French Cultural Studies

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Cultural Studies
Didier Eribon, restive rationalist: The limits of sociological self-understanding in
Retour à Reims
Oliver Davis
French Cultural Studies 2012 23: 117
DOI: 10.1177/0957155812436532
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436532
2012
FRC23210.1177/0957155812436532DavisFrench Cultural Studies
Didier Eribon, restive rationalist:
The limits of sociological
self-understanding in Retour à Reims
23(2) 117–126
© The Author(s) 2012
Reprints and permission: sagepub.
co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0957155812436532
frc.sagepub.com
Oliver Davis
University of Warwick
Abstract
This article suggests that Eribon’s autobiography is most engaging (as literature) and valuable
(as social document) in those moments when the author loses his interpretative grip on the
meaning of his own experience. Although a concerted attempt is made by Eribon to account for
his problematic relationship to his working-class family background, in particular his father, in
purely sociological terms, a restive textual indeterminacy at key junctures unwittingly exposes
the limitations of this approach. By allowing us to glimpse the limits of its author’s sociological
rationalism, the autobiography calls into question Eribon’s strategic rejection of psychoanalytic
forms of understanding and a number of his other longstanding theoretical and political
commitments. This is just as it should be: its restive moments and the critical consequences
which follow from them make Eribon’s autobiography much more than a mere exercise in
self-validation.
Keywords
autobiography, Pierre Bourdieu, Didier Eribon, gay marriage, intellectual history, paternity,
psychoanalysis, sociology
‘Et puis, et puis, comment résister à Didier Eribon?’ (Dumézil, 1987: 14)
Some 20 years after his dependable biography of Michel Foucault appeared on the shelves in its
first edition of 1989, Didier Eribon published his own autobiography, Retour à Reims (Eribon,
2009). In the intervening time he has moved from a position on the outer margins of French intellectual life – as an interviewer and biographer of others – gradually towards its centre. He is now
someone who is himself interviewed and whose work is discussed in its own right, as the very
existence of this special issue demonstrates. Eribon’s ascent is atypical for a French intellectual of
Corresponding author:
Oliver Davis, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK.
Email: [email protected]
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French Cultural Studies 23(2)
his generation, not only because he has moved from journalism into academia rather than the other
way round, but also because it can be surmised from remarks at the close of his autobiography that
he secured his academic position (in the Faculty of Philosophy, Human and Social Sciences at the
University of Amiens) less on the basis of formal qualifications and more on the strength of his
published work and his international reputation as a leading commentator on gay and lesbian issues
and an intercultural intermediary between France and the United States on these matters (Eribon,
2009: 247−8). In sociological terms, Eribon’s success in making cultural capital, a reputation and
indeed a career principally out of homosexuality is nothing short of miraculous.
In Retour à Reims, however, he sets out on what, for him at least, is a new departure by exploring
an earlier ‘miracle’ which he now looks back on with understandable ambivalence: his ‘escape’
from his provincial working-class origins, the break with his family background on which the last
two decades of Parisian intellectual endeavour have been premised. His autobiography projects a
self-assured confidence in its author’s capacity to interpret this break and its wider social significance beyond Eribon’s own individual case; in this respect the tone of the autobiography differs
markedly from the far more tentative and in some respects timid approach in his biography of
Foucault. I shall try to look past the text’s prevailing self-assurance and focus instead on the fleeting manifestations of interpretative uncertainty which occur in the narration of decisive moments
in Eribon’s trajectory. These are moments when the self-writing subject temporarily loses his grip
on the meaning of his own experience and where a suppressed sense of the limitations of his strident sociological rationalism becomes legible in the restive surface of the text. It will be argued
that although these moments of interpretative indeterminacy undermine Eribon’s mastery of the
meaning of his own destiny, in so doing they redeem this text, recovering for it a provisionality
which salvages it both as literary self-writing and as social document.
