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From 'Amor Fati' to 'disgust': Affect, habitus, and class identity in Didier Eribon's Retour Reims
Jeremy F. Lane French Cultural Studies 2012 23: 127 DOI: 10.1177/0957155812436533 The online version of this article can be found at: http://frc.sagepub.com/content/23/2/127

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FRC23210.1177/0957155812436533French Cultural StudiesLane

French Cultural Studies

From Amor Fati to disgust: Affect, habitus, and class identity in Didier Eribons Retour Reims
Jeremy F. Lane

French Cultural Studies 23(2) 127140 The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and permission: sagepub. co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0957155812436533 frc.sagepub.com

University of Nottingham

Abstract In his Retour 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 Sedgwicks work on shame and queer identity and Bourdieus 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, Bourdieus 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 Reims which suggest that Eribons parents had a far more contradictory relationship to working-class identity than Bourdieus 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 mindbody dualism that underpins Bourdieus 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. Keywords affect, Pierre Bourdieu, class, disaffection, disgust, habitus, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, mindbody dualism, Eve Sedgwick, shame, Beverley Skeggs

Corresponding author: Jeremy F. Lane, Department of French and Francophone Studies, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK. Email: jeremy.lane@nottingham.ac.uk

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In his autobiography, Retour Reims (2010), Didier Eribon draws on the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, as well as on his own earlier work on gay identity, to offer a moving personal account of his own social trajectory an account which also provides numerous insights into the relationships between class, education and sexuality in post-war France. One of the most striking features of Retour Reims is the central role Eribon attributes to affect and emotion in his account of his conflicted relationship to the working-class milieu in which he grew up. Eribons relationship to his social origins appears to turn on a series of visceral affective reactions against that working-class milieu and all it represents: reactions of disgust, rejection, hatred, embarrassment and horrible unease. For example, early in the book, he admits to his highly ambivalent relationship towards his working-class identity a mixture of proximit and solidarit, which coexists with, au plus profond de moi-mme un rejet du milieu ouvrier tel quil est rellement Et je dtestais de plus en plus me retrouver au contact immdiat de ce qutaient, de ce que sont, les classes populaires (Eribon 2010: 27). Later, he will confess to feeling horriblement mal laise (2010: 106) when attending family events or to une terrible gne when fielding questions about his brothers modest profession of apprentice butcher (2010: 110). While this unease and embarrassment sometimes trigger in their turn feelings of culpabilit and remords, ultimately, Eribon admits, these are outweighed by a stronger sense of joy, even light-headedness at having escaped his social destiny: Encore nprouvais-je que par intermittance cette culpabilit Le sentiment de ma libert me grisait. La joie dchapper mon destin. Cela laissait peu de place au remords (2010: 116). Eribons determination, from a young age, to escape his working-class origins appears itself to have its genesis in these feelings of disgust and rejection. Thus he identifies as a pivotal moment in his own social trajectory his horrified reaction to his fathers return to the family home in a drunken violent rage after two or three days unexplained absence. As Eribon puts it:
Au fond, ce nest pas tant la personne qui avait accompli ces gestes que javais prise en horreur que le dcor social dans lequel ces gestes taient possibles. Le lancer de bouteilles ne dura peut-tre que quelques minutes: il inscrivit en moi, je crois, un dgot de cette misre, un refus du destin auquel jtais assign et la blessure secrte, mais toujours vive, davoir porter en moi, jamais, ce souvenir. (2010: 99)

