Returning to Reims

by Didier Eribon

  The influence this friendship had on me and the help that this boy offered me—without even realizing it—nonetheless had a defining impact. My class habitus had at first led me to resist acculturating to a life of study, to the kinds of discipline it required. I was unruly, intractable, and it wouldn’t have taken much for certain irresistible forces to have pushed me over the edge towards a complete rejection of school. In his case, it was the opposite. Culture was his life, and always had been. He wrote short stories of a certain kind, in the genre of the fantastic. I set myself to writing, making an effort to imitate him. He had taken a pen name. I decided to do the same. When I told him what mine was, he made fun of me, for it was totally made up (preposterous and convoluted), whereas his, as he hammered home to me, was composed of his middle name and his mother’s maiden name. There was no way I could compete with him. Everything I tried merely revealed my inferiority. He was cruel and hurtful without meaning to be, without even knowing it. In the years since then I have often come across situations like this: where a different class ethos lies behind certain behaviors and reactions that turn out to be nothing more than the putting into action of certain social structures and hierarchies within a specific interactive moment. Friendship cannot escape from the laws of historical gravity: two friends are still two incorporated social histories that attempt to coexist. And so sometimes in the course of a friendship, no matter how close, two classes come into conflict with each other, simply as the effect of the inertia of the habitus involved. Attitudes that are taken and words that are exchanged need not be meant aggressively, nor meant to be hurtful, and yet they may still be so. For example, when you spend time in bourgeois circles, or simply with ordinary middle class people, it is often simply assumed that you come from the same background. In the same way that heterosexual people always speak about homosexuals without stopping to think that the person to whom they are speaking might be a member of the stigmatized species that they are in the process of belittling or making fun of, so middle class people always address you as if your existential and cultural experiences have been the same as theirs. They don’t even notice that they are attacking you by way of their assumptions (even if you are flattered and proud at managing to “pass” for something you are not—a child of the bourgeoisie—since you have spent so much time working to get yourself into this situation). Sometimes it happens even with your closest friends, the oldest and most loyal ones. When my father died, one of my close friends—an heir!—to whom I mentioned that I wasn’t going to be attending my father’s funeral, but that I nonetheless had to go to Reims to see my mother, made the following observation: “Of course. In any case you’ll have to be there when the lawyer reads the will.” These words, spoken in an utterly matter-of-fact tone of voice, reminded me of the truth of the fact that parallel lines never meet, even in the course of a friendship. The reading of the will? What will? Good heavens! As if anyone in my family drew up wills with their lawyers. What, precisely, would they be leaving to anyone? In the popular classes nothing passes from generation to generation, no securities, no capital, no houses or apartments, no antique furniture or valuable objects, nothing.8 All my parents had were some meager savings, painstakingly accumulated over the years, and deposited in an account at a savings bank. And in any case, as far as my mother was concerned, that money belonged to her, since she and my father “put it away” together, setting aside a portion of their earnings that really would have come in handy for other basic things in life. The idea that this money, their money, would have to be passed on to anyone other than her, even if it was to her children, seemed inconceivable and unbearable to her. “But it’s mine! We did without so much so that we could set that money aside for a rainy day …,” she exclaimed indignantly upon learning from the bank that several thousand euros from their shared account would have to be paid to her sons, and that she was entitled only to a small portion of the account balance. She was thus required to ask us to sign a document conceding to her the proceeds of this “inheritance.”

  It remains the case that the boy I was friends with for this brief period in high school taught me to love books, taught me to think about writing in a different way, convinced me to become a believer in art and in literature—a belief I faked at the beginning, but that became more and more real as the days went by. What counted the most was really enthusiasm, a desire for discovery. The content of what would be discovered could come later. Thanks to this friendship, my kneejerk rejection to the world of studies—a reaction that came from my upbringing—didn’t lead to a wholesale rejection of all forms of culture. It turned into a passion for anything avant-garde, radical, intellectual. (I was seduced by Duras and Beckett, but soon Sartre and Beauvoir would steal my heart from them. Given that I was mostly on my own in attempting to discover what authors and books to read, my choice would often be made after I saw that someone had signed a petition—especially during and after May 1968. That’s how I came to buy Duras’s Destroy, She Said in 1969 when it first appeared between what seemed to me to be the magical covers of the Éditions de Minuit. That’s how, a bit later, I became fascinated by Beauvoir’s memoirs.) So I moved with no transition from the readings of my childhood— I had eagerly read every volume of The Famous Five series published in the Bibliothèque Rose collection before entering high school—to the enthusiastic discovery of contemporary literary and intellectual life. I hid my ignorance, my lack of reading of the classics, the fact that I had read almost nothing that other people my age had already read—War and Peace, Les Misérables, and the like—feigning scorn and disdain towards my peers, taunting them for being conformist. They called me a “snob,” which, obviously, left me overjoyed. I was inventing culture for myself, and at the same time inventing a character and a personality.

