French Cultural Studies

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Cultural Studies
From 'Amor Fati' to 'disgust': Affect, habitus, and class identity in Didier Eribon's
Retour à Reims
Jeremy F. Lane
French Cultural Studies 2012 23: 127
DOI: 10.1177/0957155812436533
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FRC23210.1177/0957155812436533French Cultural StudiesLane
From ‘Amor Fati’ to ‘disgust’: Affect, habitus, and class identity
in Didier Eribon’s Retour à Reims
23(2) 127–140
© The Author(s) 2012
Reprints and permission: sagepub.
co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0957155812436533
frc.sagepub.com
Jeremy F. Lane
University of Nottingham
Abstract
In his Retour à Reims (2010), Didier Eribon draws on the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu and on his
own earlier work on gay identity to offer a moving and insightful account of his social trajectory
and of the issues of class, education and sexual identity that trajectory raises. Throughout this
autobiographical account, Eribon stresses the centrality of affect and emotion to social and sexual
identity, and the feelings of shame, disgust, frustration and rejection that marked his and his
parents’ relationship to their working-class identity. In so doing, he draws on two different and
potentially contradictory theoretical traditions: Eve Sedgwick’s work on shame and queer identity
and Bourdieu’s emphasis on the centrality of affect to the workings of the class habitus. This article
examines the tensions or potential contradictions between these two traditions, questioning,
in particular, Bourdieu’s insistence on the immediate, pre-reflexive way in which working-class
subjects allegedly invest in and come to love their social identity and destiny. Focusing on those
episodes in Retour à Reims which suggest that Eribon’s parents had a far more contradictory
relationship to working-class identity than Bourdieu’s theory would suggest, the article calls for
a reformulation of certain of the key tenets of Bourdieusian sociology. This involves drawing on
the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty as a means of thinking through the mind−body dualism that
underpins Bourdieu’s concept of habitus. The article concludes that the work of Beverley Skeggs
on class and gender offers a more fruitful way of theorising the relationships between class, affect,
social identity and political or social change.
Keywords
affect, Pierre Bourdieu, class, disaffection, disgust, habitus, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, mind−body
dualism, Eve Sedgwick, shame, Beverley Skeggs
Corresponding author:
Jeremy F. Lane, Department of French and Francophone Studies, University of Nottingham, University Park,
Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK.
Email: [email protected]
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French Cultural Studies 23(2)
In his autobiography, Retour à Reims (2010), Didier Eribon draws on the sociology of Pierre
Bourdieu, as well as on his own earlier work on gay identity, to offer a moving personal account of
his own social trajectory − an account which also provides numerous insights into the relationships
between class, education and sexuality in post-war France. One of the most striking features of
Retour à Reims is the central role Eribon attributes to affect and emotion in his account of his conflicted relationship to the working-class milieu in which he grew up. Eribon’s relationship to his
social origins appears to turn on a series of visceral affective reactions against that working-class
milieu and all it represents: reactions of ‘disgust’, ‘rejection’, ‘hatred’, ‘embarrassment’ and ‘horrible
unease’. For example, early in the book, he admits to his highly ambivalent relationship towards his
working-class identity − a mixture of ‘proximité’ and ‘solidarité’, which coexists with, ‘au plus
profond de moi-même un rejet du milieu ouvrier tel qu’il est réellement … Et je détestais de plus en
plus me retrouver au contact immédiat de ce qu’étaient, de ce que sont, les classes populaires’
(Eribon 2010: 27). Later, he will confess to feeling ‘horriblement mal à l’aise’ (2010: 106) when
attending family events or to ‘une terrible gêne’ when fielding questions about his brother’s modest
profession of apprentice butcher (2010: 110). While this unease and embarrassment sometimes trigger in their turn feelings of ‘culpabilité’ and ‘remords’, ultimately, Eribon admits, these are outweighed by a stronger sense of joy, even light-headedness at having escaped his social destiny:
‘Encore n’éprouvais-je que par intermittance cette culpabilité … Le sentiment de ma liberté me
grisait. La joie d’échapper à mon destin. Cela laissait peu de place au remords’ (2010: 116).
Eribon’s determination, from a young age, to escape his working-class origins appears itself to
have its genesis in these feelings of disgust and rejection. Thus he identifies as a pivotal moment
in his own social trajectory his horrified reaction to his father’s return to the family home in a
drunken violent rage after two or three days’ unexplained absence. As Eribon puts it:
Au fond, ce n’est pas tant la personne qui avait accompli ces gestes que j’avais prise en horreur que le
décor social dans lequel ces gestes étaient possibles. Le lancer de bouteilles ne dura peut-être que quelques
minutes: il inscrivit en moi, je crois, un dégoût de cette misère, un refus du destin auquel j’étais assigné et
la blessure secrète, mais toujours vive, d’avoir à porter en moi, à jamais, ce souvenir. (2010: 99)
In hindsight, witnessing his father’s drunken rage seems to Eribon to have played a catalytic role
in what he terms his ‘désidentification’: it was that moment ‘qui installa en moi une volonté
patiente et obstinée de contredire l’avenir auquel j’étais promis’ (2010: 97−8). Eribon describes
this moment as ‘une prise de conscience’, yet the emphasis he places here, as elsewhere, on the
feelings of disgust, rejection and hatred it engendered, suggests that what was at stake in this
instance related less to the realm of rational consciousness or deliberative judgement than to the
workings of affect or emotion.
