I discovered in the short book that Pierre Bourdieu finished and sent to his German publisher a month before his death, Sketch for a Self-Analysis, a kind of blown-up image of what I had lived through. He portrays himself in that book as a pre-teenager and then a teenager “always in a state of revolt close to a kind of delinquency,” and he describes the “clashes with school discipline” that ceaselessly produced in him an attitude of “stubborn fury” that nearly got him expelled from school just prior to the Baccalaureate examination. Yet at the same time, he was an exceptional student, devoted to his studies, spending hours quietly reading, shutting out all the commotion he regularly helped produce and the rows that he often provoked.1
Unfortunately, Bourdieu doesn’t here push his self-analysis as far as he should have. He warns us on the first page of the book that, as a way of helping the reader understand him and his work, he will present the kinds of material “pertinent from the point of view of sociology … and only those.” Yet we might wonder how he is able to decide for his readers which are the elements they need in order to grasp the dispositions and the principles that presided over the birth of his intellectual project and the development of his thought. Moreover, it is hard not to have the impression that the elements he foregrounds in writing of his youth, and his way of foregrounding them, belong more to the register of psychology than to that of sociology; it is as if he had wanted to describe the traits that made up his (difficult) personal character and not the logic of the social forces that acted on him as an individual. His writing is too reserved, too diffident—and doubtless the main function of his opening remark is to justify his caution and his parsimoniousness. He doesn’t dare reveal himself any more fully, providing only fragmentary information and most certainly neglecting many key aspects. He leaves out more than he reveals.
For example, he does not explain how he managed to deal with the tension or the contradiction between his social ineptitude when it came to conforming to the demands of the school environment and his desire to learn and to succeed; nor does he explain how his desire in the end won out over his ineptitude (obvious traces of this ineptitude remaining visible much later on in his way of conducting his intellectual life, in his evident lack of respect for the rules of bourgeois decorum that reign in university circles and tend to impose themselves on anyone who does not wish to be excluded from the “scholarly community,” rules that insist that people follow established norms regarding “intellectual debate” when what is at stake clearly has to do with a political struggle). He doesn’t explain how he overcame all these difficulties and managed to survive in a universe that everything he was encouraged him to reject, even as he wanted nothing more than to remain in it. (For instance, he describes himself as “paradoxically so well adapted to the boarding school world which I so profoundly detested.”2) It was this ambivalence that allowed him to become what he became and that inspired his entire intellectual project, as well as the approach he would take in the future: a rebellion—a “stubborn fury”—that continued in and through the production of knowledge. It is what Foucault, for his part, would call “intentional intractability” [l’indocilité réfléchie].
He doesn’t mention any of the books he read; he tells us nothing about any of the people who were important to him, who gave him a taste for culture or for thought at a moment when he could simply have sunk into a complete repudiation of such things. The value placed on sports and on masculinity in the world of the popular classes, values he admits he fully subscribed to, would have seemed to destine him for just such a repudiation, although he does mention rejecting the anti-intellectualism of those who shared these values with him. And he points out that he watched all those who came from backgrounds similar to his disappear one by one, year after year, from the educational universe.3 How and why did he survive? Is it enough, given that we know who he became, to recount in a few pages towards the end of the volume the scuffles, fights, and similar escapades he was involved in as a young man, opposing them to his equally real taste for study, for reading, for knowledge? If it was meant to be illuminating, then this portrait is incomplete. What about the transformation he went through as the years went by, changing from a child from a village in the Béarn disconcerted by “certain ‘cultural features’ ” that he learned at school, into a student accepted into an elite Parisian preparatory program before being admitted to the École Normale Supérieure on the Rue d’Ulm? And what about the matter of bilingualism (speaking Béarnese with his father and French at school), of the accent he devoted himself to correcting once he had moved to Paris (ashamed both of its class origins and its geographical ones), an accent that would occasionally crop up again here and there in conversation? What about sexuality? Is heterosexuality such a given that there is no point in even mentioning it, in pointing it out, if only in counterpoint to the passing description of a classmate who played the violin and who, because “he was recognized as homosexual,” suffered from endless bullying on the part of the others, who thereby proved they weren’t homosexual? (The story follows the classic opposition between aesthetes and athletes, with the athletes, in Bourdieu’s version of the story, being the same boys he played rugby with and watched slowly being eliminated from the educational system.4)
