New Literary History, 2015, 46: 435–457 Pierre Bourdieu and Pragmatist Aesthetics: Between Practice and Experience Richard Shusterman I P ragmatist philosophy has had a long and complicated connec- tion with French thought. William James, who established pragma- tism as a philosophical movement after borrowing its key idea from C. S. Peirce, was saved from the crippling depression that haunted his early career through the inspiration of Charles Renouvier’s philosophy, and he later drew further inspiration from Henri Bergson. After enjoying Bergson’s support, pragmatism’s status dramatically declined in France through its adoption by right-wing religious thinkers. Émile Durkheim thus opposed pragmatism as “an attack on reason” that “chiefly appears in the neo-religious movement” where its anti-intellectualist affirmations of feeling, faith, and action were dangerously deployed. 1 In the last two decades, after a long period of eclipse, pragmatism is reemerging as a notable perspective in the field of French ideas. Pragmatism’s recent reception in France has been particularly power- ful in social theory and aesthetics rather than in the core philosophical disciplines of epistemology, philosophy of mind, ethics, metaphysics, and philosophy of language and logic. In both of these fields Pierre Bour- dieu has had enormous influence but his rapport with their pragmatist expression is complex and ambivalent. In sociology, Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, who initially worked with Bourdieu and within his theoretical framework, now lead a group of researchers that explicitly bears the title “sociologie pragmatique” and uses pragmatist ideas to contest many of Bourdieu’s own views. The influential theorists Bruno Latour and Louis Quéré also identify themselves with pragmatism in developing theories of action that challenge in different ways the domi- nance that Bourdieu’s theoretical paradigm has exercised on French social theory since the 1960s. 2 My efforts to analyze Bourdieu’s ambiguous rapport with pragma- tist thought and his equally equivocal role in pragmatism’s reception in France will focus instead on pragmatist aesthetics, in which I have