Of course, affect or emotion, notably in the form of shame, plays a central role in Eribon’s theoretical work on gay identity (Eribon, 2004). And in the course of Retour à Reims he will suggest
that his rejection of his working-class identity and his assumption of his sexuality were very closely
articulated. Hence perhaps one of the most significant innovations contained in Retour à Reims is
Eribon’s attempt to expand on his earlier work on the centrality of affect to sexual identity so that
this might also be brought to bear on the realms of class identity and political affiliation. If we are
to draw any general theoretical conclusions from Eribon’s personal experiences, then, it would
appear that his major contribution to social theory may be to the sociology of emotions, to theoretical understandings of the precise role played by affect and emotion in forming and re-forming
social and sexual identities, and potentially, by extension, also in the emergence of political affiliations. In this sense, it might be possible to situate Eribon’s work within the so-called ‘turn to
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affect’ that has characterised certain trends in social and cultural theory over roughly the last
decade or so.1 This much broader ‘turn to affect’ contains a range of different strands, among
which two have perhaps proved most influential. Thus, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s engagement
with the work of psychologist Silvan Tomkins has had an important impact in the realm of Queer
Theory (Sedgwick and Frank, 1995; Sedgwick, 2003). A more Deleuzian−Spinozist strand,
meanwhile, exemplified by the work of Brian Massumi, has had considerable impact in the
realms of cultural and political theory (Massumi, 2002). Despite their differences, what these
two currents share is a tendency to figure embodied affect as a source of affirmative potential, of
creativity, transformation, and hence emancipation. To quote Constantina Papoulias and Felicity
Callard (2010: 34), for these theorists of affect the body and its affects are typically conceived as
‘a creative space, a field of potentiality that, crucially, precedes the overwriting of the body
through subjectivity and personal history’.
Eribon shares this emphasis on the potentially creative and emancipatory character of affect,
at least as regards the role he attributes to shame in the emergence of his own, politically engaged
sense of gay identity. As he has acknowledged, his work here owes a considerable debt to
Sedgwick’s theories on the role of shame in the production and transformation of queer identities
(Eribon, 2011: 44).2 However, when it comes to theorising the role of affect in the production and
reproduction of the working-class identities of his parents and brothers, it is to a rather different
theory of affect that Eribon turns. Here he draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology, reiterating the
latter’s emphasis on the centrality of affect to the production of a class habitus considered capable of guaranteeing the reproduction of existing class divisions and social distinctions. More
specifically, Eribon echoes Bourdieu’s emphasis on what, following the Stoics, he terms ‘amor
fati’. For Bourdieu, the ‘amor fati’ corresponds to the ‘immediate’ or ‘doxic’ manner in which,
he claims, the objective conditions of working-class identity are incorporated into a workingclass habitus such that working-class subjects come not merely to accept but also to love their
socially determined fate.
In short, where Sedgwick attributes a transformative, creative potential to the realm of affect, in
Bourdieu’s work that realm is most closely associated with a certain social inertia, and with the
reproduction of the status quo. At the theoretical level, then, Eribon’s deployment of Sedgwick’s
work on shame alongside Bourdieusian sociology raises questions about how he can reconcile
these two rather different, potentially even contradictory conceptions of the relationship between
affect and social or sexual identity. At the empirical level, meanwhile, Eribon’s accounts of the
ambivalence of his own parents’ relationship to their working-class identity seem difficult to reconcile with his and Bourdieu’s emphasis on the ‘amor fati’ − the fact that working-class subjects
are apparently defined by the way they come to love their socially determined fate. There is little
sign of such love of one’s fate either in Eribon’s disgust at his social milieu, or in his father’s unexplained disappearance from and return to the family home in a violent drunken rage, or indeed in
his mother’s ultimately vain attempts to escape her social destiny by retraining as an IT worker.
Allowing and accounting for such visceral affective reactions against one’s social fate and the
attempts to escape they can generate would necessitate a significant reformulation of Bourdieu’s
theories of habitus and class, as well as some attempt to resolve the potential contradictions
between Bourdieusian sociology, on the one hand, and Eribon’s acknowledged debts to the work
of Sedgwick, on the other. As this article will argue, some such reformulation is implicitly called
for by the empirical evidence Eribon presents in Retour à Reims, yet it is forestalled by his adherence to a Bourdieusianism of the most orthodox kind whenever he discusses questions of class,
education and social reproduction. This article will hence seek, first, to clarify Bourdieu’s understanding of the role of affect in his theory of class, habitus and social reproduction, before showing
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how faithfully Eribon echoes this theory in his Retour à Reims. It will then turn to a number of
empirical examples drawn from Retour à Reims that sit uneasily with Eribon’s theoretical commitments to Bourdieusian sociology. This, finally, will serve as a pretext for reformulating some of the
assumptions regarding affect and social identity that underpin Eribon’s analyses.
Affect, habitus and social reproduction
Affect plays an absolutely central, if often overlooked role in Bourdieu’s accounts of habitus, class
identity and social reproduction. Thus, for example, working-class identity, for Bourdieu, is as
much about a shared set of tastes, aversions, affects, practices and dispositions as it is about, say,
position in the relations of production. That shared set of dispositions, tastes and aversions reflects
the manner in which objective social necessity has become incorporated into the structures of the
habitus in such a way as to be experienced as so many subjective choices which are in fundamental
accord with any working-class subject’s deepest sentiments, habits and affections. So, to give the
obvious example, the low objective chances of a working-class student attending an elite highereducation establishment becomes internalised into a working-class habitus which rejects such an
establishment as being ‘not for the likes of us’ or which condemns as unacceptable pretension any
aspiration to escape one’s social destiny. In this way, the working-class habitus is what allows
objective necessity to be experienced as a subjective choice undertaken in accordance with a communally maintained sense of what might constitute an appropriate or proper course of action.
