3.In a universe where the paradox of ‘deriving profits from
disinterestedness’[xvi] reigns supreme, it is natural to expect that symbolic
productivity would be directly proportional to the degree of invisibility of
investment. In other words, more a person succeeds in matching his ardour
of ‘disavowal’ with his passion for ‘denial’ more he gains in prestige, and
therewith, material benefits. This also explains why discourses on art are
pathologically compelled to repeat binary oppositions such as ‘best-sellers
vs. classics’, ‘bourgeois vs. intellectual’, ‘traditional vs. avant-garde’,
‘commercial vs. cultural’, ‘big houses vs. little magazines’, ‘low vs. high’
with a tedious regularity.[xvii] The monotony is itself a pointer to the fact
that in their battles against ‘establishment’ the proponents of ‘anti-
establishment’ rhetoric employ an always-already blueprint; to dethrone
consecrated authors, that is, those whose power of ‘denial’ become
progressively weak because they receive prizes, critical approvals or public
adulation, the greenhorns the greenhorns determined to consign ‘canonized
bones’ to fire play upon ‘disavowal’ with greater and greater alacrity. To use
a much-recited phrase from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the tragedy that revolves
round the ever-lurking apparition of the departed Father, the aspirants or
pretenders ‘protest too much’. ‘Over-protestation’ clearly indicates, the
relationship between the out-dated and the new-comer is over-determined by
the age-old ageist ideology and in the final instance the son-like challengers
only endorse their fathers’ ‘bad-faith economy’[xviii] which from the start
was predicated upon the creed of ‘disinterestedness’. In place of providing
an antidote to the original ‘repression’, subversion ends up giving a fresh
lease of life to it; instead of burying the dead and moving on, the new
entrants remain haunted by the spectral presence of their elders. This never-
ending circularity, this ‘collective mis-recognition’[xix] is what bestows on
clichés like ‘intellectuals think less of writers who win prizes’ or ‘success is
suspect’ or ‘failure is the proof of authenticity’, an endearing as well as an
enduring quality.

4.The dominance of ‘bad-faith economy’ or the economy ‘based on
disavowal of the “economic”’ in the field of Art condemns all its players to
engage in a ‘game with mirrors’.[xx] New styles appear, new schools evolve

and newer labels, very often manufactured by loosely pre-fixing ‘post’ or
‘neo’ to previously popular nomenclature, continually proliferate but since
the ‘will to be different’ is always subject to the law of ‘creation of
symbol[s] [by] negation’, the space of Art also gets to be systematically flat.
This steady ‘homogenization’ is reflected in the near-homology between
various art-practices and their critical appraisals. It is as if each lot, whether
it be championed as ‘Sentinel of Tradition’ or ‘Harbinger of Newer Tides’,
has a slot of its own. ‘Disavowal’ coupled with ‘the homology which exists
between all fields of struggle organized on the basis of an unequal
distribution of a particular kind of capital’[xxi], spell out the general
principle for the production of belief surrounding the myth of self-
sufficiency in the arena of Art.

5.The process of ‘accumulation of symbolic capital’ gets better told if we
admit two more words to the discourse. They are: habitus and ethos. Habitus
is a synonym for any regulating principle which enables ‘agents to cope
with unforeseen and ever-changing situations’[xxii]; far from being a
random series of dispositions or erratic, habitus enunciates a logic of
practice which ‘integrating past experiences, functions at every moment as a
matrix of perceptions, appreciations and actions [and by] analogical transfer
of schemes permits the solution of similarly shaped problems’[xxiii].
Imbibed by ‘internalization’, habitus necessarily operates unconsciously. It
is thus a family, group or class. Moreover, being a unified phenomenon,
habitus produces an ethos that relates all the practices generated by a habitus
to a unifying set of principles. Once we accept that a cogent definition of
class is implicit in the notion of habitus, it becomes plain, the practice of art
is a component of a particular class-ethos and is determined by struggles
between fractions within the dominant class. And, since the principle of
‘disinterestedness’ is a governing habitus of the ruling elite, its political
unconscious as it were, all conflicts between class-fractions on questions of
taste, style, form, content, modes of discrimination etc. in various subfields
such as painting, literature, theatre or social science remain orientated,
albeit, asymptomatically, towards reproduction. This means, in the arena of
art patronized by the cultivated, ‘difference’ is no more than a prop essential
to the promotion and perpetuation of Theatre of class-inequality. Perhaps,
this rather convoluted pattern of artistic reproduction has been, although
unwittingly, best described by the fifteen year old hero of Mark Haddon’s
novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003). Although
the boy has severe ‘behavioral problems’ and finds it difficult to
‘understand’ other human beings, it is he who supplies a three-step formula
for unraveling the mystery of the ‘accident’ that made life possible on earth.
First is, replication, meaning, ‘Things have to make copies of themselves’;
second, mutation, meaning, ‘They have to make small mistakes when they
do this’; and, third, heritability, meaning, ‘These mistakes have to be the
same in their copies’.[xxiv] Isn’t this what exactly happens in the universe
of art? Begin with the Big Bang of the self-preoccupied, independent
Author, i.e., take recourse to the ideological construct which encourages one
to think that ‘the ultimate basis of belief in the value of a work of art is
charisma’[xxv]; then, in replicating the founding principle introduce
displacements in such a manner that all mutations remain enclosed within a

