Returning to Reims Read online

  Didier Eribon

  * * *

  RETURNING TO REIMS

  Translated by Michael Lucey

  Contents

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part II

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part III

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Part IV

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Part V

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Epilogue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Follow Penguin

  For G., who always wants to know everything.

  I

  * * *

  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. From time to time, while traveling abroad, I would send them a postcard, all that remained of an effort to sustain a connection that for my part I wished as tenuous as possible. While writing their address, I might briefly wonder what the place where they now lived was like, but my curiosity went no further than that. On those rare occasions when I spoke to my mother on the telephone—perhaps once or twice every few months, perhaps less—she would ask me, “When are you coming to visit?” I would give a vague answer, mentioning how busy I was, promising to come soon. But I had no intention of doing so. I had left my family behind and had no desire to return to it.

  So it was only quite recently that I came to know Muizon. It was pretty much as I had expected: a typical instance of a certain kind of “rurbanization,” one of those semi-urban spaces built out in the middle of the fields, where it is difficult to tell if it is still part of the countryside or if, with the passage of time, it has become something like a suburb. At the beginning of the 1950s, I have since learned, it had no more than 50 inhabitants. They were clustered together around a church, parts of which dated to the twelfth century, having survived the devastation due to the endless stream of wars that has washed over the northeast of France, a region with, in Claude Simon’s words, “a particular status,” where names of towns and villages seem synonymous with “battles” or “armed camps” or “muffled cannon fire” or “vast cemeteries.”1 These days more than two thousand people live in Muizon, between, on the one side, the Route du Champagne, which begins quite close by to wind its way through vine-covered hillsides, and, on the other, a grim-looking industrial zone, part of the outskirts of Reims, which is about a fifteen or twenty minute car ride away. New streets have been laid down, lined with identical houses, built in groups of two. Most of these are public housing; their tenants are far from rich. My parents lived there for twenty years without me ever making up my mind to go see them. I finally found myself in this municipality—I’m not sure exactly how to refer to a place like this—and inside my parents’ small house only after my father had left it, my mother having found him a place in a nursing facility for Alzheimer’s patients, where he would reside until his death. She had put off the inevitable moment as long as possible, until finally, worn out and frightened (one day he had grabbed a kitchen knife and attacked her), she gave in to what had become increasingly obvious: she had no other options. It was only once he was no longer in the house that it became possible for me to undertake this return voyage, or maybe I should say, to begin the process of returning, something I had never been able to make up my mind to do before. It was a rediscovery of that “region of myself,” as Genet would have said, from which I had worked so hard to escape: a social space I had kept at a distance, a mental space in opposition to which I had constructed the person I had become, and yet which remained an essential part of my being. So I returned to see my mother and this turned out to be the beginning of a reconciliation with her. Or, to be more precise, it began a process of reconciliation with myself, with an entire part of myself that I had refused, rejected, denied.

