Returning to Reims

by Didier Eribon

  Back when I was young, to be honest, I wasn’t so concerned about the implacable harshness of the conditions of factory work—or I was concerned only in an abstract kind of way. I was too fascinated by all I was discovering about culture, about literature, about philosophy to spend time thinking about what was going into making my access to these things possible. Indeed, it was quite the opposite: I resented my parents for being who they were, for not being the interlocutors of my dreams, or the kinds of interlocutors some of my fellow students had in their parents. Being the first in my family to embark on an upward trajectory, I had little inclination, as a teenager, to try to understand who they were, and even less inclination to understand and assimilate on a political level the truth of their existence. I may have been a Marxist, but I have to say that my Marxism, like my engagement on the left, was perhaps little more than a way of idealizing the working class, of transforming it into a mythical entity compared to which the actual life of my parents seemed utterly reprehensible. They were eager to get their hands on all the products consumer society was making available and all I could see in the sorry state of their daily life and in their aspiration for forms of comfort that had long been denied them was the sign of their social “alienation” and of their misplaced aspirations to join the middle class. They were workers and they had lived in poverty. Like everyone in my family, like all our neighbors, like everyone we knew, they were eager to obtain everything that had been denied them up till now, everything that had been denied to their parents before them. As soon as they were able to, they would buy what they had been dreaming of, even if it was on credit: a used car, then a new car, a television, furniture from a catalogue (a Formica table for the kitchen, a sofa in artificial leather for the living room, and so on). I found it deplorable that they were constantly caught in the grip of this desire for material well-being, that they became envious of others—“If they have it, there’s no reason we shouldn’t have it too.” It was unpleasant for me to realize that perhaps these desires and this envy had been what determined their political choices, even if they would not themselves have made a link between these two different registers. In my family, everyone bragged about how much this or that item had cost, because it showed they weren’t in need, that they had made it. Feelings of pride and honor were tightly linked with a regular habit of announcing what everything had cost. This hardly matched up with the heroic stories of the “worker’s movement” with which my head was filled. But what is the point of a political story that doesn’t take into account what people are really like as it interprets their lives, a story whose result is that one ends up blaming the individuals in question for not conforming to the fiction one has constructed? It is clearly a story that needs to be rewritten in order to make it less unified and less simple, to build in more complexity and more contradictions. And to reintroduce historical time. The working class changes. It doesn’t stay identical to itself. And clearly the working class of the 1960s and 1970s was no longer the same as that of the 1930s or the 1950s. The same position in the social field does not correspond to exactly the same realities, nor to the same aspirations.7

  My mother recently reminded me, with more than a touch of irony in her voice, that I was always criticizing them for being too “bourgeois.” (“You were always saying stupid things like that in those days,” she added. “I hope at least now you are aware of it.”) Basically, according to the way I looked at things back then, my parents were betraying whatever it was that they were supposed to go on being, and my disdain for them was simply the expression of my desire certainly to be nothing like them—and even more certainly to be nothing like what it was that I wanted them to be. For me, the “proletariat” was an idea that came straight out of a book, something abstract. My parents didn’t fit the image. I may have been keeping myself amused and entertained by deploring the distance separating a class “in itself” from a class “for itself,” separating the “alienated worker” from a “class consciousness,” but the truth is that this “revolutionary” political position simply served as a cover for the social judgment that I had passed on my parents and my family, for my desire to escape from their world. My youthful Marxism was thus a vector for a kind of social disidentification: I glorified the “working class” in order to put more distance between myself and actual workers. While reading Marx and Trotsky, I imagined myself at the avant-garde of the people. But really I was finding my way into a world of people of privilege, into their kind of temporality, their modes of subjectivation: the world of people who had the leisure time available for reading Marx and Trotsky. I was fascinated by Sartre’s writings about the working class, but I was repulsed by the working class in which I was immersed, by the working class environment that limited my horizons. To be interested in Marx or Sartre was my way of getting out of this world, out of my parents’ world, all the while of course imagining that I was more clear sighted than they were about their own lives. My father was perfectly aware of this. I had begun to read Le Monde—one of the ways in which I was forever putting on display my deeply serious interest in politics. Not quite knowing how to give voice to the hostility he felt towards this newspaper—it was clearly not intended for people like him, he felt; it was in his eyes a vehicle for middle-class ideology (he was better informed than I was!)—he simply declared, in a voice full of anger: “Nobody but schoolmarms reads that rag.” [C’est un journal de curé que tu es en train de lire.] Then he got up and walked out of the room.

