- Delphine Chaume, hello.
- Hello, Olivier.
Welcome back
to Forum des Humanités
where, this semester, we are exploring
the theme of violence. 
We have tackled
the question of cannibalism
and, today, we are going to
return to Reims with Didier Eribon,
the author of the book
Retour à Reims.
So, Didier Eribon is a sociologist
and a contemporary French philosopher,
he is currently living, he is famous,
well known and translated worldwide.
This book was even taken
on stage in Berlin at the Schaubühne,
which is a very famous theatre
directed by Thomas Ostermeier
and in this book,
the sociologist applies
and uses the concepts of
sociology on himself
to try to understand
what his social trajectory has been.
It thus resumes a movement that
was initiated by Pierre Bourdieu:
rather than using
psychoanalysis, we use sociology
to understand who we are,
where we come from and where are now,
and he will make this journey back,
which is also a reversal,
a return to oneself 
that is not without violence
for someone who thinks they have been
snatched from their social milieu of origin,
and that is not without shame,
and precisely this shame
is a form of
internalised social violence
which is too intimate to talk of.
- Yes, well Didier Eribon
says it in this text,
in fact, he says:
"I am the son of shame. "
So, that’s already very clear.
It's the trajectory of a young, gay man
from a working class background,
it's his trajectory
and, in fact, he returns to Reims
at the time of his father’s death.
It's been a long time
since he last returned,
since he last saw his family
and, in fact, at the time of that return,
it will surface in his conscience
the fact that he thought he had been ripped out
of this milieu, freed from it,
and he realizes that this is not the case,
and then, he will question the fact
that he could write
about sexual shame,
but he never has
written about social shame.
He is also aware of the fact
that it's a cleaved habitus,
it's Bourdieu's formula,
because he actually belongs
to two very different worlds,
even antagonistic worlds: the working class world
and the bourgeois world.
- Intellectual, bourgeois from the left.
- Exactly.
And in fact, there is a
melancholy that emerges
from this awareness
to be completely cleaved
and then, there is also,
at this moment,
a bad conscience too,
a sort of guilt,
and he wonders why,
in fact, the fact
that he’s keeping company with class,
or the bourgeois world,
made him renounce his family
and, in fact, he realised
that he had integrated the bourgeois norms
and the bourgeois point of view
on the working class,
that is to say, a
kind of disgust, of scorn
and, in fact, it's all this that he wants to explore
in this text.
- Then, he has several
things, he has a cleaved habitus.
So, with Bourdieu,
the question of habitus,
is a question of precisely
the incorporation
of ways of
thinking, feeling, acting,
within the body, they
become almost invisible,
and we have a class habitus
according to Bourdieu,
so, if you're from the bourgeois class
or working class, one has a determined habitus.
The cleaved habitus, people who
change, who are class defectors,
who pass from one
social class to another,
it creates, as you said,
a form of melancholy,
a form of suffering too,
which can be magnified
also in creation,
since, often, they are individuals
who do not feel comfortable anywhere
and who have, as a result,
a very particular point of view
and are very distanced within the
 social
worlds, the social worlds they live in,
and this is also one of the
themes of Didier Eribon’s book,
it's the point of view that he has
on the bourgeois world
to which he is now attached,
and, at the same time, on the working class world
which he is ashamed of and that he has left.
"Yes, so
there are several things,
firstly the fact
that Didier Eribon was told that
"an awareness of class
only when one is dominated”,
that is to say
this awareness of class,
is felt in
our skin, in our body.
The dominators,
that is to say, the bourgeois world,
is not at all aware
of belonging to
a special world, a specific world, etc.
That’s the first thing
and, at the same time, they say:
"The question of the body
is very important. "
He actually says, when
he looks with his mother,
when he returns,
at family albums,
he sees these bodies of the past, he says:
"These are social bodies,
which are marked in fact
by social violence, "
and the body of his mother too,
which is a body crippled with pain,
which is a body that is struggling,
in fact, it's also where we see
the existence of classes in the body.
And what Didier Eribon
does with this text
is talk about a place
from another place,
and inversely, that is to say
that he moves the lines,
he will move
from one place to another,
and that's actually allowing him
to escape all the norms,
that is to say,
the norms of the working class world,
but also the norms of
bourgeois world that he has integrated into
and therefore to create a
sort of strange distance
that will allow him
to find a
new form of autonomy,
and besides, that's what
Annie Ernaux also said
about the same problem,
that is to say, to tell oneself,
allows you to transfer your body,
a new body
in fact, in the book.
