ABSTRACT
Common sense, as well as “the typical illusion of the lector” ( Bourdieu 1997a trans. Nice 2000: 2), treats the author’s biography as a coherent whole, a continuous path, a meaningful unidirectional trajectory, as if it was “a sequence of successive states which are turned into steps of a necessary development” (1986b trans. Winkin and Leeds-Hurwitz 1987: 1). Bourdieu identifies this process as “the artificial creation of meaning” (ibid.). As Bourdieu argues in his essay, by paying homage to such “biographical illusion” one loses sight of the fact that a life presented in the form of a history is at once an artificial post-hoc and ad-hoc event, a logical exposition of chronologically ordered events in a manner meant to make sense both for the subject and for the object of the biography.