In hindsight, witnessing his fathers drunken rage seems to Eribon to have played a catalytic role in what he terms his dsidentification: it was that moment qui installa en moi une volont patiente et obstine de contredire lavenir auquel jtais promis (2010: 978). Eribon describes this moment as une prise de conscience, yet the emphasis he places here, as elsewhere, on the feelings of disgust, rejection and hatred it engendered, suggests that what was at stake in this instance related less to the realm of rational consciousness or deliberative judgement than to the workings of affect or emotion. Of course, affect or emotion, notably in the form of shame, plays a central role in Eribons theoretical work on gay identity (Eribon, 2004). And in the course of Retour Reims he will suggest that his rejection of his working-class identity and his assumption of his sexuality were very closely articulated. Hence perhaps one of the most significant innovations contained in Retour Reims is Eribons attempt to expand on his earlier work on the centrality of affect to sexual identity so that this might also be brought to bear on the realms of class identity and political affiliation. If we are to draw any general theoretical conclusions from Eribons personal experiences, then, it would appear that his major contribution to social theory may be to the sociology of emotions, to theoretical understandings of the precise role played by affect and emotion in forming and re-forming social and sexual identities, and potentially, by extension, also in the emergence of political affiliations. In this sense, it might be possible to situate Eribons work within the so-called turn to

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affect that has characterised certain trends in social and cultural theory over roughly the last decade or so.1 This much broader turn to affect contains a range of different strands, among which two have perhaps proved most influential. Thus, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwicks engagement with the work of psychologist Silvan Tomkins has had an important impact in the realm of Queer Theory (Sedgwick and Frank, 1995; Sedgwick, 2003). A more DeleuzianSpinozist strand, meanwhile, exemplified by the work of Brian Massumi, has had considerable impact in the realms of cultural and political theory (Massumi, 2002). Despite their differences, what these two currents share is a tendency to figure embodied affect as a source of affirmative potential, of creativity, transformation, and hence emancipation. To quote Constantina Papoulias and Felicity Callard (2010: 34), for these theorists of affect the body and its affects are typically conceived as a creative space, a field of potentiality that, crucially, precedes the overwriting of the body through subjectivity and personal history. Eribon shares this emphasis on the potentially creative and emancipatory character of affect, at least as regards the role he attributes to shame in the emergence of his own, politically engaged sense of gay identity. As he has acknowledged, his work here owes a considerable debt to Sedgwicks theories on the role of shame in the production and transformation of queer identities (Eribon, 2011: 44).2 However, when it comes to theorising the role of affect in the production and reproduction of the working-class identities of his parents and brothers, it is to a rather different theory of affect that Eribon turns. Here he draws on Pierre Bourdieus sociology, reiterating the latters emphasis on the centrality of affect to the production of a class habitus considered capable of guaranteeing the reproduction of existing class divisions and social distinctions. More specifically, Eribon echoes Bourdieus emphasis on what, following the Stoics, he terms amor fati. For Bourdieu, the amor fati corresponds to the immediate or doxic manner in which, he claims, the objective conditions of working-class identity are incorporated into a workingclass habitus such that working-class subjects come not merely to accept but also to love their socially determined fate. In short, where Sedgwick attributes a transformative, creative potential to the realm of affect, in Bourdieus work that realm is most closely associated with a certain social inertia, and with the reproduction of the status quo. At the theoretical level, then, Eribons deployment of Sedgwicks work on shame alongside Bourdieusian sociology raises questions about how he can reconcile these two rather different, potentially even contradictory conceptions of the relationship between affect and social or sexual identity. At the empirical level, meanwhile, Eribons accounts of the ambivalence of his own parents relationship to their working-class identity seem difficult to reconcile with his and Bourdieus emphasis on the amor fati the fact that working-class subjects are apparently defined by the way they come to love their socially determined fate. There is little sign of such love of ones fate either in Eribons disgust at his social milieu, or in his fathers unexplained disappearance from and return to the family home in a violent drunken rage, or indeed in his mothers ultimately vain attempts to escape her social destiny by retraining as an IT worker. Allowing and accounting for such visceral affective reactions against ones social fate and the attempts to escape they can generate would necessitate a significant reformulation of Bourdieus theories of habitus and class, as well as some attempt to resolve the potential contradictions between Bourdieusian sociology, on the one hand, and Eribons acknowledged debts to the work of Sedgwick, on the other. As this article will argue, some such reformulation is implicitly called for by the empirical evidence Eribon presents in Retour Reims, yet it is forestalled by his adherence to a Bourdieusianism of the most orthodox kind whenever he discusses questions of class, education and social reproduction. This article will hence seek, first, to clarify Bourdieus understanding of the role of affect in his theory of class, habitus and social reproduction, before showing

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how faithfully Eribon echoes this theory in his Retour Reims. It will then turn to a number of empirical examples drawn from Retour Reims that sit uneasily with Eribons theoretical commitments to Bourdieusian sociology. This, finally, will serve as a pretext for reformulating some of the assumptions regarding affect and social identity that underpin Eribons analyses.