- Annie Ernaux who is a French writer,
contemporary too,
who was particularly interested
in this question of social origin,
who was also brought up
in, socially, a very working class milieu,
with books she
became cultured, 
she became a
writer who nowadays is,
her too, internationally
recognised, and who Didier Eribon quotes.
Didier Eribon’s destiny,
like that of Annie Ernaux,
is absolutely exceptional.
It's a brilliant ascending social trajectory. 
As you said, because of the
milieu from which he comes,
he should not have dreamt
of such distant horizons.
He managed to emancipate himself,
to create this setting,
and maybe that’s what
class awareness is,
when we are aware
of belonging to a class,
so namely
the working class, 
when we see to what
extent the horizon is blocked up,
and when we see the lack of
ways to get out of where we are.
Bourgeoisie,
in Bourdieu’s writing,
is, we have the capitals so
we have many more possibilities,
and so we can have a much more universalist vision
 than others.
It's when we are
prevented that we see.
Which shows us something,
(his unique position
coming from the working class world
and joining the bourgeois world),
is that
relationships between classes exist, 
and the relationships between classes, this
distinction between social classes,
brings a very real violence
to the social world,
which has also structured
politics for a long time,
with a strong
communist party
and which was the spokesperson
for the working class.
Yes, then,
indeed, Didier Eribon
returns to
political positioning,
finally, more precisely, the political adhesion
of the working class,
through the story of his family.
It's an evident
adhesion for his family
so it's not at all
”We do not look to the USSR,"
we do not expect
the Soviet regime
to establish itself in France,
of course,
it's a lot more immediate
and a much more concrete
adherence,
that is to say that we rise up against what
we suffer in our everyday lives,
so it's a vote of
protest, and it's also because
the world is, too,
split and separated in two:
those who are for the working class
and those who are against
the working class.
And, in a certain way
in fact, it's ... the individuals,
by adhering to the communist vote,
allowing them to go beyond
what they are as individuals,
and create a kind of pride
of class identity,
that’s how they
acquire pride in their class.
So Didier Eribon says that,
finally, it's a vote,
a positive affirmation
of his social identity.
In fact, everything changes at the time
of the Mitterrand election.
- So 1981, the communist hope,
and the alliance between the
communist party and the socialist party.
- That's exactly it.
And so, there is a
mutation of the socialist left
that will promote
non-conservative intellectuals, 
in which the working class
will not recognize itself at all,
and that's, for example,
the father of Didier Eribon
who, after seeing
Trotskyist students,
tells his son, he himself was
Trotskyist at that time,
"Ah, but they want to make us
do certain things,
then, in ten years, it's
them who will command us
and who will tell us
what needs to be done! "
So there is this sort of
fracture at that time.
And so, they will finally refuse,
the working class will refuse
to let themselves be robbed
by spokespersons
which they no longer
recognize,
and they will search for
other spokespersons,
and that's going to be those
from the extreme right.
And here, Didier Eribon's analysis
is very interesting,
because he says, in fact:
At that moment ,
it's a vote that's going to be
different, much less faithful,
more intermittent, denied
or at least hidden,
and so, there, in fact,
it's no longer a positive affirmation
of social class,
but a negative affirmation
 of social class,
that is to say, in silence,
they will try to protect
what remains of this identity
of class that is ignored,
because at that
moment, no one,
(in fact, the view on
the social world has changed),
no one is watching
the working class,
except the extreme right.
So, that's what's very
interesting and, in fact,
the "us" of the working class
will become "the French"
against "the foreigners".
Because Didier Eribon also speaks 
of the spontaneous racism
of the working class,
that manifests itself at the time
of the war of Algeria,
that is to say, a condescending,
scornful view
of the French working class
on workers from the Maghreb,
and that is going to be exacerbated
at the time of
family reunification, etc.
But, in fact, even before
this turn to the extreme right,
in fact, this racism
of the working class
is completely out of touch with the vote,
it's two levels of
different awareness
and, in any case, this
is what Didier Eribon notes,
that adherence
to the communist party
and adherence to the extreme right,
and later to the National Front, 
are two radically
different ways
of becoming political. 
