Didier Eribon

Works

• 1999Insult and the Making of the Gay Self

  Insult comes first: gay subjectivity is formed by the injurious word – and by the work of reshaping oneself against it.

• 2009Returning to Reims

  After his father’s death a gay intellectual returns to his working-class family and asks why it was easier to write about sexual shame than about the shame of class.

Position

In Insult and the Making of the Gay Self (1999) Eribon argues that gay subjectivity begins with an injury: before one has words for oneself, one has been named by an insult, and the world is already organised by this verdict. Becoming gay means learning to live with it and to reinvent oneself, often by moving to the city, building new networks and drawing on a tradition of writers from Wilde to Gide and Genet. Returning to Reims, written after his father’s death, turns the same analysis on class. Eribon asks why he wrote at length about sexual shame but had kept silent about the shame of his origins, which he had hidden behind the life of a Parisian intellectual. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and social verdict, and on the literary model of Annie Ernaux, he describes school as a sorting machine and social mobility as a painful conversion. The book also offers a political thesis: his family, once voting Communist, had come to vote for the National Front, because the left had stopped speaking of class and the working class looked for a new collective identity. How far former Communist voters in fact moved to the far right is disputed in electoral research. Eribon has continued this “socio-analysis” in La société comme verdict (2013) and in a book on his mother’s last years in a care home (2023).

Life & context

Didier Eribon was born in Reims in 1953 into a working-class family; his father was a factory worker, his mother a cleaner and later a factory worker. He was the first in his family to complete secondary school. He studied philosophy, failed the competitive teaching examinations and abandoned a doctoral thesis for lack of money. From 1979 he was a literary critic for Libération and from 1984 to the 1990s for Le Nouvel Observateur. He published book-length conversations with Georges Dumézil and Claude Lévi-Strauss and in 1989 the first biography of Michel Foucault, whom he knew personally. Pierre Bourdieu became a mentor and friend. He later obtained his habilitation and became a professor at the University of Picardie in Amiens, and he has taught as a visiting professor at Berkeley and elsewhere. Returning to Reims (2009) became an international success; its German translation (2016) was a bestseller, and Thomas Ostermeier staged it at the Berlin Schaubühne in 2017.

Further main works

• Michel Foucault (1989)
• La société comme verdict (2013)
• Principes d’une pensée critique (2016)
• Vie, vieillesse et mort d’une femme du peuple (2023)