I cannot help thinking that Bourdieu’s thought and his speech remained, to a large extent, a bit stuck in or determined by those very modes of perception, or, better put, by those same dispositions, long ago deeply inscribed in his very being—especially when, earlier in this same book, he comes close to designating Foucault in a pejorative manner as an “aesthete.” For this is a label that, following the structuring polarities that he himself lays out in his final chapter, would send us back to the opposition between people who are “into sports” and “homosexuals,” between the rugby team and the music lover; it sends us back to a certain social and sexual unconscious. When he had me read the manuscript of this text, I quite openly expressed my astonishment to him about the fact that he hadn’t seen the homophobic nature of this unconscious.5 This is another area in which his self-analysis could have been taken further. He emphasizes in the book, in the passage where he is endeavoring to make explicit how “I situated myself objectively and subjectively in relation to Michel Foucault,” that he shared with him “almost all the pertinent properties,” with a few exceptions: “Almost all —except two, but these, in my view, had very great weight in the constitution of his intellectual project: he came from a well-to-do provincial bourgeois family, and he was homosexual.” Then he adds a third distinguishing feature, which is “the fact that he was and declared himself to be a philosopher,” but this feature, he notes, was perhaps only an “effect of the first two.” Bourdieu seems to me to be right on the mark here. There is no disputing what he says. But the inverse must then also be true: Bourdieu’s choice of sociology, and even the very physiognomy of his work, could well be linked to his class origins and to his sexuality. Support for this could be found in the judgment he offers more generally of philosophy. Taking the side of sociology and of “science” against philosophy, he marshals a whole vocabulary that is structured by an opposition between masculine and feminine—something he should have been conscious of, given his masterful study of these binary oppositions not only in his studies of Kabylia, but also in his study of the academic field and its division into disciplines.6
If I was able in many ways to recognize something of myself in the description Bourdieu offers towards the end of his book of the tension that was so significant in his youth between his sense of not fitting in to the educational system and yet his ever deeper attachment to it, there was a major difference between my path through my high school years and his. Despite a few attempts, in my early days in the world of secondary education, to conform to the model imposed upon me by the values I had incorporated from my social milieu, it didn’t last. I quickly left behind the various kinds of role-playing involved in affirming masculinity (the tendency to pick fights, which really didn
’t suit me, but which I had learned from watching my older brother and, more generally, the other men—and also women—in my family) and began rather to disassociate myself in ever more marked ways from the typical behaviors of young people from the popular classes. You could say that, having started out resembling the troublemakers from Bourdieu’s story who refused to be studious, I would then make a concerted effort to resemble the fellow who played the violin, the “aesthete” who had no interest in being an “athlete,” even if I was still actively involved in sports (although that was something I would soon give up in an effort to correspond more fully to what I wanted to be, even going so far as to regret that I had built up my body instead of letting it remain lanky, puny even, in accordance with the image I now had of what an intellectual’s appearance was and should be). That is to say that I chose culture over popular virile values. A commitment to culture—a vector of “distinction,” which is to say a manner for differentiating yourself from others, of creating distance between yourself and others—often constitutes for a young gay man, especially if he is from the working classes, a mode of subjectivation that allows him to sustain and give meaning to his “difference.” Consequently, it can serve as a way of building a world, of constructing an ethos that is different from the one he inherits from his social circumstances.7
Learning to be studious, to be scholarly, with all that involves, was a slow and chaotic process for me: the discipline required—both of body and of mind—is not something one is born with. It takes time to acquire it if you are not fortunate enough for that acquisition to have been encouraged in you since childhood without you even being aware of it. For me it was a true process of ascesis: a self-education, or more exactly, a reeducation that involved unlearning everything I already was. What was a matter of course for others was something I had to struggle with day after day, month after month, working anew each day to find ways of organizing my time, of using language, of relating to others, that would transform my very person, my habitus. The process would place me in an increasingly awkward position within my family, to which I returned each evening. To put it simply, the relation to oneself that is imposed by scholarly culture turned out to be incompatible with the way people behaved in my world; the educational process succeeded in creating within me, as one of its very conditions of possibility, a break—even a kind of exile—that grew ever more pronounced, and separated me little by little from the world that I came from, the world in which I still lived. Like every situation of exile, my own contained a certain kind of violence. Perhaps I wasn’t aware of it, given that I consented to having it inflicted upon me. In order not to shut myself out of the educational system—or to be expelled from it—I had to shut out my own family, the universe from which I came. There was really no possibility of holding the two worlds together, of belonging in any easy way to both of them. For a number of years I had to shuttle back and forth between two registers, between two universes. A split as agonizing as this one—between the two different persons I had to be, the two roles I had to play, my two social identities, less and less related to each other, less and less compatible with each other—produced in me a level of tension that was difficult to bear and, above all, highly destabilizing.
