I publish here the interview published under the title "I hated my father because he worker was "in the cultural magazine Lyon The coup de grace (No. 4, Spring 2010) about Back in Reims.
- You say in your book you have been more difficult to write about the social stigma on the sexual shame. Why?
is the starting point of my book when my father died, I did not attend his funeral. But I went to spend the next day with my mother. She pulled out boxes of pictures of a wardrobe, and we stayed for several hours watching them. I was hit - it hit me in the face - the social setting that these photos represented, that is to say, the poorest working class, which is where I spent my childhood and my adolescence.
It's amazing how when you look at photos from the past, the bodies that we see are bodies of classes, socially marked bodies: by the way people are dressed, how they stand, hairstyles, attitudes
... I thought: "My past is my childhood" and returning to Paris, I am said: "But since I was that boy, why, then, have I thought almost exclusively as a gay child and not as a child laborers? Why do I written books on gay trajectories and not on the social trajectories, including those of children born in the working world? "
In my books, including Reflections on the gay issue (Fayard, 1999) or A moral minority (Fayard, 2001), one of the central foci of the analysis is the notion of shame: shame as an affect with which each individual, when it belongs to a stigmatized group, insulted, must struggle throughout his life and from what he must be his personality. I asked myself: why have I never wrote about the social stigma while shame this point, I lived intensely leaving my place of origin and covering more or less what happened that was the mine that belonged to people with backgrounds in which I now began to live.
- You mean that you become aware of your homosexuality before they realize that you were from a poor family?
course not! Being from a poor family, I knew from the start. But let's say, then, I wanted to suppress this reality. Very consciously. These are things that I wanted to distance me and I insisted, especially in what I wrote. on one aspect of my personality (being gay), leaving aside another aspect of my path.
I therefore question the fact of why I have been more difficult to overcome the social stigma that sexual shame. And I think the reason - one reason, anyway - is that the contemporary political movements, the categories of contemporary politics, somehow this perception that I had prescribed implementation. Marxism had almost completely disappeared from public life and political discourse, it became less immediately obvious to think as child laborers. No one spoke of the labor movement so there were not many opportunities to think in terms of pride in working, cultural workers, belonging to the "working class", while the cultural movements or sex, feminism, the gay and lesbian movement, in particular, had a very strong presence and offered classes to think for yourself, and therefore to think of his childhood and past. We think such as being a young gay man, a victim of homophobia, and, therefore, social perception, I mean in class terms, is set aside, it becomes secondary to that other self-perception.
I wanted to ask me about the fact that childhood was largely determined retrospectively by the senior political contemporaries. There are policy frameworks of memory, that it is collective or individual (but is it ever separate?)
- You mention your grandmother, mowed
Oh no! The violence suffered by my grandmother
Nevertheless, it is true that I may be very sensitive to the violence she suffered because myself, a young gay time it happened to me several times to make me physically assaulted. And it is a primary violence, incomprehensible, which, initially, we think hardly complain since they not only suffered physical violence because you're gay, but dare not speak because we are ashamed of being gay. This violence is integrated as a dimension of shame: instead of protesting, it is taken as part of the destiny to which it is assigned. And then there is recomposed himself an identity from this coverage first.
- In reading your book, how did your mother react?
Your question is tricky. It is obviously difficult for someone like my mother, for example, to see it become a central figure of such a book. She knew that I wrote. It is a book of sociology who is built like a survey with a principal informant is my mother. And so she spoke to me knowing I was doing this book. But once these things are written, published and, more importantly, the book does not remain confidential - we talk in the local newspaper, she knows that she knows people are reading - is probably more difficult to live, even if I think she has finally lived rather well. But imagine: it is a book where I say that I was ashamed of my social and family environment, and I wanted to escape this environment. Yet this environment, it is ... It took a lot of strength and intelligence to understand and accept the draft of this book.
- And your brothers?
My brothers ... These are people who do not probably read lots of books in general, and certainly not books of sociology or theory. So when they read a book like this, because it speaks to them because it is I who have written, they do not see an analysis but often some form of indictment from me as if I disparaged. If I say that my brothers did not pass the tray, they tend to think that I mean they were not able to move while the approach of my book is to show that there is a disposal systematic quasi-class children by the school system and that this elimination works often with the active help of self-elimination, the participation of the dominated in the mechanisms of domination is itself socially produced and introduced by any social history, any history of social classes including their unequal access to the school system and their differential relationship with it.