As we have seen, Bourdieu adopts the Stoic notion of ‘amor fati’ to describe this process,
whereby working-class subjects find their freedom in socially determined necessity. As he puts it
in Méditations pascaliennes (1997): ‘[L’agent] se sent chez lui dans le monde parce que le monde
est aussi en lui sous la forme de l’habitus, nécessité faite vertu qui implique une forme d’amour de
la nécessité, d’amor fati’ (Bourdieu 1997: 170). Or again:
l’investissement, la croyance, la passion, l’amor fati, qui sont inscrits dans la relation entre l’habitus et le
monde social (ou le champ) dont il est le produit font qu’il est des choses que l’on ne peut pas faire dans
certaines situations (‘ça ne se fait pas’) et d’autres que l’on ne peut pas ne pas faire (l’exemple par
excellence étant tout ce qu’impose le principe ‘noblesse oblige’). (1997: 174−5)
It is because these affective investments are at the centre of class habitus and identity, Bourdieu
argues, that those situations in which such identities are at play or in question can so often provoke
immediate emotional responses of ‘honte, humiliation, timidité, anxiété, culpabilité’, which themselves ‘se trahissent dans des manifestations visibles, comme le rougissement, l’embarras verbal,
la maladresse, le tremblement, la colère ou la rage impuissante’ (Bourdieu 1998: 44−5).
There is no doubt that Bourdieu has identified something very important here about the nature
of social experience and class identity. Moreover, one can easily see why Eribon might be attracted
by the prospect of allying Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus to Sedgwick’s and his own theoris
ations of the centrality of shame to the formation of minority sexual identities. However, as we
have already noted, in Bourdieu’s sociology affect tends to be understood above all as a force of
social inertia, in a way that sits uneasily with both Sedgwick’s and Eribon’s emphasis on the
transformative, emancipatory potential contained within shame. This problem, inherent to
Bourdieu’s conceptualisation of the affective nature of the habitus, is highlighted when he comes
to theorise the conditions of possibility for any social or political change. For Bourdieu will argue
that it is because the practical dispositions incorporated into the habitus operate at the affective,
embodied level that they are unconscious, fundamentally resistant to change, and marked by an
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extraordinary inertia. Thus, in Méditations pascaliennes, he evokes what he terms ‘l’extraordinaire
inertie qui résulte de l’inscription des structures sociales dans les corps’ (Bourdieu 1997: 206).
Further, he argues that it is because they are embodied that the social imperatives incorporated
into the habitus cannot be suspended by a mere act of will. As he puts it in La Domination
masculine:
Les passions de l’habitus dominé (du point de vue du genre, de l’ethnie, de la culture ou de la langue),
relation sociale somatisée, loi sociale convertie en loi incorporée, ne sont pas de celles que l’on peut
suspendre par un simple effort de la volonté, fondé sur une prise de conscience libératrice. S’il est tout à
fait illusoire de croire que la violence symbolique peut être vaincue par les seules armes de la conscience
et de la volonté, c’est que les effets et les conditions de son efficacité sont durablement inscrits au plus
intime des corps sous forme de dispositions. (Bourdieu 1998: 45)
For Bourdieu, then, the affective, embodied, dispositional structures of the working-class habitus
generate a ‘practical knowledge’ of the social world that is qualitatively different from the objective or scientific knowledge of that world accessible to the bourgeois intellectual − the kind of
knowledge that is the prerequisite for constructing a rational project for future political change.
In his theorisations of political change, Bourdieu thus distinguishes between a rational consciousness of the social world, an ability to formulate coherent political projects for the future,
dependent on a certain level of material wealth, and the ‘doxic’ level of consciousness available
to the dominated classes in society. This ‘doxic’ level of consciousness implies a ‘practical sense’
of the social world, an implicit sense of what one could or could not hope to achieve in the future,
a sense of one’s place and one’s limits which works to naturalise and reproduce the status quo.
However, while Bourdieu acknowledges that this ‘sens pratique’ does imply ‘un acte de construction’, a ‘représentation pratique’ of the social world, he insists that this is ‘plus proche d’un
inconscient de classe que d’une « conscience de classe » au sens marxiste’, since ‘l’essentiel de
l’expérience du monde social et du travail de construction qu’elle implique s’opère dans la pratique en deça du niveau de la représentation explicite et de l’expression verbale’ (Bourdieu 1984: 5).
Bourdieu argues that as long as the ‘practical expectations’ internalised in the habitus are in
accord with the ‘objective chances’ of those expectations being met, the social world will appear
immediately self-evident, natural and beyond question. As long as there is a ‘correspondance
entre … les structures objectives et les structures mentales’, this will secure ‘une sorte d’adhésion
originaire à l’ordre établi’, which Bourdieu terms ‘la doxa originaire’ (Bourdieu 1982: 150).
In order for this situation to end and for the established order to be challenged, two conditions
have to be fulfilled, according to Bourdieu. First, there has to be ‘une crise objective’ which brings
to an end the correspondence between practical expectations and objective chances and hence
causes dominated agents to undergo an ‘épochè pratique’, to ‘suspend’ their immediate investment
in the self-evidence of the doxa. Second, there has to be a conjuncture between this objective crisis
and ‘un discours critique’: the discourse elaborated by intellectuals which will exploit the collective energies unleashed by the practical épochè, channelling and directing those energies towards
rational goals for future change (1982: 150). In Bourdieu’s account, only bourgeois intellectuals
can elaborate such a rational critical discourse; their ability to achieve critical distance on the social
world, to undertake an ‘epistemological break’ vis-à-vis its self-evident immediacy, is contingent
on their relative material wealth. Lacking that material wealth and constrained by a host of pressing
immediate material needs, the dominated classes are, for Bourdieu, by definition incapable of
achieving that critical distance, of undertaking that epistemological break. As he puts it in
Méditations pascaliennes, only bourgeois intellectuals have the ability to articulate ‘la vérité de
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ceux qui n’ont ni l’intérêt, ni le loisir, ni les instruments nécessaires pour entreprendre de
s’approprier la vérité objective et subjective de ce qu’ils sont et de ce qu’ils font’ (Bourdieu 1997:
228). Thus Bourdieu will conclude that the dominated classes are forced to ‘delegate’ responsibility
for articulating rational projects for future political change in their favour to mandated party, trade
union or intellectual representatives (Bourdieu, 1987). The role of such delegates is to transform
the mute, pre-reflexive, practical dispositions of the class habitus or ethos into the coherent, explicit
form of a rational political programme: ‘la systématicité « en soi » des pratiques ou jugements
engendrés à partir des principes inconscients de l’ethos’ into ‘la systématicité consciente et quasi
forcée du « parti » politique’ (Bourdieu, 1977: 70−1).
