Returning to Reims

by Didier Eribon

  There was a common thread to these abandoned projects: in both cases my interest was captured by gay history and gay subjectivity. It seems bizarre now that I never had the idea to compose a story about social class—one that would, for example, take as a point of departure the path followed by a child of the working classes who leaves his family behind, a story whose framework would have allowed me to reconstruct the life of two or three generations, showing what elements divide them, and what other elements nonetheless hold them together. As it was, I didn’t pursue my incursions into fictional realms any further; instead, I turned to a kind of writing that had been beckoning to me for a long time, and that I had put off for too long. I began writing about intellectual life and about the history of ideas. I started with two book-length interviews, one with Georges Dumézil and the other with Claude Lévi-Strauss. My first steps were thus an extension of my activity as a journalist, but the move to book-length projects changed everything. As I was working on the first of these books, in 1986, Dumézil suggested that I write a biography of Foucault, who had died two years earlier. Dumézil was an enormous help in the early stages of that project, providing me with a good deal of information as well as many documents before he too died. For me, the biography was a way of paying homage to Foucault at a time when both his name and his work were being regularly defamed and insulted by the various neoconservative squadrons that had taken over one by one all the major public forums, which led them to believe that the whole world shared their ideology and their sense of who was anathema. They even declared that a new “paradigm” now governed the social sciences (whereas what was happening was simply that they were attempting a kind of coup de force). My biography of Foucault was an ambitious book and a contrarian one. It was also a big success. I believe that it played an important role in helping build the resistance that was just starting to reveal itself in public circles to the ideological counterrevolution that was thriving at the time. It was quickly translated and published in a good number of other countries, which meant I began receiving invitations to take part in conferences, to deliver lectures, and so on. Little by little, the world of journalism began to leave me behind, or rather I left it. I would, of course, continue to publish a few articles each year and to conduct a few interviews, but they were less and less frequent and almost all of my time was now spent working on books and participating in activities at various universities in other countries. I had changed professions. My new life brought me into contact with authors and works that were reshaping the intellectual landscape, especially in the way that they were taking up questions previously neglected as subjects of research. I very much wanted to be a part of this movement, and so began writing more theoretically inclined kinds of work. The first to appear was Insult and the Making of the Gay Self, followed by Une morale du minoritaire [A minoritarian morality].

  It had taken me some time to begin thinking in my own name. It is not at all obvious that someone would feel such an activity to be a legitimate one for them, especially if all their past has not already provided this legitimation, or if it has not come from the social world, or from various institutions in it. Whatever crazy dreams I had entertained in earlier years, it was not easy for me to feel that I had the aptitude—that I was socially authorized—to write books, especially books of theory. Dreams are one thing, but reality is another. To make the two coincide requires a certain kind of stubbornness; but even more than that, it requires the right circumstances. When I was growing up at home, there were no books. It was the opposite of what Sartre describes in The Words, his autobiographical text about his childhood, where his goal is to reconstruct the history of a “vocation,” or even of a “mission,” which is to say a kind of social predestination to become part of literary and philosophical life. I was not “summoned” in this way.1 The act of writing was not, for me, the sign of a future calling already being foreshadowed in the games of my childhood, in youthful verbal exploits that would be performed in front of astonished adults, adults who would be amazed by my precocious linguistic abilities, exploits that would be taken as signs of what would naturally come to fruition when the time was right. Quite the opposite, in fact. Another destiny had been laid out for me: that of being obliged to constrain my desires to fit within my limited set of social possibilities. For me it was thus a great struggle—and in the first instance a struggle with myself—to be granted certain possibilities and to be accorded certain rights that other people take for granted. I had to feel my way tentatively along pathways that for more privileged individuals had seemed wide open. Sometimes I had to find different paths to follow since the preexisting ones turned out not to be open to people like me. The new status that I found myself accorded in the mid-1990s and the new international environment in which I then found myself moving, played for me, somewhat late in the game, the role that a class habitus or an educational trajectory through a set of prestigious institutions would have played for other people at an earlier stage in their lives.

  I thus spent a lot of time traveling, in Europe, in Latin America, and especially in the United States. I gave lectures in Chicago, I spoke at conferences in New York or at Harvard, I taught at Berkeley, I spent time at Princeton …

  Yale University awarded me a prize. The work I had done on intellectual history, on homosexuality, on minoritarian subjectivities, had thus led me to a place that was nearly unimaginable for someone with my class origins on the lowest rungs on the social ladder. It wasn’t just that the place I now found myself in was nearly unimaginable; in fact it was a place I had had almost no chance of attaining.

