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http://www.cross-x.com/vb/showthread.php?t=990024

 

 
 
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, 

 

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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 labour is intrinsically antithetical to profit-

oriented enterprises. ‘Disavowal’ framed in terms of (Kantian or Neo-
Kantian) ‘disinterestedness’ turns the favoured self-representation of the 

 

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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 ‘homogenisation’ 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.  

 

 

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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 

 

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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: 

 

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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 

 

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‘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’. 

 
_____________________________ 

 

 

7

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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 addend 

 

[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 Anxietyed. cit., Vol. 10, pp. 311-

312, emphasis addend 
 

[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 Écritsed. 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 Écritsed. 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 

 

8

background image

 

[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]

 Ibi

 

[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 SocietyA Critical Readerop. cit., p. 

118 

 

[xxxii]

 For details see: Nicholas Garnham and Raymond Williams, ‘Pierre Bourdieu 

and the sociology of culture: an introduction’, Media, Culture and SocietyA Critical 

Readerop. 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 SocietyA Critical Reader, p. 117 
 

[xxxv]

 W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘Representation’, Critical Terms for Literary Studyop. 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 SocietyA 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 

 

9

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10

 

[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 

 

 
.........................................................................  

 
**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