Stato, rivoluzione e violenza simbolica. Una lettura à la Bourdieu dell’insorgenza cilena

Abstract

The essay is part of a book that aims to rediscover and enhance Pierre Bourdieu's contribution to the legal philosophy. Clelia Bartoli's paper takes up the French sociologist's theory of the State outlined during courses held at the College de France in 1989/1990 and 1990/1992. Bourdieu eschewed an intellectual fashion of his time that pushed historians, political scientists, lawyers and sociologists to examine the causes and reasons, evolutions and epilogues of revolutions, at the expense, however, of what is happening on the background: the dull, muffled and repetitive order of things. Bourdieu believed that permanence more than change, what is obvious more than what is eccentric, the ordinary more than the extraordinary should astonish and deserve explanation. However, in the course of the lectures mentioned above, he suggests that in order to attempt the arduous task of thinking and understanding the State, it is necessary to look at the moment of its genesis or its phases of crisis, such as during revolutions. In fact, during those phases the symbolic power – of which the State is monopolist – is not stable and lends itself to being observed as the result of a process rather than in its pretended naturality and inevitability. The categories and the socio-epistemic approach à la Bourdieu are adopted by Bartoli to read the case of the Chilean uprising of 2019 and the onset of the constituent process.