  My mother spoke with me at great length during the several visits I made in the course of the next few months. She spoke of herself, of her childhood, her adolescence, her life as a married woman … She also spoke to me about my father, how they met, what their relationship was like, of the different periods in their lives, the harshness of the jobs they had worked in. She had so much to tell me that her words tumbled out rapidly in an endless stream. She seemed intent on making up for lost time, erasing in one swoop all the sadness represented for her by those many conversations between us that had never happened. I would listen, seated across from her, drinking my coffee, attentive when she was talking about herself, much less so when she got caught up in describing the doings of her grandchildren, my nephews, whom I had never met, and in whom I wasn’t much interested. Between the two of us a relationship was being reestablished. Something in me was being repaired. I could also see how difficult the distance I had kept had been for her to deal with. I understood that she had suffered from it. How had it been for me, the person responsible for it? Had I not also suffered, but in a different way, one delineated in the Freudian vision of “melancholy,” associated with an unavoidable mourning of the various possibilities one sets aside, the various identifications one rejects? Such possibilities and such identifications remain in the self as one of its constitutive elements. Whatever you have uprooted yourself from or been uprooted from still endures as an integral part of who or what you are. Perhaps a sociological vocabulary would do a better job than a psychoanalytic one of describing what the metaphors of mourning and of melancholy allows one to evoke in terms that are simple, but also misleading and inadequate: how the traces of what you were as a child, the manner in which you were socialized, persist even when the conditions in which you live as an adult have changed, even when you have worked so hard to keep that past at a distance. And so, when you return to the environment from which you came—which you left behind—you are somehow turning back upon yourself, returning to yourself, rediscovering an earlier self that has been both preserved and denied. Suddenly, in circumstances like these, there rises to the surface of your consciousness everything from which you imagined you had freed yourself and yet which you cannot not recognize as part of the structure of your personality—specifically the discomfort that results from belonging to two different worlds, worlds so far separated from each other that they seem irreconcilable, and yet which coexist in everything that you are. This is a melancholy related to a “split habitus,” to invoke Bourdieu’s wonderful, powerful concept. Strangely enough, it is precisely at the moment in which you try to get past this diffuse and hidden kind of malaise, to get over it, or when you try at least to allay it a bit, that it pushes even more strongly to the fore, and that the melancholy associated with it redoubles its force. The feelings involved have always been there, a fact that you discover or rediscover at this key moment; they were lurking deep inside, doing their work, working on you. Is it ever possible to overcome this malaise, to assuage this melancholy? When I telephoned my mother a little after midnight on December 31 that year to wish her a happy new year, she announced: “The nursing home just called me. Your father died an hour ago.” I didn’t love him. I never had. I had known that he only had months, and then days, to live, and yet I had made no effort to see him one last time. What would have been the point, really, since he wouldn’t have recognized me? It had, in any case, been years since either of us had really recognized the other. The gap that had begun to separate us when I was a teenager had only grown wider with the passage of time, to the point where we were basically strangers. There was not
hing between us, nothing that held us together. At least that is what I believed, or struggled to believe; it had been my idea that one could live one’s life separate from one’s family, reinventing oneself and turning one’s back on the past and the people in it.

  At the time, it seemed to me that for my mother his death was a kind of liberation. My father had been sinking more and more deeply day by day into a state of physical and mental decay, and it could only get worse. It was an inexorable process. There was no chance of a cure. He alternated between periods of dementia during which he fought with his nurses, and long periods of torpor, doubtless due in part to the drugs he was given when he became agitated. During these subdued periods he would not speak or walk or eat. In any case, he remembered nothing and no one. His sisters found it enormously difficult to visit him (two of them were too frightened to return after their first visit), as did my three brothers. As for my mother, who had to drive twenty kilometers to the nursing home, her devotion astonished me. It was astonishing because I knew that her feelings for him were—and, for as long as I can remember had always been—made up of a mixture of hatred and disgust. I am not exaggerating: hatred and disgust. Yet for her, this was a duty. It was her own image of herself that was at stake. “I can’t just leave him there all alone,” she would repeat each time I asked her why she made a point of visiting the nursing home every day, even after he no longer knew who she was. She had put up on the door of his room a photograph of the two of them together and pointed it out to him regularly. “Do you know who that is?” He would reply, “It’s the lady who takes care of me.”

  Two or three years earlier, the news of my father’s condition had provoked in me a huge attack of anxiety. Not really so much for him—it was too late and, in any case, I felt very little towards him, not even compassion. Rather, selfishly, I was worried about myself. Was this a hereditary condition? Would it soon be my turn? I set myself to reciting all the poems or scenes from classical tragedy that I had learned by heart to see if I still knew them: “Songe, songe, Céphise, à cette nuit cruelle qui fut pour tout un peuple une nuit éternelle …”;2 “Voici des fruits, des fleurs, des feuilles et des branches/ Et puis voici mon coeur …”;3 “L’espace à soi pareil, qu’il s’accroisse ou se nie/Roule dans cet ennui …”.4 No sooner would I forget a line than I would tell myself, “It’s started.” I have yet to rid myself of this obsession. As soon as my memory stumbles over a name or a date or a telephone number, I become uneasy. I see warning signs everywhere: I seek them out and I fear them in equal measure. There is a way in which my daily life is now haunted by Alzheimer’s—a ghost arriving from the past in order to frighten me by showing me what is still to come. In this way, my father remains present in my existence. It seems a strange way indeed for someone who has died to survive within the brain—the very place in which the threat is located—of one of his sons. Lacan writes remarkably in one of his Seminars of this door that opens onto anxiety for children, or at least for sons, at the moment of their father’s death, for then the son finds himself on the front lines facing death alone. Alzheimer’s adds a more ordinary, day-to-day kind of fear to this ontological anxiety: you are always on the lookout for symptoms, ready to turn them into a diagnosis.