Sociological determinism and love
For Eribon, the import of his Retour greatly exceeds the modest retelling of his own story; he has
described it as ‘un livre de sociologie’ and he, or his publishers, presumably with his consent,
even go as far as to advertise it as ‘un grand livre de sociologie et de théorie critique’ (Eribon,
2011: 16; Eribon, 2009: back cover). At first glance these seem unusual claims to make about any
autobiography, for in an obvious sense autobiography is one of the most subjective types of
writing; such claims are bound to arouse even greater suspicion when made so forcefully by the
author of the work in question, or on his behalf by his publisher. The book is certainly saturated
with references to sociology, principally to the work of Pierre Bourdieu, and a concerted effort is
made by Eribon to account for his own experience of the education system and his relationship to
art and culture in terms of the theoretical paradigms developed by Bourdieu. The question is
whether framing his own life-story in terms derived from a particular sociologist’s work is sufficient to make the book in any substantial sense a work of sociology. For it could be argued that
what Retour lacks is the degree of objectivity which empirical data, gathered in fieldwork and
analysed statistically, are supposed to provide in properly sociological analyses. Of Bourdieu’s
own work, Retour most closely resembles his posthumous Esquisse pour une auto-analyse
(Bourdieu, 2004), a text Eribon comments on extensively in Retour and which he clearly views as
one of the models for his own endeavour; yet this Esquisse is perhaps among the least sociological
and certainly among the least objective of all Bourdieu’s publications.
The ubiquitous references and allusions to Bourdieu’s sociology in Retour are often deferential
and sometimes ritualistically recitational, for example when Eribon pauses in the narrative of his
parents’ marriage to intone solemnly that ‘les lois de l’endogamie sociale sont aussi fortes que
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celles de la reproduction scolaire’ (Eribon, 2009: 79), or when he exclaims, ‘Car ils sont tracés, les
destins sociaux! Tout est joué d’avance’ (2009: 52). On occasions the insistence on framing pivotal
scenes in overtly sociological terms is so pronounced as to be unwittingly comic, for example
when he edges towards his parents’ first meeting with a framing description of their social milieu:
Les traditions ouvrières, et notamment certaines formes de culture et de solidarité, ne manquaient pas ni
de s’y développer ni de s’y perpétuer. C’est par le moyen d’une de ces formes culturelles – le bal populaire
du samedi soir – que mes parents se rencontrèrent. (2009: 49)
The irony of this sociological scene-setting is that the abstract generality of its terms conveys
almost nothing to the reader about the particular features of the environment in which his parents
met; the description is stripped not just of sentimentality and emotion but almost entirely drained
of material substance. Similarly, when he relates what must have been the frightening experience
for a young boy of his drunken and sometimes violent father returning home after a drinking binge
and throwing things around the kitchen in a rage, he merely observes with po-faced professorial
empathy that: ‘Il avait du mal à se détacher d’une certaine forme de sociabilité ouvrière’ (Eribon,
2009: 99). While Eribon may think that such affect-stripped re-narration of his family history
brings his approach closer to sociology it is difficult not to see his striving for sociological rationalism here as a defence against the potentially disabling affective force of memory. Eribon suggests
as much himself in the Epilogue, where he speculates that the value of literary, theoretical and
political references to his self-writing project may lie, above all, in the way they ‘permettent de
neutraliser la charge émotionnelle qui serait sans doute trop forte s’il fallait affronter le « réel »
sans cet écran’ (Eribon, 2009: 246). The text may be sociological in its lexis, in its espousal of a
largely deterministic Bourdieusian analysis and in much of its explicit narrative framing, but is this
sufficient to make the book a work of sociology in its own right, or do the sociological references
instead serve principally a protective function by allowing disruptive affect to be held at a distance,
thereby enabling the writing to take place?
The implication is that the originality of Retour, as sociology, lies in the account it offers of
Eribon’s ‘miraculous’ escape from his social destiny: he recounts how, at the age of 13 or 14, he
fell in love with a classmate, the son of a university professor (2009: 173), and how this attachment
allowed him to escape the mechanism of social determination by radically transforming his relationship to culture and education:
ce garçon brièvement fréquenté au lycée me donna le goût des livres, un rapport différent à la chose écrite,
une adhésion à la croyance littéraire ou artistique … Grâce à cette amitié, mon rejet spontané – c’est-à-dire
fruit de mon origine sociale – de la culture scolaire ne déboucha pas sur un refus de la culture tout court.