limiting fold and the faith in Author with its concomitant principle of
‘disinterestedness’ gets passed on as an invaluable heirloom. Suitably aided
as it will be by ‘the disavowed economic enterprise of art dealer[s] or
publisher[s], “cultural bankers” in whom art and business meet in
practice’[xxvi] and by specialists who in the task of elaborating upon the
intricacies of inter-textually opulent innovations craft equally esoteric
‘intellectual commentaries’[xxvii], this montage of fade-in and fade-out of
‘trademarks or signatures’[xxviii] is bound to culminate in the fortification
of ‘racism of class’[xxix] and nostalgic whimper of heritability, a whimper
that would nevertheless succeed in suppressing the all-important question,
which is, ‘what, [in the first place], authorizes the author?’ or to put it in
theological terms, ‘who creates the “creator”?’[xxx]

Pierre Bourdieu’s article can well be re-named ‘A Contribution to the
critique of apolitical economy of Aesthetics’. That this re-naming is quite
legitimate is vouchsafed by two major figures in the area of Culture and
Communication Studies: Raymond Williams and Nicholas Garnham. In
their essay ‘Pierre Bourdieu and the sociology of culture’, the two
theoreticians go to great lengths in demonstrating that Bourdieu is
uncompromising in retaining the same critical flavour for the word ‘critique’
as it is to be found in Marx’s work. They argue: for both Marx and Bourdieu
‘critique’ signifies a critical exercise, which ‘provides the very conditions of
its own potential scientificity’. Thus, just as Marx’s theories of fetishization
and ideology cannot be pushed to the margins or regarded as a more or less
dispensable spin-offs of his general theory, so also Bourdieu’s ‘theoretical
and empirical analysis of symbolic power’ cannot simply be relegated to the
safe region of cultural studies.[xxxi] To wrench his theory on ‘accumulation
of symbolic capital’ from the cozy bosoms of cultural studies and give to it
the sprite of a biting ‘critique’, Bourdieu, in a vein similar to that of Marx,
takes it upon himself to systematically interrogate a host of dominant critical
tendencies. And, unremitting as he is in his confrontation, Bourdieu has
many adversaries. For example:[xxxii]

1.Those who in their haste to establish one-to-one correspondences between
ideological substance of artistic products and class-interest of producers
bypass the specific logic of the field of production. The party most guilty of
such crude reductionism and by extension responsible for the populism of
pandering to the vulgar taste of the artistically insensitive is, of course, the
party of Orthodox Marxists.

2.Those who seduced by the narcissistic charms of ‘subjectivism’ tend to
give far too credence to the individual actor and upon the experimental
reality of social action. Jean Paul Sartre with his brand of humanism called
‘existentialism’ provides one prime example of this one-sided proclivity.
3.Those who in counter-acting ‘subjectivism’ submit themselves to the
equally one-sided drift of ‘objectivism’. Lured by the Truth-claims of
‘Science’ spelled with capital ‘S’, they inexorably finish up by turning
‘structure’ itself into an object of fetish. Levi Strauss’ Structuralist
Anthropology and Louis Althusser’s fiction of ‘structure without subject’
are two prominent instances of this school.

4.Those who in spite of highlighting the arbitrary character of symbolic
systems remain oblivious of the fact that symbolic systems, although
arbitrary in themselves, are not arbitrary in their social function. It is this
half-hearted tussle against ‘idealism’, this part-surrender to ‘metaphysics’,
which gives to Émile Durkheim’s Sociology or Ferdinand de Saussure’s
Semiology the look of being simultaneously novel and quaint.
5.Those who in their over-sensitiveness to the artifact fall for a newly
fangled version of ‘formalism’, that is, ‘formalism’ mediated by
Althusserian theoreticism. Mostly unaware of their intimacy with Althusser,
the adherents of this school love to parade themselves as being descendents
of ‘Other Parisians’ like Jacques Derrida or Jacques Lacan. Proud of having
adopted a left-wing position in the present hay-day of ‘free market’ and
‘finance capital’, the only service these left ‘deconstructionist’ dandies
render to the academia is to instill in students the feeling that ‘text’ is a
forbiddingly privileged space, a sacred reserve meant solely for the truly
erudite and his acolytes.

