SEMIOTEXT(E) FOREIGN AGENTS SERIES Originally published as Retour h Reims. © Librairie Artheme Fayard, 2009 © This edition 2013 by Semiotext(e) Cet ouvrage, public dans le cadre d’un programme d’aide k la publication, ben^ficie du soutien financier du minist^re des Affaires etrangeres, du Service culturel de Pambassade de France aux fitats-Unis, ainsi que de l’appui de FACE (French American Cultural Exchange). This work, published as part of a program providing publication assistance, received financial support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States and FACE (French American Cultural Exchange). All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photo­ copying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher. Published by Semiotext(e) 2007 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 427, Los Angeles, CA 90057 www.semiotexte.com Special thanks to John Ebert. Cover art by Matthew Picton, London 1940 Waterloo—selected text from Full Dark House by Christopher Fowler, 2012. Back Cover Photography by Antoine Idier. Design by Hedi El Kholti French Voices Logo designed by Serge Bloch ISBN: 978-1-58435-123-8 Distributed by The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, and London, England Printed in the United States of America RETURNING TO REIMS Didier Eribon Introduction by George Chauncey Translated by Michael Lucey <e> For G., who always wants to know everything. Introduction by George Chauncey DID1ER ERIBON’s REPUTATION as one of the preeminent intellectual historians and social critics writing in France today made it a risk for him to publish a book like this. His reputation began to develop in the mid-1980s, when he started writing incisive reviews of major works in philosophy and the social sciences for the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur and then published a series of wide-ranging, book-length conversations with the Eminences grises of French intellectual life such as Claude Levi- Strauss and Georges Dumezil. His acclaimed 1989 biography of Michel Foucault gave him new prominence and introduced him to a global audience when it was translated into twenty languages. He went on to lecture across Europe and North America and to organize conferences at the most prestigious institutions of France on Sartre, Foucault, Gide, multiculturalism, and the cultural legacies of the 1970s. In the 1990s he took up the question of homosexuality as a theoretical, historical, and personal matter, publishing a series o f important books and essays, most notably his magisterial treatise Reflexions sur la question gay (1999), translated into English as Insult an d the M aking o f the Gay S e lf (2004). He also played a key role in the establishment o f the field o f LG BT studies in France by organizing the country’s first conference 7 on the subject at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1997 and then co-founding and for many years co-directing a seminar on the sociology of homosexuality at the prestigious ficole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. As a public intellectual, he became involved in the fierce French debates over the establishment of civil unions, which in the late 1990s took place on a very different intellectual plane than in the United States, with French parliamentarians citing Levi-Strauss rather than the Bible to condemn the legal recognition o f same-sex relationships. In 2004, once civil unions were won, he and several colleagues issued a manifesto insisting on gay people’s right to marriage itself, a campaign that saw victory a decade later. At the same time, he also became a prominent critic of French anti-immigrant xenophobia and what he saw as the growing neo-conservatism of the Socialist Party. So the book before you, Retour a Reims/Returning to Reims, came as something of a surprise to the French reading public when it was published in 2009. For in its pages the distinguished public intellectual Didier Eribon came out again, not this time as gay, but as a son of the working class. For many years he had felt obliged to hide this seminal element of his past, he explained, as much as he had once felt obliged to hide being gay; it seemed the price of admission to his new life in the elite intellectual circles of Paris. A compelling meditation on the formative influence o f class in his own life and in French society, the book provoked soul-searching and public discussion across France. It was featured prominently in every bookshop I saw during a visit to Paris in the spring o f 2010. 8 / Returning to Reims The book is, first of all, a memoir of surpassing beauty and insight, in which Eribon tells the story o f his estrangement and then escape from the family, the class, and the region in which he was raised, and then how he hid and forgot these origins for most of his adult life. He returned to visit his mother in the working-class neighborhoods and suburbs of Reims only as his father lay dying, years after he had abandoned them both. Even then, he could not bring himself to see his despised father again, or to attend his funeral. But his illness and death shook some of the barriers Eribon had erected between himself and his past, and a long series of conversations with his mother unleashed a flood of long-suppressed memories and emotions. Probing those memories, his mothers stories, and the fading family photographs she placed before him on her kitchen table, Eribon reflects on the class, gender, and regional inequalities and frustrations that shaped his parents’ marriage, led to his father’s periodic disappearances and growing bitterness, and condemned his mother to loneliness. With bracing insight, he uses his family’s history to depict and analyze the production and reproduction of class inequality in France, developing, for instance, a penetrating analysis of how the schools’ tracking system made it inevitable that his brothers would become disaf­ fected, drop out, and be left with no alternative but to pursue lives of difficult and, in one case, literally disabling labor. At one level, then, this memoir offers an incisive portrait o f what Richard Sennett once called the hidden injuries of class. But Eribon also uses the story o f his family to reflect on the transformation of French politics in the last generation. How, he asks, did his parents, his brothers, and so many other working people shift their allegiance from the parties o f the Left to those Introduction by George Chauncey / 9 o f the Right? How did his father, once a militant communist who denounced de Gaulle whenever the rightist president made an appearance on the family television, come to see the National Front as a more authentic representative of his interests than either the Communist or Socialist Party? Mitterrand’s turn to neo-conservative ideologues and technocratic solutions take some of the blame in Eribon’s account, but his most penetrating observations have to do with the power of electoral politics and political mobilization to promote a collective vision of the world. Drawing on the realignment of his own relatives and neighbors, Eribon provides a trenchant analysis of how the parties of the Left stopped articulating the situation of workers, while the National Front gave license to their preexisting racism and legitimized it as a central framework for explaining the disappointments of their class. Finally, and perhaps most provocatively, Eribon meditates on the formative influence of class shame in his own life. In achingly honest prose, he ponders why he felt compelled not only to escape his working class origins but to hide them and for many years virtually forget them. Here he draws on his earlier work on the formative role of insult in shaping homosexual identity to reflect on the manifold ways he had been made to feel ashamed of his class origins— and on the striking parallels in the reproduction of class and sexual domination. The quotidian strategies he had long used to hide his homosexuality, he now realized, were mimicked by those he had felt compelled to adopt to conceal his working class origins: the constant surveillance of his gestures and accents, the knowledge he paraded, and the realms of knowledge he never admitted to having. More still, he reflects on the mutually sustaining evolution of his class and 10 / Returning to Reims sexual identities: on how his youthful rejection of the sports in which his brothers excelled represented a rejection of both a masculinist culture in which he could not succeed and of a working class culture he had come to abhor, how his migration to Paris was simultaneously a journey of class escape and of sexual exploration. Eribon draws on his deep knowledge of Bourdieu, Barthes, Foucault, Sartre, and other theorists to enhance his analysis in ways that are both illuminating and inviting. But the core of this book’s remarkable power is Eribon’s unflinching honesty and preternatural insight as he uses his own life to expose the continuing power of class and sexual shame to sustain systems of social domination. — George Chauncey George Chauncey, the Samuel Knight Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University, is the author of Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1 8 9 0 -1 9 4 0 . Introduction by George Chauncey /11 1 FOR THE LONGEST TIME it was nothing more than a name to me. My parents had moved to the village in question at a point in time when I no longer went to see them.