Durkheim, the Durkheimians, and the Arts

Alexander Tristan Riley is Professor of Sociology at Bucknell University. With the aid of the late Philippe Besnard, he edited the war correspondence of Robert Hertz, Un ethnologue dans les tranchées. He is the author of Godless Intellectuals?: The Intellectual Pursuit of the Sacred Reinvented (Berghahn Books, 2010) and currently he is contemplating a book on literary autobiography, cultural sociology, and the writing of Michel Leiris.

• List of IllustrationsIntroductionAlexander RileyChapter 1. Total Aesthetics: Art and The Elemental FormsWilliam Watts MillerChapter 2. Durkheim, the Arts, and the Moral SwordW.S.F. PickeringChapter 3. Durkheim and Festivals: Art, Effervescence, and InstitutionsJean-Louis FabianiChapter 4. The Power of Imagination and the Economy of Desire: Durkheim and ArtPierre-Michel MengerChapter 5.  Dostoevsky in the Mirror of DurkheimDonald A. NielsenChapter 6. Durkheim, L’Année sociologique, and ArtMarcel FournierChapter 7. Marcel Mauss on Art and Aesthetics: The Politics of Division, Isolation, and TotalityMichèle Richman           Chapter 8.  Too Marvelous for Words...: Maurice Halbwachs, Kansas City Jazz, and the Language of MusicSarah DaynesChapter 9. Total Art – The Influence of the Durkheim School on Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Reflections on Art and ClassificationStephan Moebius and Frithjof NungesserChapter 10.  Sex, Death, the Other, and Art: The Search for Mythic Life in the Work of Michel LeirisAlexander RileyChapter 11. Apophasis in Representation: Georges Bataille and the Aesthetics and Ethics of the NegativeS. Romi MukherjeeChapter 12. Acéphale/Parsifal: Georges Bataille contra WagnerClaudine FrankBibliographyNotes on ContributorsIndex

“The strengths of the book are the featuring of the diversity of the [Durkheim] tradition and the many lines linking broadly Durkheimian themes to current work on the arts… [It] illustrates powerfully how Durkheimian concepts live with us today and how we can benefit by comparisons with this rich tradition. Read and be inspired.” · American Journal of Sociology“The triumvirate editors have put together an imaginative set of authors, representing different generations, who have already made important contributions to recent Durheimiana.” · Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers canadiens de sociologie“…offers readers a tour of twentieth-century French intellectual history by one of the finest Durkheimian scholars writing today. At the heart of the book is Durkheim’s concept of the sacred. Yet despite the seemingly familiar starting point, Riley’s book sparkles with creative ideas, intriguing concepts, and introductions to a broad class of characters. Riley is not a historian of ideas but a sociologist and social theorist. Consequently, he frames the telling of this history with key theoretical categories, which help order a broad range of material…Part of the book’s (mystic) charm is its comprehensive and suggestive nature.” · Sociology of Religion“…an important volume of original thinking that will make a significant contribution, both to a new understanding of Durkheim/Durkheimianism and to the sociological understanding of art… The contributors are true, world-renowned experts in Durkheim and his school and his legacy.” · Jeff Alexander, Yale University“The essays are uniformly intensely learned and clearly written, which is a real feat in a book involving so many people.” · Howie Becker, author of Outsiders and Art Worlds