Habitus e storia di vita. Una teoria sociale dell'identità difensiva

The paper provides an account of Pierre Bourdieu's theory of practical identity in the light of those contemporary approaches to personal identity which, within a naturalistic understanding of the mental, combine narrative and realist explanations of the self. I will argue that Bourdieu's concept of habitus offers a subpersonal level of cognitive and practical unification of the agent and that histories of life are attempts, prone to a variety of distortions, to achieve an interpretive reappropriation of the products of the habitus in the form of a narrative totality. Lastly, I will maintain that both habitus and history of life have a defensive fundament.