In the course of his Retour à Reims, Eribon rehearses each of these Bourdieusian tenets. His
analyses of the role played by the French Communist Party in his family’s working-class milieu
draw heavily on Bourdieu’s theories of political delegation (Eribon, 2010: 42). He repeats
Bourdieu’s claims about the fundamental ‘inertia’ of the working-class habitus and the ‘doxic’
nature of working-class agents’ relation to the social world (2010: 119). He echoes Bourdieu in
assuming that his elder brother’s apparent acceptance of his social destiny reflected the latter’s
immediate affective investment in working-class culture and identity. As he puts it: ‘Lui correspondait sans problème et sans distance au monde qui était le nôtre, aux métiers qui se proposaient à
nous, à l’avenir qui se dessinait pour nous’ (Eribon, 2010: 111). He argues that the condition of
possibility of his own break with the immediate assumptions of the working-class habitus was the
social break with his working-class milieu that was secured by his academic success and social
ascension. As he puts it:
Il faut être passé, comme ce fut mon cas, d’un côté à l’autre de la ligne de démarcation pour échapper à
l’implacable logique de ce qui va de soi et apercevoir la terrible injustice de cette distribution inégalitaire
des chances et des possibles. (2010: 51)
And Eribon goes on to argue that it was this social break with his working-class origins that was
the condition of possibility of the epistemological break that allows him to objectify the mechanisms of social reproduction:
Seule une rupture épistémologique avec la manière dont les individus se pensent spontanément permet de
décrire, en reconstituant l’ensemble du système, les mécanismes par lesquels le social se reproduit, et
notamment la façon dont les dominés ratifient la domination en élisant l’exclusion scolaire à laquelle ils
sont voués. (2010: 52)
Finally, in explaining how he was able to escape his social destiny, Eribon has recourse to the
Bourdieusian notion of the ‘miraculé’ (2010: 119), the term Bourdieu coined to describe those rare
working-class students who do succeed academically but whose success ultimately serves merely
to justify the republican ideology of equal educational opportunity for all.
‘Amor fati’ in the eye of the beholder
Eribon’s very orthodox application of Bourdieusian social theory to his own personal experiences
does, however, seem to present a number of interrelated problems. First, we might want to question
his assertion that the ability to stage some kind of break, whether at the affective or the rational
level, with the apparent self-evidence of the social world is necessarily contingent upon prior academic success and/or relative material wealth. Second, we may wonder whether the relationship of
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all working-class subjects to their status and likely social destiny is always and by definition
characterised by the ‘amor fati’ − by their immediate and unquestioning investment in what society
has in store for them. A series of episodes recounted by Eribon in Retour à Reims suggest that these
two fundamental assumptions of Bourdieusian sociology may be highly questionable.
As we have seen, Eribon maintains that it was his academic success and consequent social
ascension that formed the condition of possibility for his escaping ‘l’implacable logique de ce qui
va de soi’ and noticing ‘la terrible injustice de cette distribution inégalitaire des chances et des possibles’. However, this seems to contradict his assertions, elsewhere in Retour à Reims, that what
first allowed him to escape the apparent self-evidence of the values of his working-class milieu
were his affective reactions of disgust, horror and rejection of the normative model of violent,
bigoted working-class masculinity personified by his father. On such occasions, Eribon speculates
that it may have been his rejection of that heterosexual identity that proved the catalyst and motor
for his miraculous academic success and for his flight from his working-class origins. As he puts
it: ‘Je me suis décrit plus haut, en évoquant ma trajectoire scolaire, comme un « miraculé »: il se
pourrait bien que, en ce qui me concerne, le ressort de ce « miracle » ait été l’homosexualité’
(Eribon 2010: 203). According to this account, Eribon’s initial disgust at and rejection of a certain
kind of working-class masculinity at the affective level preceded and determined the subsequent
academic success and social ascension that he also wants to claim were the conditions of possibility of breaking the immediate, spontaneous doxic assumptions of his working-class habitus.
