Editor’s Column: Reading Habits

This issue focuses on habits. The reception of “habit” among philosophers and theorists has been less than hospitable. Frequently set in opposition to what is called the event—or the Real in a Lacanian register—habits would seem to serve ideology and the symbolic order, whereas the event—habits’ other, as it were—calls us into an ethical relation, into “an ethics of the Real.” Habits allegedly constitute our lifeless or quasimechanistic horizon, whereas the event punctures the psychic shield that such a horizon presumably affords. In its disruption of everydayness, the event opens a space for ethics, for thinking singularity as such. Jacques Derrida and others suggest such a reading of the event as an irreducible otherness. Yet, Derrida is also quick to caution against seeing the event as an ethical moment in itself. The event might be better described as the “nonethical opening of ethics” (140), as Derrida famously puts it in Of Grammatology. This reading invites us to rethink ethics “after” the event. Such a view no longer defines ethics in opposition to habits, but conceives of it as a commitment to the event, positing the possibility of an unlikely “ethical habitus.”

This notion of habitus is arguably anticipated by Pierre Bourdieu’s reworking of this ancient concept. Habitus, to recall, is the Latin translation of the Greek hexis, which Aristotle used to describe an acquired skill, a habit or disposition. Philosophers after Aristotle increasingly saw in habitus the enslaving powers of custom, its power to produce in all of us a second nature. In the Essays, Renaissance author Michel de Montaigne describes the normalizing logic and deep ontological reach of custom: “The laws of conscience, which we say are born of nature, are born of custom. Each man, holding in inward veneration the opinions and the behavior approved and accepted around him, cannot break loose from them without remorse, or apply himself to them without selfsatisfaction” (83). For Montaigne, not even the “laws of conscience”—the bedrock of ethics—are immune from custom’s power to generate misrecognition.

But for Bourdieu, naming habitus functions more than a warning against custom’s mystifying ways. Bourdieu deploys habitus ironically as an alternative to philosophy’s own mystifying ways, to its blind investment in the powers of consciousness. Habitus calls into question the primacy of the phenomenological subject, pointing out how the social conditions the perceptual itself. At the same time, Bourdieu was preoccupied with the need to alter one’s habitus, to modify its conservative impulse, since habitus inclines us to seek an environment in which we feel like a “fish in water.” In Pascalian Meditations, Bourdieu talks of “countertrainning” (172), of engaging in practices aimed at transforming one’s habitus. This recalls Foucault’s late reflections on the “care of the self,” and the ways in which we participate actively in our production as subjects. We are neither outside of power nor solely determined by it. The question of the event, though, remains. If the notion of habit proves more complex, more messy—and thus not a priori morally or politically suspect—how do we read the event? Is its value grounded on a misreading of habit? Do we need to rethink the relation between habits and the event? Can, or should, we rehabilitate habits?

The volume opens with Mari Ruti’s article, “The Bad Habits of Critical Theory,” which raises concerns about the ways criticism has developed in the last fifteen years or so. What was initially, according to Ruti, a breath of fresh air in criticism and critical theory—the hermeneutic practice of suspicion—now seems all-too-stagnate in its dual obsessive habits: the perpetual displacement of the subject (so that any interest in agency becomes discouraged or seen as reactionary) and the privileging of an anti-normative stance (so that prescriptive critique is a priori off the table). In “Mind the Gap: Toward a Political History of Habit,” Tony Bennett invites us to go beyond the notion of habit as unthinking repetition. Bennett draws productively on Latour to theorize a gap in the power-laden habit system in order to craft a multidisciplinary...