Bourdieu's sociological fiction.

Summary by Simon Susen : In the eleventh chapter, ‘Bourdieu’s Sociological Fiction: A Phenomenological Reading of Habitus’, Bruno Frère provides a detailed analysis of Bourdieu’s conception of habitus. Frère points out that just as we need to be aware of the key strengths of Bourdieu’s genetic-structuralist approach, we need to identify its main weaknesses. Hence it is possible to draw on Bourdieu’s approach whilst developing it further and thereby overcoming its most significant shortcomings. Illustrating the complexity inherent in the
analytical task of revising Bourdieu’s genetic-structuralist approach to the social, Frère’s chapter focuses on five accounts of the ‘social actor’: (1) Pierre Bourdieu’s account of the ‘homological actor’, (2) Bernard Lahire’s account of the ‘plural actor’, (3) Philippe Corcuff ’s account of the ‘dynamic actor’, (4) Merleau-Ponty’s account of the ‘bodily actor’, and (5) Bruno Frère’s own account of the ‘imaginative actor’.