(2009: 178)
The young Eribon imitates, introjects, and in a sense becomes the loved object, copying and gradually assuming his tastes, mimicking his airs and graces, indeed even and to this day, his handwriting
(2009: 175). I hesitate to speculate what educational policy conclusions, if any, could be drawn from
this episode; what is nonetheless remarkable is the utterly romantic way in which the otherwise
indomitable edifice of social determinism quakes for just long enough to allow Eribon to slip free.
Yet Eribon wavers in his interpretation of this formative attachment; in the passages cited above it
is ascribed a decisive transformative influence. It is what reverses, at a stroke, the young Eribon’s
socially determined rejection of art and culture, initiating him into a world in which the likes of
Godard and Beckett matter: ‘Il m’apprenait tout cela, et surtout l’envie d’apprendre tout cela’ (2009:
175). A little further on, however, Eribon seems already to have forgotten the singularity of this
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attachment as he offers a sociological-existentialist interpretation of his trajectory, according to
which his self-creation as an intellectual was the means he invented to avoid suffocating in the
homophobic environment in which he was raised: ‘l’homosexualité impose de trouver une issue
pour ne pas étouffer’ (2009: 203). He goes on to conclude, rather too neatly, by yoking together his
earlier theorisation (Eribon, 1999) of the role played by the aesthetic in gay subjectivity with his
Bourdieusian account of his class-specific experience of the school system, that: ‘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, 2009: 203). The terms
in which this conclusion is phrased suggest confusingly that any boy, of any class, would have done,
and that a love of culture and a certain intellectualism came afterwards as a way of marking out his
difference from those around him. What has become of the decisive transformative singularity of
that one particular attachment? What if he had fallen in love with a working-class boy instead? What
if his social ascent and his flight from Reims had been motivated primarily by his enduring fidelity
to the singularity of his first love? That the text allows such questions to be raised prevents wider
sociological conclusions being drawn from the particularities of Eribon’s own story yet at the same
time redeems for his autobiography a complexity and an indeterminacy concealed by its self-assured
surface of sociological rationalism.
‘Father forgive me’
Nowhere is sociology called upon to do more self-protective explanatory work in Retour than in
the analysis of Eribon’s feelings towards his father, who died following a gradual descent into
Alzheimer’s disease but with an uncannily exact (uncannily paternal) sense of timing on New
Year’s Eve. Immediately after the report of his death, which occurs shortly after the beginning of
the text (given not, incidentally, in Eribon’s own words but in those of his mother’s, part of whose
telephone call to her son is quoted directly), comes the frank admission from Eribon: ‘Je ne l’aimais
pas. Je ne l’avais jamais aimé’ (Eribon, 2009: 15). It quickly becomes clear that the son’s attitude
to his dead father is not merely to be characterised privatively, as it is here, by an absence of love,
but more accurately as an active and multiply overdetermined hatred. It would be no exaggeration
to describe Retour as an elaborate attempt by Eribon to understand his hatred of his father in
rational terms, for after his death Eribon writes: ‘je me mis à repenser à mon enfance, à mon adolescence, à toutes les raisons qui m’avaient conduit à détester cet homme qui venait de s’éteindre’
(2009: 17, emphasis added). A little later Eribon refers, in similarly rationalistic terms, to
‘l’irrépressible désir de remonter dans le temps afin de comprendre les raisons pour lesquelles il
me fut si difficile d’avoir le moindre échange avec celui que, au fond, je n’ai guère connu’ (2009:
32, emphasis added). These reasons are, Eribon insists, not psychological or personal to his father
but rather a function of ‘l’époque et la région de l’espace social où se décida ce qu’allait être sa
place au monde’ (2009: 35). Sociological rationalism is thus called upon to explain and atone for
hatred of his father.
