Habitus and Power: Bourdieu and Foucault

The aim of this article is to compare the concept of power between Foucault and Bourdieu. Although the notion of power is as central to Bourdieu as it is to Foucault, both of them criticizing previous formulations of power, few of Bourdieu’s commentators have actually been interested in substantiating this connection. This is all the more surprising in that the two authors’ position against Marxism helped them establish a new dimension of power, the former with the concept of ‘symbolic violence,’ the latter with that of ‘biopower.’ Much as studies devoted to Foucault’s notion of biopower powerfully reinforced the crisis of Marxism in the 1980s, the new concept of ‘symbolic violence’ elaborated by Bourdieu deserves our attention today, for the construction of this notion can only be properly understood, according to Bourdieu, through a critique of Foucault’s conception. Foucault’s micro-power, unlike the Bourdieuian micro-sociology of power, is not simply the miniaturization of forms of domination. When Foucault writes of a new micro-physics’ of power, it is a matter of two different levels at once, the microscopic and the macroscopic. In reality they are always linked to one another. By contrast, because the fold of the subject only comes into play in the symbolic conflict of society for Bourdieu, a change in the construction of the self is only possible by considering relations of domination and non-domination. This is why I have judged that the Bourdieuian mode of domination is inscribed in the Marxist tradition.