Étienne Anheim and Paul Pasquali look at a capital moment of interdisciplinary dialogue: the translation and edition of the art historian Erwin Panofsky by Pierre Bourdieu.
In May 1967, Pierre Bourdieu published in the collection “ common sense “, That he had just founded at Minuit, the first French translation of a book by the art historian Erwin Panofsky: Gothic architecture and scholastic thought (Gothic Architecture and Scholastization). He is then seventy-six and recognized as an essential reference in the discipline worldwide. The translation is accompanied by a substantial editorial work: Bourdieu increases the small volume initially published in 1951 of another text by Panofsky on the Abbé Suger published in 1948, which he translated from English and that he accompanies a postface where he lays the foundations of a major part of his own sociological theory, around the theory ofHabitus. This “ editorial event (P. 11), as Etienne Anheim and Paul Pasquali qualify, has a considerable epistemological scope, and he acquired for his main instigator the status of a real founding moment.
These are these three dimensions – of translation, publishing and critical epistemology – that this “ Essay on intellectual archeology »»,, that the Editions de Minuit publish in the same collection. Étienne Anheim being medievalist and Paul Pasquali sociologist, not only their collaboration applies the principle of interdisciplinarity at the heart of the Bourdieusienne approach, but she replies in parallel the respective positions that Panofsky occupied in art history and its French transfective transfacier in sociology. Now, the “ intellectual project “From the latter, write the two authors,” inseparable from a conquering sociology, had an interdisciplinary aiming, including history and anthropology as well as, in a way, philosophy (P. 32).
It is therefore the archeology of an editorial and scientific field that Etienne Anheim and Paul Pasquali, by composing a text which is at the limit between a holistic approach from a sociological approach and individual training in the young Bourdieu. They thus retrace the context in which the editorial project has sprouted ; The learning that Bourdieu of the publisher profession does on this occasion ; Its socialization process in contact with Panofsky, whose unprecedented correspondence with Bourdieu is reproduced in the appendix to the work. They describe the way of Bourdieu to consider the translation he practices for the first and last time ; the intellectual development of the concept ofhabitus that ; And finally the critical reception of the book, in sociology and art history, short and in the longer term.
Cathedral as an issue
It is undoubtedly in chapter 5, devoted to the notion ofhabitusthat are concentrated by the most significant theoretical and epistemological issues linked to the publishing that Bourdieu of the two Panofsky texts offers. In order to measure the magnitude, it may be worth using a detour by the last pages of the conclusion of the book by Etienne Anheim and Paul Pasquali, where they return to the object that Panofsky takes on-the Gothic cathedral-in order to establish a school report between its architecture and the school report.
“” During the interwar period “Recall the two authors,” circulated the idea that European societies could be interpreted from this unique object that was the Gothic cathedral. “Taking an interest in the latter, they suggest, therefore immediately exceeded the framework of” A problem of erudition specific to art history (P. 235) ; More or less admitted ambition which could in any case be sure to interest Bourdieu. In fact, abound the two authors, “ The medieval cathedral was a matrix, in the etymological sense, for European societies as for the processes of subjectivation of the individuals who compose them »(P. 239), and that from a point of view as much religious as scholastic.
On the one hand, in fact, the cathedral came to represent “ A world supposed to hold together in an organic and harmonious way “, Homogeneity which supposed” a work of ordering and hierarchy “And who, correlatively, imposed” Exclusion of heretics, Jews and Muslims »» ; While, on the other hand, the figure of the cathedral legitimized “ The domination of lords and clerics (P. 239). During this process, everything happens as if they had succeeded priests in the pulpit (cathedra in Latin), by enjoying the passage of a transfer of symbolic capital increased by a suspicion of learned scholarship. In other words, to discover between scholastic thought and Gothic architecture a homology of principle and style, as Panofsky had done, authorized Bourdieu to uncover the historical determinants of the mechanisms of domination around which the fields of art were structured like those of the school.
