Returning to Reims

by Didier Eribon

  When I reread these incandescent but painful texts by Foucault, ones that stand at the beginning of his body of work, I recognize something of myself in them: I lived through what he writes about, something he had lived through before I did and was seeking a way to write about. Even today each of these pages provokes an emotional response in me, one arising from the deepest regions of my past; they give me the immediate feeling of an experience that I shared with him. I know how difficult it was for him to overcome these difficulties. He attempted suicide several times and walked a precarious line between sanity and madness for many years. (Althusser gives a superb account of this in his autobiography, speaking of this person whom he knew to be a brother in “suffering.”) If Foucault did manage to work through these difficulties, it was by exiling himself (first to Sweden) and then by the patient effort of calling radically into question the pseudo-scientific discourse of medical pathologization. He set up the cry of Unreason (a category that includes both madness and homosexuality among other kinds of “deviance”) in opposition to the monologue uttered by psychiatry (by which he designates discourse about normal people and normality) as it deals with those it takes as its “objects” and attempts to keep in a subordinated position. All of Foucault’s political effort during this period was organized around a confrontation between exclusion and access to speech, pathologization and protest, subjugation and revolt.

  Madness and Civilization can be read as a major book of intellectual and political resistance, as the insurrection of a subjugated subject against the powers of the norm and of subjection. As his work progressed, across all its many reformulations, Foucault would never stop pursuing this same goal: to think about the confrontation between a subject and the power of the norm, to reflect on the ways in which an existence can be reinvented. It is thus no surprise that his readers connect with his texts on this point (or at least certain of his readers do, since others see nothing more in them than fodder for academic commentary): this is because a certain set of readers feel that the texts are speaking about them, are addressing the rifts and fault lines that traverse them, which is to say the sources of their fragility, but also the sources of the restiveness and insubordination that can be born of these same conditions.

  There’s no doubt that we can include Madness and Civilization in that part of our library that includes books that “call to us,” as Patrick Chamoiseau puts it, books that make up a “library of feelings” and help us to overcome the effects of domination within our own selves.8 We could place it on the shelf next to another great volume whose intention was to contest social and medical ways of regarding deviants and to return to such people, or to offer to them, the status of subjects (rather than objects) of discourse, to make it so that their words could be heard, words that contest and refute what others say of them. I am speaking, of course, of Sartre’s Saint Genet. No doubt there are major differences between the two volumes. In Foucault’s case, the struggle he enters into against psychiatric and psychoanalytic forms of interrogation is a personal struggle; he is dealing with his own experience, and he is affirming his own voice and defending his own life. Sartre, on the other hand, is writing about someone else; he sets out, with all the empathy and enthusiasm that he has at his disposal, to analyze someone else’s trajectory, and to give an account of the mechanisms of domination and the processes of self-invention that are involved in it. Yet these two books, one published in the early 1950s, the other in the early 1960s, are obviously related. (The relation between them might even be called a filiation: I like to imagine that Foucault was deeply marked by his reading of Sartre’s book! How could this not have been the case?) They are linked by a common gesture.

  It was only towards the end of the 1970s that I got to know Foucault’s book (in 1977, I believe). I thus read it after having read Sartre’s (which it seems to me I read in 1974 or 1975). Sartre’s book was thus the first one that counted for me during those years in which books served as a key source of support for the work of self-reinvention and self-reformulation that I was involved in—or, more precisely, for my decision to accept what I was (and therefore, of course, to reappropriate and reformulate what the hostile ambient culture repeatedly told me I was). The decision to accept what I was, to reappropriate what was said about me, changed everything—or nearly everything. It was a decision that I came to slowly; but then, after a long period of hesitation, it became quite urgent to me: a decision not to spend my life suffering from feelings of shame or fear because I was gay. That would have been too difficult, too painful. It can nearly drive people mad (a kind of madness on which psychoanalysts thrive and which they therefore work, perhaps for this very reason, to perpetuate). I had the strength, or the luck (and who knows where it came from) to take this step at a relatively young age (I was 19 or 20), first confiding my “secret” to several friends—who, in any case, had already known or suspected it and couldn’t understand why I hadn’t already spoken to them about it—, and then declaring in a more theatrical and ostentatious manner that it was simply not possible for me to keep this “secret” any longer.