It is also important to note that this affective rejection of the working-class habitus appears
neither to have been exclusive to Eribon nor to have been contingent upon the ‘miracle’ of his
academic success. As we learn in the course of Retour à Reims, both of Eribon’s parents made
strenuous, but vain efforts to escape their working-class destinies through education. The father
attended evening classes in the hope of becoming an industrial designer and kept his notebooks in
a drawer, periodically bringing them out to show family members and friends in poignant testimony to both his thwarted ambitions and the persistence of his desire to be someone else (2010:
54). His mother, meanwhile, wasted significant amounts of money on an IT course (2010: 84) −
easy prey, for lack of the necessary cultural capital, to those seeking to exploit her desire for social
advancement, and again to escape from the social destiny in which Eribon, following Bourdieu in
this, will elsewhere have us believe she uncritically and spontaneously invested. As was implied at
the beginning of this article, it would also seem reasonable to interpret the violent rages into which
both of Eribon’s parents regularly flew as so many expressions of their disgust and frustration at
their social fate, their rejection of or dis-identification from their working-class identities, again
expressed at the level of affect. Elsewhere in Retour à Reims, Eribon describes a rather different
form of affective investment characteristic of his working-class family, namely their affective and
financial investment in mass consumerism. As he puts it:
Dès qu’ils le purent, ils achetèrent, en multipliant les crédits, ce dont ils rêvaient: une voiture d’occasion,
puis une voiture neuve, une télévision, des meubles qu’ils commandaient sur catalogue … Je déplorais de
les voir mus en permanence par la seule recherche du bien-être matériel, et même par la jalousie …
Chacun, dans ma famille, aimait à se vanter du prix qu’avait coûté tel ou tel objet, car cela montrait qu’on
n’était pas dans le besoin, qu’on s’en était bien sorti. Les sentiments de la fierté et de l’honneur
s’investissaient dans ce goût prononcé pour l’affichage chiffré. (Eribon 2010: 87)
This apparent investment in conspicuous consumption, like the parents’ thwarted educational
ambitions and violent rages, seems difficult to reconcile with Eribon’s and Bourdieu’s insistence
on the working class’s amor fati, or on their immediate affective investment in or doxic adherence
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to their working-class culture and identity. Rather, what appears to lie behind such conspicuous
consumption is a surely understandable desire both to escape the limitations of working-class
existence and to demonstrate to one’s peers ‘qu’on s’en était bien sorti’.
As we have seen, Eribon would have us believe that what distinguishes him from his stillworking-class parents and family members is a fundamental difference in their cognitive relationship to the social world. On the one hand is Eribon’s own rational grasp of the objective
mechanisms of that world, secured by an epistemological break whose condition of possibility is
his academic success and consequent social ascension. On the other hand lies the realm of mute
doxic immediacy inhabited by his parents and family, who are destined to give their immediate
and spontaneous adherence to their social fate. It would be possible, however, to give a very different interpretation of this situation and to suggest that what really distinguishes Eribon from his
parents and family is that where their sentiments of frustration and disgust at their social fate were
destined to lead nowhere but sporadic outbursts of violent impotent rage, he was able successfully
to exploit his rejection of his social fate, of his working-class social and sexual identity, and to
escape. We might speculate that the reasons for Eribon’s success, as against his parents’ failure,
reflect a mixture of good fortune, innate talent and changes to the structures of post-war French
education, notably the establishment of ‘l’école unique’. In other words, it could reasonably be
argued that the difference between Eribon and his parents is not that Eribon achieved a critical
distance on his working-class milieu that was, by definition and a priori, inaccessible to his parents, whose relation to that milieu was thus characterised by a spontaneous, immediate, uncritical,
doxic adherence to its values. Rather, what Eribon’s own account in Retour à Reims strongly
suggests is that his parents’ relationship to their own class identity was just as ambivalent as his
own − just as much characterised by a mixture of sometimes solidarity and pride, yes, but also
feelings of disgust, rejection and frustration. What distinguishes Eribon from his parents is thus
not the difference between two qualitatively different kinds of consciousness, knowledge or intelligence, but between Eribon, who was able successfully to act on those feelings of disgust and
rejection, and his parents who were not able to do so, and this for purely contingent reasons.
Eribon comes close to endorsing this alternative interpretation in the course of the second of
the two interviews published in Retours sur Retour à Reims (2011), a series of reflections on the
reception of Retour à Reims. Here Eribon acknowledges his debt to Sedgwick’s conception of
shame as a kind of ‘énergie transformatrice’, which ‘à la fois réduit au silence et pousse à la prise
de parole’, which is ‘productrice de crainte et de rébellion’ (Eribon 2011: 44). He goes on to
speculate about the relationship between ‘la honte sexuelle’, he felt in regard to his sexual identity, and ‘la honte sociale’, provoked by his working-class origins. He suggests that he found it
easier to transform his sexual shame into the basis for his own self-affirmation and political
engagement as a gay man than he did to transform his social shame into the equivalent basis for
any working-class self-affirmation and political engagement. This, he argues, reflected a set of
purely contingent conditions, namely the existence of a vocal gay movement, validating his sexual
ity as a legitimate form of identity in a way that contrasted strongly with the contemporaneous
disappearance of Marxism and the decline of the workers’ movement in France. Thus, where the
gay movement provided him with a conceptual vocabulary through which to articulate his gay
identity, the decline of the worker’s movement deprived him of ‘la possibilité de revendiquer
comme sien ce dont l’accès à un autre monde lui a donné plus ou moins honte’ (Eribon 2011: 45).
It would surely be possible to extend these purely personal reflections and apply them to
Eribon’s own family members or to working-class subjects more generally. We might then suggest
that his parents’ occasional violent rages, their thwarted educational ambitions and their investment in conspicuous consumption were all expressions of moments of disgust, rejection or shame
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in the face of the limitations of their working-class identity. That these affective responses to their
situation, these moments of disaffection, were to come to nought reflected not working-class
subjects’ spontaneous, immediate or doxic investment in their working-class identities, but rather
the purely contingent lack of those political forms and institutions, those opportunities which might
facilitate the translation of such disaffection into a more positive form of ‘énergie transformatrice’.
This, in turn, would involve acknowledging the possibility that working-class ‘amor fati’ − the
tendency of some working-class subjects aggressively to proclaim their love for their way of life
while rejecting more legitimate cultural forms or lifestyles − may not be as straightforward as it
might initially appear to the outside observer. Not only are such sentiments surely not shared by all
working-class subjects all of the time, they may also form part of a compensatory mechanism
whereby subjects seek to defend the validity of working-class culture against outside criticism
even as, at another level, they might bridle at its rigidities and limitations. In short, such apparent
‘amor fati’ may co-exist, in a contradictory way, with feelings of disgust at or rejection of the
limitations of working-class existence. To raise this possibility is to do no more than to suggest
that working-class subjects’ relationship to their own social identity is as potentially complex and
contradictory as that of any other social group. Such complex and contradictory relationships
between working-class subjects, their identity and culture are certainly implicit in Eribon’s accounts
of his own family members’ lives, their violent rages, and their evident aspirations to social
mobility and educational achievement. However, his application of an orthodox Bourdieusianism
to his analyses of working-class life prevents Eribon from accounting for such evident complexity
and contradiction in a convincing manner.