- Yes, in this idea
of ordinary racism,
where the spontaneous racist reaction was
somehow outdated
thanks to this positive adhesion
in the idea of a social
class that can mobilise,
that can be mobilised and that
can transform the world,
and it was the vote
for the Communist Party,
we can see that the offer
that the extreme right proposes
is a more negative offer,
in the sense that it arouses
an adhesion that is more of a reaction,
which is what 
Didier Eribon described too,
so these reactions are reactivated,
but there is not an excess
there is not a way of transcending
this vote in terms of class,
a mobilisation in terms of the
working class, and indeed,
the substitution
of class relationships,
working class / bourgeois,
sees another criterion dominate:
French / foreigner,
so we find more exclusion,
and we become dominant over those who appear
to be more excluded.
So, there, there is a form of
social violence that existed, 
but towards 
an agent of transformation,
and another social violence
which is a violence of exclusion,
rejection and even racism.
We feel that in this
very precise analysis,
and that also allows us
to think about the situation today, 
in France and in Europe, we feel that
in this way too
Eribon reconciles
with his social origin,
since he himself is a man of
the left, the far left, clearly left,
and he manages to
introduce subtlety
to the analysis of the
working class vote today,
which is not just
ostracising, by saying:
"The working class is wrong in
voting for the National Front”,
he manages to see the mechanisms
that are behind it,
and it's a way of saying:
I know where I come from too,
and it's what you say,
he has seen ordinary racism
that there could be at his parent’s
house, for example,
the climate that surrounded him was not
really a socially open climate,
and that's also the question, the 
question of homosexuality
that will arise, since he
grew up in Reims,
he says: “I grew up
in the city of insults”,
so that's the environment,
that violence against anything
that is not perceived as normal.
- So, yes, in fact,
he talks about it very well,
before talking about homosexuality,
in fact with the figure of his father,
his father that he hates, that he detests,
but he realises that in fact
he doesn’t so much detest the person
as much as what social 
violence has made of his father.
He talks about what he
calls a primal scene
in which, when he was very small, with
his brothers and his mother,
one evening, the father returns, drunk,
and he smash
es
all the bottles
that he can find
against the wall
and, in fact, it's less
his father who he hates,
who he loathes,
but rather the social context that
allows such scenes.
But it's also the
relationship between his parents,
the verbal abuse,
the household scenes,
the incessant cries,
and besides, it's less his
father who is violent towards his mother
than his mother who is violent,
physically, against the father,
and by the way,
- It's very surprising
- It's she who will hurt him,
breaking two of his ribs
because she throws a household
object at his head.
In the same primitive scene.
- That's it, and so it's
actually this social context,
this social violence that is exercised
that he loathes.
- His mother actually,
she is interesting,
because she was
clearly quite bright
and, scholarly, she
could have aspired to a lot,
she had to give up her studies
precisely because of the lack of horizon
that the working class world offered her
and she has, at the same time,
given a lot to her son
who proved to be brilliant at school,
but with this relationship that was
always ambivalent,
and there we see the whole question of
social reproduction via the school,
of the legitimacy of knowledge that
is acquired by school culture,
the more he progresses in his studies,
the more, in a way, he
becomes a traitor to his social class,
because already he brings back
no money,
that is to say, he becomes
a sort of spoilt child,
we could see it like that,
and his mother suspects him to be
condescending and arrogant
because he has acquired
a culture that she does not have.
We see, this
terrible violence.
Both worlds come, not
into a logical
agreement or cohesion
to grow together,
but they come into conflict.
Yes, so school
is really the place
where this social violence
crystallises,
and - it's Didier Eribon's 
very beautiful formula -
it is "the inequality of the possible".
Women, men too
by the way, from the working class,
and that's what he heard too
in his family very often:
Ah, school is not for me.
And in this sentence, in fact,
there is a whole system of exclusion,
of domination,
which is due to social determinism,
that is to say
the elimination of school,
it's a self-elimination,
which will even be defended
as a choice later on,
whereas in fact, it's only
due to social determinism
and, in fact, he explains that
there is an impenetrable frontier,
a separation between two worlds,
the world of the working
class and the world of the bourgeois
and in each of these two worlds
there is the perception
of what we can be
and of what we can become,
and that is the inequality of possibilities.