  2

  As part of the award ceremony for the prize from Yale, I was asked to deliver a somewhat formal lecture. When they requested that I provide a title for the lecture and a short description, I decided I would reread in a critical fashion the books that had made it possible for me to be awarded this prize and to take part in this ceremony. My idea was to think about the manner in which we retrospectively construct our pasts using the theoretical and political categories that are made available to us by the social world in which we live. I began by describing the death of my father, the day I spent with my mother going through boxes of old photos, my rediscovery, of which each photo was a reminder, of the universe I had lived in back then. After having described my childhood as the son of a worker, I posed the question as to why it had never occurred to me to think about that history, why I had never wanted to do so, why I had never taken that history as a point of departure for some project of reflection. I cited a passage from an interview with Annie Ernaux that I had found very moving: in it, she was asked about the influence Bourdieu had had on her work, and she tells of a moment when she was quite young and taking her very first steps in the world of literature, a moment at which she noted in her journal (in 1962): “I will avenge my race!” What she meant by that, she goes on to say, is that she would avenge the world from which she came, the world of the dominated. She was still unsure what form would be best suited to carrying out this project. But she adds that a few years later when she was still “caught up in the wake of 68,” she made “the discovery of The Inheritors [a book by Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron on the French educational system].” This was “a time when [she] was having some difficulties both personally and as a teacher,” and her discovery of this book constituted “a secret injunction,” an injunction to “dive” deeply into her memory in order to “write about the wrenching nature of upward social mobility, the shame involved, etc.”

  Like her, I had felt a need, within the context of a political movement and its accompanying theoretical effervescence, to “dive” into my memory and to write in order to “avenge my race.” But for me the “race” had been a different one, and so the memories I chose to explore were also different. Collective movements provide individuals with the means to constitute themselves as political subjects, and in so doing, they furnish a certain set of categories for self-perception. The frames of reference that they pr
ovide for reading yourself apply both to the present and to the past. Theoretical and political schemas both precede and have an effect on the way we think about ourselves; they create the possibility for a memory that is both individual and collective: when we look back at the past in order to think about processes of domination and subjection, we do so from the point of view of contemporary politics. The same is the case when we think about the kinds of self-reformulation we have undergone, produced by projects of resistance that may have had a self-conscious element to them, or may simply have been the result of the practices that make up our daily lives. Such political frameworks of memory define to a great extent the child one was or the childhood one had.

  And yet (and this is a point Halbwachs had already called our attention to), even if it is true that collective memory—the memory of the group to which one belongs or with which one identifies and therefore helps to make exist—is one of the necessary conditions for the existence of individual memory, it is also true that each individual is a member of multiple groups, either simultaneously or in succession.2 Sometimes these groups overlap; they are always evolving and forever transforming themselves. So “collective memory” and, along with it, individual memories and the pasts of different individuals, are not only plural, they are also changeable. They are elaborated in spaces and temporalities that are multiple and heterogeneous and that it would be pointless to try to unify or to place into some kind of hierarchical structure in order to determine which ones are important and which ones are not. After all, Annie Ernaux’s first book, Cleaned Out, published in 1974, describes not only the social world of her childhood and adolescence. It also tells of a young woman of 20 going through the traumatic experience of a clandestine abortion.3 And when she returns much later, in Les Années [The years], to the moment in which she launched her writing career in order to recuperate everything that she had “repressed as shameful,” everything that was becoming “worthy of rediscovery,” she insists on the extent to which that kind of “memory that takes away humiliation” had laid out for her a future that was as much political as literary and intellectual. In the course of that future she would prove capable of reappropriating different stages in her life’s trajectory, different dimensions that were all constitutive of her personality: “To struggle for a woman’s abortion rights, to struggle against social injustice, and to understand how she became the woman she was were all one and the same thing for her.”4

  During the period of the 1960s and 1970s, when I was a student and when Marxism dominated French intellectual life, at least on the left, all other forms of “struggle” seemed “secondary”—or they might even be denounced as “petite bourgeois distractions” from the place where attention should be focused, the only “true” struggle, the only struggle worthy of interest, that of the working class. Movements that came to be labeled as “cultural” were focusing their attention on various dimensions that Marxism had set aside: gendered, sexual, and racial forms of subjectivation, among others. Because Marxism’s attention was so exclusively concentrated on class oppression, these other movements were required to find other avenues for problematizing lived experience, and they often ended up to a great extent neglecting class oppression.