It is as a bearer of abstract social relations, the almost mathematical expression of the place,
time and circumstances of his birth, that the text strives to represent and comprehend the father.
Nowhere does Eribon’s sociological rationalism strain harder: ‘tout ce qu’avait été mon père,
c’est-à-dire tout ce que j’avais à lui reprocher, tout ce pourquoi je l’avais détesté, avait été façonné
par la violence du monde social’ (2009: 34). At first glance this would appear to be an extreme
example of the text’s interpretative self-assurance as everything (‘tout’) about Eribon’s hatred is
reduced, with triple rhetorical insistence, to its sociological determinants. Yet, even here, interpretative indeterminacy creeps back in by way of this evasively non-committal verb, ‘façonner’.
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What exactly does Eribon mean when he says that his father and the reasons why he hated him
were shaped, or conditioned, by social violence? The choice of ‘façonner’, rather than a stronger
verb of determination, leaves open the possibility that neither his hatred of his father nor that
which was hateful about his father can in fact be entirely reduced to their sociological determinants. In other words, although there is no explicit recognition of this possibility on the surface of
the text, in the interpretative indeterminacy that undercuts what at first sight is one of its most
deterministic and rationalistically overinflated moments, lies a tacit – suppressed or repressed –
recognition that there is something glaringly incomplete about Eribon’s sociological analysis of
his affective relation to his father.
In Annie Ernaux’s autobiographical text, La Place (Ernaux, 1983), which also laments the
distance that has come to separate the author from her working-class parents, in particular her
father, whose death is similarly the trigger for that writing project, so in Retour à Reims the
author–narrator’s well-meaning resolve to process negative affect by explaining it in sociological
terms comes up against an intractable remainder which is only legible in the interstices of the narrative. Although Ernaux’s text is considerably less marked by overtly sociological lexis, framing
and reference, she is known to share Eribon’s faith in the explanatory virtues of Bourdieu’s sociology (Ernaux, 2010: 24), and her work has clearly influenced Eribon, who mentions it on numerous
occasions and seems to regard it as a model for, or precursor of, his own (Eribon, 2009: 28, 55,
84−5, 241−3). Yet although Ernaux, in La Place, does try to explain away the emotional divide
which arose between her and her father in sociological terms by insisting, in particular, on the way
he was excluded from formal education after the age of 12, there remains in that work an undercurrent of unrecognised contempt for his lack of what could be called native wit. So she registers
the fact that he chose to ‘modernise’ their café-épicerie by installing neon lights and applying
pebbledash to the facade just when the fashion in these matters had moved in the opposite direction and his rivals, ‘qui avaient du flair’, were re-exposing their beams and cultivating an oldeworlde style with period lamps (Ernaux, 1983: 84). In the distance which separates her from her
father there is a remainder which resists sociological analysis. Although Ernaux offers no explicit
recognition or discussion of this remainder, her text allows us to see that even after every conceivable allowance has been made sociologically for his particular socio-economic background and
lack of formal education, her father also lacked ‘du flair’.
Similarly in Eribon’s text, the attempt to process sociologically the ‘désarroi’ which news of his
father’s death created in him is only partly successful (Eribon, 2009: 19). His rational investigation
into his hatred of his father has certainly enabled the text to come into being – and in this sense the
sociological framework has succeeded in its work as a protective ‘écran’ to disabling affect – yet it
has failed to dispel his sense of regret and responsibility for the hateful distance which separated
them. It has failed in the task of atonement. For at the end of Retour, when he thinks of his father,
Eribon is left with a self-berating sadness which his sociological analysis seems to have left more
or less intact:
Le cœur serré, je repensai à lui et regrettai de ne pas l’avoir revu. De ne pas avoir cherché à le comprendre.
