Critical Writing : The Value and Cost of Pascale Casanova’s Combative Ethos
Résumé
Pascale Casanova’s works are characterized by a very specific intellectual project, style, tone, and ethos. Taking a science des oeuvres approach (Pierre Bourdieu), this chapter aims to bring out their critical dimension. It links together the way her writing evolved – a situated “formal reality” “between a language and a style” (Roland Barthes) – and her demanding and atypical intellectual trajectory at the intersection of academia, the media, and literary criticism. Her works, taken in the context of some of the stakes, forms, and routines that go with writing in these various fields, are firstly envisaged as forming a whole (in terms of theoretical postulates, relationship to readers, general configuration, and formal characteristics) that allowed an openly embraced critical verve progressively to unfold. I then highlight the value of this type of writing, in the sense of how rare it is, and also its cost, insofar as it can come at a price in terms of social trajectory.