So, indeed,
his mother will do everything she can to
let him study,
at least go to secondary school,
which is not the case of his brothers,
who stopped going to school at 16.
He goes to secondary school, but he realises
to what extent, in fact, he
belongs to the working class.
There is a bluntness
in people’s language, as he says,
there is a kind of unruliness
or spontaneous resistance at school,
and he explains that he is going
have to learn
about school culture which is not
at all obvious to him,
and it is even
unnatural, because
school culture involves a
relationship, a type of relationship with oneself,
which is the opposite of
what he has at home.
And so, there will be a choice
that will arise before him:
exclude himself from this school culture
or exclude himself from his family.
So, he says that to resist
is the formula:
"To resist, to lose
myself; to submit myself,
 - to submit to this school
culture - saved me. "
So, there is, on the one hand,
so it's extraordinarily violent
and, besides, it's a violence
which he is not necessarily aware of,
but that he undergoes with his
consent anyway.
So, that's a first thing,
and then, after, when
he arrives at high school,
in fact, he realises
that he does not have at all
the same relationship with culture,
book culture, etc., and
that he is the odd one out, that is to say that
he has a friend that he
also desires sexually,
his first emotions,
who he admires
and who tells him about his
cinematographic experiences,
his reading experiences,
as if Didier Eribon
had had the same ones,
that is to say, he does not
question at all
the individual that
Didier Eribon is,
and he says, in fact, he was
extraordinarily offensive and cruel,
without knowing,
because he's always running
behind this culture that he does not have.
And he will completely reinvent himself,
that is to say, he will change his
voice, his intonation, his body
to not look like
the people,
those from the working class,
but to adhere to
standards of the bourgeois class,
and there is a scene that he
describes and which is very strong,
and there we come back to
family issue that is the mother, etc.,
he learns the Christmas song
Merry Christmas in English,
and then he proudly goes to
sing it to his mother
who, in a fit of
rage, insults him by saying:
But you are making fun of me!
You are making fun of me, saying
things that I do not understand!
Yes, it’s exactly that, and here we
see the brake up
between the family
environment and Didier Eribon,
and this transformation
of this feeling of shame
towards
 them,
that will worsen
even more obviously
when he leaves
Reims to go to Paris.
As we have just understood,
he is someone who has been submitted
to school education,
who has internalised and
integrated the rules,
so he was able to reach the
expectations of the university community,
though... because he also had
accidents, he tells it very well,
already the sort of symbolic
barrier that is the thesis,
or the entry exams
for higher education,
that, for someone who
comes from a working class background,
will in fact create a real form of
segregation, that is even psychological -
he will go to Paris, he will go
to Paris to continue his studies -
but also with the desire
to emancipate from this environment
which weighed on him, which I
described earlier,
we have seen, the question of desire, the
question of knowledge, is extremely connected,
this could remind us of Foucault,
about who he has written extensively
and to whom he feels very close,
knowledge and desire are connected.
He discovered a sexuality
that is not the norm
in his milieu, homosexuality,
and, this homosexuality
is associated to values
that are, we
could say, feminine,
a certain way of dressing,
a certain interest
in fine things,
culture, literature,
opera, classical music,
which will also
help him to transform himself,
and that will in fact allow him to accomplish
what he calls a miracle.
Yes, and which is due
to his homosexuality
in any case, that
is how he tells it,
he says : "Reims,
the city of insults ",
because at the time he
discovers this homosexual desire,
he will change
social class,
an identity that is already
stigmatised by insult,
so it's an
identity that existed before
which is, again,
stigmatised by insult, 
shaped by
insult, and that he will embody,
and then there, in fact, he shows
well how much, in fact,
homosexuality means
finding a way out
so that the individual does not suffocate,
and he asks himself the question, he says:
I am a miracle, but
maybe I owe this miracle
to homosexuality
which in fact forced me
to get out of this environment,
and that is, for example,
frequenting gay places,
which are in fact protected spaces,
but where there is also
a very strong form of violence,
which goes beyond insults,
because there, we have
physical violence,
thugs surrounding
these gay places
- who hang around to beat up homosexuals
- Exactly,
police raids,
with sarcasm,
threatening remarks, etc.,
anyway, all these forms of violence,
and he asks himself the question too:
“What is it like to keep quiet about a desire?
A desire that reaffirms
and affirms itself non stop?
