回归故里 – Returning to Reims by Didier Eribon

《回归故里》是法国哲学家、社会学家迪迪埃·埃里蓬结合自身经历创作的一部反思性社会学著作。父亲去世后，作者迪迪埃·埃里蓬决定回到自己的出生地兰斯，重新了解他最初诞生的社会阶层和那群他已经告别三十年的人。他重返过去，回顾家族的历史，回忆童年时身处的工人阶级阶层，回溯了他如何从工人家庭的穷孩子成为法国著名的知识分子……

在这场极为内在又颠覆的心灵之旅中，作者思考了社会阶层、学校教育、身份建立等一系列主题，通过梳理集体决定论中不同个体的命运轨迹，剖析了不同社会环境下，人的“个人选择”是如何被影响、被决定的。

On thinking the matter through, it doesn’t seem exaggerated to assert that my coming out of the sexual closet, my desire to assume and assert my homosexuality, coincided within my personal trajectory with my shutting myself up inside what I might call a class closet. — from “Returning to Reims”

After his father dies, Didier Eribon returns to his hometown of Reims and rediscovers the working-class world he had left behind thirty years earlier. For years, Eribon had thought of his father largely in terms of the latter’s intolerable homophobia. Yet his father’s death provokes new reflection on Eribon’s part about how multiple processes of domination intersect in a given life and in a given culture. Eribon sets out to investigate his past, the history of his family, and the trajectory of his own life. His story weaves together a set of remarkable reflections on the class system in France, on the role of the educational system in class identity, on the way both class and sexual identities are formed, and on the recent history of French politics, including the shifting voting patterns of the working classes — reflected by Eribon’s own family, which changed its allegiance from the Communist Party to the National Front.

“Returning to Reims” is a remarkable book of sociological inquiry and critical theory, of interest to anyone concerned with the direction of leftist politics in the contemporary world, and to anyone who has ever experienced how sexual identity can clash with other parts of one’s identity. A huge success in France since its initial publication in 2009, “Returning to Reims” received enthusiastic reviews in “Le Monde, Liberation, L’Express, Les Inrockuptibles,” and elsewhere.