From ‘Amor Fati’ to ‘disgust’: Affect, habitus, and class identity in Didier Eribon’s Retour à Reims

In his Retour à Reims (2010), Didier Eribon draws on the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu and on his own earlier work on gay identity to offer a moving and insightful account of his social trajectory and of the issues of class, education and sexual identity that trajectory raises. Throughout this autobiographical account, Eribon stresses the centrality of affect and emotion to social and sexual identity, and the feelings of shame, disgust, frustration and rejection that marked his and his parents’ relationship to their working-class identity. In so doing, he draws on two different and potentially contradictory theoretical traditions: Eve Sedgwick’s work on shame and queer identity and Bourdieu’s emphasis on the centrality of affect to the workings of the class habitus. This article examines the tensions or potential contradictions between these two traditions, questioning, in particular, Bourdieu’s insistence on the immediate, pre-reflexive way in which working-class subjects allegedly invest in and come to love their social identity and destiny. Focusing on those episodes in Retour à Reims which suggest that Eribon’s parents had a far more contradictory relationship to working-class identity than Bourdieu’s theory would suggest, the article calls for a reformulation of certain of the key tenets of Bourdieusian sociology. This involves drawing on the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty as a means of thinking through the mind–body dualism that underpins Bourdieu’s concept of habitus. The article concludes that the work of Beverley Skeggs on class and gender offers a more fruitful way of theorising the relationships between class, affect, social identity and political or social change.