Didier Eribon: New book by Eribon: This has no future

The dispute as to whether identity politics is the new left or rather its gravedigger, insofar as “identity” can be translated as the “individuality” from which the self-marketing economy is made – has subsided somewhat, perhaps because the identity left is in matters Israel/Palestine didn’t look too good.

Anyone who didn’t want to be talked out of saying that Marx and woke wouldn’t completely exclude each other when identity movement voters voted Green could have found support in Didier Eribon’s global success “Return to Reims”, where the question of the identity of the gay worker’s son, the has advanced into a bourgeois intellectual, is imbued with the “violence of the social” as the violence of class society. Perhaps, Eribon suspects, who is as at home with Marx as he is with Foucault, the main contradiction first had to be put to one side in order to regain contours through the secondary contradictions, and perhaps it is wrong to hierarchize the contradictions anyway: as if it were in the… The dog hasn’t always buried the idea of ​​hierarchy.

“Return to Reims” was also the book of the time in other respects: as a memoir and certificate of origin, published 13 years before the Nobel Prize for Annie Ernaux, it served the audience’s need for authenticity and, although nominally a non-fiction book, functioned through its strong self -Narrator who understands how to vouch for his report empirically and theoretically and embodies the double being that he describes as the narrator himself.

In Eribon’s new book »A Worker. “Life, Age and Dying” doesn’t work so well because the main character is not himself, but his mother, who is spending her last months in an old people’s and nursing home, where her lifelong dependence and invisibility condenses into the final metaphor : The mother dies as she lived, poor and unhappy, through “structural abuse” and “institutional violence,” and when Eribon exclaims like the best social democrat: “The system is immoral,” he doesn’t even have to say that the system here just comes to himself.

This is where the book is strongest. Those who live, Eribon reminds us, live because they have a future; If you don’t have a future, you don’t live. The old people’s home as a storage facility, as it seems to be the norm in France, is already death, and in very concrete terms: Eribon describes the “syndrome du glissement”, the loss of the will to live when people are left in the home , rapidly lose physical and mental mobility, which they no longer need. This is not a plea against the home as such, but rather against the home being underfinanced, under-staffed and, at worst, subject to the dictates of profit.

However, this is nothing new, and as much as the structure of “A Worker” resembles “Return to Reims” – the proletarian father died there, the proletarian mother dies here – the son essentially has the problems, the children get older Parents have a guilty conscience included, and beyond the old people’s home as an allegory of class violence, it’s no longer so theoretically stunning: “The family as an institution and as an emotional fact represents a space in the head and body of the class changer in which the The class you come from and the class you now live in come into relationship, exchange and conflict with each other.” Sounds good, but it doesn’t mean more than that you speak differently to your cousin from the building than you do to your friend the University.

The book, which is certainly a quarter too long, succumbs to the fate that no editor dared to delete the prominent author’s many redundancies and null sentences: “After all, it is one of the great advantages of relationships with people close to us (especially with… those closest to us) that we can remain silent together. Because that requires a high degree of intimacy and familiarity.” Or: “It is an iron law of human existence that you cannot undo the past.” Or: “It is not easy to plumb the unfathomable depths of the social order .” That will be the case, but sometimes it’s too simple, for example when it comes to the mother reading pulp novels and not what the son has on his bedside table: “She left school at fourteen and didn’t have the means about the necessary training for such reading.«

Anyone who has the necessary training to even use Eribon already knows about it. But the author digresses, and the prolixity is of course also a sign of educational privilege: “She had not had the opportunity to acquire the cultural and intellectual ‘dispositions’ that would have enabled her to be interested in things that I was interested in, classics of literature or texts about trade union history, for example. Just as with Marx and Engels, it almost went without saying that she would never open Camus’s novel or Sartre’s autobiography. She lacked…” – and again – “the educational and cultural ‘competences’, which are neither universal nor innate, but a privilege of the ruling classes, which is achieved through the transmission of cultural capital in families and in the social environment as well as through the attendance of certain schools (those that do not exclusively prepare for craft and technical professions) is reproduced. Neither my father nor my mother nor anyone else in my family read Marx, that is so self-evident that the statement is actually unnecessary. Actually, yes, and one will find that the sociology professor Eribon, especially the one with a propaedeutic soul, was a biographical writer repeatedly gets in the way; if he does not have to come to his aid, because the story that the writer tells has already been told by himself, and better in every way.

This is just a literary objection, not a sociological one, and the fact that Eribon follows the same patriarchal triangle of class – body – mind is of course the diagnosis. In the end he ends up back with the question of who speaks for those who cannot speak for themselves, whether they are in a retirement home or in the banlieue: How can we find out from the dilemma that speaking for others means dominating them to exercise them? One might close »A Worker« with the thought that everyone who still has the home ahead of them is like the Eribon class refugee who will pay for his betrayal by having his origins finally catch up with him. And not as death, as it is part of life, but as dying, which ends a life that had no future.

Didier Eribon: »A worker. Life, old age, dying”, Suhrkamp, ​​born, 272 pages, 25 €.