  My mother didn’t have a very clear idea about what was going on in my life, about what I was getting up to. I had entered a different world, one in which everything seemed far off and unfamiliar to her. And then I hardly ever spoke to her about my interests, since she had no idea who these authors were that I found so fascinating. Once, when I was about 15 or 16, she picked up a novel by Sartre that was lying on my desk and commented a bit hesitantly, “I think this book is a bit crude.” It was an opinion she had heard from a woman whose house she cleaned—someone from the middle class in whose eyes Sartre must have been some kind of dangerous writer—and she repeated it a bit naively, perhaps as a way of showing me that she knew at least the name of one of the authors I was reading.

  One thing, at least, was sure: I didn’t match the image she had of someone who was “pursuing their education.” In high school, I was active in a group of extreme leftists, and that took up a lot of my time. The principal even called in my father to tell him about my “propagandistic” activities at the entrance to, and even inside the school. The scene that followed at home that evening was dramatic: they threatened to take me out of school. My mother was worried that I would fail the Baccalaureate exam, but above all, she and my father had a great deal of difficulty accepting that I wasn’t devoting all of my time to studying, since they were wearing themselves thin in order to give me the opportunity to do precisely that. They were both furious and disgusted. I was given an ultimatum: either drop the political activism or drop out of school. I declared that I would prefer to drop out of school. That was the last I heard of the matter. When it came right down to it, my mother was too deeply invested in the idea that I continue.

  As for my studies, there too, I failed to conform to what she had in mind. My choice to study philosophy must have seemed ludicrous to her. She barely knew what to say when I told her of my decision. She would have preferred that I choose to study English or Spanish. (Medicine or Law would never have occurred to her—or to me—, whereas choosing a language was for her the best way to guarantee myself a future as a high school teacher.) But above all she was aware of the distance that was being established between us. I was becoming incomprehensible to her, and she readily commented that I seemed “eccentric.” I can imagine how strange I must have seemed to her, how bizarre. I was moving further and further away from what was, in her eyes, the normal world, a normal life. “But it’s just not normal to …” were words she often repeated about me, as did my father.

  “Not norma
l,” “strange,” “bizarre.” It’s nonetheless the case that such words still contained no direct or indirect reference to sexuality, even if my parents’ perception of me was, of course, connected to the style I was taking up, the general image I wanted to give of myself. My hair was quite long, and that drove my father crazy for many years. (“Go get a haircut right now,” he would shout, pounding on the table.) Doubtless the sexual dissidence that I would soon assert was already legible in that style and that image. But it would only be years later that my mother discovered I belonged to the category that she could only manage to refer to as “people like you.” Her desire not to employ any vocabulary that might be taken as derogatory and her uncertainty as to how to do this meant that she could think of no word she could safely use, and so resorted to this awkward circumlocution. Quite recently, when, looking at a photograph she had at her house, I asked her who the three young people in it were, she replied: “Those are the children of B.,” which is to say my older brother’s partner. She went on, “The one in the middle is D. He’s like you.” At first I didn’t understand what she meant, but then she added, “When he told his mother he was … you know … you see what I mean … that he was like you … she kicked him out. But then your brother made her change her mind by pointing out that if that’s how she felt, it would mean he could never invite his own brother to his house.” I was surprised to hear that about my brother. As far as I could remember, he hadn’t always been so tolerant. It appeared his views had changed considerably on this topic. But in point of fact, I never do visit him at his house. I’ve never tried to visit. I’ve never wanted to visit … And as this whole book is trying to demonstrate, this is due to my social identity, my class identity, as much as or more than it is due to my sexual identity. If it is now the case that he accepts who I am and yet I haven’t gotten back in touch, it’s obviously because I am uncomfortable with who he is. I thus have to admit that if, these days, we still never see each other, it is more because of me than because of him. It is not so easy to overcome the past. Trajectories that have diverged to this degree do not easily come back together.

  Yet this is also an example of the truth of something Bourdieu demonstrated about the family: that it is not some stable entity, but rather a set of strategies. Say my brothers had become lawyers, university professors, journalists, high-ranking government officials, artists, writers … We would still be in touch, even if in some distant kind of way, and in any case, I would have claimed them as brothers, accepted them as such. The same is true for my aunts and uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews … If one’s available social capital is, first of all, the set of family relations one maintains and can bring into play, it could be said that my trajectory—with all the ruptures it involved—did not just endow me with an absence of social capital, it left me with a negative balance: I had to nullify certain relationships as opposed to maintaining them. This was a far cry from claiming distant cousins as my own, as happens in bourgeois families; in my case it was more a matter of cutting my own brothers out of my life. There thus was and would be no one I could count on to help me move forward along the paths I had chosen, to help me overcome any difficulties I might encounter.