  I might put it this way, taking my inspiration from the metaphoric floral prose of Genet: there comes a moment when, being spat upon, you turn the spit into roses; you turn the verbal attacks into a garland of flowers, into rays of light. There is, in short, a moment when shame turns into pride. This pride is political through and through because it defies the deepest workings of normality and of normativity. You don’t start from scratch when you set out to reformulate what you are. It is a slow and painstaking process through which you shape an identity, starting from the one imposed upon you by the social order. This is why you never completely free yourself from insult or from shame. After all, the world is constantly issuing calls to order, reactivating feelings we might prefer to forget, feelings we sometimes believe we have forgotten. If Genet’s character Divine, in Our Lady of the Flowers, having moved beyond the crushing sense of shame she felt during her childhood and adolescence, and having transformed herself into a flamboyant figure within the queer culture of Montmartre, finds herself once again blushing when someone insults her, it is because it is impossible to ignore the social forces that surround and assail her, the forces of the norm. It is just as impossible to ignore the affects that such forces have inscribed—and are continually reinscribing—at the deepest levels of the psyches of stigmatized individuals. We all know this, all of us who experience these kinds of things in the most ordinary situations, when we find ourselves suddenly hit and bruised without expecting it, when we thought we had some kind of immunity. It is never enough, using Goffman’s way of speaking, to have turned the stigma around, to have reappropriated the insult and changed its meaning; to do so does not do away with its capacity to hurt us. We walk a tightrope between the wounding meaning contained within an insulting word and the prideful reappropriation we might have made of it. We are never fully free, never completely emancipated from it. We more or less free ourselves from the burden that the social order and its subjugating force press upon us all at every moment. If shame is, in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s wonderful expression, a “transformational energy,”9 we should note that self-transformation never happens without the integration of traces from the past. It preserves the past, simply because that past is the world in which we were socialized and it remains within us to a considerable extent, just as it continues to surround us within the world in which we go on living. Our past is still there in our present. So we remake ourselves, we recreate ourselves (a task that is never finished, always needing to be taken up again), but we do not make ourselves, we do not create ourselves.

  It would thus be futile to set up an opposition between change or agency on the one hand and determinisms or the self-reproducing energy of the social order and of sexual norms on the other—or between ways of thinking about “freedom” and ways of thinking about “reproduction.” These dimensions are inextricably bound together; they exist in an imbricated relation with each
other. To take determinisms into account is not the same as affirming that nothing can change. But the effects of heretical activity, activity that calls orthodoxy and its repetitions into question will necessarily be limited and relative. Absolute “subversion” exists no more than does absolute “emancipation.” Something is subverted at a particular moment; something gets slightly displaced; you push something aside; you take a step in a different direction. To put it in Foucauldian terms, we should not be dreaming of some kind of impossible “emancipation.” Our best hope will be to breach certain frontiers that history has put into place and that hem in our existence.

  This observation of Sartre’s from his book on Genet was key for me: “What is important is not what people make of us but what we ourselves make of what they have made of us.” It soon became the principle of my existence, the principle of an ascesis, the project of remaking my self.

  Yet it was a double meaning that Sartre’s sentence came to have in my life. It came to apply both in the domain of sexuality and in the domain of class, but in contradictory ways. In the former domain, it was a case of appropriating and claiming my insulted sexual being. But in the latter it was a case of uprooting myself from my origins. I could put it this way: in one case I needed to become what I was, but in the other I needed to reject what I was supposed to have been. Yet for me these two activities went hand in hand.

  Basically, I had been convicted twice, socially speaking: one conviction was based on class, the other on sexuality. There is no escaping from sentences such as these. I bear the mark of both of them. Yet because they came into conflict with each other at a certain moment in my life, I was obliged to shape myself by playing one off against the other.

