Title: Durkheim's ghosts : cultural logics and social things /
Authors: Lemert, Charles C., 1937-
Publisher: Cambridge University Press,
Year: 2006
Subjects: Durkheim, Émile, Influence.; Sociology France Philosophy.
Abstract: Durkheim's Ghosts is a fascinating presentation of the tradition of social theory influenced by Emile Durkheim's thinking on the social foundations of knowledge. From Saussure and Levi-Strauss to Foucault, Bourdieu and Derrida, today's criticisms of modern politics and culture owe an important, if unacknowledged, debt to Durkheim. These engaging and innovative essays by leading sociologist Charles Lemert bring together his writings on the contributions of French social theory past and present. Rather than merely interpret the theories, Lemert uses them to explore the futures of sociology, social theory, and culture studies. Durkheim's Ghosts offers the reader original insights into Durkheim's legacy and the wider French traditions for the cultural and social sciences. Of special note is the book's new and exciting theory of culture and semiotics. Provocative, scholarly, imaginative and ambitious this book will be invaluable to anyone interested in social theory, culture, and intellectual history of modern times.
Contents: Frantz Fanon and the living ghosts of capitalism's world-system -- Durkheim's ghosts in the culture of sociologies -- Levi-Strauss and the sad tropics of modern cultures -- What is culture? Amid the flowers, seeds or weeds? -- Paris 1907 and why the sociological imagination is always unstable -- Sociological theory and the relativistic paradigm -- Ferdinand de Saussure and why the social contract is a cultural arbitrary -- Literary politics and the champ of French sociology -- Marcel Mauss and Durkheim and why the ghosts of social differences are ubiquitous -- Durkheim's woman and the Jew as the pluperfect past of the good society -- Jacques Derrida and why global structures had to die when they did -- The uses of the French structuralisms -- Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and why structures haunt instruments and measures -- Structures, instruments, and reading in social and cultural research (with Willard A. Neilsen, Jr.) -- Roland Barthes and the phantasmagorias of social things -- Language, structure, and measurement as a semiotic of differences -- Michel Foucault and why analytic categories are queer -- Pierre Bourdieu's aesthetic critique of sociological judgment -- Simone de Beauvoir and why culture is a semiotics of the other -- Power-knowledge, discourse, and transgression (with Garth Gillan) -- Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein and why globalization is a social geography of inequalities -- The system of future worlds -- Postscript: What culture is not.