From self-analysis to social criticism

“ … Only an ever-renewed theoretical analysis of the mechanisms of domination, in their innumerable cogs, registers and dimensions, combined with an ineradicable desire to transform the world in the direction of greater social justice, will allow us to resist, as much as what can be done, to the various forms of oppressive violence and to implement what it will finally be legitimate to call a democratic policy. » (p. 277) These are the last lines of Society as a verdict, which summarize the project of “ return cycle » by Didier Eribon, but undoubtedly also of all of his work.

After numerous publications and interventions on the “ gay question “, with Return to Reims, published in 2009, then in a pocket edition in 2010, Didier Eribon made a sociological turning point at the time of his father’s death, an event which pushed him to open the file of his social belonging and position to make it his own. -analysis. Where Roland Barthes, losing his mother, begins writing a Diary of mourning, autographing the emotions and feelings that upset him, Didier Eribon works to return to his trajectory to explore a “ inseparably personal and political questioning on social destinies, on the division of society into classes, on the effect of social determinisms in the constitution of subjectivities, on individual psychologies, on the relationships between individuals » (RR, p. 19). Accompanied by the authors he admired, knew, and studied at length, Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault, and inspired by writers proposing, “ outside of fiction “, “ a posture writing ” who is “ exploration of exterior or interior reality, the intimate and the social in the same movement » , like Annie Ernaux, Didier Eribon thus shifts the cursor of his reflection and his approach to the theoretical-political genealogy of homosexuality – where the literature of Proust, Wilde, Genet, among others, already occupied a central place — to the “ sociological introspection » (SV, p. 11).

Analysis of self and others

Didier Eribon does not observe himself as another, but rather as a field from which to look at others, as the site of observation of the paradoxical proximity that class defectors experience in relation to their original social condition. Why, after having studied the dynamics of insult constituting gay subjectivity and the indelible traces they leave on those who suffer and fear them in all areas of social life, and after having written a book on the shame felt with regard to his social origin and his family, was he ashamed again to appear on the pocket cover photo of Return to Reims alongside his father, to the point of cutting and destroying the photo ? This is the question that opens the work. Based on the feeling of shame towards a social environment from which he uprooted himself and which he says he concealed through strategies of both avoidance and assimilation, the sociology of return that he proposes allow “ to reflect, from a more general point of view, on what an “individual” is, on what the “me” is, on the mechanisms of its constitution and the conditions of its relationship to others and to the world » (SV, p. 64). In Return to Reims we accessed the social and family universe of a popular and dominated class which inscribed in itself “ a disgust at this misery, a refusal of the destiny to which I was assigned and the secret, but still raw, wound of having to carry within me, forever, this memory » (RR, p. 99). In Society as a verdict, Didier Eribon once again insists on the cut made, on the “ disidentification with its original class » (p. 126) and, therefore, on the structures, determinations and tensions revealed by this distancing. If the project therefore remains auto-socio-analytical, the object is renewed.

The theme of memory, for example, introduces a sociology of the absence of memory of the working class, where the least noble objects, such as quotes and invoices found in an envelope kept by his father at the bottom of a cardboard, signal the absence of a heritage that could be used as symbolic capital, characteristic of the dominant. It is books, history and literature which constitute the instruments of emancipation, of the construction of one’s own trajectory, and which at the same time operate the break with a world that Didier Eribon describes as without books and above all without history. Returns, to oneself and to this hated but never truly distant world, are therefore operations of genealogical reconstruction: “ My genealogy is that of the oppressed » (p. 172), he writes.

But the denunciation of the logic of domination which weighs on the working classes does not mean, writes Didier Eribon, rereading “ the male, masculinist bias » (p. 219) expressed by Richard Hoggart in The Culture of the Poor, “ that we must celebrate these values, these lifestyles and these ways of being and thinking » (pp. 218-219). Because this would amount to anchoring on “ nostalgic laments which, the day before yesterday, yesterday, today and tomorrow no doubt, wanted, want and will want to oppose the ways of life within which roles and relationships are regulated and codified by the traditional structures of the life of family to the dangers of a generalized disintegration of social relations caused by “individualist” aspirations for emancipation compared to inherited models » (p. 220). The apology for the codes and values ​​of the working classes would then produce a naive sociology incapable of bringing to light the forms of domination produced and reproduced within them, under the pretext of spontaneous resistance to the values ​​of liberal society.

It is therefore a critical sociology of domination that Didier Eribon proposes in this book. Sociological introspection is a support, not an end in itself and for yourself. The criticism then takes the form of revealing the violence suffered but also exercised by the working classes that he describes: thus ordinary racism and sexism, the attachment to small daily happiness which veils the instruments and structures of domination, this complicity that the dominated grant to their domination, and which comes from the fact that we are so manufactured by the order of the world – social – that we become responsible for the reproduction of it: we validate its legitimacy and functioning, even when it is contested or fought at another level in order to change it » (pp. 66-67). Retracing the portraits of his two grandmothers, he paints a picture of what seems to take on the features of a destiny of domination: “ they were destined to lose the game, because the opponent was too strong for them ; or, at least, they lacked weapons » (p. 152).

Reality as a critical moment in sociology ?

The choice of a critical look is a strategy aimed at avoiding the traps of miserabilism, which would make one feel sorry for the infuriating fate of these popular circles, on the one hand, and of populism, which would be the apology of a world autonomous and potentially revolutionary resisting the neo-liberal gentrification consumed by the upper classes, on the other: two forms of the same prejudice, of the same intellectual privilege too, as Claude Grignon and Jean-Claude Passeron. But the reality seems to resist criticism. And the author notes, recalling the discouragement felt with regard to the lack of critical and political lucidity of his parents: “ They didn’t want to “make a revolution” ! They wanted to “have a pavilion built” » (SV, p. 207).

Thus, Didier Eribon’s sociological analysis, if it echoes for its readership close experiences which, through identification and recognition, favor the formulation of the troubles in the class inhabiting the defectors, seems never to encounter those and those -those for whom domination takes the form of an inescapable destiny, never completely understood and never truly contested. The observation and criticism of others by looking back on oneself then leads one to question the desire to emancipate which seems to animate this book. Because the critical principle as the starting postulate of introspective observation can lead to a stylization, according to which the popular class in question finds itself permanently objectified and reduced to a sociological category, and in a certain way derealized.

It is not a question of limiting oneself to a sociology of justification, or a sociology which would blindly justify the status quo, but to give upa priori of the unsurpassable alienation of the working classes and to consider social practices, not only as the product of the verdicts that society imposes on individuals, but also as the concretization of popular knowledge that is always moving, permeable and contextually heterogeneous. Certainly, the look of “ returning » is circumscribed to the narrow circle of the family field of action, and in fact justifies the sometimes unexpected effects of reduction and sociological homogenization, but the emancipatory political ambition which runs through the work from start to finish, tends to harden the features of a social universe depicted as closed and refractory. We can wonder if the critical ambition of the sociologist, when it serves as a political manifesto, does not end up hindering the writing of reality, and therefore its analysis.

The courageous and powerful enterprise of introspection masterfully presented in Return to Reims, at the crossroads of a sociology of the intimate and a critique of social ascension, ends in the redoubled gesture of Society as a verdict by raising the question of its own limit. A self-centered social critique, which does without quantitative and qualitative descriptions of reality, which rises in generalities and arrives at will in the lower floors of the dominated neighborhoods of the social world by taking the elevator of theory, does not risk- does it not precisely reduce the sociological enterprise to an exercise in thought? ?