  EPILOGUE

  * * *

  1

  Whatever I am today, it happened at the intersection of these two itineraries: I came to Paris in the hopes both of being able to live an openly gay life and of becoming an “intellectual.” The first half of this project was not so hard to realize. The second, however, had led to a dead end. Once I had failed in my attempts to become a high school teacher as well as in my attempts to complete a doctoral dissertation, I found myself without a job and without any prospects. A solution presented itself thanks to resources I encountered within the gay subculture. Gay cruising does allow for a certain amount of mixing between classes. You can meet people whom otherwise there would be no way of meeting because their backgrounds are so different from yours or because your social horizons are so divergent. This mixing sometimes produces certain phenomena of solidarity and of mutual assistance that are perhaps not even directly experienced or perceived as such in the moment in which they occur, not unlike the experience of the process of “cultural transmission” that I described earlier. In the public park behind Notre Dame, a popular gay spot, I met a fellow with whom I had a brief affair. I was 25 at the time, and had basically run out of ideas of how to support myself. I was having a hard time admitting the obvious: that I was going to have to give up the naive utopian dreams for the future that I had been indulging in ever since starting university. I was at loose ends, anxious, and unsettled. What was to become of me? One night my friend invited another of his friends over for dinner, and this friend brought his girlfriend. She worked at Libération, the daily newspaper founded at the beginning of the 1970s with the support of Sartre and Foucault, aligned with the spirit of the “struggles” of those years. This woman and I hit it off and we soon struck up an acquaintance. She asked me to write some articles … I was persistent and doggedly held on to the unexpected possibility that had presented itself to me. And so it happened that, little by little, I became a journalist. More precisely, I became a literary journalist. I wrote reviews of intellectual works; I conducted interviews (the first of them was with Pierre Bourdieu, about Distinction: I still remember it as if it were yesterday). This profession provided me with an unforeseen form of access to and way of participating in the intellectual world. It was a kind of participation I had never imagined in my teenage dreams or during my years as a student, but there were significant kinds of resemblance. I found myself having lunch with publishers and spending time in the company of authors. I quickly became friends with a number of them—close friends, in fact, with Pierre Bourdieu, with Michel Foucault … It was only a short while earlier that I had decided to abandon writing my thesis and yet, through a series of mysterious chance occurrences whose possibility arose from a complexly related mix of social necessities and risky decisions I had made, here I was spending time in the company of all the great names of contemporary thought. I didn’t work for that particular newspaper for all that long. It was already in the process of turning itself into one of the principle vehicles of the conservative revolution that I have described at several different points in the course of this book. A vast offensive was being prepared in order to facilitate an organized shift to the right (a lot of organization went into this!) of the politico-intellectual field, in philosophy and the social sciences. Certain people’s access to the public sphere and to the media, people in the fields of philosophy and the social sciences, was obviously one of the central and decisive stakes in this offensive. My own allegiances were too clearly linked to Bourdieu and to Foucault; I was too attached to the defense of critical thought and to the legacy of May 1968. Thus I quickly became undesirable, although fortunately not before I had had a chance to make a name for myself in the profession. The editor of a weekly magazine who had a hard time swallowing the fact that Bourdieu wouldn’t give him the time of day and refused every invitation to write something for the magazine’s columns became obsessed with this situation, and offered me a job as a way of solving it. I didn’t like the magazine. I never had. And what was worse, it was even more involved in the neoconservative turn than the newspaper I just left had been. I couldn’t make up my mind to accept the job. (“You need some way to earn a living,” Bourdieu kept telling me, in order to convince me to take it. “I’ll give you an interview and then they’ll leave you in peace for two years.”) In any case, I didn’t really have a choice. I really did have to find a way to earn my keep!

  From my very first days at the Nouvel Observateur I felt ill at ease (to put it mildly). And yet my name would be associated with that magazine for a good number of years even though everything about me hated the place. I never really learned to accept the situation in which I found myself: once again I was out of kilter. It wasn’t just that I detested the place; there were deeper roots to my feelings of aversion. A certain little clique of academics considered the literary pages of this magazine to be their private reserve. They used these pages shamelessly to advance their own agendas, attempting to impose their power and their drift towards reactionary thought on the whole politico-intellectual scene. At every turn they would fight against anything that was truly eminent and that threatened to leave them in the shadows, against anything that was leftist and intended to remain so. My presence at the magazine was a hindrance to their plans. Every article I wrote, every interview I conducted enraged them, giving rise to invective and to threats of various kinds. (Intellectual life isn’t always very pretty when you look at it up close. Its reality bears little resemblance to the idealized image you might have looking in from the outside when you are trying to find a way in.) After a series of crises and of skirmishes whose brutality I found staggering, I decided there was no point in wasting any of my energy in such fruitless and exhausting struggles. From that point on, I decided that this “job” would represent nothing more than a pay check for me, and that I would use my salary in order to write books. All in all, these painful experiences turned out to have been a source of extraordinary motivation: they inspired me to branch off in a new direction; they helped me harness my energy in order to transform myself one more time.

  My first aspirations as a writer were of a literary nature: I started working on two different novels, and spent a good deal of time on them in the last half of the 1980s. The first of these two projects
was inspired by my friendship—and by my conversations—with Dumézil and with Foucault. I wanted to describe three generations of gay men joined by the bonds of friendship. Three eras, three lives: each marked by permanence and by change. I wrote a hundred pages, or maybe a bit more. At a certain point I got stuck, and set the pile of pages aside in a closet. I would come back from time to time to what I called “my novel,” still imagining that I would finish it one day. It was not to be! When I read Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library, a novel that bore some resemblance to my project, I was filled with admiration and I realized what a huge gulf separated my drafts from a finished work. I literally threw my pages into the trash can. My second novel was going to portray two men together, inspired by the real-life couple formed by Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears; it would have dealt with the idea of creative activity when it is anchored in a loving relationship. At the time, I had developed a passion for Britten, and especially for his operas, which were often written with Pears’s voice in mind (Peter Grimes, Billy Budd, Death in Venice …). Was it perseverance that I lacked? Or a novelistic talent? Or, more simply, did I realize that I was merely playing some kind of a game? Driven by old ambitions I was incapable of letting go of, it seemed I was doing little more than just going through the motions. In my imagination, I was a writer, but I had no real predisposition to become one. Little by little, I broke away from these literary temptations, although I never fully forgot them. From time to time I still find myself regretting that I didn’t have the patience or the determination to pursue this path.