Le cas Didier Eribon. Une lutte contre « l’infériorisation sexuelle et l’infériorisation sociale »

Abstract

“After his father’s death, Didier Eribon went back to Reims, his hometown, and rediscovered a social background that he more or less broke up with thirty years before”. Those are the first lines of the book Retour à Reims’s summary, in which the French sociologist talks about his childhood, his teenage years, and the fundamental traits that built his personality, including his homosexuality. He also describes his upward social mobility and his shame at “betraying” – in a sense – his origins. To be on the fringe of society for two different reasons is a perpetual suffering, resulting from past circumstances; we are not responsible for what we are, but we must grow from there on, and our life will, in most cases, be the result of an “act”, a pretence amongst a thousand concealments.