Beyond the mind−body dualism
While he applies Bourdieusian sociology to explain his personal experiences, then, Eribon’s
accounts of his own affective rejection of his working-class identity, and of his parents’ thwarted
ambitions and violent rages, question Bourdieu’s understanding of the workings of habitus and
social reproduction on at least two levels. First, the assumption that the injunctions, affects and
values of the working-class habitus are spontaneously or immediately incorporated by all workingclass agents seems particularly questionable. Second, and by extension, the notion that the ability to
question, at the rational level, or to reject, at the affective level, the apparent self-evidence of the
social world is contingent upon having achieved a prior social and hence epistemological break
with that social world seems equally dubious. On the contrary, the evidence of Retour à Reims
strongly suggests that a prior rejection of the apparently self-evident values of one’s class habitus
can prove to be the motor or catalyst for a subsequent social break, although the chances of that
break being successfully achieved may well be strongly correlated with a series of other social
preconditions. To put it more simply, it is easier for someone from a wealthy middle-class background to act upon their affective rejection of their class habitus since their wealth provides them
with greater opportunities for translating that affective rejection into effective action.
What needs to be questioned here is the Bourdieusian assumption that the innate capacity to
question or reject one’s initial class habitus is determined by class position. In short, what is needed
here is a reformulation of the Bourdieusian framework in such a way as to recognise and account
for the inherent possibility of processes of incorporation going awry, and going awry in such a way
that may not imply a ‘prise de conscience’ or an act of deliberative judgement, as traditionally
understood, but may indeed be more a matter of an affective reaction or rejection, with varied but
nonetheless potentially highly significant consequences. This, in turn, would necessitate questioning Bourdieu’s assumption as to the inherent ‘inertia’ of the habitus and his consequent theorisation
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of any political change as necessitating an epistemological break − a break that secures access to a
realm of rational or scientific knowledge which defines itself in opposition to the realm of practical,
affective embodied knowledge, characterised precisely by its unthinking inertia. For there appears
to be only one reason for assuming that the practical schemes of the habitus are inert because they
are embodied and that social or political change demands accession to a level of rationality defined
in opposition to the embodied and affective. And that reason is continued adherence to a rigid
mind−body dualism. Rejecting such a rigid dualism would involve acknowledging that if affective
and embodied forms of experience can indeed play a central role in securing agents’ adherence to
existing social identities and institutions, there is no a priori reason why affective reactions of disgust or rejection of those identities and institutions might not play an equally significant role as
motors of social and political change, whether at the purely individual or the more collective level.
To acknowledge that affective reactions to existing social identities may be more ambivalent
and contradictory than Bourdieu’s social theory suggests is not simply to invert the mind−body
binary so that the affective and the embodied are idealised as the locus of a dynamic, affirmative
force seen as preceding and constantly escaping those forces that strive to channel, discipline or
capture affect within pre-existing identities of class, gender, sexuality or nation. This is the danger inherent in much of what falls under the rubric of the ‘affective turn’ in social theory, from
Sedgwick’s appropriations of the work of Silvan Tomkins to Brian Massumi’s Deleuzo-Spinozist
theories of the politics of affect. As Papoulias and Callard (2010: 49) have convincingly argued,
much of the social theory produced within this affective turn relies on a highly selective reading
of experimental work in psychology and neuroscience. As a result, any mention of the evolutionary determinations and hence regulatory functions, which scientists regularly ascribe to the
affects, is ignored, so that ‘an essentially dynamic, self-organizing biology/nature is presented as
the guarantor for an emancipatory and creative politics’ (Papoulias and Callard 2010: 49).
Massumi’s attempt to draw a rigid, binary distinction between affect, on the one hand, and emotion, on the other, offers one particularly clear example of this tendency. According to Massumi,
emotion is ‘qualified intensity’ or ‘intensity owned and recognised’ through the ‘sociological
fixing of the quality of the experience which is from that point onward defined as personal’
(Massumi 2002: 28). Affect, by contrast, is described in an idealised and hypostatised manner as
a kind of immediate, inherently dynamic and affirmative life force. ‘Affect is vivacity of context’,
Massumi claims; ‘affect enlivens’ (Massumi 2002: 220). As Leys (2011: 455) argues, at such
moments affect theorists reveal their disavowed adherence to a ‘classical dualism of mind and
body’; the mind−body dualism may be inverted here but it is certainly not deconstructed, with the
result that the affective turn ultimately risks amounting to little more than a kind of reheated
Romanticism.3 Leys (2011: 465 n. 56) attributes such failings to affect theorists’ embrace of an
‘anti-intentionalist paradigm’, thus implying that intentionalist accounts of consciousness may
offer one way out of the mind−body dualism that continues to underpin both the work of affect
theorists and Bourdieu’s sociology. This is a suggestion that is surely worth pursuing, not least
because Bourdieu’s theory of practice owes such a debt to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s account of
intentionality, and to his phenomenological philosophy, of which it represents a kind of sociological re-reading.