Ou tenté autrefois de lui parler. D’avoir, en fait, laissé la violence du monde social l’emporter sur moi,
comme elle l’avait emporté sur lui. (2009: 247)
At the end of his account Eribon is restive, still blaming himself for not having done more to narrow a distance for which, if he entirely believed his own sociological rationalism, he could not
possibly hold himself personally responsible. In this self-berating sadness Eribon is not only
holding himself to an impossible standard in the terms of his own sociological analysis but also,
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in his enduring fantasy that fuller comprehension of his and his father’s social situations would
have allowed for greater closeness between them, he is choosing to overlook the fact that hatred
of, or, less dramatically, a painful or problematic lack of closeness to the father, is so commonly
attested by gay men of different social backgrounds, whether in Edmund White’s autofiction, in
Hervé Guibert’s excoriatingly sadistic diatribes, in recent accounts of LGB-affirmative psychotherapeutic practice (for example, LaSala, 2010), or anecdotally in a casual conversation with
almost any gay man. When it comes to his relationship to his father, the suspicion arises that the
same can be said of Eribon’s Retour as he says of Bourdieu’s Esquisse: ‘Le portrait est incomplet,
s’il veut être éclairant’ (Eribon, 2009: 166). While the fact that hatred of the father is so common
an experience among gay men of all social classes does not in itself invalidate Eribon’s sociological analysis, it very pointedly raises the question of how complete that analysis is and, in turn, as
I shall now go on to argue, it casts doubt retrospectively on the wisdom of Eribon’s strategic
rejection of psychoanalysis, on his commitment as a theorist to a resolutely non-psychoanalytic
account of gay subjectivity, and indeed on his commitment as an activist to the institution of gay
marriage.
Psychoanalysis and embourgeoisement
As was the case in the 1990s in debates over the PaCS, during the last dozen years elements
within the French psychoanalytic establishment have been among the most tenacious and
resourceful opponents of the legal recognition of lesbian and gay marriage and parenting rights.
In his hostility towards a psychoanalytic establishment with theoretical assumptions largely
resistant to rational democratic scrutiny, as an opponent of psychoanalysis, Eribon has become
‘radicalised’, to the point where, in Échapper à la psychanalyse (Eribon, 2005), he surveyed with
a studied bewilderment tinged with revulsion the fascination which psychoanalysis has exerted
over numerous queer theorists and asked, rhetorically, whether, ‘L’urgence, pour une pensée critique ou radicale ne serait-elle pas, au contraire, de se donner pour objectif de tourner le dos
résolument à la psychanalyse? De l’ignorer? Et sans doute même de la combattre?’ (2005: 81).
Upping the ante a little further on in the same text, in a daunting assertion of ownership over the
intellectual legacy of Michel Foucault that carries its own measure of symbolic violence, not to
say paternal authoritarianism, Eribon declares flatly: ‘C’est Foucault ou la psychanalyse’ (2005:
86). As I understand, Eribon is advocating a turn away from psychoanalysis both as institution, or
practice, and as mode of thinking. It is difficult not to share Eribon’s indignation at the way in
which parts of the French psychoanalytic establishment have sought repeatedly to influence the
political debate on LGBT rights, in interventions as marked by their wilfully obscurantist theoreticism as they have been by their ignorance of Freud’s fundamental insight into the non-natural
character of human sexuality.
Nevertheless, it is almost impossible to make sense of the stark choice Eribon offers – ‘C’est
Foucault ou la psychanalyse’ – not just because there are distinguishably different moments in
Foucault’s own relationship to psychoanalysis, but also because what travels these days under the
name of psychoanalysis and, more so still, psychotherapy, is a wide variety of very different kinds
of instantiated acts and practices. The way in which Eribon points back to Foucault’s wholesale
rejection of psychoanalysis in La Volonté de savoir (Foucault, 1976) as authority for his own very
similar gesture is wholly inadequate, first because Foucault could himself have been wrong, or
wrong to have gone quite as far as he did − wrong to have indulged a taste for strategic hyperbole
in this instance. Foucault’s unquestioning assimilation of psychoanalysis with disciplinary practices of confession was almost certainly a philosophical and historical error, a totalising move
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which took one aspect of psychoanalytic practice and misrepresented it reductively as all there
was to say on the subject; this assimilation was tantamount to a slur. Eribon’s unquestioning reliance on Foucault’s slur as authority for his own position begs far too many questions.
