Returning to Reims

by Didier Eribon

“No, sociology.”

  “Sociology, what’s that? Something to do with society?”

  Notes

  PART I

  1. Claude Simon, The Jardin des Plantes, trans. Jordan Stump (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 149.

  2. “Think, Cefisa, think of that cruel night that for a whole people became an eternal one,” from a scene in Racine’s Andromaque. (Translator’s note.)

  3. “Here are fruits, flowers, leaves and branches/ And now here is my heart ….,” from “Green,” a poem by Paul Verlaine. (Translator’s note.)

  4. “Space, identical to itself, whether expanding or denying/Rolls in this tedium …” from “Quand l’ombre menaça …”, a sonnet by Stéphane Mallarmé. (Translator’s note.)

  5. Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 2010), 73.

  6. Cf. Didier Eribon, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self, trans. Michael Lucey (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 18–23.

  7. Didier Eribon, Une morale du minoritaire: Variations sur un thème de Jean Genet (Paris Fayard, 2001); Hérésies: Essais sur la théorie de la sexualité (Paris: Fayard, 2003).

  8. The French expression is “transfuge de classe.” (Translator’s note.)

  9. Paul Nizan, Antoine Bloyé [1933], trans. Edmund Stevens (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973), 163.

  10. Annie Ernaux, A Man’s Place, trans. Tanya Leslie (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1992); Shame, trans. Tanya Leslie (New York: Seven Stories, 1998); A Woman’s Story, trans. Tanya Leslie (New York: Seven Stories, 2003).

  11. James Baldwin, “Notes of a Native Son” [1955], in Notes of a Native Son [1964] (New York: Penguin, 1995), 98.

  12. Baldwin, “Notes,” 85–86.

  13. James Baldwin, Conversations, ed. Fred L Standley and Louis H. Pratt (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989), 60.

  14. Encore ça que les Boches n’auront pas!

  15. See, on this subject, Virginie de Luca Barrusse, Les Familles nombreuses: Une question démographique, un enjeu politique (1880–1940) (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2008). See also Remi Lenoir, Généalogie de la morale familiale (Paris: Seuil, 2003).

  16. See Alain Coscia-Moranne, Reims, un laboratoire pour l’habitat. Des citésjardins aux quartiers-jardins (Reims: CRDP Champagne-Ardenne, 2005) and Delphine Henry, Chemin vert. L’oeuvre d’éducation populaire dans une cité-jardin emblématique, Reims 1919–1939 (Reims: CRDP Champagne-Ardenne, 2002).

  17. Gilles Deleuze, “Gauche,” in Gilles Deleuze From A to Z, DVD (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011).

  18. On this working class way of dividing the world up into “us” and “them,” see Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working Class Life [1957] (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1998), 72ff.

  19. See Francine Muel-Dreyfus, Le Métier d’éducateur (Paris: Minuit, 1983), 46–47.

  20. Annie Ernaux, A Woman’s Story, 22.

  PART II

  1. Perhaps this explains why supple and shifting kinds of morality can exist alongside rigid moralism in working class contexts. It is this mix of malleability in practice and ideological strictness that makes people incredibly sensitive to gossip, rumor, and to worrying over what others will say.

  2. Paul Éluard, “Comprenne qui voudra,” in Au rendez-vous allemand (Paris: Minuit, 1945). [Translator’s note: an incomplete translation by George Dillon of this poem, “Understand who will,” was published in Poetry in October 1945. Dillon seems to have left out the line “Découronnée défigurée” (“Uncrowned disfigured”). Otherwise I have cited his translation.]

  3. Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima mon amour, trans. Richard Seaver (New York: Grove Press, 1961), 12, 59, 99.

  4. Cf. Fabrice Virgili, La France « virile ». Des femmes tondues à la Libération (Paris: Payot, 2000).

  5. Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1981), 239, 263.

  6. Annie Ernaux, A Woman’s Story, 52–53.

  7. I can refer the reader here to the wonderful account Carolyn Kay Steedman gives of her mother in Landscape For a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 809. See also the harsh critique she offers (pp. 11–12) of Richard Hoggart’s book, The Uses of Literacy, for presenting an ahistorical vision of the working class, and for celebrating its simplicity and its psychological fixity, as if the working class had simply ceased to evolve on the day that this future sociologist left it behind.

  8. I’ve provided an analysis of this Lacanian discourse on the “causes” of homosexuality—homophobic down to its root—in Une morale du minoritaire: Variations sur un thème de Jean Genet (Paris: Fayard, 2001), 235–284.

  9. Raymond Aron, “Science et conscience de la société,” in Les Sociétés modernes (Paris: PUF-Quadrige, 2006), 57. [Translator’s note: Eribon’s book on the conservative revolution is called D’une révolution conservatrice et de ses effets sur la gauche française (Paris: Léo Scheer, 2007).]

  10. Richard Hoggart, A Local Habitation: Life and Times, 1918–1940 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1988).