There is no denying, re-reading Bourdieu’s 1977 article now has a
refreshing effect. Still, it is difficult to suppress the suspicion that in the
Herculean task of cutting to size all his foes at one go, Bourdieu too has
faltered at several points. The stimulating essay therefore, in its turn,
prompts such questions as:

1.Bourdieu’s dual conceptualization of habitus and ethos—and, in places
Bourdieu’s construction of habitus is quite reminiscent of the Freudian
construction of the preconscious—has the appeal of a General Theory. On
the other hand, his contentions vis-à-vis the ‘accumulation of symbolic
capital’ are far too historically circumscribed. It is even difficult to locate
their proper ‘objective correlates’ in every ‘order of things’ that emerge at
different stages of capitalism. Bourdieu attempts to see through the ‘bad-
faith economy’ of Art World by laying an excessive emphasis on a
particular figuration of ‘Author’. But the figuration itself has a specific
historical beginning. To frontally face the question ‘what authorizes the
author?’ it is imperative to follow through various incarnations of
auctor.[xxxiii] During the pre-modern, medieval days, auctor signified
attesting authority—regarded as fountainheads of founding rules and
principles, different auctors then commanded a near-consensus acceptance
in their respective disciplines. It was from late 15th century following the
so-called discovery of ‘New World’ and the rise of ‘New Man’ that faith in
auctores began to weaken. Increasingly challenged by ‘self-made’ authors
the stolid auctor was eventually overthrown. But the irony was, the
progressive vindication of ‘Author’ as an ‘autonomous subject’ ran parallel
to the process which brought about separation of the cultural from the
political and economic realms. And, the cultural realm became almost
wholly ‘self-referential’ in the late 19th and 20th centuries. This made space
for the return of the auctor in the guise of ‘Author’ whose nick-name was
genius. Recovering the authority previously exercised by pre-modern auctor,
the 19th-20th century Author was elevated to the rank of exemplar and
source of value. But, in contradistinction to the auctor, the Author, the
presiding deity of ‘Republic of Letters’, was more than instrumental in

drawing boundary-lines between the cultural on one hand and economic and
political on the other. Given this back-drop, is it so surprising that modern
authors use the pretext of ‘disinterestedness’ in order to market their texts?
In the ultimate analysis, isn’t Bourdieu’s account of the arrangement of field
of Art along two axis—one axis relating to the transfer of cultural capital
into economic capital and the other to the other-worldly vision of cultural
purity—a symptomatic reading of romantic melancholia or modernist angst
linked to the theme of the poet’s loss of position in the business of running
the world? (Recall the candidly self-piteous confession of Shelley: ‘Poets
are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind’. ‘Disavowal’ is a normal
reaction of the ‘unacknowledged’—isn’t this a psychologically compelling
account of all those who really do not matter?)

2.Despite trying best to avoid the ‘short-circuit’[xxxiv] of reductionism
commonly found in Marxist literary criticism, doesn’t Bourdieu too
somewhat substitute the issue of evaluation of art by the issue of social
origin of artists?

3.Shunning the currently fashionable view that the term ‘misrepresentation’
has no substantive value as an explanatory category, W. J. T. Mitchell in his
1990 essay titled ‘Representation’ asserts, enmeshed as it is with
‘communication’, a representation may act like ‘a barrier presenting
[thereby] the possibility of misunderstanding, error or downright
falsehood’.[xxxv] Bourdieu too speaks of ‘mis-recognition’. But, Mitchell
also places a special premium on representation; he insists that one may
always expect a ‘return’ from every representation; and the dividend of
‘return’ is simultaneously akin to ‘excess’ and ‘gap’[xxxvi]. In Bourdieu’s
picture of ‘representation’ however it is precisely this gap that is
conspicuous by its absence. One therefore is driven to wonder, whether this
‘lack’ of ‘lack’ is not somehow connected with the way Bourdieu employs
Freud’s notion of negation.

