Returning to Reims

by Didier Eribon

  Anyone who stumbled into this philosophy department, a place of demoralizing torpor and paralysis (different from the excitement that could be found in other areas of the same university), would find themselves in a universe closed in upon itself, one from which all the sounds and colors of the outside world had been banished. Time had ground to a halt, frozen for all eternity: here, May 1968 had never happened, nor any of the critical social and political thinking that had accompanied the important uprising of that moment. I had been hoping to discover past and present forms of thought in their relation to the world around me, and yet here we were, stuck writing tedious and redundant summaries of authors and texts that we would have been better off reading on our own; we would have understood better what they said and what could be done with them than did those who were being paid to teach them to us. It was intellectual pedantry at its worst. This was a time when new universities were being established or others were expanding all over France, and it seems likely to me that the standards used in appointing “teachers” (if they deserved to be called that) might have been a bit lax. It turned out to be a bad strategy for retaining students. They left in droves as the months went by; the wave of desertions was so strong that I almost got caught up in it at the end of my first year. And indeed this might be seen simply as an amplification of a more general phenomenon, to the extent that the same fate was lying in wait for a good portion of all the students from the poorer classes in any discipline who had managed to hold on for this long. Once the structure provided by high school was no longer in place, they were left on their own to organize their work habits, and they often didn’t manage to establish good ones. In the absence of any pressure from their families to continue—indeed the pressure was more likely in the opposite direction—the system of elimination quickly set itself in motion yet again, this time making use of the centrifugal forces of loss of interest and of capitulation.

  I was having a hard time finding my feet: at the end of the first year I only barely managed to pass my exams, and that was on the second try, in early September. But that experience woke me up a bit, so I decided to persevere. Even so, I liked to imagine that what I felt towards certain of my professors, the ones I was just speaking about, caricatural incarnations of a certain kind of academic mediocrity, must have been something like what Paul Nizan describes feeling for his professors at the Sorbonne in the 1920s and 1930s: anger in the face of the “watch dogs” of the bourgeoisie.10 Yet in point of fact the two situations were not at all similar. The philosophers Nizan was taking on so mercilessly were all brilliant thinkers and eminent professors. They were teaching young people from the dominant social classes, and working diligently to justify for them a vision of the world favorable to the maintenance of the established order. As for my own professors, they were talentless tutors of a kind of culture they did their best to render useless, emptying it of any substance; they were utterly inept at preserving anything; they conveyed nothing to any of their students, none of whom, in any case, would ever find themselves in any position of power. They truly gave us nothing! Except, perhaps, by accident and as a reaction against them, a desire in a few of their students to look elsewhere, to read other things.

  Obviously, the components making up my intellectual horizon were mostly beyond the ken of my professors, and this occasionally allowed for some comic moments. There was the day when I mentioned Freud in the course of one of my presentations, causing the objection to be offered that he “reduced everything the level of man’s lowest instincts.” Or there was the time when, after I had made mention of Simone de Beauvoir, this same ultra-Catholic professor, an extremely powerful presence in the philosophy department, interrupted me and curtly interjected: “You seem to be unaware that Mademoiselle de Beauvoir treated her own mother disrespectfully.” I imagine he was alluding to the beautiful A Very Easy Death, in which she recounts both the life and the death of her mother. “Mademoiselle”! I laughed for months each time I thought of this way of referring to her.