  11. John Edgar Wideman, Brothers and Keepers [1984] (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 26–27.

  12. Wideman, Brothers and Keepers, 27.

  13. John Edgar Wideman, Fanon (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), 50.

  14. Wideman, Fanon, 62–63.

  15. Pierre Bourdieu, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992),102.

  16. Pierre Bourdieu, “L’idéologie jacobine” [1966], in Interventions: Science sociale et action politique, 1961–2001 (Marseille: Agone, 2002), 56.

  PART III

  1. Cf. Stéphane Beaud and Michel Pialoux, Retour sur la condition ouvrière: enquête aux usines Peugeot de Sochaux-Montbéliard (Paris: Fayard, 1999).

  2. The fact that a concept as inept as it is reactionary, that of “mass individualism,” has thrived in various analyses of the “precarization” of the labor market can teach us a lot more about the sorry itinerary followed by certain sociologists who use it, leading them from a critical position on the left towards the sanctums of technocrats and neoconservative thinkers, than it can about the reality of any “transformation of the social question.”

  3. On the transformation in economic discourses and policies, see Frédéric Lebaron, Le Savant, la politique et la mondialisation (Bellecombe-en-Bauge: Le Croquant, 2003).

  4. This odd formulation was her way of saying that she had voted for Le Pen in the first round of the Presidential elections of 2002, but for Chirac against Le Pen in the second round. In 2007, she voted for Sarkozy in both rounds.

  5. For more on these questions, see my book D’une révolution conservatrice et de ses effets sur la gauche française (Paris: Léo Scheer, 2007).

  6. See Jean-Paul Sartre, “Elections: A Trap for Fools,” in Life/Situations: Essays Written and Spoken, trans. Paul Auster and Lydia Davis (New York: Pantheon, 1977), 198–210.

  7. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “On Abstaining,” in Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 319–20 (translation modified).

  8. On the social, political, and ideological processes that led to a similar result in Great Britain—the formation of historic blocs uniting the bourgeoisie with large segments of the popular classes in a vote for parties on the right—see Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (London: Verso, 1988).

  9. On the vote for the National Front, see the article by Patrick Lehingue, “L’objectivation statistique des électorats: que savons-nous des électeurs du Front national?”, in Jacques Lagroye, La Politisation (Paris: Belin, 2003), 247–278.

  10. On the shifts from one generation to the next within the popular classes as regards their relation to the left and to the right, see the article mentioned earlier by Patrick Lehingue.

  11. A quite realistic description of this French work
ing class racism and of the living conditions of immigrant workers in the 1950s can be found in the 1967 novel by Claire Etcherelli, Elise; or, The Real Life, trans. June P. Wilson and Walter Benn Michaels (New York: Morrow, 1969).

  12. On racism and anti-Semitism within the popular classes in France (and especially on the left), as well as on right-wing workers movements, see Zeev Sternhell, La Droite révolutionnaire, 1885–1914 (Paris: Fayard, 2000), especially chapter 4, “L’antisémitisme de gauche,” and chapter 6, “Une droite prolétarienne: les Jaunes.” See also Sternhell’s Neither Right Nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, trans. David Maisel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).

  13. On theories that opposed both the left and Marxism and offered other frameworks for thinking about the social conditions of workers, their place, and the social role they play, see Sternhell, La Droite révolutionnaire, especially chapter 9, “À la recherche d’une assise populaire: l’Action française et le prolétariat.”

  14. For a critique of “experience” used as immediate “evidence,” and for an analysis of the role of political discourses and theories in the sorting out of perceptions and practices and of the meanings they take on, see Joan W. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (1991): 773–797.

  15. See on this point the crucial remarks made by Stuart Hall in The Hard Road to Renewal.

  16. For an example of someone celebrating “competence” that is held in common and the “drawing of lots” as the regulatory principle of a “power of the people,” see Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steve Corcoran (London: Verso, 2006). Rancière seems to be vaguely aware of the problem I am discussing without ever explicitly formulating it. (Indeed, how could he without calling into question some of his most basic ideological assumptions?) All the examples he provides of democratic forms of expression have to do with what he calls “struggles” or “movements,” which is to say collective and organized manifestations of dissident opinion. This reveals that the “power of the people” as a foundation of democracy is never that of undifferentiated and interchangeable individuals. It is always already inscribed in heterogeneous social and political frameworks that are in conflict with each other. So it is rather these very frameworks themselves that any reflection on democracy should place at the heart of its preoccupations and interrogations.

  17. This crucial element—the mediation of political parties—is almost entirely absent from Sartre’s model or is dismissed by him. (When he wrote his article on elections, he was caught up in a belief in a political revolution that would arise from spontaneous action.) But it is emphasized by Bourdieu in his article “Le mystère du ministère: Des volontés particulières à la ‘volonté générale,’ ” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 140 (2001): 7–13.