Affect, habitus and social reproduction

Affect plays an absolutely central, if often overlooked role in Bourdieus accounts of habitus, class identity and social reproduction. Thus, for example, working-class identity, for Bourdieu, is as much about a shared set of tastes, aversions, affects, practices and dispositions as it is about, say, position in the relations of production. That shared set of dispositions, tastes and aversions reflects the manner in which objective social necessity has become incorporated into the structures of the habitus in such a way as to be experienced as so many subjective choices which are in fundamental accord with any working-class subjects deepest sentiments, habits and affections. So, to give the obvious example, the low objective chances of a working-class student attending an elite highereducation establishment becomes internalised into a working-class habitus which rejects such an establishment as being not for the likes of us or which condemns as unacceptable pretension any aspiration to escape ones social destiny. In this way, the working-class habitus is what allows objective necessity to be experienced as a subjective choice undertaken in accordance with a communally maintained sense of what might constitute an appropriate or proper course of action. As we have seen, Bourdieu adopts the Stoic notion of amor fati to describe this process, whereby working-class subjects find their freedom in socially determined necessity. As he puts it in Mditations pascaliennes (1997): [Lagent] se sent chez lui dans le monde parce que le monde est aussi en lui sous la forme de lhabitus, ncessit faite vertu qui implique une forme damour de la ncessit, damor fati (Bourdieu 1997: 170). Or again:
linvestissement, la croyance, la passion, lamor fati, qui sont inscrits dans la relation entre lhabitus et le monde social (ou le champ) dont il est le produit font quil est des choses que lon ne peut pas faire dans certaines situations (a ne se fait pas) et dautres que lon ne peut pas ne pas faire (lexemple par excellence tant tout ce quimpose le principe noblesse oblige). (1997: 1745)

It is because these affective investments are at the centre of class habitus and identity, Bourdieu argues, that those situations in which such identities are at play or in question can so often provoke immediate emotional responses of honte, humiliation, timidit, anxit, culpabilit, which themselves se trahissent dans des manifestations visibles, comme le rougissement, lembarras verbal, la maladresse, le tremblement, la colre ou la rage impuissante (Bourdieu 1998: 445). There is no doubt that Bourdieu has identified something very important here about the nature of social experience and class identity. Moreover, one can easily see why Eribon might be attracted by the prospect of allying Bourdieus concept of the habitus to Sedgwicks and his own theoris ations of the centrality of shame to the formation of minority sexual identities. However, as we have already noted, in Bourdieus sociology affect tends to be understood above all as a force of social inertia, in a way that sits uneasily with both Sedgwicks and Eribons emphasis on the transformative, emancipatory potential contained within shame. This problem, inherent to Bourdieus conceptualisation of the affective nature of the habitus, is highlighted when he comes to theorise the conditions of possibility for any social or political change. For Bourdieu will argue that it is because the practical dispositions incorporated into the habitus operate at the affective, embodied level that they are unconscious, fundamentally resistant to change, and marked by an

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extraordinary inertia. Thus, in Mditations pascaliennes, he evokes what he terms lextraordinaire inertie qui rsulte de linscription des structures sociales dans les corps (Bourdieu 1997: 206). Further, he argues that it is because they are embodied that the social imperatives incorporated into the habitus cannot be suspended by a mere act of will. As he puts it in La Domination masculine:
Les passions de lhabitus domin (du point de vue du genre, de lethnie, de la culture ou de la langue), relation sociale somatise, loi sociale convertie en loi incorpore, ne sont pas de celles que lon peut suspendre par un simple effort de la volont, fond sur une prise de conscience libratrice. Sil est tout fait illusoire de croire que la violence symbolique peut tre vaincue par les seules armes de la conscience et de la volont, cest que les effets et les conditions de son efficacit sont durablement inscrits au plus intime des corps sous forme de dispositions. (Bourdieu 1998: 45)

