The ‘nostalgia to be God’

Pierre Bourdieu (on Heidegger):

"Placed in an uncomfortable situation in the dominant class, as an illegitimate bourgeois, stripped of his bourgeois rights and of the possibility of even claiming them…the intellectual can only define himself in opposition to the rest of the social world, categorised as ‘dirty bastards’, that is, as 'bourgeois', but in Flaubert’s rather than Marx’s sense, meaning all those who feel at ease with themselves and secure in their rights because they have the luck and the misfortune not to think. If we agree to recognise in the ‘bourgeois’ and the ‘intellectual’ the existential realisation of what will later become, in Sartre’s philosophically euphemised system, the en-soi (self-sufficient being) and the pour-soi (self conscious being), we will better understand the ‘nostalgia to be God’, that is, the reconciliation of the bourgeois and the intellectual ('living like a bourgeois and thinking like a demigod’, as Flaubert said), of thoughtless power and powerless thought."



"In The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger ( 1991 ), Pierre Bourdieu...describes [Heidegger's philosophy as registering] a distinct configuration of revolutionary conservative thought, an ideological matrix or system of common mental schemata that engenders the National Socialist vision of the world. No single ideologue mobilizes all of these schemata, which, for this reason, neither fulfill the same functions nor have equal importance in the different systems in which they are inserted. But each thinker is able to "produce, from the particular combination of the common schemata which he mobilizes, a discourse that is perfectly irreducible to the others, although it is only a transformed form of all the others". Bourdieu understands Heidegger's philosophy as one such discourse. This allows him to draw parallels between Heidegger's work and the less formalized discourses of other revolutionary conservative thinkers like Oswald Spengler and Ernst Jnger. Such an approach to Heidegger embodies a "dual refusal, rejecting not only any claim of the philosophical text to absolute autonomy. . . but also any direct reduction of the text to the most general conditions of its production".

"History's stamp: Wyndham Lewis's The Revenge for Love and the Heidegger controversy"
Comparative Literature, Winter 1999 by Brett Neilson