Pierre Bourdieu, Sketch for a Self-Analysis, 2008

P ierre Bourdieu's Sketch for a Self-Analysis can be recommended equally to devotees and critics.The short text revisits many of Bourdieu's classic themes-including symbolic violence, the "scholastic fallacy," and habitus, this time in the context of his personal experiences and development.Is this an autobiography?The heavily freighted denial which opens the text rides very low in the water."I do not intend to indulge in the genre of autobiography," he writes, "which I have often enough described as both conventional and illusory" (p. 1).Such a claim cues the central tension of Bourdieu's work, the dialectics of structure and agent, aas well as the Freudian-Weberian inflection that Bourdieu gives to intention, as something rooted in the range of meanings available to particular actors in particular social contexts and in "barely articulated" predispositions based in deep feelings, revulsions, and attractions, even when raised to the level of critical reflexivity.Bourdieu, however, by means of what he calls self-socioanalysis, intends to subject his experience "to critical confrontation, as if it were any other object" (p. 1).If intention and result do not match, Bourdieu places the responsibility in the reader's inability to read the text in the right way.By his own admission Bourdieu refuses the "autobiography" label partly because if he did not, he would have to contradict his earlier claims that the genre is "conventional and illusory."It follows that Bourdieu's intention is to be both unconventional and genuine.It does not take an unusually exercised critic to note that such a claim could not be, for the genre of autobiography, any more conventional.Just as conventional (although here autobiography as apologia very decisively breaks from autobiography as confession) is the insistence that with regard to the past one is going to "take nothing back."One need not engage in this sort of exegesis to recognize that this text is polemical in several ways.The main targets are all academic.He focuses on philosophers, social scientists, and boarding schools in turn, criticizing each for their peculiar way of splitting the world, as the higher

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