  18. Here I am in agreement with the analysis of Stuart Hall in “Gramsci and Us,” in The Hard Road to Renewal, 163–173.

  19. They are aided in this, of course, by the intellectuals of the party and of the government, who work to delimit what counts as political and what doesn’t, what is “democratic” and what is “anti-democratic,” and so on. This kind of work represents the opposite of what intellectual work should be—to think about the shifting nature of the social world rather than to seek to prescribe what that world is—, and also the opposite of a democratic kind of activity, which cannot be imprisoned in the diktats of authoritarian ideologues such as these, tied to all the technocracies and bureaucracies that are out there, tied to institutions and the powers that be. As a salutary antidote to these antidemocratic impulses, see Sandra Laugier, Une autre pensée politique américaine: la démocratie radicale d’Emerson à Stanley Cavell (Paris: Michel Houdiard, 2004).

  PART IV

  1. Pierre Bourdieu, Sketch for a Self-Analysis, trans. Richard Nice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 94–96.

  2. Bourdieu, Sketch, 94.

  3. Bourdieu, Sketch, 99–100.

  4, On the link between the masculinist values of boys from the popular or working classes (notable in their rejection of authority, and their hostility towards good students, whom they take to be conformist) and their exclusion from the educational system, see Paul Willis, Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (Westmead: Saxon House, 1977).

  5. See Bourdieu, Sketch, 79–82. I recounted in my journal for the year 2004—the year in which this book appeared in France—a number of the conversations I had with him on this subject and others while he was working on the manuscript and had given it to me to read. (See Didier Eribon, Sur cet instant fragile … Carnets, janvier-août 2004 [Paris: Fayard, 2004].) In reply to my criticisms, he said that when he returned to working on the book, for the French publication that would happen after it had appeared in Germany, he would endeavor to modify these pages. It was something he wasn’t given the time to do.

  6. On the masculinist—and also class-based—categories that are at work in the discourse by which sociology constructs itself as a “science” in opposition to philosophy, see Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, “L’inconscient sociologique: Émile Durkheim, Claude Lévi-Strauss et Pierre Bourdieu au miroir de la philosophie,” Les Temps modernes 654 (2009): 99–108.

  7. This is a point I developed in Insult and the Making of the Gay Self and Une morale du minoritaire. This specifically gay use of culture is missing from the model Bourdieu proposes in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1984). When I made this remark to Bourdieu one day, he immediately agreed with me.

  8. Richard Hoggart points this out clearly in A Local Habitation.

  9. See Bourdieu, Distinction, 125–168.

  10. Paul Nizan, The Watchdogs: Philosophers of the Established Order [1932], trans. Paul Fittingoff (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971).

  PART V

  1. Guy Hocquenghem would offer a severe critique of Reich in Homosexual Desire, trans. Daniella Dangoor (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), first published in 1972. On the infatuation of certain segments of the gay movement of the 1970s with Reich, see Thierry Voeltzel, Vingt ans et après (Paris: Grasset, 1978), especially pages 18 and 29. This book is a conversation between a young man, age 20, and an “older friend” who is, in fact, Michel Foucault. I discussed this volume in Insult and the Making of the Gay Self, pp. 303–309.

  2. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. [La Volonté de savoir], trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990). For more on this point see my discussion of Foucault’s project in the third part of Insult and the Making of the Gay Self, in Une morale du minoritaire, and in Échapper à la psychanalyse (Paris: Léo Scheer, 2005).

  3. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). Her book was a great source of inspiration to me as I wrote Insult and the Making of the Gay Self.

  4. [Translator’s note: The French examples given are “Quelle heure est-elle?”, and “Quel temps fait-elle?”, feminized forms of the traditional expressions for asking the time or asking about the weather.]

  5. George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Knopf, 1994).

  6. Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Englewood Cliff, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963). On symbolic domination, see Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 169–71.

  7. Cf. Georges Dumézil, Loki (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1948), and my comments on this book in “Le crime de Loki,” in Hérésies, 19–32.

  8. See Patrick Chamoiseau, Écrire en pays dominé (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 23–24. Chamoiseau coins the word sentimenthèque to describe this kind of collection of volumes that speak to our feelings.

  9. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Shame, Theatricality, and Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel,” in Touching Fe
eling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 35–65.

  EPILOGUE

  1. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Vintage, 1981), 169–70.

  2. See Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), and The Collective Memory, trans. Francis J. Ditter, Jr. and Vida Yazdi Ditter (New York: Harper & Row, 1980).

  3. Annie Ernaux, Cleaned Out [Les Armoires vides], trans. Carol Sanders (Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990).

  4. Annie Ernaux, Les Années (Paris: Gallimard, 2008), 121.

  5. Didier Eribon, “The Dissenting Child: A Political Theory of the Subject,” a lecture given on April 9, 2008, at the award ceremony for the James Robert Brudner Memorial Prize.

  6. Raymond Williams, Border Country (New York: Horizon Press, 1962), 351.

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  First published as Retour à Reims 2009

  This translation first published by Semiotext(e) 2013

  Published by Allen Lane 2018

  Text copyright © Librairie Artheme Fayard, 2009