The Importance of Pierre Bourdieu Today. On Consent to Misery

Abstract

This article reflects on the crisis of political reason in this heyday of populistic rhetoric, proposing to move beyond the erroneous dichotomy between “democratic reason” and “raging passions,” and the demo-phobia that often derives from it. We propose instead to follow Bourdieu’s footsteps in bringing our attention to the forms of impermeability that fracture our contemporary political and social life, establishing the conditions of possibility of the reasonable and the unreasonable. What marks contemporary political passions as particularly dangerous is their impermeability to the lessons of our historical past, to the moral condemnation of the political instrumentalization of difference and to the sacred character of fundamental principles. This hermeneutical gap, however, is later explained by a more fundamental analysis of the problem of contemporary impermeability, one which operates as a reversal of the dichotomy between political reason and passion. It is no longer the electorate, seduced by the sirens of populism, which is impermeable to the voice of political reason; it is, instead, this very reason, embodied by the elites who claim to recognize themselves in its values and principles, which has become impermeable to the “conditions of non-existence” in which a considerable part of the population lives. If there is a problem of contemporary impermeability, or imperturbability, it is that of a political discourse that has lost touch with “all the misery of the world”.