  They served us up courses on Plotinus and Maine de Biran (about whom I understood next to nothing, and in whom I had a hard time finding anything interesting), but never on Spinoza, Hegel, or Husserl, who seemed not even to have existed for them. As for “contemporary philosophy,” it never managed to advance beyond existentialism (which was taken up in one quite academic, but well-informed, course on “Bergson and Existentialism,” where the professor demonstrated how much Sartre owed to Bergson’s philosophy). In the four years I spent studying in this department, I never heard mention of Lévi-Strauss, Dumézil, Braudel, Benveniste, Lacan, and so on, even though their importance had been recognized for quite some time. Obviously authors like Althusser, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and Barthes were never even mentioned even though they were all quite famous by now. But that was in Paris and we were in Reims. We may only have been 150 kilometers from the capital, but there was still a huge gulf separating us from intellectual life there, an intellectual life that had been in the process of reinventing itself with varying degrees of intensity ever since the end of the war. I do, of course, fully realize that my youthful philosophical enthusiasms were in fact tied to my provincial situation and my class position. What I experienced as a chosen preference for a certain kind of philosophical thought was really something dictated to me by my social position. Had I been a student in Paris, or at least not so distant from those locations in which new ways of thinking and new kinds of theory were being developed and celebrated, I would have chosen Althusser, Foucault, or Derrida, and not Sartre, whom I would have regarded with disdain. It was only a bit later that I would discover that being disdainful of Sartre was the done thing in Parisian circles, where people preferred Merleau-Ponty, who was taken to be more serious because he hadn’t garnered the same degree of worldly acclaim. (Althusser emphasizes this point in his posthumously published memoirs.) Still, I remain convinced even today that Sartre is a much more powerful and more original thinker than Merleau-Ponty, who was more of a professor, a traditional academic, and whose approach for a long time—until the break between them—owed a great deal to Sartre. More generally, I would have made more of an effort to stay up to date with the most sophisticated of contemporary intellectual developments. But in the time and place where I found myself, Sartre for me had all the answers. As far as I was concerned, it was Saint Sartre. Looking back on this period now, I see no reason to regret my past enthusiasm. I prefer having been a Sartrean to having been an Althusserian. I should add that after a long period in which it seemed I had broken with those early intellectual loves of mine, my “existentialist” leanings would return as I formulated my own projects—in which references to Sartre’s thought would intermingle and coalesce with references to my later readings in Foucault and Bourdieu.

  Yet if I wanted to go on pursuing my interest in this thinker whom I found so captivating, I was going to have to earn a living. Many students had to find some kind of work to support themselves while they pursued their studies. I had no choice but to resign myself to doing the same if I wished to avoid having my aspirations toward an intellectual life crash into the wall represented by economic reality—a reality my family reminded me of nearly every day.

  But then a roll of the dice came along to abolish that necessity. I’m not sure how I learned of this opportunity nor how I convinced myself I should try my luck, but in any case, at the end of my second year at university, I signed up for, and managed to pass, the IPES exam. (I think, though I am not certain, that it stood for Institut pédagogique de l’enseignement secondaire— the Pedagogical Institute for Secondary School Teaching.) The written portion of the exam was made up of an essay on a general topic and a commentary on a specific text. I have no recollection today as to what the topic of the essay was. I remember the commentary was on an excerpt from Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation. I had just read a number of books on Nietzsche that dealt with his relation to Schopenhauer, and, armed with this reading, I had no prob
lem writing brilliantly on the assigned passage. The other candidates, who were probably disconcerted by the strangeness and the difficulty of the passage, had a harder time with it. When the results were posted, I was overjoyed to see that there was only one name on the list of people who had been passed on to the oral portion of the exam: mine. As the only one left in contention, I still had to pass two oral exams, but I was nearly there. At the orals, my mark in sociology was barely average, but in foreign languages—I had chosen English—I was able to translate a text by Marcuse perfectly and my commentary on it—in which I compared his idea of the “atomization” of individuals to Sartre’s concept of seriality—won high praise from the woman from the English Department who was my examiner and who gave me a very high mark. I had successfully jumped the hurdle and was poised to become a “student-teacher”: I would be paid a stipend for two years, or even three if I managed to get a high enough mark on my master’s thesis (which I did). The most surprising thing about all of this was that nothing was to be demanded of me in return during the years I was studying. The only obligation was that I work in secondary education for ten years after passing the two recruitment exams (the CAPES and the agrégation). But at the time there were so few jobs on offer (I sat for the agrégation twice: the first time there were 16 openings, and the second time 14, whereas over one thousand people were taking the exam), that I had no chance of passing. To have had any chance of passing—and it’s no different today, or the situation may even be more extreme—you would have needed to go to all the best schools, which would have involved taking the right preparatory courses so that you could get into the Écoles Normales Supérieures. My failure was a foregone conclusion. But this was something I would only learn much later. For the moment, all that counted was my new status and the happiness it gave me: I was going to be paid so I could devote myself to my studies.