  Yet my life is not only haunted by the future; there are also the ghosts of my own past, ghosts which leapt into view immediately upon the death of the person who incarnated everything I wanted to run away from, everything I wanted to break with. My father certainly constituted for me a kind of negative social model, a reference point against which I had performed all the work I undertook as I struggled to create myself. In the days that followed his death, I set to thinking about my childhood, about my adolescence, about all the reasons that had led me to hate the man who had just died and whose end, along with the unexpected emotions it provoked in me, woke in my memory so many different images I had believed forgotten. (Or perhaps I had known on some level that I hadn’t forgotten them, even if I had made an effort, a quite conscious one, to repress them.) Some people might remark that this is something that happens during any period of mourning. It might even be said to be a universal feature of mourning, an essential characteristic of it, especially when it is parents who are being mourned. Even if that is the case, I had a strange way of experiencing it: a kind of mourning in which the urge to understand something about the person who had passed away and something about the person—myself—who has survived predominates over any sadness. Other losses, earlier ones, had affected me more deeply and caused me much deeper distress—the loss of friends, of people I had made the choice to be involved with, people whose sudden disappearance ripped something from the fabric of my daily life. Unlike these relationships I had chosen, whose strength and stability came from the fact that the parties involved ardently desired to perpetuate them (a feature which explains the feeling of dejection that occurs when they are cut off), my relationship with my father seemed to me to be only a biological and a legal one: he had fathered me, and I bore his name, but other than that he didn’t much matter to me. Reading the notes in which Roland Barthes kept a daily record of the despair that enveloped him when his mother died, of the unbearable suffering that then transformed his life, I am struck by the degree to which the feelings that took hold of me when my father died differ from his despair and affliction. “I’m not mourning, I’m suffering,” he writes as a way of expressing his refusal of a psychoanalytic approach to understanding what happens after the death of a loved one.5 What was happening to me? Like Barthes, I could say that I was not “in mourning” (in the Freudian sense of working through something in a psychic temporality where the initial pain gradually lessens). But nor was I experiencing an indelible suffering on which time could have no effect. What, then, was going on? A state of confusion and disarray, perhaps, produced by something being called into question, something both personal and political, something about one’s social destiny, about the way society is divided into classes, about the role played by a number of different social determinants in the constitution of individual subjectivities, something to do with individual psychologies, with the relations that exist between individuals.

  I did not attend my father’s funeral. I had no desire to see my brothers again, having been out of touch with them for thirty years. All I knew of them was what I could see in the framed photographs found all around the house in Muizon. So I knew what they looked like, how they had changed physically over the years. But what would it have been like to meet them again in these particular circumstances? “How he has changed,” we would all have been thinking about each other, desperately seeking in our appearance today the signs of what we looked like a while back, a good while back, when we were brothers, when we were young. The day after the funeral, I went and spent the afternoon with my mother. We spent a few hours chatting, seated in the armchairs in her living room. She had brought out from a cupboard some boxes filled with photographs. There were pictures of me, of course, as a young boy and a teenager—and of my brothers. There it was in front of my eyes again (but wasn’t it in fact still inscribed in my mind and in my flesh?), that working class environment I had grown up in, the incredible poverty that is palpable in the appearance of all the houses in the background, in the interiors, in the clothes everyone is wearing, in the very bodies themselves. It is always startling to see to what an extent bodies in photographs from the past (and perhaps this is even more the case than for bodies we see in action or in situation in front of us) appear before our eyes as social bodies, bodies of a certain class. It can be equally startling to remark to what extent a photograph, a “souvenir,” by returning an individual—in this case, me—to his or her familial past, ties that person to his or her social past. The private sphere in even its most intimate manifestations, when it resurfaces in old snapshots, can still serve to reinscribe us in the very particular social location from which we came, in places marked by class, in a topography in which that which you might take as belonging to the most fundam
entally personal kinds of relations nonetheless plants you firmly in a collective history, a collective geography. (It is as if tracing any individual genealogy were somehow inseparable from uncovering a social archaeology, a social topology that is there in each of us, one of our most fundamental truths, even if not one of the ones we are most aware of.)