Eribon’s extremist choice of sociology over psychoanalysis is, moreover, a strategic error in the
ongoing political struggle for LGBT emancipation. While David Halperin must be right in his
folksy, anti-monopolistic assertion that, ‘Psychoanalysis should not be the only critical show in
homo-town’ (Halperin, 2007: 99), Eribon goes far too far in seeking to banish that show altogether.
While he is careful to present much of his writing on psychoanalysis as polemical intervention, this
does not excuse the way in which it misrepresents psychoanalysis, a fractured and internally contested discipline wherever in the world it is actually practised, including France, as a monolithic
and inherently conservative institution inured to criticism. In the essay on subversion he asserts
that: ‘Actuellement, la psychanalyse est un discours, quelque peu dépassé et désespéré, de contrôle
social, de fermeture des possibilités humaines’ (Eribon, 2010: 64). Yet the adverb which begins this
sentence matters, or could be made to matter. ‘At present’, psychoanalysis, or more accurately
some kinds of psychoanalysis, in France and elsewhere, may effectively perform a normalising
policing function, restricting the range of human possibilities, particularly if one happens to live at
variance with heteronormativity. While much of what has been said by many analysts in France on
LGBT issues, particularly same-sex parenting, is indeed remarkably narrow-minded, why would
an activist not want to change psychoanalysis, or contribute to that change? Until Eribon can put
aside his righteous indignation and contribute to the transformation of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, then the countless ‘ordinary’ LGBT people (as opposed to prominent Parisian intellectuals
with Eribon’s kind of discursive agency) who have need, in their daily lives, to turn to psychotherapy, or psychoanalysis, at times of difficulty will not have been well served. Instead of turning
our back on psychoanalysis, why would we not want to intervene to reshape it, or at least disrupt
it, indeed queer it? Given the influence of institutions of psychoanalysis, most especially in France,
over the day-to-day practice of the therapy to which countless ‘ordinary’ LGBT people turn,
Eribon’s position on the matter amounts to theoreticist polemical grandstanding.
In fairness to Eribon, it should be acknowledged that his wholesale rejection of psychoanalysis
(Eribon, 2005) only came after earlier attempts at engagement had, in his estimation, failed. The
tone and manner of his dialogue with psychoanalysis may be contrasted instructively with that of
another French theorist and activist, his longstanding antagonist Marie-Hélène Bourcier. On 9
February 2004, as Eribon recounts (2004: 40), he delivered an invited lecture in the library of the
École de la Cause Freudienne. In his bemused account of the proceedings, published later that
same year, Eribon remarks on the newfound fascination of this particular part of the French psychoanalytic establishment with matters gay and queer and surmises that their anti-identitarian strategy is one of cannibalisation:
Pour répondre à ce que j’ai écrit ils sont amenés à adopter une stratégie assez naïve, qui consiste à reprendre
à leur compte la critique de l’‘identité’ menée à l’intérieur de l’espace gay et lesbien par des théoriciennes
comme Judith Butler et le courant que l’on a dénommé ‘théorie queer’ … Ainsi, le signifiant ‘gay’ serait
un carcan, et la psychanalyse une libération, à l’instar de la pensée ‘queer’. Voici donc le lacanisme se
proclamant ‘queer’, contre ceux qui se définissent comme gays. On aura décidément tout vu! (2004: 44)
Although Eribon’s considered view, after the event, of the analysts’ tactics is highly critical, it
would appear that the mood on the day was more than cordial. What can be deduced about the tone
of his speech contrasts markedly with that of Bourcier’s address to a similar gathering of analysts
at around the same time. Invited to speak to an audience composed mainly of Lacanian analysts at