For Bourdieu, then, the affective, embodied, dispositional structures of the working-class habitus generate a practical knowledge of the social world that is qualitatively different from the objective or scientific knowledge of that world accessible to the bourgeois intellectual the kind of knowledge that is the prerequisite for constructing a rational project for future political change. In his theorisations of political change, Bourdieu thus distinguishes between a rational consciousness of the social world, an ability to formulate coherent political projects for the future, dependent on a certain level of material wealth, and the doxic level of consciousness available to the dominated classes in society. This doxic level of consciousness implies a practical sense of the social world, an implicit sense of what one could or could not hope to achieve in the future, a sense of ones place and ones limits which works to naturalise and reproduce the status quo. However, while Bourdieu acknowledges that this sens pratique does imply un acte de construction, a reprsentation pratique of the social world, he insists that this is plus proche dun inconscient de classe que dune conscience de classe au sens marxiste, since lessentiel de lexprience du monde social et du travail de construction quelle implique sopre dans la pratique en dea du niveau de la reprsentation explicite et de lexpression verbale (Bourdieu 1984: 5). Bourdieu argues that as long as the practical expectations internalised in the habitus are in accord with the objective chances of those expectations being met, the social world will appear immediately self-evident, natural and beyond question. As long as there is a correspondance entre les structures objectives et les structures mentales, this will secure une sorte dadhsion originaire lordre tabli, which Bourdieu terms la doxa originaire (Bourdieu 1982: 150). In order for this situation to end and for the established order to be challenged, two conditions have to be fulfilled, according to Bourdieu. First, there has to be une crise objective which brings to an end the correspondence between practical expectations and objective chances and hence causes dominated agents to undergo an poch pratique, to suspend their immediate investment in the self-evidence of the doxa. Second, there has to be a conjuncture between this objective crisis and un discours critique: the discourse elaborated by intellectuals which will exploit the collective energies unleashed by the practical poch, channelling and directing those energies towards rational goals for future change (1982: 150). In Bourdieus account, only bourgeois intellectuals can elaborate such a rational critical discourse; their ability to achieve critical distance on the social world, to undertake an epistemological break vis--vis its self-evident immediacy, is contingent on their relative material wealth. Lacking that material wealth and constrained by a host of pressing immediate material needs, the dominated classes are, for Bourdieu, by definition incapable of achieving that critical distance, of undertaking that epistemological break. As he puts it in Mditations pascaliennes, only bourgeois intellectuals have the ability to articulate la vrit de

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ceux qui nont ni lintrt, ni le loisir, ni les instruments ncessaires pour entreprendre de sapproprier la vrit objective et subjective de ce quils sont et de ce quils font (Bourdieu 1997: 228). Thus Bourdieu will conclude that the dominated classes are forced to delegate responsibility for articulating rational projects for future political change in their favour to mandated party, trade union or intellectual representatives (Bourdieu, 1987). The role of such delegates is to transform the mute, pre-reflexive, practical dispositions of the class habitus or ethos into the coherent, explicit form of a rational political programme: la systmaticit en soi des pratiques ou jugements engendrs partir des principes inconscients de lethos into la systmaticit consciente et quasi force du parti politique (Bourdieu, 1977: 701). In the course of his Retour Reims, Eribon rehearses each of these Bourdieusian tenets. His analyses of the role played by the French Communist Party in his familys working-class milieu draw heavily on Bourdieus theories of political delegation (Eribon, 2010: 42). He repeats Bourdieus claims about the fundamental inertia of the working-class habitus and the doxic nature of working-class agents relation to the social world (2010: 119). He echoes Bourdieu in assuming that his elder brothers apparent acceptance of his social destiny reflected the latters immediate affective investment in working-class culture and identity. As he puts it: Lui correspondait sans problme et sans distance au monde qui tait le ntre, aux mtiers qui se proposaient nous, lavenir qui se dessinait pour nous (Eribon, 2010: 111). He argues that the condition of possibility of his own break with the immediate assumptions of the working-class habitus was the social break with his working-class milieu that was secured by his academic success and social ascension. As he puts it:
Il faut tre pass, comme ce fut mon cas, dun ct lautre de la ligne de dmarcation pour chapper limplacable logique de ce qui va de soi et apercevoir la terrible injustice de cette distribution ingalitaire des chances et des possibles. (2010: 51)