What is very strange is that when my book came out, my mother told me: "Your brothers are not happy because you say they have not passed their tank, but you know, s 'they did not happen, not because they could not, because it they did not like to continue studying. "And I had to answer him:" But it's precisely what I am talking in my book, I'm trying to analyze! That is to say why there are people who belong to environments where you do not even raise the question of whether it pleases or not: it faitt studies! And environments where statistically, it does not like and it is eliminated - or are self-eliminated - because we think the studies are done for others and not for himself. " Let's say that's what I try to analyze, explain. With my brothers, we say basically the same thing! But they believe it is a choice, their choice, and I watch it a law, a relentless social law. And we see that it is necessary to have a look outside and overlooking the route of each other to understand the social world and the mechanisms of domination since the spontaneous perception that people have of their experience or mask denies that this dominance is exerted on them without their knowledge.
- But you throughout your education, you denied that social determinism?
Say I have violated! But then one must ask why! And how! And how much (because we never fully escape his past). But this determinism, I find that it works at full it worked when I was a child or adolescent, it worked when my brothers went to school a few years and it still works so brutal.
Someone told me during a public debate: "Your book is wonderful except the fact that you can write a book like that, your analysis belies the fact that no exception its social destiny because you've escaped. "
I do not think this is an objection to the extent that the fact that there are few who escape the fate normally assigned to them does not mean that the social law does not exist.
In addition, the rule is that upward mobility is slow, difficult, and the point of arrival is strongly linked to the starting point. We did not have the same opportunities for social mobility according that is the son of a housekeeper or son of a teacher, son of senior staff or university professor, industrial or members of the haute bourgeoisie of Paris, etc.. The upward mobility is, in a very largely related to the starting point and when the starting point is low, limited by it.
But that does not mean there is no upward mobility. This means that the social structure remains what it is, that differences remain between children and those of each other, between the trajectories.
- About your father, you write: "I do not love him. I've never liked." How can you not love his father?
is still the case for many people! One of the reasons why I started hating my father was when my path began to diverge and I started to realize I was gay, and probably for this reason, interested in culture (as an escape to my community and I differ as different). Obviously, I could only hate what my father since he was the opposite of everything that attracted me. And so I always gave good reasons for this hatred: "My father embodies the ignorance, homophobia, stupidity masculinist most primary, etc".
course, I say today that all this was not true, but there were other reasons for this hatred: racism of a certain class that we can not help but share when that is accessed or wants access to another medium, one becomes a member of another class. I was, in the words of Paul Nizan, "candidate for the bourgeoisie." And this nomination was through the setting aside of my social background.
- like when you mention John Edgar Wideman: "My success is measured at the distance I put between us" ...
Yes, the more I distanced myself from them, the more I felt I achieve what I wanted to be. Achieve what I wanted to do this by not only going to shelve radical, but also by an occultation of my past.
I would not be bound to them because it was like a stigma that I wore and I wanted to get rid of. And indeed, Wideman describes very well what kind of feelings Am I my brother's keeper? I had to invent another life, another character, and therefore it must be said very simply, I mainly hated my father because he was a laborer. But today I have to wonder: was he responsible for what it was? Basically, all I could criticize him do not report to a personal trait but a social and historical reality: it was was made at the intersection of place and time where he was born. It was the product of a social class and era. He was born ten years before the Second
I wanted to reconstruct the history of my father to try to realize what it was and the real reasons why it was like it was and therefore to make this journey - I have not been able to accomplish in he was alive - that is to try to understand, and thus to reconcile myself with him ... but a little later.
- Your mother said, speaking of homosexuals, "People like you." Are not you trying to answer "people like you" to talk about the poor?
Maybe! But in this case, since my approach is to re-enroll me in some way - to re-register my story and my life - in the table shown in the photos is also to say: "People like us' . It is nevertheless true that I am aware that writing about the working class, the working classes - to rehabilitate them, to make their visibility in public space, to give them a story, and a voice - c ' is also talk of them, from outside. If you write about them, it's always because we do not or no longer part of them.
This will give them a place in the public sphere, it is therefore to speak of them with a certain distance. It's inevitable. You just try to control the maximum distance that this may introduce into the mind of the reader who is also outside of classes. Neither the writer nor the world that reads pertain discussed. The important thing to be aware and try to neutralize up complicity in the position and potentially higher.
- But that distance can sometimes be seen as a form of "social racism"?
