Though I think of myself as a pretty devoted Bourdieu fan, I didn't actually read everything here, and I punted and read in English. What I read was the opening 350 pp. with the text of his Collège de France lectures, stopping short of going through the unfinished MS based on those lectures, which appears to follow it closely. My excuse is that I may be a megafan but I'm not a cultist.

Qua fan, I particularly liked confirming that my own simplifications or reformulations of Bourdieu's ideas about historical context and text, and artistic form and habitus, matched his own informal summaries. Also, the lectures admit to a level of vulnerability and uncertainty which Bourdieu never permits himself in published prose. But also there are some sharp edges here, especially at the expense of TJ Clark (from whom he nonetheless learned a lot) but even more at the expense of "iconologists" (Michael Fried) and lectores. I loved the moments where he denounced the sheer EASE of producing interpretations based on your own clever associations, etc. Bourdieu says at one point that his method is "monstrous" in its demands on the researcher---or rather the research team---to know the field.

As a tour through Manet, who Bourdieu likes a whole lot more than I do, this is perhaps unsatisfying. The best parts, I think, show how Manet related to predecessors and rivals (Courbet, the pompier painters). The idea of a "symbolic revolution" doesn't, to me, rescue the notion of a modernist "break" as a historiography.

Also touching to see Bourdieu improvising and running out of time, week after week. At the end, in the final lecture, he rushes through discussion of a dozen canvases before stopping abruptly, a full hour after he was supposed to (according to the tragicomic final footnote).