In his Phénoménologie de la perception (1945), Merleau-Ponty sets out to elaborate a theory
of human practice that sees embodiment and rational or objective knowledge as existing on a
continuum, rather than being in opposition to one another. For Merleau-Ponty, objective knowledge and rational political agency have as their necessary preconditions the affective investment
and embodied presence of agents in the social and cultural worlds. Rather than seeing freedom
of thought or action as necessitating an epistemological break with the realm of embodied
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practice, as Bourdieu does, Merleau-Ponty argues that it is precisely the incorporation of certain
habitual actions and reflexes that is the precondition for consciousness and freedom of action. In
order for an agent to gain consciousness of the external world, it is necessary, according to
Merleau-Ponty, that:
les stimulations du dehors ne le touchent plus qu’avec « respect », que chaque situation momentanée cesse
d’être pour lui la totalité de l’être, chaque réponse particulière d’occuper tout son champ pratique, que
l’élaboration de ces réponses, au lieu de se faire au centre de son existence, se passe à la périphérie et
qu’enfin les réponses elles-mêmes n’exigent plus chaque fois une prise de position singulière et soient
dessinées une fois pour toutes dans leur généralité. Ainsi, c’est en renonçant à une partie de sa spontanéité,
en s’engageant dans le monde par des organes stables et des circuits préétablis que l’homme peut acquérir
l’espace mental et pratique qui le dégagera en principe de son milieu et le lui fera voir. Et à condition de
replacer dans l’ordre de l’existence jusqu’à la prise de conscience d’un monde objectif, nous ne trouverons
plus de contradiction entre elle et le conditionnement corporel: c’est une nécessité interne pour l’existence
la plus intégrée de se donner un corps habituel. Ce qui nous permet de relier l’un à l’autre le ‘physiologique’
et le ‘psychique’, c’est que, réintégrés à l’existence, ils ne se distinguent plus comme l’ordre de l’en soi et
l’ordre du pour soi, et qu’ils sont tous deux orientés vers un pôle intentionnel ou vers un monde. Sans doute
les deux histoires ne se recouvrent jamais tout à fait: l’une est banale et cyclique, l’autre peut être ouverte
et singulière. (Merleau-Ponty, 1945: 103)
When Bourdieu attempts to graft Gaston Bachelard’s concept of an epistemological break on to
his sociological re-reading of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, he unwittingly reasserts the
mind−body dualism that Merleau-Ponty had worked so hard to think through and reject. As I have
sought to demonstrate, when he recounts both his own rejection of his working-class identity and
the rejections and violent impotent rages of his parents, Eribon implicitly also undermines this
dichotomy between mind and body, epistemological break and doxic adherence − a dichotomy
his adherence to an orthodox Bourdieusianism constantly works to reimpose.
Merleau-Ponty’s insistence that there is no contradiction between ‘une prise de conscience’ and
‘le conditionnement corporel’, and his call for us conceptually to reintegrate the physiological and
the psychic, even as we acknowledge that these two ‘ne se recouvrent jamais tout à fait’, surely
offers a more convincing theoretical model through which to make sense of both Eribon’s and his
parents’ ambivalent affective responses to their class identity. One indication of what a sociology
of working-class experience might look like, if it reformulated Bourdieu’s social theory on the
lines suggested here, is offered by British sociologist Beverley Skeggs in her Formations of Class
and Gender (1997). Skeggs does not engage with the work of Merleau-Ponty per se, but, in her
efforts to engage with and reformulate the tenets of Bourdieusian sociology, she does reject the
mind−body dualism, while retaining an emphasis on the centrality of affect in ways broadly consistent with Merleau-Ponty’s approach.
Formations of Class and Gender is a study of young working-class British women training to
be care assistants. Skeggs applies Bourdieu’s concepts of class identity and cultural capital to her
research subjects but rejects his assumption regarding the immediate or unproblematic manner in
which working-class subjects supposedly adhere to existing class or gender identities. In the behaviour of her subjects, Skeggs observes ‘strenuous efforts to deny, disidentify, and dissimulate’ their
working-class identity (Skeggs 1997: 94). Yet these efforts are in no way contingent on prior academic success or social advancement, or on staging an epistemological break with their social
milieu, as Bourdieu and Eribon would both assume. These are rather, as Skeggs puts it, ‘affective
responses’ motivated by a sense of injustice at their ‘social and cultural positioning’. Such responses
also reveal aspirations to ‘social betterment’, and to the kind of middle-class respectability,
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femininity and material comfort embodied in the person and politics of Margaret Thatcher and her
form of market populism (Skeggs 1997: 76). Skegg’s important contribution here is to allow for the
possibility of processes of incorporation going awry, and for affective responses or reactions
against one’s allotted social identity which produce real social and political effects. Yet she does
this in such a way as to avoid the tendency to idealise or romanticise the realm of affect, hence
acknowledging that such responses and reactions can often produce quite conservative political or
social effects. Affect, in Skeggs’ work, is neither idealised as inherently creative, as a Sedgwick or
a Massumi would imply, nor is it characterised as a realm of immediate doxic investment, of
unthinking inertia, as Bourdieu would have it. Skeggs shows how affective reactions against a
working-class milieu can generate impulses towards significant political and social changes. There
is nothing essentially affirmative or progressive in such affective reactions, yet any social theory
worth its name must surely be able to acknowledge and account for their possibility and potential
effects.
In Retours sur Retour à Reims, Eribon argues that to provide a realistic account of the inherent
limitations of working-class life and culture is necessarily to invite the accusation that one is guilty
of reproducing a form of class prejudice. As he puts it:
Mon livre entend s’insurger contre cet ordre social, contre la violence sociale qu’il véhicule, contre le
racisme social qui le cimente. Mais pour parler des dominés sans tomber dans la mythologie ouvriériste,
populiste, on est obligé de dire des choses qui renvoient à des réalités parfois peu glorieuses, et peu
enviables, et cela peut être ressenti par ceux qui sont concernés comme du racisme de classe. Je le sais.