Racism is pervasive in the social world in which we live, social hierarchies are installed, with dominant positions and positions dominated. Dominants have a look at the dominated, which is already social racism. My mother was a housekeeper and when his boss told him: "You can not trust you," was a phrase full of social violence, set the tone of everyday conversation, the reprimand commonplace. My mother could never answer him: "And I'm very disappointed in you "or" Fuck you. "But more generally, our every move, our every words are marked by these hierarchies that we all remember, in every moment of our lives. It is difficult to escape. My book intends to rebel against this social order, social violence against that vehicle, against racism social cement. But to speak of the dominated without falling into the mythology workerist, populist, it is necessary saying things that refer to realities sometimes inglorious, and unenviable, and this can be felt by those involved as racism class. I know. It is a paradox unsurpassable. I have to do with. It is also not easy, believe me.
- This violence experienced social changes your grandparents and your parents, it still exists today?
course nothing has changed. When someone says "
- should call them so how?
Necessarily, it is better to be ensconced in the social and economic life, have a substantial salary and income rather than being unemployed or Rmiste. Therefore, the available vocabulary to talk about these realities differential is still trapped. For example, when we speak of "social ladder", this implies that there is a top and bottom of the ladder. But how to avoid the vocabulary, which seems so self-evident that it is difficult not to use it. But we are not obliged to despise people who are " bottom "of the scale or value people who are" above ".
- Why should I be ashamed to come from the working class?
I do not need! I say that I was ashamed, this is not the same thing. And I try to analyze this feeling, and if I can risk this oxymoron, the reasons for this affect. Today, I am ashamed to have been ashamed. These are the emotions embedded, entangled with trying to report. Since my book came out many people have written, many friends have confided in me, and everyone spoke to me a shame painfully experienced a situation, a silence on a secret, etc.. I discovered that the feelings of shame is most prevalent in the society and a sense that, by definition, does not speak. The shame is related to secrecy. We are not talking of shame except in one special moment, when something cracks and we begin to talk about it. I knew I
shame at the age of sixteen or seventeen years, but at the time, I was Trotskyist and extol the proletarian struggle, the revolutionary workers and at the same time I despised my parents who were workers whose aspirations were not everything to the revolution but to buy a car or a television. When you work all day at the factory and that was previously deprived of everything, it just sucks to consumer goods and we do not necessarily think the political struggle. Or you think otherwise! And there should evoke some form of contempt of class, or if you prefer, ethnocentrism class found among the intellectuals who, today as yesterday, hold forth on the workers' revolution and the knowledge of the people, but without ever meeting a worker, and therefore speak of a people fantasy that exists only in their imaginations.
- We still feel that in your book to get the feel of a successful life, one must have studied and most importantly, no longer poor. A bit like the Rolex
I do not have a Rolex! I do not watch! I'm not saying that to succeed in life one must have studied, if we did not make it missed its life. I describe the universe in which we live and how it face classes. And I describe the environment where I am, how I got out. But when I say "I" is not so much an "I" individual, but rather an "I" class, which is that many people who have experienced difficult situations similar to mine. I am just describing the social world as it is, where the positions we occupy are always relational. It's not my fault if, in the society in which we live, you better have done studies that do not have that, you better have gone on to jobs that are less painful than trades workers ... Yes, it is best if you can, to escape those trades that you can not imagine how they can be painful. Yes, my book says, somehow, I think I'll be going out than work in factories. But I try to describe and analyze what the price for this "class betrayal." And do justice to those who worked in factories, as did my parents.
- Intellectuals - all sides - are from the bourgeoisie. Their work, their speeches are not they, finally, in the interests of the ruling classes?