And Eribon goes on to argue that it was this social break with his working-class origins that was the condition of possibility of the epistemological break that allows him to objectify the mechanisms of social reproduction:
Seule une rupture pistmologique avec la manire dont les individus se pensent spontanment permet de dcrire, en reconstituant lensemble du systme, les mcanismes par lesquels le social se reproduit, et notamment la faon dont les domins ratifient la domination en lisant lexclusion scolaire laquelle ils sont vous. (2010: 52)

Finally, in explaining how he was able to escape his social destiny, Eribon has recourse to the Bourdieusian notion of the miracul (2010: 119), the term Bourdieu coined to describe those rare working-class students who do succeed academically but whose success ultimately serves merely to justify the republican ideology of equal educational opportunity for all.

Amor fati in the eye of the beholder

Eribons very orthodox application of Bourdieusian social theory to his own personal experiences does, however, seem to present a number of interrelated problems. First, we might want to question his assertion that the ability to stage some kind of break, whether at the affective or the rational level, with the apparent self-evidence of the social world is necessarily contingent upon prior academic success and/or relative material wealth. Second, we may wonder whether the relationship of

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all working-class subjects to their status and likely social destiny is always and by definition characterised by the amor fati by their immediate and unquestioning investment in what society has in store for them. A series of episodes recounted by Eribon in Retour Reims suggest that these two fundamental assumptions of Bourdieusian sociology may be highly questionable. As we have seen, Eribon maintains that it was his academic success and consequent social ascension that formed the condition of possibility for his escaping limplacable logique de ce qui va de soi and noticing la terrible injustice de cette distribution ingalitaire des chances et des possibles. However, this seems to contradict his assertions, elsewhere in Retour Reims, that what first allowed him to escape the apparent self-evidence of the values of his working-class milieu were his affective reactions of disgust, horror and rejection of the normative model of violent, bigoted working-class masculinity personified by his father. On such occasions, Eribon speculates that it may have been his rejection of that heterosexual identity that proved the catalyst and motor for his miraculous academic success and for his flight from his working-class origins. As he puts it: Je me suis dcrit plus haut, en voquant ma trajectoire scolaire, comme un miracul : il se pourrait bien que, en ce qui me concerne, le ressort de ce miracle ait t lhomosexualit (Eribon 2010: 203). According to this account, Eribons initial disgust at and rejection of a certain kind of working-class masculinity at the affective level preceded and determined the subsequent academic success and social ascension that he also wants to claim were the conditions of possibility of breaking the immediate, spontaneous doxic assumptions of his working-class habitus. It is also important to note that this affective rejection of the working-class habitus appears neither to have been exclusive to Eribon nor to have been contingent upon the miracle of his academic success. As we learn in the course of Retour Reims, both of Eribons parents made strenuous, but vain efforts to escape their working-class destinies through education. The father attended evening classes in the hope of becoming an industrial designer and kept his notebooks in a drawer, periodically bringing them out to show family members and friends in poignant testimony to both his thwarted ambitions and the persistence of his desire to be someone else (2010: 54). His mother, meanwhile, wasted significant amounts of money on an IT course (2010: 84) easy prey, for lack of the necessary cultural capital, to those seeking to exploit her desire for social advancement, and again to escape from the social destiny in which Eribon, following Bourdieu in this, will elsewhere have us believe she uncritically and spontaneously invested. As was implied at the beginning of this article, it would also seem reasonable to interpret the violent rages into which both of Eribons parents regularly flew as so many expressions of their disgust and frustration at their social fate, their rejection of or dis-identification from their working-class identities, again expressed at the level of affect. Elsewhere in Retour Reims, Eribon describes a rather different form of affective investment characteristic of his working-class family, namely their affective and financial investment in mass consumerism. As he puts it:
Ds quils le purent, ils achetrent, en multipliant les crdits, ce dont ils rvaient: une voiture doccasion, puis une voiture neuve, une tlvision, des meubles quils commandaient sur catalogue Je dplorais de les voir mus en permanence par la seule recherche du bien-tre matriel, et mme par la jalousie Chacun, dans ma famille, aimait se vanter du prix quavait cot tel ou tel objet, car cela montrait quon ntait pas dans le besoin, quon sen tait bien sorti. Les sentiments de la fiert et de lhonneur sinvestissaient dans ce got prononc pour laffichage chiffr. (Eribon 2010: 87)