L’habitus as a reason
However, it is precisely this decisive forgetfulness, “ As if the social sciences had metabolized what had preceded them (P. 240), write Etienne Anheim and Paul Pasquali, which Bourdieu designates by the notion ofhabitusand that, at the same time, he “ invent According to Panofsky, in the archaeological sense of the word. He talks about “ Mental clothes “In English in the text, by carrying out a translation by a quote from Thomas d’Aquin, while Bourdieu” translated “The expression” Mental clothes “By the term” habitus That Panofsky, for his part, does not write, and that he endorses with a certain reluctance.
The conditions for extraction of the concept ofhabitus – Since the Thomism, therefore, and through him according tohexis Aristotelian, up to an enlarged art history to reach the field of emancipated sociology with an emancipatory vocation – therefore contributed to making it an operational term at the intersection of different human and social sciences. L’habitus thus counts among these notions also metabolized, in this case in the modus operandi Scientists who sought to return his exploratory and explanatory function to him. Bourdieu himself, note Etienne Anheim and Paul Pasquali, “ After this “Panofskien moment” “, Deployed the notion ofhabitus in his posterior work by proceeding, through references “ less and less visible – which does not mean accessories (P. 214), to its formalization from the work of Panofsky.
Conversely, for many historians of French art who had read Panofsky in German or English before Bourdieu, but who finally mentioned it quite little, and who had not put as much ardor as their young colleague to have him translated, the question then arose to know, “ To find Panofsky, how to forget Bourdieu ? “(P. 208) Read the cumulative sales figures that Etienne Anheim and Paul Pasquali report, Bourdieu obviously contributed to making Panofsky known to a larger readership than the somewhat specific title of his book could not let him think. However, it must be admitted that a Bourdieusian reading of Panofsky has not imposed itself, or even really installed, in the landscape of the history of French art, and one can only regret that a work of this importance also does not give rise to readings, if not of the same level, at least as fertile on the theoretical level as that of the now famous afterword.
Translation as horizon
The main reason for this fertility without real equivalent deserves to be underlined, if not as well as methodological teaching. If Bourdieu was able to draw such fruits from Panofsky’s book, it is not only that there were stratified as countless layers of knowledge, themselves from varied eras and disciplines, but that his exegete had followed a multidisciplinary curriculum and that he readily read authors-in this case art historians- a priori far from his own field of research. In a way, disciplinary distance favored conceptualization. One of the merits of Etienne Anheim and Paul Pasquali’s test is in this regard regularly insist on the inscription of Bourdieu in real “ writing channels “(P. 92), including that of” A whole “world of publishing” (P. 107), they insist, able to deliver access to “ a hermeneutic chain (P. 114). Within the latter, the two authors highlight how much Bourdieu’s interest in thehabitus The one had expressed before him another Panofsky reader, in this case the medieval paleographer Robert Marhal, to whom he explicitly recognized his debt in the afterword.
Going up even higher, as the two authors invite, it becomes obvious that Bourdieu had been beforehand “ arranged “To such an approach by the teaching of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a connoisseur of the work of Panofsky, which he had notably recommended to study to Hubert Damisch in the late 1940s. However, write Étienne Anheim and Paul Pasquali,” By putting philosophy in the operating position of the reflexive constitution of the human sciences, Merleau-Ponty operated a considerable displacement, which engaged at the same time an epistemology, a theory of action and an ontology of temporality (P. 163). Likewise, they continue, as in mirror, the notion ofhabitus allowed sociology as Bourdieu envisaged him at the end of his philosophical training “ to keep a theory of practice together, a reflexive epistemology and an empirical approach (P. 165).
Bourdieu has less subtracted a word from the history of the panofskian art that he did not take him in order to restore it increased by a critical and epistemological power that Panofsky himself had somehow kept in reserve. So that, “ According to Bourdieu, the afterword was supposed to “demonstrate” the truth implicitly contained in the book (P. 137). It is now up to the emulators of Panofsky to continue to take over their own account, to reintegrate into their vocabulary, this word, as it belongs to the disciples of Bourdieu to continue to look at the books of art history in appearance most foreign to their discipline in order to take the field in turn.