  As we think back over the struggle that was necessary to overcome Marxism’s practice of censoring or of excluding a whole set of issues that included gender and sexuality from the very field of perception of political and theoretical problems, was it inevitable that the only way to win this struggle was in turn to censor or to repress that which Marxism had accustomed us to “perceive” as the only form of domination? Was it the case that the disappearance of Marxism, or at least the way it was expunged as a hegemonic discourse on the left, was a necessary condition for the possibility of thinking politically about the mechanisms of sexual, racial, and other forms of subjection, about the production of minoritarian subjectivities? The answer is probably yes.

  But why should we be obliged to choose between different struggles being fought against different kinds of domination? If it is the nature of our being that we are situated at the intersection of several collective determinations, and therefore of several “identities,” of several forms of subjection, why should it be necessary to set up one of them rather than another as the central focus of political preoccupation—even if we are aware that any movement will have a tendency to posit the principal division of the social world specific to it as the one that must take priority? If we are shaped as political subjects by discourses and by theories, should it not be incumbent upon us to construct discourses and theories that allow us not to neglect this or that aspect, not to exclude any form of oppression, any register of domination, any form of inferiorization, any form of shame that is linked to some kind of practice of insult from the range of what is considered political, or from what can be actively addressed? Shouldn’t we have theories that allow us to be ready to welcome any new movement that would want to introduce new problems into the political discussion, voices that have not yet been heard, that are somehow unexpected?5

  This lecture at Yale represented quite an ordeal for me, by which I mean, among other things, that it constituted a key moment in a process of initiation. No sooner had I delivered the lecture than I felt compelled to return to a book project I had begun shortly after my father’s death, picking up where I had left off a manuscript to which I had tentatively given the title Returning to Reims. It was a project I had abandoned after only a very few weeks; continuing with it had seemed utterly impossible to me. But now I began in a frenzied way to read everything I could find related to the themes involved. I understood that a project like this—to write about a “return”—could only succeed if it was mediated by, or perhaps filtered through, a wide set of cultural references: literary, theoretical, political, and so on. Such references help push your thinking along, they help you formulate what you have to say. But most importantly, they permit you to neutralize the emotional charge that might otherwise be too strong if you had to confront the “real” without the help of an intervening screen. I did promise myself that it would be only after I had finished writing my final chapter that I would read the novel by Raymond Williams, Border Country. Something in me warned me it might exercise too much influence over my project, and so I waited. I’ve just finished reading it now, as I write these final pages. Its “plot” begins when a professor from a London university learns that his father has just had a heart attack and only has a short while to live. He quickly boards a train. The story then jumps back in time and we watch all the stages in a life’s itinerary slowly unfold, from a working class childhood in Wales to the moment when he returns to his family just before their impending bereavement. In between, we read of the distance that grows up between him and the world of his childhood, the unease and the shame that are the inevitable consequences of this distance, and the obligation he feels, once he has “returned,” to relive in his mind his whole childhood and adolescence. At the heart of the story is, of course, his departure for university, made possible thanks to the support of his parents, who also understand that one result of all their efforts and all their sacrifices will be a separation between them and their son. On the final page of the book, the main character understands that “going back” isn’t really possible. It isn’t possible to tear down the barriers that the years have built up. The most one can hope for, he reflects, when one tries to bring the past and the present back in touch with each other, is some kind of reconciliation with oneself and with the world that has been left behind. He somberly states that for him, “the distance is measured,” and “the feeling of exile” is “ending.” He declares that “by measuring the distance, we come home.”6

  Is he right or is he wrong? I remain unable to decide. What I do know is that when I got to the end of the novel, to the moment when the son learns that his father has died, the father with whom he has just barely had the time to reestablish a relationship of affection, a relationship that had either disapp
eared or been forgotten, I felt tears well up in my eyes. Was I about to cry? If so, over what? Over whom? The characters in the novel? My own father? I thought of him with a sense of heartache, and regretted that I hadn’t gone to see him, that I hadn’t tried to understand him, that I hadn’t at some point tried to talk to him again. I regretted the fact that I had allowed the violence of the social world to triumph over me, as it had triumphed over him.

  A few years earlier, finding myself once again in a situation where I had no steady and reliable source of income, it had seemed logical for me to take the necessary steps to find my way into the world of the French university. My books and my teaching in universities in the United States gave me the right to knock on that door. So it happened that after a long detour, I found myself once again in those very spaces that I had had to leave at the end of the 1970s, when I lacked the social competences necessary to survive there. Now I am a professor. When I told my mother I had been offered a university position, she asked me, deeply moved by the news:

  “What will you be teaching? Philosophy?”