This apparent investment in conspicuous consumption, like the parents thwarted educational ambitions and violent rages, seems difficult to reconcile with Eribons and Bourdieus insistence on the working classs amor fati, or on their immediate affective investment in or doxic adherence

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to their working-class culture and identity. Rather, what appears to lie behind such conspicuous consumption is a surely understandable desire both to escape the limitations of working-class existence and to demonstrate to ones peers quon sen tait bien sorti. As we have seen, Eribon would have us believe that what distinguishes him from his stillworking-class parents and family members is a fundamental difference in their cognitive relationship to the social world. On the one hand is Eribons own rational grasp of the objective mechanisms of that world, secured by an epistemological break whose condition of possibility is his academic success and consequent social ascension. On the other hand lies the realm of mute doxic immediacy inhabited by his parents and family, who are destined to give their immediate and spontaneous adherence to their social fate. It would be possible, however, to give a very different interpretation of this situation and to suggest that what really distinguishes Eribon from his parents and family is that where their sentiments of frustration and disgust at their social fate were destined to lead nowhere but sporadic outbursts of violent impotent rage, he was able successfully to exploit his rejection of his social fate, of his working-class social and sexual identity, and to escape. We might speculate that the reasons for Eribons success, as against his parents failure, reflect a mixture of good fortune, innate talent and changes to the structures of post-war French education, notably the establishment of lcole unique. In other words, it could reasonably be argued that the difference between Eribon and his parents is not that Eribon achieved a critical distance on his working-class milieu that was, by definition and a priori, inaccessible to his parents, whose relation to that milieu was thus characterised by a spontaneous, immediate, uncritical, doxic adherence to its values. Rather, what Eribons own account in Retour Reims strongly suggests is that his parents relationship to their own class identity was just as ambivalent as his own just as much characterised by a mixture of sometimes solidarity and pride, yes, but also feelings of disgust, rejection and frustration. What distinguishes Eribon from his parents is thus not the difference between two qualitatively different kinds of consciousness, knowledge or intelligence, but between Eribon, who was able successfully to act on those feelings of disgust and rejection, and his parents who were not able to do so, and this for purely contingent reasons. Eribon comes close to endorsing this alternative interpretation in the course of the second of the two interviews published in Retours sur Retour Reims (2011), a series of reflections on the reception of Retour Reims. Here Eribon acknowledges his debt to Sedgwicks conception of shame as a kind of nergie transformatrice, which la fois rduit au silence et pousse la prise de parole, which is productrice de crainte et de rbellion (Eribon 2011: 44). He goes on to speculate about the relationship between la honte sexuelle, he felt in regard to his sexual identity, and la honte sociale, provoked by his working-class origins. He suggests that he found it easier to transform his sexual shame into the basis for his own self-affirmation and political engagement as a gay man than he did to transform his social shame into the equivalent basis for any working-class self-affirmation and political engagement. This, he argues, reflected a set of purely contingent conditions, namely the existence of a vocal gay movement, validating his sexual ity as a legitimate form of identity in a way that contrasted strongly with the contemporaneous disappearance of Marxism and the decline of the workers movement in France. Thus, where the gay movement provided him with a conceptual vocabulary through which to articulate his gay identity, the decline of the workers movement deprived him of la possibilit de revendiquer comme sien ce dont laccs un autre monde lui a donn plus ou moins honte (Eribon 2011: 45). It would surely be possible to extend these purely personal reflections and apply them to Eribons own family members or to working-class subjects more generally. We might then suggest that his parents occasional violent rages, their thwarted educational ambitions and their investment in conspicuous consumption were all expressions of moments of disgust, rejection or shame