  When I was 18 or 20, my mother didn’t yet take me to be one of those “people like you,” but she nonetheless watched me change with an increasing sense of astonishment. She was at a loss for what to think. And I took no notice, since I had already more or less separated myself from her, from them, from their world.

  3

  After their marriage in 1950, my parents moved into a furnished room. Lodging was hard to come by in Reims in those years, so it was in that room that they spent the first years of their married life. They had two children, my older brother and me, and my grandfather made a wooden bed for the two of us in which we both slept, head to toe. We all lived together in that room until a social welfare organization arranged for my parents to move into a house in a new housing project for workers located on the other side of town. Really the word “house” isn’t quite right: it was a cement block attached to other cement blocks, these blocks arranged on either side of a street that ran parallel to other similar streets. They were all one-story houses, with one main room and a bedroom (which the four of us therefore shared, just as we had before). There was no bathroom, but there was running water and a sink in the main room. The sink was thus used both for cooking and for bathing. In winter, the coal burning stove wasn’t capable of heating the two rooms sufficiently, so we were chilled to the bone all of the time. There was a small yard adjoined to the house, offering a touch of greenery, and my father managed with great pains to grow a few vegetables in it for us.

  Have I retained any memories from those years? Rare ones, vague and uncertain. Except for one, that is, which is quite precise and quite haunting: it is of my father coming home dead drunk after having gone missing for two or three days. (“Every Friday night, after work, he would live it up in the bars,” my mother told me, “and he often wouldn’t come home.”) He is standing at one end of the room and taking every bottle he could lay his hands on—oil, milk, wine—and throwing them one by one against the opposite wall, where they shatter. My brother and I are crying, huddled up against our mother, who is simply repeating, in a voice of both anger and despair, “at least watch out for the kids.” When, shortly after my father’s death, I reminded my mother of this scene and several others as part of an explanation for why I hadn’t wanted to attend his funeral, she was astonished: “You can remember that? But you were so little.” Yes, I could remember it. I had always remembered it. I had never been able to forget it. It was a kind of indelible trace left by a childhood trauma, linked to an “originary scene,” but not one that should be understood in psychological or psychoanalytic terms. Once you start talking about the Oedipus complex, you desocialize and depoliticize the way you look at processes of subjectivation. A family scene replaces one that is grounded in historical and geographical (urban) reality, which is to say the reality of social classes. What was going on here was not the weakening of the paternal imago, not a failure to identify with the father—real or symbolic; it corresponds to neither of these interpretative schemas, the ones that would be routinely invoked by habitual forms of Lacanian thought in order to discover the “key” to my homosexuality—a “key” they plant there ahead of time in order to be able to discover it. No, there is no fodder here that anyone can use to trot out yet again these notions that have been fabricated by psychoanalytic ideology and that its proselytizers are constantly repeating.8 What was going here was rather what I would call a social mirror stage, one in which someone becomes conscious of belonging to a milieu in which certain kinds of behaviors and practices occur; this was a scene of interpellation, but a social, not a psychic or an ideological one; it was an interpellation involving the discovery of a class-based sociological situation, one that assigns to you a place and to an identity; it teaches you to recognize who you are and who you will be by means of an image someone else presents—someone else whom you are meant to become. But in fact it turns out that what was planted in me in that moment was rather a patient and obstinate desire to contradict the future for which I was intended. Yet at the same time I was left with a lasting impression of my social origin, a call to “remember where you came from” that no later transformation, no cultural education, no disguise, no subterfuge, would ever allow me to forget. That, at least, is the meaning that, retrospectively, it seems to me possible to give to this moment from my distant past, even if I realize that this is a reconstruction—as any other interpretation would be, including, of course, a psychoanalytic one. The processes by which you come to belong to yourself or to transform yourself, to constitute an identity or to refuse an identity, were thus always tightly linked for me, imbricated each one in the other, fighting with each other, holding each other in check. My most basic social identification (recognizing oneself as oneself) was thus from the outset perturbed by a disidentification that fed constan
tly on the very identification being refused.