  I opened a bank account and, as soon as it had money in it, I took a room near the center of town. My parents were not pleased about this. They would have preferred that I continue living with them and that I “hand over my pay.” Up to this point in time, they had supported me, and it was difficult for my mother to accept and to understand why I would leave home the very day that I began earning my own keep, instead of beginning to help them in my turn. This whole situation must have been disturbing for her, and she surely hesitated about what course of action to take. Even though I was still a minor at the time (you only became an adult at 21), in the end she gave in and did nothing to stop me moving out. Not long thereafter I decided to move to Paris. I was 20 years old, and it was like a dream come true. Fascinated by Beauvoir’s memoirs and everything she described in them, I wanted to see all the places she and her friends went to, the streets she spoke of, the neighborhoods she described. Today I know that I was caught up in imagining a world of legend, a world that was somewhat mythological. Still, it was a marvelous myth to me, and I was hypnotized by it. These were really years in which intellectual life, and the way it was caught up in political, social and cultural life, exercised a magnetic pull; it made you want to be part of this world of thought. People admired the major figures of the intellectual world; they identified with them, and were eager to take part in the creative activity around them. People imagined their future self as an intellectual figure, someone who wrote books, and who exchanged ideas with others during heated discussions, someone who intervened in political matters in ways that were both practical and theoretical. I could say that the two big reasons I had for wanting to move to Paris were Simone de Beauvoir’s books and my desire to live freely as a gay man.

  I was still enrolled in the university in Reims, because my stipend was being paid to me by its administration. This meant I came back almost every week for classes, or just to meet attendance requirements. I did my Masters degree there, writing an essay on “Self and Other in French Existentialism,” in which I dealt with Sartre’s early works, up to Being and Nothingness, and with their relation to Husserl and to Heidegger. I haven’t kept a copy of the thesis, and have only the vaguest of recollections of what I said in it. I do remember that at the end of the introduction, I attacked Structuralism, specifically Lévi-Strauss and the Foucault of The Order of Things, whose major error was, as I saw it in those days, that they “denied history.” I hadn’t read either of them; I simply rehashed all the commonplace attacks being made against them in those days by the Marxist writers who constituted my frame of reference, especially Lucien Goldmann and, above all, Sartre, who never stopped reasserting the freedom of the subject in the face of structuralist thought, although he started calling what he was defending “praxis” in his texts from the 1960s. He was endeavoring to rework (and thereby to preserve) the philosophical principles he had defined in Being and Nothingness, reconciling them with his later allegiance to Marxism, trying to make a place for forms of historical determinism while maintaining the ontological idea of the fundamental wrenching free of consciousness—his word was “nihilation” [néantisation]—from the weight of history and from the logic of systems, from rules and from structures.

  I was awarded my degree with honors, and thanks to the extra year of IPES funding that I thereby obtained, I left this university behind (it really was, at the time, third rate), enrolling for an advanced degree (a DEA, diplôme d’études approfondies) at the Sorbonne (Paris-I), while also studying for the agrégation. For reasons that now escape me, I was no longer required to be enrolled in Reims, even though the administration there still paid me my stipend. Perhaps this was because the DEA was considered to be the first year of thesis writing and so it was no longer deemed necessary to adhere to one’s geographical assignments on the “academic map.” I had already been living in Paris for two years, and now I would finally also be a student in Paris! Reims was behind me. I had no reason to be going back there, so I didn’t. My life was in Paris, and I was happy there. At the Sorbonne, my professors were good ones, excellent and even inspiring. The difference between the Sorbonne and Reims was the difference between night and day. I would attend courses given by a number of these professors for two or three years. You might say that this was actually the moment when I became a student of philosophy. I had a lot of catching up to do—as was made clear to me each day as I compared myself to the students sitting next to me in the lecture halls. I therefore spent my time reading. One might say I was finally getting a philosophical education that had been long postponed. I threw myself into it body and soul: Plato, Descartes, and Kant took on a new light for me, and I was finally able to study Spinoza and Hegel in a serious way.

