There are many ‘Bourdieus’. There is the more determinist Bourdieu of Reproduction and the more affective and temporal Bourdieu of Pascalian Meditations. There was the Bourdieu who proclaimed that sociologists should stick to science and there was the Bourdieu who became a public intellectual appearing on TV. In this book I have rethought some of Bourdieu's concepts by drawing out their implicit reliance on affect, emphasizing relationality and the way affinities mediate and enable the emotional processes of social magic and symbolic violence. Individuals develop an affective reservoir of immanent dispositions as they move through the trajectory of their lives. Fields and settings are spaces imbued with their own affective atmospheres and structures of feeling. Practices develop through affinity, moments of potency where feelings and emotions emerge between the force of an affecting body and the impact it leaves on the affected.

Affects stick to form affinities. Practice in the social world is driven by affective affinities that range between what Bourdieu called social magic and symbolic violence, or what I am calling affective violence. A relation of positive affective affinity is one of ease and comfort, in the sense that one's taken-for-granted preferences, emotional relations and morals, tastes and associations provide a lubricated trajectory towards an illusio. But this trajectory will not necessarily feel easy. There still needs to be an investment of time, effort and emotion, still a need to work, to devote labour. But the affective conditions of the field or setting will be homologous with the affinities developed throughout their history, will align with advantageous feelings and emotions in the present and then likely unfurl a relatively lubricated trajectory towards their desires. There will also be homophily with others in that space, minimizing overt conflict or discomfort. A common response of the relatively privileged when their advantages are called out is offence or bewilderment, with the complaint that ‘I have worked hard for what I achieve’. Those who possess privileged affinities may still work hard, but this is a different kind of work compared to those who face material, symbolic and affective inequalities. There may be long hours, setbacks to overcome, obstacles to strategically avoid, but these hours, setbacks and obstacles fall in the realms of what is doxically expected and the individual's relative autonomy, that is, their reasonable chances.