Didier Eribon, restive rationalist: The limits of sociological self-understanding in Retour à Reims

This article suggests that Eribon’s autobiography is most engaging (as literature) and valuable (as social document) in those moments when the author loses his interpretative grip on the meaning of his own experience. Although a concerted attempt is made by Eribon to account for his problematic relationship to his working-class family background, in particular his father, in purely sociological terms, a restive textual indeterminacy at key junctures unwittingly exposes the limitations of this approach. By allowing us to glimpse the limits of its author’s sociological rationalism, the autobiography calls into question Eribon’s strategic rejection of psychoanalytic forms of understanding and a number of his other longstanding theoretical and political commitments. This is just as it should be: its restive moments and the critical consequences which follow from them make Eribon’s autobiography much more than a mere exercise in self-validation.