The Paradoxes of a Pre‐reflective Will to Interpret: A Critical Comment on Junghun Oh's Idea of ‘Embodied Moral Reflexivity’

ABSTRACT In her recent publication in this journal, Junghun Oh offers an alternative reading of Pierre Bourdieu's notion of the habitus by invoking the ideas of ‘the will to interpret’ and ‘embodied moral reflexivity’. Oh premises her analysis on the idea that there are inner interpretive processes or re‐evaluations that the habitus is assumed to allow. My main line of critique in this comment is, first, that this approach is similar to past inconsistent efforts by other authors to reconcile the irreconcilable ideas of Bourdieu's habitus and self‐reflection; and, second, that, in the absence of an ontological stratum that can enable the emergence of the reflective interpreter that Oh assumes, the idea that Bourdieu's habitus allows for subtle reinterpretations of personal values and dominant norms is theoretically unintelligible and leads to paradoxical imageries.