Zwischen Klassen, gegen Klassen

Abstract I provide an account of class transition with reference to Bourdieu, Spinoza and Marx, building on essayistic work by contemporary French philosopher Chantal Jaquet. After clarifying the notion of class with Marx and Bourdieu, I sketch a Spinozist perspective of movements between classes. While Bourdieu registered such movements as exceptions, Jaquet explains them as rearrangements of affective, economic, political and socio-cultural determinants. She thereby pits Spinoza’s concept of ingenium against Bourdieu’s habitus figure. As I show, this expresses ontological and anthropological differences between both oeuvres. Spinoza’s understanding of affect , disposition and conatus , I argue, allows class reproduction to be grasped in its inherent instability. While Jaquet inherits Bourdieu’s struggle to account for the politics of whether the social refracts into classes (making class transition an issue in the first place), I suggest reconciling the analysis of class transitions with the critique of class relations by triangulating Spinoza and Bourdieu with Marx.