What is it that
someone like that
who suffers this violence,
and so who is going
build another world
which is updated
only with insult? "
And this is how we see
to what extent
this contributed to making
him leave this milieu.
He says : "There is a moment
in which shame
turns into pride, "
and this pride is
fundamentally political,
because, in fact,
it's a challenge to the 
social standards, norms,
to this violence of the norm,
which is exercised on individuals
and so, it's the same
in fact, by changing the insult, 
by reappropriating it,
that we build pride,
that is to say that one passes
from shame to pride,
but we always
swing between, says Didier Eribon,
the offensive meaning
 of the insult
and its proud reappropriation,
and so, finally,
it's a work on oneself
which never ends,
which has no end, because
we do not invent,
we do not create ourselves,
we can reinvent or recreate ourselves,
or rephrase, but constantly.
And so, that’s a person in the world
who permanently reinvents themselves.
- I like the idea of
reformulating ourselves a lot
because we reformulate our
speaking, we reformulate our writing,
writing plays a very important role in
the trajectory of Didier Eribon, it’s...
it comes almost as an accompaniment to
this proud self-assertion,
since the question of being gay is going to be at
the heart of his ideas, his thoughts,
thoughts on
being gay and so on.
He transformed this
sexual shame into pride,
into the subject of a solid theoretical study
and, finally, he
went on this journey,
on this path of reinvention,
because he had social shame,
which is the driving force of
this book, Retour À Reims,
saying: I've
done some of the work,
but I have almost
affirmed this gay identity
against the social identity of origin
and, in fact, the question
of emancipation
returns, because we cannot 
ignore what we are, all the time,
we always come back to it,
especially when facing death
where we see what we owe to the milieu
and to those who made us,
but writing is
maybe the best way,
both to return to his past,
and to find this path towards emancipation
and towards the construction of
his subjectivity and himself. 
- Yes, and it’s mainly
the posterity of this text
and in fact the way in which Didier Eribon’s writing
 can talk to others,
and there, we see him with Édouard Louis,
who also prefaced
Didier Eribon’s text,
where in fact, Édouard Louis
says how much, in fact,
reading this
text has changed his life.
So, as a reminder,
Édouard Louis wrote a book
that is called En finir
avec Eddy Bellegueule,
which was widely
inspired by Didier Eribon's book,
in form
maybe more of a story,
about sociology of course,
but less emphatic
than Didier Eribon, so a
little more accessible too,
and which had a phenomenal success,
it must be said, since he was an
author unknown to all
and who disembarks onto the literary
scene with considerable success,
and who perfectly summarises
the same issues,
so he recognised himself
in Didier Eribon’s book,
and that opened a path for him
which did not exist before.
- That's it, maybe it's
what made Édouard Louis
a miracle in turn.
In the reception that there was
of Didier Eribon’s work,
I read an interview with
Didier Eribon, where he tells that,
many have said to him: But your
book is incredibly violent.
Yes, it is violent,
but we almost
need to be careful when using
this term regarding a text like that,
that’s what this text
describes as violent,
it’s not the text that it violent,
it's the social world and
it’s violence that is shown,
and violence, both
physical and material,
the economic conditions
for example,
but also all this 
symbolic violence, said Bourdieu,
this violence that is invisible and
which is interiorised by the dominators
and that suddenly appears,
thanks to his movements, the look
of his parents at him,
thanks to him seeing
what he has become,
thinking back to what
he once was,
thanks to the historical reading
of this working class
that is searching for an identity,
we see all these forms
of violence revealing themselves,
sometimes in a constructive way,
sometimes in a
terribly destructive way.
- Yes, because, for example,
as much as he proves to be a disgrace
to the working class from which he comes,
he also proves a disgrace
which is no less strong
to the bourgeois world
and the permanent humiliations
that the dominant exert
on the dominated,
whatever the class is, by the way,
and so, finally, there
is this notion of disgrace
which runs through the whole text,
because violence, in fact,
it's also when you exercise it,
when it comes from
 oneself
and that one exercises on oneself,
and that's what Didier Eribon
shows very well.
- Disgrace, it's a reaction
of the body that can not be mastered.
We disgust, we cannot say to ourselves:
I do not want to be disgusted.
It’s impossible, it’s 
there, it’s already present.
I suggest that we leave it here.
Delphine Chaume, thank you very much.
Thank you Olivier.