4.Deducing from Freud’s essay, Jean Hyppolite had surmised, the
dissymmetry between ‘affirmation’ and ‘negation’ and the contradiction
between ‘disavowal’ and ‘denial’ made manifest ‘a margin for thought’;
and, every ‘symbol of negation’ was a concrete emanation, a materialization
of that ‘margin’.[xxxvii] Could it be, to parody the anguish of the
marginalized, to lampoon delusions of grandeur modern artists ritually
display as a sort of compensation for their steady depreciation, Pierre
Bourdieu has taken the Freudian idea of negation far too literally? Will it be
too off the point if one said that it is by not giving due attention to
representational ‘return’ in the form of the gap,Bourdieu has undervalued
the significance of the margin in Art?

5.Raymond Williams and Nicholas Garnham have expressed their
discomfort about the epistemological suppositions underlying Bourdieu’s
project. They have felt the structure of the symbolic field envisioned by
Bourdieu inevitably dooms all interventions to recuperation and
futility.[xxxviii] Will it be wrong if we rephrase this charge as, by avoiding
the prickly problem of emergence of contradictions which narrow the scope

of reproduction of a given set of class relations at the symbolic level and by
diminishing the kinetic potentials of ‘gaps’ and ‘margins of thought’,
Bourdieu has propped up a theory of reproduction which assiduously
underplays the role of change?

Let me conclude my presentation by introducing a digression. Setting aside
all objections, let us now concentrate on one of Bourdieu’s fundamental
propositions. The proposition is: although ‘disavowal’ signifies
‘dissimulation’, the kind of ‘hypocrisy’ that characterizes the modern
practice of art is not ‘simple’.[xxxix] This observation seems theoretically
promising as far as Bengal, the Land of the bhadralok, is concerned. Short
of all capital save cultural capital, the bhadralok is tailor-made to be
proficient in the art of ‘hypocrisy’ which goes beyond the limits of ‘simple
“dissimulation” of the mercenary aspects of [his] practice’.[xl] And, as
though in anticipation, the complex nature of the bhadra has been
beautifully summed up in the 258th sloka of the 9th chapter of the Laws of
Manu—a sloka that has troubled commentators and translators over
generations.[xli] For, we learn from Manusamhitā 9.258, that according to
the redoubtable law-maker, bhadra stands for the class of ‘open deceivers
composed of sanctimonious hypocrites’. Explicating the sloka,
Kullukbhatta, the 13th century ‘Gouriyo’ commentator of Manu, has
written, ‘bhadra is he who hiding his motive by the screen of decorous
behaviour takes hold of others’ money’.[xlii] And, surely this is historically
instructive that while in G. Bühler’s 1886 translation of Manu 9.258, the
bhadra was ‘sanctimonious hypocrite’[xliii], in Wendy Doniger and Brian
K. Smith’s 1991 translation of the same sloka, the bhadra has
metamorphosed into ‘smooth operators’[xliv].
Perhaps, the job of deciphering the coded message inscribed in Manu 9.258
is left for some true-born left ‘deconstructionist’.

____________________________________________________

Notes

[i] Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Production of belief: contribution to an economy of symbolic
goods, tr. Richard Nice, Media, Culture and Society: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Collins,
James Curran, Nicholas Garnham, Paddy Scannell, Philip Schlesinger, Colin Sparks,
London-Beverly hills-Newbury Park-New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1986, p. 131

[ii] Angela Richards, ‘Editor’s Note’, in Sigmund Freud’s ‘Repression’, trans. C. M.
Baines, in The Penguin Freud Library, Vol. 11: ‘On Metapsychology’, (London: Penguin
Books, 1991), pp. 142-143

[iii] Sigmund Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, trans. James Strachey, in The
Penguin Freud Library, Vol. 10: ‘On Psychopathology’, (London: Penguin Books, 1993), p.
323, emphasis added

[iv] Ibid

[v] Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, trans. Joan Riviere, in The Penguin Freud Library,
Vol. 11, ed. cit., p. 353

[vi] Sigmund Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, ed. cit., Vol. 10, pp. 311-312,
emphasis added

[vii] Sigmund Freud, ‘Negation’, trans. Joan Riviere, in The Penguin Freud Library, Vol.
11, ed. cit., p. 438

[viii] Jean Hyppolite, ‘A Spoken Commentary on Freud’s “Verneinung’, ‘Appendix I’,
trans. Bruce Fink, in Écrits by Jacques Lacan, (New York & London: W. W. Norton &
Company, 2002), p. 747