  My DEA was a success. I wrote on Nietzsche and language. (What did I say? I have no idea. I don’t think I kept a copy.) And, of course, I failed the agrégation, as anyone could have predicted. I wasn’t too upset, since I hadn’t really expected to pass. I had understood that I wasn’t at the level required for a competitive exam like that.

  I enrolled to begin working on a thesis. My topic had to do with philosophies of history from Hegel to Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason. It didn’t occur to me to extend my topic far enough to include Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, which had just appeared. I had no desire to read it. It didn’t even cross my mind that I might do so. I would discover the emerging work of Pierre Bourdieu a little bit after this, and only then would I discover Foucault’s work, which was already quite well established. My theoretical universe would be turned upside down. The result would be that Sartre was pushed into a back corner of my brain. It would only be fifteen years later that he would reemerge from the purgatory to which I had consigned him in my mind.

  But if I wanted to be able to write my thesis and to make another attempt at the agrégation, I was going to have to find a job. After failing the agrégation exam the first time, at the end of the year in which I completed my DEA, my status changed. I would no longer be receiving a stipend, so I would need to figure out how to earn some money. I began working as a night watchman several times a week at a hotel in the
rue de Rennes. (I finished my shift at 8 a.m. and would go directly to class at the Sorbonne, before going home to sleep in the afternoon. It was exhausting, and I only managed to keep it up for a few months.) Then I found work in the evenings, from 6 p.m. to midnight, in a nearby suburb. I kept an eye on computers. In those days they looked like tall metal cabinets, and I was in charge of backing up the data that churned through these machines by recording it on magnetic tapes the size of movie reels. At midnight I would run to the train station to catch the last train back to Paris. The work was totally without interest, but at least it left me time to read, and I devoted the time I was shut up in that office to the intensive study of the authors on my program. (In my mind’s eye I can see myself spending entire evenings reading Descartes and Leibniz.) When, even though I did pretty well on the written portion of the agrégation, I nonetheless failed it for a second time, I became a bit desperate. I had gotten my hopes up and had put a lot of energy into my preparations for the exam. I had also invested a huge amount of time and energy into the idea of becoming a high school teacher, and now it had come to nothing. The national education system had turned me down. They were also unable to find me a position as a substitute (with no security of employment), which meant that I was no longer under any obligation to spend ten years working as a teacher. But I also didn’t have the necessary means to keep pursuing my studies in the hopes of a university career. I had come to understand how obvious it was that only the “inheritors,” people coming from certain kinds of social and economic privilege, could truly count on taking up such a career. I had run away from the place I came from, but now my origins caught up with me: I was going to have to give up my thesis, my intellectual ambitions, and all the illusions on which they were based. The truth that I had been trying to deny about what I was had reasserted itself and was imposing its consequences: I had to find a real job. But how? And what kind of job? We can see here how the value a diploma actually has is tightly correlated to the social position of the person to whom it belongs: my DEA had not been a gateway to a thesis for me, as it would have been for others. This was because you needed to have money to live on while you wrote a thesis. (Without it, you might stubbornly hold on to the idea that you were writing a thesis until the moment came when you finally had to admit the obvious: you hadn’t been able to write a thing because you were too busy working and had no energy left for anything else.) On top of that, and here I’m simply pointing out something so obvious that there’s no need to spend much time proving it, such a diploma does not have the same worth, will not open the same doors, for people who lack social capital or for people who don’t possess the information that is needed to strategize about how to convert the diploma into a professional possibility. In these kinds of situations, help from families, relatives, friendship networks, and the like all contribute to the value a diploma is able to have when you are looking for a job. As far as social capital is concerned, it has to be said that I really didn’t have much. Or, to be absolutely precise, I didn’t have any. And as for strategic information: none of that either. Taken altogether, this meant my diploma was worth nothing, or next to nothing.