When I read an author like Jacques Rancière, for example, and I see that his whole speech can be summed up in 40 years - what does he say more? Nothing! - An exaltation of a populist kind of political knowledge, cultural, scientific ... spontaneous working class, of equal competence of all with all, I feel anger and disgust ... because it deliberately ignore the real inequalities, and the effects of cultural dispossession is to ignore the operation of the school system is to ignore what form and how do the political views, etc.. And even prevent it from asking all these problems! When he dare say that trying to analyze the inequalities (including schools), as did Pierre Bourdieu, would lead to freeze people in this inequality and to deprive them of their freedom, their mobility, I find this kind of talk really grotesque and indecent even (to be polite). It is typical of bourgeois thinker who focuses on the high people, whom he never met other than in books of the nineteenth century ... and fantasize about the people he does not know (is not this 'spontaneous knowledge' of classes that leads by example, self-eliminating school I mentioned above, and believes that Rancière probably be an invention of sociologists, if he has heard). Apply a principled equality of all with all, as it does is to refuse to see what the inequality in reality, its mechanisms of operation and perpetuation, and also its effects in modes of thought and act in relation to politics in the lives .... So simply ratify and extend the inequality from an idealistic position that has the appearance of radical politics but that is just the opposite. I know that it pays: they applauded everywhere, because this way people fantasize is widely shared in intellectual circles. But it is even more outrageous because that kind of talk from understanding inequalities as they are, and thus control them. This reinforces the established order. To use the model
fond Rancière and flows logically from his perspective of the ignorant master of society and of the draw in Greece
Indeed, Rancière has remained the Maoist intellectual bourgeois he once was - the overwhelming Maoism of the Ecole Normale higher, that is to say the philosophers and their poor - and thrilled
So I wanted my book to address these issues, which are very difficult when one refuses to facilities and benefits offered by these immediate symbolic mythologies: how to think about inequality and the mechanisms of domination, how to fight against them, think how effective democracy, how to fight every day to widen the democratic space, what is the role of social movements, associations, the role of political parties, and also, of course, the work of intellectuals and researchers in these processes, tests they can produce, etc. ....
- The cultural studies, highlighting issues of sexual identity, racial, cultural, have they evacuated the social issues?
Much has changed since May 1968 in particular. The left does not substantially concern matters sexual, racial, cultural, etc.. These questions were then politicized by the action of movements that wanted to show that conditioning is not only in terms of class domination, but also in terms of domination gender, sexuality, race, etc..
It is obvious that these movements have tended, by proposing other divisions of reality, and other categories of political perceptions, to replace the social issues and in particular the notion of class.
Today we are witnessing a return to the question of classes with many people who claim - it has even become a theme drummed into almost everything that is written and published at this time, the extreme right to the far left - that these movements sexual, racial, etc.. made diversion from "real" issue that would question the classes, the social question.
My book tries to resist this trend-there saying that there is not a question that is more true than another. All these issues are present in social reality and therefore they are all legitimate political arena. Struggles coexist in society. So I think not in terms of articulation and convergence of struggles, but rather in terms of multiplicity and proliferation. To unify or reunify the struggle is to seek to limit the scope of their deployment, and therefore to guide and limit them.
- Exactly, when we see the historical impasse and absorption of margins by the dominant system, does it still make sense to revolt?
revolts always breed because there are always phenomena of oppression. And if the margins are similar, as you seem to believe, there is always, in any case, other lines that appear, other voices who are politicizing new issues.
Social violence has many forms and therefore the revolts are still valid.
- How can you rebel today?
It's not for me to say. I can not prescribe to the political and social actors what to do. I can still see that the movement of undocumented migrants, unemployed, transsexuals mobilize energies and act politically against injustice and oppression. And this, so diverse and complex, moreover, sometimes contradictory. Just take the example of feminists face the question of the veil at school. Some say it is the symbol of the oppression of women, others say, however, prohibits girls to wear it is a social and cultural violence against women. There is not a single feminist position on an issue like this.
- Have you become the new thinker margins?
I'm interested in what happens at the margins, I'm interested in what comes from the margins. But the discourse on the margins may also be a way to stabilize the objections and situations established example, about gay marriage or same-sex families, many people repeat it conformist, it's wanting to integrate the model dominant, and should remain "marginal". But it is clear that this discourse of "margin" or "subversion" nobody. Quite the contrary, the conservative right and left say: "Why is it that homosexuals do not remain at the margin, what is their role in society." While the claim to go into existing legal forms raises hysterical reactions to the world be it in California, Italy, Spain or France.
What is subversive is not always or necessarily what lies at the margin, but often what comes to challenge the system in his heart same.
say: "We are at the margin", then it is a way to ratify and to stabilize the border established between those who are on one side in the margin and those in the standard. While this is very dangerous to social order is when people want to shake that border.
- If the presidential election were held tomorrow, whom would you vote?
I would like to avoid thinking only in terms of parties or persons. What seems important is that the vote can express, what balance of power can help achieve at one time or another. We do not fully recognize the party or candidate for whom they vote. We never adhere to the program as a whole. Voting is a gesture located. It seems to me above all necessary, therefore, to think what the act of voting as always articulated with other aspects of politics, those embodied social movements, associations, mobilization, lasting or ephemeral. Wondering: who, in a particular configuration represents the best that moves in society. And the answer may change son for years and elections.
(Interview by Matthew CARB).
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