C’est un paradoxe indépassable. (Eribon 2011:25)
What Skeggs’s work shows is that Eribon has presented us with a false dichotomy here, for it is
quite possible to acknowledge and account for the ambivalence and complexity of working-class
agents’ relationships to their social identity without in any way endorsing ‘la mythologie ouvriériste, populiste’. The paradox Eribon evokes here is in no way ‘indépassable’, provided one
eschews one-dimensional depictions of working-class agents and hence rejects or at least reworks
certain of the fundamental assumptions underpinning Bourdieu’s sociology. These assumptions
are very closely and logically interrelated, so that a classical, if strenuously disavowed, mind−body
dualism generates the assumption that working-class agents’ relationship to the social world is
defined by a pre-reflexive, doxic immediacy. This, in turn, validates Bourdieu’s and Eribon’s
constant slippage from registering material inequalities to making the illegitimate assumption
that these must correspond to inequalities of inherent intellectual capacity.
It cannot be emphasised enough that to question these fundamental tenets of Bourdieusian
sociology is not to seek to deny the continuing importance of class to the shockingly divergent
life chances of those born and brought up in the developed Western economies. Inasmuch as
Eribon’s Retour à Reims has brought these important questions of class once more to the fore of
the French intellectual field, the book is to be warmly welcomed. However, in a context where the
relevance of social class is routinely, and hypocritically, dismissed as hopelessly outdated, the
onus on those undertaking class analysis to get it right, to avoid simplistic or one-dimensional
accounts of working-class identity, is all the greater. As this article has sought to demonstrate, in
his excessive reliance on Bourdieu’s social theory, Eribon unwittingly risks reproducing a
damagingly one-dimensional account of working-class experience. As we have argued, avoiding
this danger is surely not as difficult as Eribon implies. It is sufficient to acknowledge that the possibility of human agents not immediately adhering to the values contained in their class habitus
and identity, and the potential for affective reactions of disgust, horror or rejection of such values,
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is intrinsic to us all, and it forms part of our very species-being. To argue this is not to embrace a
naïve idealism, which ignores the weight of social conditions and the very different life chances
and opportunities these offer agents of different social origins. For one can assert the universality
of the innate capacity to reject or react against one’s class habitus, while still acknowledging that
the chances of being able successfully to move from that affective response to escape one’s social
destiny vary greatly depending upon one’s social origin. The image of Eribon’s father drunkenly
smashing all the bottles in the family home in a violent rage, or, perhaps more movingly still,
carefully conserving the notebooks that bear witness to his thwarted ambition to escape his social
destiny, surely bears witness to both of those truths.
Notes
1 For two useful critical surveys of this ‘turn to affect’, see Leys (2011) and Papoulias and Callard (2010).
Within this broad body of work, ‘affect’ is conventionally considered to be conceptually distinct from
‘emotion’. For reasons that will become clear in the main body of my argument, I concur with Leys
(2011: 435) in considering this distinction to be ultimately unsustainable and will hence employ the
two terms interchangeably throughout my analysis.
2 The key reference here is Sedgwick’s essay ‘Shame, Theatricality, and Queer Performativity: Henry
James’s The Art of the Novel’ (in Sedgwick 2003: 35−65). For Sedgwick, the shame felt at society’s rejection of one’s sexuality as ‘deviant’ possesses a potentially transformative force inasmuch as it can provide
the basis for a sexual identity defined by its resistance to, rejection of, or rebellion against the status quo.
3 As Papoulias and Callard (2010: 38) point out, for affect theorists attending to affect ‘is about
stepping closer to lived, “fleshed” experience, a stepping closer that is frequently regarded as a kind of
re-enchantment’. Derbyshire (2011) has made this same accusation of Romanticism in his critique of
Beasley-Murray’s book Posthegemony (2010), itself an attempt to synthesise a Deleuzo-Spinozist reading
of affect with Bourdieu’s theory of practice.
References
Beasley-Murray J (2010) Posthegemony: Political Theory and Latin America. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Bourdieu P (1977) Questions de politique. Actes de la recherche en sciences socials 16: 55−89.
Bourdieu P (1982) Décrire et prescrire: les conditions de possibilité et les limites de l’efficacité politique.
In: P Bourdieu, Ce que parler veut dire: l’économie des échanges linguistiques. Paris: Fayard, 149−61.
Bourdieu P (1984) Espace social et genèse des ‘classes’. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 52−3:
3−15.
Bourdieu P (1987) La Délégation et le fétichisme politique. In: Choses dites. Paris: Minuit, 185−201.
Bourdieu P (1997) Méditations pascaliennes. Paris: Seuil.
Bourdieu P (1998) La Domination masculine. Paris: Seuil.
Derbyshire P (2011) Romanticism of the multitude. Radical Philosophy, 169 (September/October): 51−3.
Eribon D (2004) Preface. In: Insult and the Making of the Gay Self, trans. M Lucey. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press), x−xxii.
Eribon D (2010) Retour à Reims. Paris: Flammarion/Champs Essais.
Eribon D (2011) Retours sur Retour à Reims. Paris: Éditions Cartouche.
Leys R (2011) The turn to affect: a critique. Critical Inquiry 37(3): 434−72.
Massumi B (2002) Parables of the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Merleau-Ponty M (1945) Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard.
Papoulias C and Callard F (2010) Biology’s gift: interrogating the turn to affect. Body and Society 16(1):
29−56.
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Sedgwick EK (2003) Touching, Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Sedgwick EK and Frank A (1995) Shame in the cybernetic fold: reading Silvan Tomkins. In: EK Sedgwick
and A Frank (eds) Shame and its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1−28.
Skeggs B (1997) Formations of Class and Gender. London: SAGE.
Jeremy F. Lane is Associate Professor in the Department of French and Francophone Studies at Nottingham
University. He is author of Pierre Bourdieu: A Critical Introduction (2000) and Bourdieu’s Politics, Problems
and Possibilities (2006).

French Cultural Studies

Transcription

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