Returning to Reims

by Didier Eribon

“I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.”11

In working class environments, a leftist politics meant first and foremost a very pragmatic rejection of the experience of one’s own daily life.

Even the very word “inequality” seems to me to be a euphemism that papers over the reality of the situation, the naked violence of exploitation. A worker’s body, as it ages, reveals to anyone who looks at it the truth about the existence of classes.

Yet this is also an example of the truth of something Bourdieu demonstrated about the family: that it is not some stable entity, but rather a set of strategies.

When people write about the working class world, which they rarely do, it is most often because they have left it behind. They thereby contribute to perpetuating the social illegitimacy of the people they are speaking of in the very moment of speaking about them. This happens even if they write with the goal of exposing and critiquing the very status of social illegitimacy to which these people are relegated over and over again, because in writing they take a necessary critical distance, and with it comes the position of a judge or an evaluator.

What strikes me as particularly undeniable is that the absence of the feeling of belonging to a class is characteristic of children of the bourgeoisie. People in a dominant class position do not notice that they are positioned, situated, within a specific world (just as someone who is white isn’t necessarily aware of being so, or someone heterosexual).

The “common sense” that was shared by the “French” popular classes underwent a profound transformation, precisely because the quality of being “French” became its central element, replacing the quality of being a “worker,” or a man or woman of the “left.”