Attending the main high school in the city brought me into direct contact with the children of the bourgeoisie (and with the sons of the bourgeoisie in particular, since co-education had barely begun at this point in time). The other boys’ ways of talking, the clothes they wore, and above all their familiarity with culture—by which I mean legitimate culture—all reminded me of my status as an intruder, as someone who was clearly out of place. Music class was perhaps the most insidious kind of litmus test, also the most brutal, of one’s mastery of what was understood by “culture”—whether it was something you experienced as self-evident or as utterly foreign to you. The teacher would bring in records, and would play endless excerpts of various pieces to us. Students from bourgeois backgrounds would pretend to be caught up in some kind of inspired reverie. Students from the popular classes would whisper silly comments to each other, or would be unable to restrain themselves from talking out loud, or bursting into laughter. If you were one of those students who found it difficult to conform to the social injunction addressed to you and all the students in it by the educational system, through every bit of its machinery, then everything conspired to implant in you the feeling that you didn’t belong, that this was not your world. In reality, there were only two paths open to me. I could continue to resist in an impulsive, unpremeditated kind of way—a resistance expressed in any number of rebellious attitudes, maladjustments, misfits, dislikes and sniggers, obstinate refusals. I would then find myself quietly kicked out of the system like so many others, because of the way things were set up, even though it would end up seeming to be due to my own behavior. Or I could little by little shape myself to what the school required; I could adapt, accept its demands, and thereby manage to remain within its walls. If I resisted, I was lost. If I gave in, I was saved.
2
During my time in high school, around the age of 13 or 14, I became close friends with a boy in my class who was the son of a college professor. (The local university was brand new at the time.) It would hardly be going too far to say that I was in love with him. I loved him as teenagers do. Yet, both of us being boys, there was no way I could tell him what I felt for him. (This is one of the more traumatizing kinds of difficulties tied to the experience of same-sex attractions during one’s teenage years—or even at other moments in life: not being able to express what you feel for someone of the same sex. It explains why places where gay people can meet—once you find out they exist and once you are old enough to seek them out—take on such importance, for in them the prevailing understanding of how certain kinds of things work is reversed.) I just wrote “there was no way I could tell him what I felt.” Of course that’s true. But even before that, it would have had to be possible for me to express those feelings to myself. I was still too young for that. The whole surrounding cultural universe was organized in such a way (and to a great extent it still is) that people of that age do not have access to references, discourses, images that would allow them to understand and name this particular kind of incredibly intense affective attachment as anything other than “friendship.” One day, our music teacher asked us to try to recognize a piece he was going to play for us. I was flabbergasted when I saw this boy raise his hand after only a few measures and proudly announce, “It’s Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain!” Music class was one I had always found simply ridiculous, focusing on a kind of music I couldn’t bear; I was forever finding ways to make fun of it, but I was also always trying to get this boy to like me, so I was totally thrown off balance by the discovery that he knew something about—that he enjoyed—something that seemed to me simply laughable, an object of scorn. At home, whenever we stumbled on a radio station broadcasting it, we referred to it as “fancy music,” and quickly turned it off, saying “we’re not at church.”
His first name was a fine one, mine banal. That symbolized in some way the social gap that existed between us. He lived with his family in a large house located in a well-to-do neighborhood near the center of town. Whenever I went over to his house I was impressed and intimidated. I worried about him finding out that I lived in a new housing development on the edge of town, which meant I remained evasive whenever he would ask me questions on this subject. But then one day, probably just curious to find out where and how I lived, he came over and rang our doorbell unannounced. However kind a gesture it was, I was mortified, unable to grasp that he might simply have meant to let me know that I had nothing to be ashamed of. He had older brothers and sisters who were students in Paris and so (also because of the family atmosphere in which he was immersed) his conversation was filled with the names of directors and writers: he talked to me about Godard’s films, Beckett’s novels, and the like. I always felt ignorant in his company. He not only taught me about all
these things, he also taught me to want to know about all of them. He fascinated me, and since I wanted to be like him, I too began talking about Godard, having never seen anything of his, and about Beckett, having never read a word. He was obviously a good student, one who never missed a chance to demonstrate a kind of dilettantish distance from the world of education; I tried to play the same game, without, of course, holding the same cards in my hand. I therefore learned how to cheat, pretending to know things I didn’t. The truth didn’t seem important. Appearances were what counted, along with the image I was struggling to construct for myself. I even went so far as to imitate the way he wrote (I mean his actual handwriting), and even today when I form the shapes of certain letters they carry the traces of this past relationship. But in fact, it wasn’t a long one. I soon lost sight of him. It was the late 1960s, and the spirit of the time left a deep stamp on each of us, but a radically different one. He left school well before passing the Baccalaureate exam, and set out “on the road.” He was a big fan of Kerouac’s, loved playing the guitar, and was drawn to hippie culture. As for me, I was marked instead by the events of May 1968, by the political rebellion of that moment: in 1969, when I was barely 16 years old, I became a Trotskyite activist, and that took up most of my time for the next few years. I would remain active until about the age of 20, and this led me to read Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky. For me it was a decisive intellectual experience: it helped me set my sights on philosophy.
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