  2

  There was a question that had begun to trouble me a bit earlier, once I had taken the first steps on this return journey to Reims. I would manage to formulate it still more clearly and more precisely in the days that followed the afternoon of the day after my father’s funeral, the one I spent with my mother going through old photographs: “Why, when I have written so much about processes of domination, have I never written about forms of domination based on class?” Or, “Why, when I have paid so much attention to the role played by feelings of shame in processes of subjection and subjectivation, have I written so little about forms of shame having to do with class?” Finally, it came to seem necessary to me to pose the question in these terms: “Why, when I have had such an intense experience of forms of shame related to class, shame in relation to the milieu in which I grew up, why, when once I had arrived in Paris and started meeting people from such different class backgrounds I would often find myself lying to them about my class origins, or feeling embarrassed when admitting my background in front of them, why had it never occurred to me to take up this problem in a book or an article?” Let me put it this way: it turned out to be much easier for me to write about shame linked to sexuality than about shame linked to class. It seemed that the idea of studying the constitution of subordinated subjectivities, and, simultaneously, the establishment of a complicated relationship between remaining silent about oneself and making an “avowal” of who one is, had become these days valorized and valorizing, that it was even strongly encouraged in the contemporary political context—when it was sexuality that was in question. Yet the same kind of project was extremely difficult, and received no support from prevailing categories of social discourse, when it was a question of working-class social origins. I wanted to understand why this would be the case. Fleeing to the big city, to the capital, in order to be able to live out one’s homosexuality is such a classic trajectory, quite common for young gay men. The chapter that I wrote on this phenomenon in Insult and the Making of the Gay Self can be read—as, in fact, the whole first section of that book can be—as an autobiography recast as historical and theoretical analysis, or, if you prefer, as a historical and theoretical analysis that is grounded in personal experience.6 But the “autobiography” in question was a partial one. A different historical and theoretical analysis would also have been possible beginning with a similarly reflexive look at the path I had followed. This is because the decision at the age of twenty to leave the town in which I was born and where I spent my adolescence in order to go live in Paris also represented part of a progressive change in my social milieu. On thinking the matter through, it doesn’t seem exaggerated to assert that my coming out of the sexual closet, my desire to assume and assert my homosexuality, coincided within my personal trajectory with my shutting myself up inside what I might call a class closet. I mean by this that I took on the constraints imposed by a different kind of dissimulation; I took on a different kind of dissociative personality or double consciousness (with the same kinds of mechanisms familiar from the sexual closet: various subterfuges to cover one’s tracks, a very small set of friends who know the truth but keep it secret, the taking up of different registers of discourse in different situations and with different interlocutors, a constant self-surveillance as regards one’s gestures, one’s intonation, manners of speech, so that nothing untoward slips out, so that one never betrays oneself, and so on). When, after writing a number of books dealing with the history of ideas (including my two books on Foucault), I began the project of writing about subjection, it was on my gay past that I chose to draw. I chose to reflect on the workings of subordination and “abjection” (how a person is “abjected” by the surrounding world) experienced by those of us who contravene the laws of sexual normality, thereby leaving aside everything in me, in my own existence, that could—and should—have led me to turn my gaze on relations of class, to class domination, to the processes of subjectivation linked to class affiliation and to the subordination of the working classes. Of course it’s not as if I totally neglected these questions in Insult and the Making of the Gay Self, or in Une morale du minoritaire [A minoritarian morality] or in Hérésies.7 My ambition in these books was larger than the specific framework of the analyses found in them. I wanted to sketch out an anthropology of shame and from it to build up a theory of domination and of resistance, of subjection and subjectivation. Surely that is why, in Une morale du minoritaire, I kept juxtaposing the theoretical elaborations of Genet, Jouhandeau, and several other writers who deal with sexual subordination with the thinking of Bourdieu on class subordination or of Fanon, Baldwin, and Chamoiseau on racial and colonial subordination. Yet it remains the case that these dimensions are only dealt with in the course of my demonstration as other parameters that contribute to an effort to understand what the fact of belonging to a sexual minority represents and carries along with it. I call on approaches produced in other contexts; I make an effort to extend the range of my analyses; but these other approaches remain a bit secondary. They are supplements—sometimes offering support, sometimes suggesting ways of extending my analysis. As I pointed out in the preface to Insult and the Making of the Gay Self, I wanted to transpose the notion of a class habitus developed by Pierre Bourdieu to the question of sexual habitus: do the forms of incorporation of the structures of the sexual order produce sexual habitus in the same way that the forms of incorporation of the structures of the social order produce class habitus? And even though any attempt to develop a response to a problem like this one must obviously confront the question of the articulation between sexual habitus and class habitus, my book was devoted to sexual subjectivation and not social or class subjectivation.