"The violence of the social world" (last page)

Like many readers, I feel personally involved and almost involved in the story of Didier Eribon: same origins, similar path, lived in the most intimate contradiction between a strong sense of class affiliation and willingness to escape a destiny already mapped . With also important differences and political differences: the working class whom I knew in the Paris region, was more diversified, more politicized, and racism there was marginal. Openness to societal issues there was real but limited. Yet I do not see in this book any caricature, but the report, simple and precise, based on a typical example, the social frameworks in which social class views herself and the world when he n ' is no question for her "leadership" or value, but simply to recognize and perpetuate now closes the awareness of a major division between "us" and "them". The author shows how pertinently consciousness of this cleavage is not in itself the bearer of progressive values ​​and may instead expose all populist excesses. He leaves us to think the relationship between the "class consciousness" and the awakening of his "homosexual consciousness." The pages on "insult" call reflection, like those on the future of the left and the fundamental importance of language in the constitution of the perceptual field, even if it lacks, in my view it seems, an analysis of desire.
This book, which concludes with the acknowledgment of the impossibility of a "return" after so many failures, but the soothing possibility of a "measure of exile," shows very well how the center of gravity of a Life moves, must move, significantly, this movement being deep in this area the condition of possibility of any meaning.