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Using a broad definition of the Durkheimian tradition, this book offers the first systematic attempt to explore the Durkheimians’ engagement with art. It focuses on both Durkheim and his contemporaries as well as later thinkers influenced by his work. The first five chapters consider Durkheim’s own exploration of art; the remaining six look at other Durkheimian thinkers, including Marcel Mauss, Henri Hubert, Maurice Halbwachs, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Leiris, and Georges Bataille. The contributors—scholars from a range of theoretical orientations and disciplinary perspectives—are known for having already produced significant contributions to the study of Durkheim. This book will interest not only scholars of Durkheim and his tradition but also those concerned with aesthetic theory and the sociology and history of art.
“The strengths of the book are the featuring of the diversity of the [Durkheim] tradition and the many lines linking broadly Durkheimian themes to current work on the arts… [It] illustrates powerfully how Durkheimian concepts live with us today and how we can benefit by comparisons with this rich tradition. Read and be inspired.” · American Journal of Sociology
“The triumvirate editors have put together an imaginative set of authors, representing different generations, who have already made important contributions to recent Durheimiana.” · Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers canadiens de sociologie
“…offers readers a tour of twentieth-century French intellectual history by one of the finest Durkheimian scholars writing today. At the heart of the book is Durkheim’s concept of the sacred. Yet despite the seemingly familiar starting point, Riley’s book sparkles with creative ideas, intriguing concepts, and introductions to a broad class of characters. Riley is not a historian of ideas but a sociologist and social theorist. Consequently, he frames the telling of this history with key theoretical categories, which help order a broad range of material…Part of the book’s (mystic) charm is its comprehensive and suggestive nature.” · Sociology of Religion
“…an important volume of original thinking that will make a significant contribution, both to a new understanding of Durkheim/Durkheimianism and to the sociological understanding of art… The contributors are true, world-renowned experts in Durkheim and his school and his legacy.” · Jeff Alexander, Yale University
“The essays are uniformly intensely learned and clearly written, which is a real feat in a book involving so many people.” · Howie Becker, author of Outsiders and Art Worlds
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Alexander Riley
Chapter 1. Total Aesthetics: Art and The Elemental Forms
William Watts Miller
Chapter 2. Durkheim, the Arts, and the Moral Sword
W.S.F. Pickering
Chapter 3. Durkheim and Festivals: Art, Effervescence, and Institutions
Jean-Louis Fabiani
Chapter 4. The Power of Imagination and the Economy of Desire: Durkheim and Art
Pierre-Michel Menger
Chapter 5. Dostoevsky in the Mirror of Durkheim
Donald A. Nielsen
Chapter 6. Durkheim, L’Année sociologique, and Art
Marcel Fournier
Chapter 7. Marcel Mauss on Art and Aesthetics: The Politics of Division, Isolation, and Totality
Michèle Richman
Chapter 8. Too Marvelous for Words...: Maurice Halbwachs, Kansas City Jazz, and the Language of Music
Sarah Daynes
Chapter 9. Total Art – The Influence of the Durkheim School on Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Reflections on Art and Classification
Stephan Moebius and Frithjof Nungesser
Chapter 10. Sex, Death, the Other, and Art: The Search for Mythic Life in the Work of Michel Leiris
Alexander Riley
Chapter 11. Apophasis in Representation: Georges Bataille and the Aesthetics and Ethics of the Negative
S. Romi Mukherjee
Chapter 12. Acéphale/Parsifal: Georges Bataille contra Wagner
Claudine Frank
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index