Doesn’t feel like living in the old nuclear family: Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, Parisian philosopher
Photo: AFP/Martin Bureau
The relationship between structure and individual has always been the subject of controversial debates within the social sciences. While psychology generally focuses on the individual’s power to act, sociology insists that it is not we ourselves but the environment that makes us who and what we are.
The French philosopher and sociologist Geoffroy de Lagasnerie also follows this tradition. “How many people share a life at 30 that they definitely didn’t want to lead at 20,” he writes at the beginning of his recently published work “3 – A Life Outside” and continues: “They get married, have children, adjust themselves a single-family home.”
This represents a problem for de Lagasnerie, as it significantly limits people’s scope for action in a world that sees itself as free and emancipated. According to him, the well-known paths of marriage and family and the consequences associated with them lead to such mental mutilation and lack of imagination that in the end the family bond often appears to have no alternative.
But no social structure is all-encompassing. There are always pockets of revolt, refusal and dissidence. De Lagasnerie knows this very well, because as the somewhat pathetic title of his book suggests, he leads “a life outside,” which in this case means: outside the heterosexual matrix. This is what Judith Butler once called the institution of marriage, which is based on the gender binary.
But de Lagasnerie doesn’t live alone. Instead, he leads a friendly love triangle that determines and structures his life with his love partner, the sociologist and successful author Didier Eribon (“Return to Reims”), and his student and close friend Édouard Louis, who is also the author of several bestsellers (“The End of Eddy «). The three protagonists are already sharing their relationship with interested onlookers on social media. Now de Lagasnerie has dedicated a book to his two lifelong friends.
The relationship between the three gay men, which is outlined in detail, shows that being queer, despite all the pain that comes with it, especially in the course of adolescence, always represents a possibility of dissidence and solidarity in the long term. While at the beginning of the coming out there is often social exclusion from everything that is generally considered normal, over time sexual deviance also offers the opportunity to leave the paths of normativity and explore new ways of social relationships.
Like Eribon in his books, de Lagasnerie in “A Life Outside” always oscillates between humanities theory and his own biography, which are repeatedly placed in relation to each other and discussed. Whether Sartre, Bourdieu, de Beauvoir, Foucault, Freud, Derrida or Aristotle: their theories are all applied to the questions underlying the book in the course of the text.
As obvious as many of the book’s basic impulses may seem, they often boil down to a dualistic, under-complex comparison of friendship or marriage, raising children or a self-determined life, bohemianism or bourgeois life, without asking whether the two can be reconciled is.
There is no contradicting him when he complains that it is still the rule today that friendships are de facto ended as soon as children are born. But at the same time he ignores the variety of possible parenting models that have the potential to shake up the mother-father-child structure and at the same time establish new family and parenting structures.
Elsewhere he complains about the unequal treatment of friendship and parenthood and uses the example that one is allowed to report sick to one’s employer for a sick child, but not for a sick friend. This is irritating because de Lagasnerie is comparing apples and pears here: Despite all the empathy for the sick friend, it can usually be assumed that the friend can take care of himself on a basic level, which is not the case with children.
Passages like these reveal a certain level of mockery that repeatedly torpedoes the basic thrust of the book, which is to be welcomed. The theoretical explanations, the descriptions of shared afternoons in Parisian cafés or discussions of new book projects are pleasant and stimulating to read, but at the same time they cannot hide the structural inadequacies of the book.
Geoffroy de Lagasnerie: 3 – A life outside. A.d. French v. Andrea Henninger. S. Fischer, 208 pages, hardcover, €26.
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