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in the face of the limitations of their working-class identity. That these affective responses to their situation, these moments of disaffection, were to come to nought reflected not working-class subjects spontaneous, immediate or doxic investment in their working-class identities, but rather the purely contingent lack of those political forms and institutions, those opportunities which might facilitate the translation of such disaffection into a more positive form of nergie transformatrice. This, in turn, would involve acknowledging the possibility that working-class amor fati the tendency of some working-class subjects aggressively to proclaim their love for their way of life while rejecting more legitimate cultural forms or lifestyles may not be as straightforward as it might initially appear to the outside observer. Not only are such sentiments surely not shared by all working-class subjects all of the time, they may also form part of a compensatory mechanism whereby subjects seek to defend the validity of working-class culture against outside criticism even as, at another level, they might bridle at its rigidities and limitations. In short, such apparent amor fati may co-exist, in a contradictory way, with feelings of disgust at or rejection of the limitations of working-class existence. To raise this possibility is to do no more than to suggest that working-class subjects relationship to their own social identity is as potentially complex and contradictory as that of any other social group. Such complex and contradictory relationships between working-class subjects, their identity and culture are certainly implicit in Eribons accounts of his own family members lives, their violent rages, and their evident aspirations to social mobility and educational achievement. However, his application of an orthodox Bourdieusianism to his analyses of working-class life prevents Eribon from accounting for such evident complexity and contradiction in a convincing manner.

Beyond the mindbody dualism

While he applies Bourdieusian sociology to explain his personal experiences, then, Eribons accounts of his own affective rejection of his working-class identity, and of his parents thwarted ambitions and violent rages, question Bourdieus understanding of the workings of habitus and social reproduction on at least two levels. First, the assumption that the injunctions, affects and values of the working-class habitus are spontaneously or immediately incorporated by all workingclass agents seems particularly questionable. Second, and by extension, the notion that the ability to question, at the rational level, or to reject, at the affective level, the apparent self-evidence of the social world is contingent upon having achieved a prior social and hence epistemological break with that social world seems equally dubious. On the contrary, the evidence of Retour Reims strongly suggests that a prior rejection of the apparently self-evident values of ones class habitus can prove to be the motor or catalyst for a subsequent social break, although the chances of that break being successfully achieved may well be strongly correlated with a series of other social preconditions. To put it more simply, it is easier for someone from a wealthy middle-class background to act upon their affective rejection of their class habitus since their wealth provides them with greater opportunities for translating that affective rejection into effective action. What needs to be questioned here is the Bourdieusian assumption that the innate capacity to question or reject ones initial class habitus is determined by class position. In short, what is needed here is a reformulation of the Bourdieusian framework in such a way as to recognise and account for the inherent possibility of processes of incorporation going awry, and going awry in such a way that may not imply a prise de conscience or an act of deliberative judgement, as traditionally understood, but may indeed be more a matter of an affective reaction or rejection, with varied but nonetheless potentially highly significant consequences. This, in turn, would necessitate questioning Bourdieus assumption as to the inherent inertia of the habitus and his consequent theorisation

