Returning to Reims

255 Pages·2013·10.149 MB·English

by  Eribon, Didier;

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Originally published as Retour h Reims. © Librairie Artheme Fayard, 2009
© This edition 2013 by Semiotext(e)
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RETURNING TO REIMS
Didier Eribon
Introduction by George Chauncey
Translated by Michael Lucey
<e>

For G., who always wants to know everything.

Introduction by George Chauncey
DID1ER ERIBON’s REPUTATION as one of the preeminent intellectual
historians and social critics writing in France today made it a risk
for him to publish a book like this. His reputation began to
develop in the mid-1980s, when he started writing incisive
reviews of major works in philosophy and the social sciences for
the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur and then published a
series of wide-ranging, book-length conversations with the
Eminences grises of French intellectual life such as Claude Levi-
Strauss and Georges Dumezil. His acclaimed 1989 biography of
Michel Foucault gave him new prominence and introduced
him to a global audience when it was translated into twenty
languages. He went on to lecture across Europe and North
America and to organize conferences at the most prestigious
institutions of France on Sartre, Foucault, Gide, multiculturalism,
and the cultural legacies of the 1970s.
In the 1990s he took up the question of homosexuality as a
theoretical, historical, and personal matter, publishing a series
of important books and essays, most notably his magisterial
treatise Reflexions sur la question gay (1999), translated into
English as Insult and the Making of the Gay Self (2004). He also
played a key role in the establishment of the field of LGBT
studies in France by organizing the country’s first conference
7
on the subject at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1997 and
then co-founding and for many years co-directing a seminar on
the sociology of homosexuality at the prestigious ficole des
Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. As a public intellectual,
he became involved in the fierce French debates over the
establishment of civil unions, which in the late 1990s took
place on a very different intellectual plane than in the United
States, with French parliamentarians citing Levi-Strauss rather
than the Bible to condemn the legal recognition of same-sex
relationships. In 2004, once civil unions were won, he and
several colleagues issued a manifesto insisting on gay people’s
right to marriage itself, a campaign that saw victory a decade
later. At the same time, he also became a prominent critic of
French anti-immigrant xenophobia and what he saw as the
growing neo-conservatism of the Socialist Party.
So the book before you, Retour a Reims/Returning to Reims, came
as something of a surprise to the French reading public when it
was published in 2009. For in its pages the distinguished public
intellectual Didier Eribon came out again, not this time as gay,
but as a son of the working class. For many years he had felt
obliged to hide this seminal element of his past, he explained, as
much as he had once felt obliged to hide being gay; it seemed
the price of admission to his new life in the elite intellectual
circles of Paris. A compelling meditation on the formative
influence of class in his own life and in French society, the book
provoked soul-searching and public discussion across France. It
was featured prominently in every bookshop I saw during a visit
to Paris in the spring of 2010.
8 / Returning to Reims
The book is, first of all, a memoir of surpassing beauty and
insight, in which Eribon tells the story of his estrangement and
then escape from the family, the class, and the region in which
he was raised, and then how he hid and forgot these origins for
most of his adult life. He returned to visit his mother in the
working-class neighborhoods and suburbs of Reims only as his
father lay dying, years after he had abandoned them both. Even
then, he could not bring himself to see his despised father again,
or to attend his funeral. But his illness and death shook some of
the barriers Eribon had erected between himself and his past,
and a long series of conversations with his mother unleashed a
flood of long-suppressed memories and emotions.
Probing those memories, his mothers stories, and the fading
family photographs she placed before him on her kitchen table,
Eribon reflects on the class, gender, and regional inequalities
and frustrations that shaped his parents’ marriage, led to his
father’s periodic disappearances and growing bitterness, and
condemned his mother to loneliness. With bracing insight, he
uses his family’s history to depict and analyze the production
and reproduction of class inequality in France, developing, for
instance, a penetrating analysis of how the schools’ tracking
system made it inevitable that his brothers would become disaf­
fected, drop out, and be left with no alternative but to pursue
lives of difficult and, in one case, literally disabling labor. At one
level, then, this memoir offers an incisive portrait of what
Richard Sennett once called the hidden injuries of class.
But Eribon also uses the story of his family to reflect on the
transformation of French politics in the last generation. How,
he asks, did his parents, his brothers, and so many other working
people shift their allegiance from the parties of the Left to those
Introduction by George Chauncey / 9
of the Right? How did his father, once a militant communist
who denounced de Gaulle whenever the rightist president made
an appearance on the family television, come to see the National
Front as a more authentic representative of his interests than
either the Communist or Socialist Party? Mitterrand’s turn to
neo-conservative ideologues and technocratic solutions take
some of the blame in Eribon’s account, but his most penetrating
observations have to do with the power of electoral politics and
political mobilization to promote a collective vision of the
world. Drawing on the realignment of his own relatives and
neighbors, Eribon provides a trenchant analysis of how the
parties of the Left stopped articulating the situation of workers,
while the National Front gave license to their preexisting racism
and legitimized it as a central framework for explaining the
disappointments of their class.
Finally, and perhaps most provocatively, Eribon meditates
on the formative influence of class shame in his own life. In
achingly honest prose, he ponders why he felt compelled not
only to escape his working class origins but to hide them and for
many years virtually forget them. Here he draws on his earlier
work on the formative role of insult in shaping homosexual
identity to reflect on the manifold ways he had been made to
feel ashamed of his class origins—and on the striking parallels in
the reproduction of class and sexual domination. The quotidian
strategies he had long used to hide his homosexuality, he now
realized, were mimicked by those he had felt compelled to adopt
to conceal his working class origins: the constant surveillance of
his gestures and accents, the knowledge he paraded, and the
realms of knowledge he never admitted to having. More still, he
reflects on the mutually sustaining evolution of his class and
10 / Returning to Reims
sexual identities: on how his youthful rejection of the sports in
which his brothers excelled represented a rejection of both a
masculinist culture in which he could not succeed and of a
working class culture he had come to abhor, how his migration
to Paris was simultaneously a journey of class escape and of
sexual exploration.
Eribon draws on his deep knowledge of Bourdieu, Barthes,
Foucault, Sartre, and other theorists to enhance his analysis in
ways that are both illuminating and inviting. But the core of
this book’s remarkable power is Eribon’s unflinching honesty
and preternatural insight as he uses his own life to expose the
continuing power of class and sexual shame to sustain systems
of social domination.
—George Chauncey
George Chauncey, the Samuel Knight Professor of History and
American Studies at Yale University, is the author of Gay New
York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male
World, 1890-1940.
Introduction by George Chauncey /11