  What has become of the person to whom I owe so much? I hadn’t the slightest idea until a few months ago when I did a little research on the internet. We live in the same city, but on different planets. He continued to pursue music and has, it seems, built up a reputation in the world of the French chanson as an arranger of number of successful records. It seems there is nothing to feel regretful about. What would we have had to say to each other once the period of our adolescent friendship had passed? It was a relationship that lasted only three or four years. I imagine it must have been much more significant for me than it was for him.

  The educational choices I made also bear the mark of the deprived social circumstances from which I came. We had access to none of the necessary information regarding which tracks or classes were the preferable ones, had no command of strategies for seeking out prestigious subjects. I headed towards the literary track, whereas the smarter choice would have been a scientific one. (Those were the most sought-after classes at the time, but it is true that I had opted out of math classes just before high school and was drawn towards “literary” topics.) I had been a star student in Ancient Greek in middle school, but I dropped it before high school as well, managing to convince myself it served no purpose—but mainly because the boy I was just speaking about had decided to drop it, and I always conformed to his judgments regarding what to do or not to do—mostly because I wanted to be in the same class with him. I continued only with Latin, whose interest also seemed less and less obvious to me. And I chose Spanish as my second modern language instead of German, although in this case I did the opposite of what my “guide” did. German tended to be the choice of children from bourgeois families or whose parents worked in intellectual professions. The Spanish class gathered together the weakest students in the school, at least from an intellectual point of view, and also all the students from less privileged class backgrounds—these two characteristics being statistically linked—and so my choice, which really wasn’t a choice, was in some way the prefiguration of a more or less direct long-term process of scholarly elimination, or else an assignment to one of those educational tracks born out of an effort at “democratization,” tracks that served as a kind of educati
onal dumping ground, making crystal clear that that so-called “democratization” of education was to a large extent illusory. I understood nothing of all this, of course, and simply followed my likes and my dislikes. I was drawn to the south, to Spain, and I wanted to learn Spanish. (As my mother recently reminded me, when I made fun of her biological fantasies regarding Andalusia: “But you know that you also talked about Spain all the time when you were little, and you had never been there. There must be a reason for it.”) I detested Germany, and the German language. I found them repulsive. In this regard I was a Nietzschean before ever reading Nietzsche. I am thinking of Ecce Homo and The Case of Wagner in particular, where one finds the Mediterranean as a frame of reference: warmth against cold, lightness against heaviness, liveliness against seriousness, the joy of noon against the sadness of night. I believed I was making a choice, whereas in reality I was being chosen, or perhaps captured by what lay in wait for me. This was something I only realized when a literature teacher who showed some concern for my academic success pointed out to me that the choice of Spanish placed me in a lower track and obliged me to sit and vegetate among the worst students in the school. In any case, I figured it out soon enough: I was on the track followed by those who most resembled me socially, not the one followed by those whom I resembled intellectually. (What this reveals is that a child from the lower classes, even when he or she is an excellent student, is highly likely to make wrong turns and end up following the wrong educational path, which means always being shunted aside from, always being placed below, the tracks that represent high achievement, be it social or educational.)

  So I came to my final year in high school in the literary track. Philosophy was one of the subjects, but the instruction I received turned out to be, alas, ineffectual, even ridiculous. The teacher may have been young (he had just passed the exam for his teaching certificate), but he was uninspired, and dealt with the topics on the program by dictating to us a lesson carefully divided up into paragraphs: “Subpoint number one, Bergson’s thesis. Subpoint number two, the thesis of …” On each topic he read us his note cards and offered insipid summaries of doctrines and of works that he probably only knew himself thanks to his reading of textbooks that covered them. Nothing was questioned critically; no problems were posed; there was nothing at stake. What he taught was without interest, and so no one took an interest in it. The books he liked and recommended to his students were ridiculous. (He lent a certain number of us Louis Pauwels’s The Morning of the Magicians, and other nonsense of this nature!) I was keen to be introduced to critical thought, to theoretical reflection. His flat and routinized pedagogy acted like a bucket of cold water on my budding enthusiasm. It would have turned anyone away from philosophy. I never had the good fortune of coming into contact with one of those people whose teaching electrifies the classroom, a teacher you remember for the rest of your life, who introduces you to authors whose entire works you then immediately devour. No, he offered nothing except a colorless kind of boredom, and I skipped as many classes as I could get away with. For me, philosophy was Marxism and the authors Marx cited. By reading Marx I became passionate about the history of philosophical thought. I read an enormous amount, with the result that I ended up doing extremely well in philosophy on the Baccalaureate exam. The same was true in other subjects. (On the history exam, I was questioned about Stalin. As a Trotskyite, I knew everything there was to know.) I passed the whole exam without any problem. It was even easy. For my parents this was an unbelievable event. They were stunned.

