Durkheim's Ghosts
Durkheim's Ghosts
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USDDurkheim's Ghosts is a fascinating presentation of the tradition of social theory influenced by Emile Durkheim's thinking on the social foundations of knowledge. From Saussure and Levi-Strauss to Foucault, Bourdieu and Derrida, today's criticisms of modern politics and culture owe an important, if unacknowledged, debt to Durkheim. These engaging and innovative essays by leading sociologist Charles Lemert bring together his writings on the contributions of French social theory past and present. Rather than merely interpret the theories, Lemert uses them to explore the futures of sociology, social theory, and culture studies. Durkheim's Ghosts offers the reader original insights into Durkheim's legacy and the wider French traditions for the cultural and social sciences. Of special note is the book's new and exciting theory of culture and semiotics. Provocative, scholarly, imaginative and ambitious this book will be invaluable to anyone interested in social theory, culture, and intellectual history of modern times.
- An innovative collection of essays influenced by Emile Durkheim's thinking on the social foundations of knowledge
- Charles Lemert is a leading sociologist who is well known for his work on French social thought
- Presents an original new theory of culture and its meaning in social science and practical life
Reviews & endorsements
"Charles Lemert's deft disentanglement of Durkheim's legacy in social theory crowns a career devoted to exploring the cultural logics of social things. Durkheim's Ghosts is a brilliant and beautiful book, a passionate reflection on the powers and limits of French social theory's contributions to the understanding of culture."
-Anthony Elliott,Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent and author of Critical Visions: New Directions in Social Theory (2003)
"The bodies of classical theory that outlive the conditions and times that produce them haunt us as scholarly ghosts. These hauntings can be either positive or negative, depending on how we handle them. Charles Lemert brilliantly explores the legacy of both the classical ghosts – Marx, Freud, Durkheim and Mauss – and a range of more proximate giants – Fanon, Foucault, Derrida and others – to provide a critical insight into French social theory. Durkheim's Ghosts is amongst other things a fascinating intellectual journey through twentieth century structuralism and its aftermath. The result is an analytical map of the tensions between the social and the cultural that have shaped the terrain of contemporary social thought. This is a journey not to be missed."
-Bryan S. Turner, Asia Research Institute, Singapore
"Were an ambitious novice to ask me today what book one might read in order to understand the Gallic theoretical tradition at its most vital, Durkheim's Ghosts would head the short list. Lemert's famous limpidity, in combination with a solid understanding of what French thinking is all about from the time of the Paris Commune forward, makes it an easy choice."
-Alan Sica, Pennsylvania State University, American Journal of Sociology
Product details
February 2006Paperback
9780521603638
304 pages
227 × 150 × 18 mm
0.492kg
Available
Table of Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- Part I. Cultural Logics:
- 1. Frantz Fanon and the living ghosts of capitalism's world system. Durkheim's Ghosts in the culture of sociologies
- 2. Levi-Strauss and the sad tropics of modern cultures. What is culture? Amid the flowers, seeds or weeds?
- 3. Paris 1907 and why the sociological imagination is always unstable. Sociological theory and the relativistic paradigm
- 4. Ferdinand de Saussure and why the social contract is a cultural arbitrary. Literary politics and the Champ of French sociology
- Part II. Durkheim's Ghosts:
- 5. Marcel Mauss and Durkheim and why the ghosts of social differences are ubiquitous. Durkheim's woman and the Jew as the pluperfect past of the good society
- 6. Jacques Derrida and why global structures had to die when they did. The uses of French structuralisms in sociology
- 7. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and why structures haunt instruments and measures. Structures, instruments, and reading in social and cultural research (with Willard A. Nielsen, Jr.)
- 8. Roland Barthes and the phantasmagorias of social things. Language, structure and measurement
- Part III. Culture as the Ghost of Primitive Transgressions:
- 9. Michel Foucault and why analytic categories are queer. Pierre Bourdieu's aesthetic critique of sociological judgment
- 10. Simone de Beauvoir and why culture is a semiotics of the other: Michel Foucault, social theory, and transgression (with Garth Gillan)
- 11. Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein and why globalization is a social geography of inequalities. The impossible system of future worlds. Postscript: what culture is not.