[ix] Ibid, p. 753 Also see: (a) Jacques Lacan, ‘Introduction to Jean Hyppolite’s
Commentary on Freud’s “Verneinung’, trans. Bruce Fink, in Écrits, ed. cit., pp. 308-317 (b)
Jacques Lacan, ‘Response to Jean Hyppolite’s Commentary on Freud’s “Verneinung’,
trans. Bruce Fink, in Écrits, ed. cit., pp. 318-333 (c) Bruce Fink, ‘Translator’s endnotes on
Négation and Dénégation’, in Écrits, ed. cit., p. 762

[x] Sigmund Freud, ‘Negation’, trans. Joan Riviere, in The Penguin Freud Library, Vol. 11,
ed. cit., p. 438

[xi] Ibid, p. 443

[xii] Ibid, p. 438

[xiii] Ibid, pp. 438-439

[xiv] Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Production of belief: contribution to an economy of symbolic
goods, ed. cit., p. 132, p. 136

[xv] Ibid, p. 132

[xvi] Ibid, p. 132

[xvii] Ibid, p. 153, p. 138

[xviii] Ibid, p. 133

[xix] Ibid, p. 137

[xx] Ibid, p. 141

[xxi] Ibid, p. 149

[xxii] Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (first published: 1972), tr. Richard
Nice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977, pp. 72-95

[xxiii] Ibid

[xxiv] Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of The Dog in the Night-Time (first published:
2003), ‘Chapter 199’, New York: David Fickling Books (a division of Random House
Children’s Books), 2004, p. 203

[xxv] Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Production of belief: contribution to an economy of symbolic
goods, ed. cit., p. 133

[xxvi] Ibid, p. 132

[xxvii] Ibid, pp. 162-162

[xxviii] Ibid, p. 132

[xxix] Nicholas Garnham and Raymond Williams, ‘Pierre Bourdieu and the sociology of
culture: an introduction’, Media, Culture and Society: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard
Collins, James Curran, Nicholas Garnham, Paddy Scannell, Philip Schlesinger, Colin
Sparks, London-Beverly Hills-Newbury Park-New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1986, p. 126

[xxx] Ibid, p. 133

[xxxi] Nicholas Garnham and Raymond Williams, ‘Pierre Bourdieu and the sociology of
culture: an introduction’, Media, Culture and Society: A Critical Reader, op. cit., p. 118

[xxxii] For details see:
Nicholas Garnham and Raymond Williams, ‘Pierre Bourdieu and the sociology of culture:
an introduction’, Media, Culture and Society: A Critical Reader, op. cit., pp. 117-126

[xxxiii] Donald E. Pease, ‘Author’, Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed., Frank
Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago
Press, 1995, pp. 105-117

[xxxiv] Nicholas Garnham and Raymond Williams, ‘Pierre Bourdieu and the sociology of
culture: an introduction’, Media, Culture and Society: A Critical Reader, p. 117

[xxxv] W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘Representation’, Critical Terms for Literary Study, op. cit., p. 12

[xxxvi] Ibid, p. 21

[xxxvii] Jean Hyppolite, ‘A Spoken Commentary on Freud’s “Verneinung’, ‘Appendix I’,
trans. Bruce Fink, in Écrits by Jacques Lacan, ed. cit., p. 753

[xxxviii] Nicholas Garnham and Raymond Williams, ‘Pierre Bourdieu and the sociology of
culture: an introduction’, Media, Culture and Society: A Critical Reader, op. cit., p. 130

[xxxix] Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Production of belief: contribution to an economy of symbolic
goods, ed. cit., p. 132

[xl] Ibid, p. 132

[xli] Manusamhitā, ‘Chapter IX, Sloka 258’, ed. Panchanan Tarkaratna, Calcutta: Sanskrit
Pustak Bhandar, 2000, main text: p. 270

[xlii] Kullukbhatta, ‘Commentary on Manu 9.258’, Manusamhitā, ‘Chapter IX, Sloka 258’,
ed. Panchanan Tarkaratna, op. cit., p. 270

[xliii] The Laws of Manu, ‘IX, 258’, tr. G. Bühler, The Sacred Books of the East (Vol. 25),
ed. F. Max Müller, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2001, p. 387

[xliv] The Laws of Manu, ‘9.258’, tr. Wendy Doniger and Brian K. Smith, New Delhi:
Penguin Books, 1991, p. 225


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**Please quote with permission

Sibaji Bandyopadhyay,
Professor of Cultural Studies,
Centre for Studies in Social Sciences Calcutta, India

This paper was read out at the
Social Sciences Workshop 2 org. by CSSSC, Kolkata, IND, 2009
Theme: Inequalities and Differences