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an event organised in November 2003 to mark the launch of the French translation of Pat Califia’s
Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgenderism, Bourcier’s speech was delivered, she says, as a ‘zap’ − a
distinctively queer mode of contestatory intervention developed in AIDS activism of the 1980s and
90s. Although it is just possible that the ‘zap effect’ is more in evidence in the narration than it was
in the performance, the tone of Bourcier’s intervention was, according to her account, characteristically strident. She concluded with the following peroration:
votre ‘queer’, comme vous l’appelez, est un supplément de subversion, un supplément d’image, un ‘queer
chic’ made in VIe arrondissement, que vous cultivez par rapport à d’autres obédiences psychanalytiques et
lacaniennes pour faire plus moderne. Mais les docteurs et les psys ne sont plus les autorités en matière de
sexe, de genre et de sexualité. Par psychanalyse, il faut désormais entendre analyse des psys avant que
n’émergent des thérapies queer dont vous n’avez même pas idée. En attendant, cessez donc d’essayer de
nous traduire. (Bourcier, 2005: 271)
These two long quotations demonstrate that Eribon and Bourcier shared, at around the same time,
a similar suspicion about the cannibalising strategic intentions of the French psychoanalytic establishment, even if their respective visions of LGBTQ identity politics differed then just as they do
today. Bourcier and Eribon are similarly suspicious; their thinking would probably have been
described by Sedgwick (2003) as paranoid, not least in that one could instead view this interest by
factions within the psychoanalytic establishment as a belated but nonetheless welcome first step
towards understanding rather than a primarily hostile manoeuvre. Yet whereas, in Bourcier’s case,
her anger and indignation were, according to her account, projected at those gathered before her –
the zap speech was ‘gueulé’ (Bourcier, 2005: 252) – in the case of Eribon’s invited lecture, by
contrast, his anger and scepticism only emerged in written ruminations after the event − an event
at which ‘l’atmosphère [était] très cordiale, et même assez chaleureuse’ (Eribon, 2004: 50). The
point of this extended contrast is to insinuate that, ironically, Eribon’s work as a gay activist and
theorist has always been problematically bourgeois. Bourgeois not just in its increasingly obsessive
focus on equality of access to the respectable social institution of marriage, about which more in a
moment, but also in the very manner in which it has been articulated: by contrast with Bourcier’s
lively interventions, Eribon’s blend of sober Sartreanism and overzealous Bourdieusian sociology
sometimes leaves the reader wondering why any individual, or society, would even want to
embrace, or even reflect upon, deviance from the sexual norm. Wherein would the interest lie? The
mortiferous sociologism of Retour à Reims is of a piece with Eribon’s political activism and his
earlier theoretical work on sexuality; indeed the adventure of queer theory in France has been profoundly and problematically intertwined with Eribon’s own pursuit of recognition and influence as
an intellectual, problematically inflected by his own embourgeoisement. Rather than simply
switching topic, from sexuality to class, what Retour could and perhaps should have offered was a
genuinely self-critical analysis of the preoccupation with bourgeois respectability implicit in the
manner and substance of his earlier theoretical and political work.
Conclusion: gay marriage and the family drama
For mainly methodological reasons I have not sought to supply the missing psychoanalytic
dimension to Eribon’s manifestly incomplete sociological self-analysis in Retour. Instead, I have
argued that his engagement with the French psychoanalytic establishment is problematic in both
its substance and its tone. In this concluding section I briefly extend my critique of his engagement with psychoanalysis to his advocacy of gay marriage.
