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Abstract
After the publication of Simon Susen’s “Bourdieusian reflections on language: Unavoidable conditions of the real speech situation”, there can be no doubt about the centrality of language for Bourdieu’s reconstruction of practice. The crucial role of language should perhaps come as no surprise for a social theorist whose undeniable achievement consists in a rehabilitation of the role of culture within a post-Marxian framework. And yet, Susen’s analysis opens up a new challenge and a set of new questions regarding how exactly the mediation of reflexive agency and power-defined social contexts is to be understood. My comments will (1) re-situate Bourdieu’s language account in his overall theory, (2) reconstruct the failures of hermeneutic idealism, (3) revisit language after Bourdieu and Habermas and (4) suggest that attending to field-based dialogic practices can point towards a reconciliation of a normative with a power-oriented account of social agency.
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Hans-Herbert Kögler
Hans-Herbert Kögler is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the University of North Florida, Jacksonville. His major publications include the following: The Power of Dialogue: Critical Hermeneutics after Gadamer and Foucault (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, [1992] 1996); Michel Foucault (2nd edition, Stuttgart: Metzler [1994] 2004); Kultura, kritika, dialog (Prague: Publishing House Filosofia, 2006); and the co-edited volume Empathy and Agency: The Problem of Understanding in the Human Sciences (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2000). Social Epistemology (1997) dedicated a Special Issue to Kögler’s article “Alienation as Epistemological Source: Reflexivity and Social Background after Mannheim and Bourdieu”. He held guest professorships at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria, and at the Czech Academy of Social Sciences, Prague. Correspondence to: Hans-Herbert Kögler, Email: hkoegler@unf.ed