Posthegemonic Comments
Could one imagine a counter-contractarian tradition, then?
Ok, I'm interested. Can one? Or, can one? 
By the by, I'm also wondering what the points of dissonance and/or connection between Deleuze's take on contraction and habit and that of, say, Althusser and, therefore, Pascal.
I dunno, this "counter-contractarianism" could just be a conceit. But you never know.
As to the second question, well, Bourdieu's a good mediating term, in that he declares himself Pascalian (Pascalian Meditations) and often, especially early on, could be mistaken for an Althusserian if you squinted a little in poor light.
Jezzer's our resident Bourdieu expert, and may well have more to say on this.
Weird. As I clicked open this post with the left hand, I held D&R in my right hand, reviewing some parts of the first chapter, which I just finished. It took me about three days to get through it, but I did, and I think I actually got some of it.
So I guess I'm one of the few. Also, I did come to D&R through the Guattari books. And I agree that it is not as "fully social, fully political" as the later books, but because I'm unrelentingly vulgar, I can't read it any other way. Without ascribing some political content to it, the "univocity of being," say, doesn't do much for me.
Speaking of which, and sorry for the self-promo, I've just written on a political piece using a couple of concepts from the first chapter of D&R. More of an experiment than anything, really.
And Gary at philosophical conversations is reading the book right now, too, it seems.
Plus I just made a D&R-related plea at Long Sunday.
So an accidental reading group seems to have emerged...
As for any Bourdieu-Althusser affinity, I'd counsel caution in the sense that too many commentators too quickly lump Bourdieu, Althusser, and Gramsci together as adherents of the so-called "dominant ideology thesis", named after a rather poor book of the same name. This flattens out significant conceptual & political differences between the three thinkers, over-simplifying the work of each in the process. An obvious conceptual difference between Althusser and Bourdieu would be their diametrically opposed relation to the phenomenological tradition - rejected outright by Althusser in -Reading Capital-, fundamental to Bourdieu's entire "theory of practice". That said, there is a very Leninist tone to Bourdieu's early essays on the Algerian peasantry and sub-proletariat & their attitude to time - the notion that these classes are unable to transcend their immediate conditions to construct a coherent political project without the aid of an intellectual avant-garde to guide them. This all very reminiscent of -What is to be Done?- and it's hard to imagine that Bourdieu wasn't introduced to that sort of Leninism via Althusser at the Ecole normale. As for their shared allegiance to Pascal, there are parallels but differences too - it would take too long to go into these here, though.
That said, there's no reason to defend any kind of theoretical orthodoxy here, whether Althusserian or Bourdieusian. So none of the above would preclude using Bourdieu, Althusser, and Pascal together to forge a productive new theoretical approach. (Oh and Deleuze too, remembering Bourdieu's comment in
-Pascalian Meditations- that his theory of habitus is comparable to Deleuze's reading of Hume, or the influence of Bourdieu's essays on language and symbolic power on D&G's chapter on linguistics in -Thousand Plateaux- [Bakhtin/Volosinov being one important mediator here]).
Jeremy.
I started reading D&R long before finally tackling C&S and have come to find it inextricably linked with a series of conceptual knots within German Idealism: for instance, the idea of truth as production as a cashing out of the concept of thought as production/construction developed by Schelling. And the idea of the crisis of the image of thought, and the thought without image that results, is arguably deeply redolent of the Kant-Jacobi debates over nihilism in the 1780s and 90s (as recounted by Frederick Beiser).
If you see Schelling's strategy as a response to the latter, then it's difficult not to see Deleuze as attempting something similar (hence all that stuff about the Ungrund and the fulgurations of difference - very Schellingian.
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