  When I went to enroll in the humanities and social sciences division at the university, I was torn between choosing English and Philosophy as my subject. I chose Philosophy, which seemed to me a better match with the image I had of myself, and which would henceforth be central to my life and to the shape of the person I would become. In any case, I took a lot of satisfaction from the choice I made. It gave me a kind of naive happiness to now be someone who was “studying philosophy.” I had no knowledge of the existence of the prestigious Grandes Écoles in Paris, with their competitive entrance exams, nor of the preparatory courses for them, called hypokhâgnes and khâgnes. In my final year in high school, I didn’t even know such things existed. It is not just access to these institutions that was, and still is (perhaps to an ever greater extent) reserved for students from the privileged classes. The simple knowledge that such possibilities exist is even unavailable to many, with the result that I never even considered them as a possibility. When, already enrolled at the university, I did finally hear people talking about these kinds of possibilities, it seemed to me—how naive I was!—that I was in a better position than anyone who would have chosen to continue studying within the confines of a high school—what a strange idea it seemed—after they had already passed the Baccalaureate exam, instead of immediately “going to university.” That seemed to me the most obvious aspiration for any serious student. Here again we can observe how a simple lack of knowledge regarding the hierarchical structure of educational institutions and a lack of understanding of how processes of selection operate might lead someone to make counterproductive choices, to choose paths that lead nowhere, nonetheless imagining they are lucky to have gotten to a place in which people who know what they are doing would be sure never to end up. This is how people from less advantaged classes end up believing that they are gaining access to what has previously been denied to them, whereas in reality, once they have that access, it turns out to mean very little, because the system has evolved and the important and valuable place to be has now shifted somewhere else. The process of being pushed out or excluded may here be happening more slowly, or happening at a later date, but the division between those in dominant positions and those in dominated ones remains intact. It reproduces itself by changing location. This is what Bourdieu calls the “displacement [translation] of the structure.”9 What has been labeled a “democratization” is really a displacement in which, despite all appearances, the structure perpetuates itself, maintains itself with almost the same rigidity as in the past.

  3

  One day, around the time I started attending university, my mother said to me, and in a tone of voice that indicated that she had thought over carefully what she was going to say: “We can afford to pay for two years of college. After that you’ll have to work. Two years is a good long time.” In her eyes (as in my father’s) it was an amazing privilege for someone to be able to continue studying at the university level up to the age of twenty. I was myself still mostly unaware that literary studies in a provincial university could be nothing more—or barely anything more—than a dead end. But I did know that two years was too short to lead to anything professional, since it took three years to get your licence and four for a maîtrise. I was captivated just by the names of these diplomas, having no idea that they were already starting to lose most of their value. Still, given that I wanted to become a high school teacher, I had to obtain them before I could sit for the recruitment exams for high school teachers: the CAPES, and then the agrégation. On top of that, I couldn’t imagine leaving the university behind so quickly because I was so passionate about philosophy. Not, of course, the old fashioned, soporific philosophy I had been being taught, but rather the philosophy I had started teaching myself around that time, which is to say mostly Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. I was also fascinated by humanist Marxists from Eastern Europe, especially Karel Kosík, whose Dialectics of the Concrete I found especially beguiling. I remember absolutely nothing about the book now, except that I was so taken with it that I read it several times from cover to cover in the space of a few years. I also admired the early Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness (while reviling the later Lukács of the 1950s, because of his Stalinist attacks on Sartre and existentialism in The Destruction of Reason), Karl Korsch and a number of other authors who supported an open, non-dogmatic form of Marxism. Another example was Lucien Goldmann, a sociologist who is mostly—and perhaps unjustly—forgotten these days, but who was ex
tremely important at the time, and whose books, The Hidden God and The Human Sciences and Philosophy, I took to be masterpieces in the sociology of cultural works. I would pepper the papers I wrote with references to these authors, which must have seemed a bit odd to the reactionary professors for whom I was writing (two of whom had just coauthored a book titled The Crime of Abortion). They all were convinced, as one of them told me, that I was far and away the best student they had ever had, but they would inevitably return my papers to me with a score of 10 out of 20, even while praising the “originality of my thought.” Time after time, it was a 10. They would occasionally bring themselves to give me a 12 when I played by their rules, more or less successfully, citing Lavelle, Nédoncelle, Le Senne, or some other author they were fond of. It was only in papers on the history of philosophy that I could really excel, even if it always seemed to my teachers that my version of Plato or of Kant was too much under the influence of the set of thinkers I was so enthusiastic about at the time.