125
Davis
In the resolutely non-psychoanalytic account elaborated by Eribon (1999) in his Réflexions sur
la question gay, homophobic ‘insult’ and the possibilities for ‘shame’ which accompany it, or even
its mere anticipation, are held to be formative of something called gay subjectivity. Insult, as
Eribon conceives it, is a spectrum which ranges from the anticipatory fear of possible insult,
through various forms of spoken insult and practices of discrimination, through to acts of homophobic violence. Eribon’s most influential contribution to LGBT activism in France over the last
10 years, as historian Julian Jackson recently recognised, has been his impassioned conviction that
the best way to counter this spectrum of homophobic insult is to campaign for equal legal recognition of same-sex partnerships, or in other words, first and foremost, gay (and lesbian) marriage and
parenting rights (Jackson, 2009: 249). Eribon was indeed one of the leading instigators of the
Bègles marriage protest in 2004 and one of its most meticulous chroniclers (Eribon, 2004). Against
homophobic insult, Eribon’s strategy has been to campaign for equal rights to marry and raise
children; or, to be precise, to campaign for legal rights to marry and parent for those same-sex
couples who want to, on an equal basis with their heterosexual counterparts, for as Eribon himself
has made clear on numerous occasions, and it seems to me there is no reason to doubt him, he is
not in the business of trying to force either marriage or children on the unwilling. The point, as he
sees it, is about equality of access to these social institutions of kinship and more precisely about
equality of recognition under the law and what he presumes would be the beneficial broader sociocultural consequences of such recognition for the treatment of gay and lesbian people. Eribon’s
support for gay marriage thus comprises both a rights-based argument about equality of access to
a social institution of kinship and the expectation that equal access will in turn bring about a dramatic change in social attitudes towards homosexuality, effectively re-signifying it in an enduring
way. This second part of the argument reflects a rationalistic faith in the capacity of socio-legal
engineering to bring about profound changes in attitude.
My concluding question about Eribon’s fixation, as an activist, on the marriage agenda is not
about the plausibility of this second objective, although I suspect that homophobia would prove
more resistant to social engineering than he presupposes. Rather, my question is about the desirability of this stifling bourgeois institution and the danger of marriage becoming another site in which
toxic vestiges of the family drama play themselves out. The element of constraint which marriage
reintroduces risks recalling both parties to the enforced dependency of childhood. Marriage without
some measure of psychoanalytically informed self-understanding is not a social good ardently to be
desired but an infantilising prison of dependency in which, the danger is, familial roles are merely
re-enacted; not the invention of new forms of life and new possibilities of relating but a replaying
of the same tired old cards. The pressing question today is not the sociological one of how gay
marriage will transform society, but whether the bourgeois institution of marriage has any positive
transformative role to play in the lives of queer subjects and communities.
References
Bourcier M-H (2005) Queer zones, vol. 2: Sexpolitiques. Paris: La Fabrique.
Bourdieu P (2004) Esquisse pour une auto-analyse. Paris: Raisons d’Agir.
Dumézil G (1987) Entretiens avec Didier Eribon. Paris: Gallimard.
Eribon D (1999) Réflexions sur la question gay. Paris: Fayard.
Eribon D (2004) Sur cet instant fragile: carnets janvier – août 2004. Paris: Fayard.
Eribon D (2005) Échapper à la psychanalyse. Paris: Léo Scheer.
Eribon D (2009) Retour à Reims. Paris: Fayard.
Eribon D (2010) De la subversion: droit, norme et politique. Paris: Cartouche.
Eribon D (2011) Retours sur Retour à Reims. Paris: Cartouche.
126
Ernaux A (1983) La Place. Paris: Gallimard.
Ernaux A (2010) La preuve par corps. In: J-P Martin (ed.) Bourdieu et la littérature. Nantes: Cécile Defaut,
23–7.
Foucault M (1976) Histoire de la sexualité, vol. 1: La Volonté de savoir. Paris: Gallimard.
Halperin D (2007) What Do Gay Men Want?: An Essay on Sex, Risk and Subjectivity. Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press.
Jackson J (2009) Living in Arcadia: Homosexuality, Politics and Morality in France from the Liberation to
Aids. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
LaSala M (2010) Coming Out, Coming Home: Helping Families Adjust to a Gay or Lesbian Child. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Sedgwick E (2003) Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Oliver Davis teaches in the Department of French Studies at Warwick University. His research interests are
in twentieth-century and contemporary French philosophy, literature and theory. His most recent book is a
critical introduction to the work of Jacques Rancière: Jacques Rancière (2010).

French Cultural Studies

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