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of any political change as necessitating an epistemological break a break that secures access to a realm of rational or scientific knowledge which defines itself in opposition to the realm of practical, affective embodied knowledge, characterised precisely by its unthinking inertia. For there appears to be only one reason for assuming that the practical schemes of the habitus are inert because they are embodied and that social or political change demands accession to a level of rationality defined in opposition to the embodied and affective. And that reason is continued adherence to a rigid mindbody dualism. Rejecting such a rigid dualism would involve acknowledging that if affective and embodied forms of experience can indeed play a central role in securing agents adherence to existing social identities and institutions, there is no a priori reason why affective reactions of disgust or rejection of those identities and institutions might not play an equally significant role as motors of social and political change, whether at the purely individual or the more collective level. To acknowledge that affective reactions to existing social identities may be more ambivalent and contradictory than Bourdieus social theory suggests is not simply to invert the mindbody binary so that the affective and the embodied are idealised as the locus of a dynamic, affirmative force seen as preceding and constantly escaping those forces that strive to channel, discipline or capture affect within pre-existing identities of class, gender, sexuality or nation. This is the danger inherent in much of what falls under the rubric of the affective turn in social theory, from Sedgwicks appropriations of the work of Silvan Tomkins to Brian Massumis Deleuzo-Spinozist theories of the politics of affect. As Papoulias and Callard (2010: 49) have convincingly argued, much of the social theory produced within this affective turn relies on a highly selective reading of experimental work in psychology and neuroscience. As a result, any mention of the evolutionary determinations and hence regulatory functions, which scientists regularly ascribe to the affects, is ignored, so that an essentially dynamic, self-organizing biology/nature is presented as the guarantor for an emancipatory and creative politics (Papoulias and Callard 2010: 49). Massumis attempt to draw a rigid, binary distinction between affect, on the one hand, and emotion, on the other, offers one particularly clear example of this tendency. According to Massumi, emotion is qualified intensity or intensity owned and recognised through the sociological fixing of the quality of the experience which is from that point onward defined as personal (Massumi 2002: 28). Affect, by contrast, is described in an idealised and hypostatised manner as a kind of immediate, inherently dynamic and affirmative life force. Affect is vivacity of context, Massumi claims; affect enlivens (Massumi 2002: 220). As Leys (2011: 455) argues, at such moments affect theorists reveal their disavowed adherence to a classical dualism of mind and body; the mindbody dualism may be inverted here but it is certainly not deconstructed, with the result that the affective turn ultimately risks amounting to little more than a kind of reheated Romanticism.3 Leys (2011: 465 n. 56) attributes such failings to affect theorists embrace of an anti-intentionalist paradigm, thus implying that intentionalist accounts of consciousness may offer one way out of the mindbody dualism that continues to underpin both the work of affect theorists and Bourdieus sociology. This is a suggestion that is surely worth pursuing, not least because Bourdieus theory of practice owes such a debt to Maurice Merleau-Pontys account of intentionality, and to his phenomenological philosophy, of which it represents a kind of sociological re-reading. In his Phnomnologie de la perception (1945), Merleau-Ponty sets out to elaborate a theory of human practice that sees embodiment and rational or objective knowledge as existing on a continuum, rather than being in opposition to one another. For Merleau-Ponty, objective knowledge and rational political agency have as their necessary preconditions the affective investment and embodied presence of agents in the social and cultural worlds. Rather than seeing freedom of thought or action as necessitating an epistemological break with the realm of embodied

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practice, as Bourdieu does, Merleau-Ponty argues that it is precisely the incorporation of certain habitual actions and reflexes that is the precondition for consciousness and freedom of action. In order for an agent to gain consciousness of the external world, it is necessary, according to Merleau-Ponty, that:
les stimulations du dehors ne le touchent plus quavec respect , que chaque situation momentane cesse dtre pour lui la totalit de ltre, chaque rponse particulire doccuper tout son champ pratique, que llaboration de ces rponses, au lieu de se faire au centre de son existence, se passe la priphrie et quenfin les rponses elles-mmes nexigent plus chaque fois une prise de position singulire et soient dessines une fois pour toutes dans leur gnralit. Ainsi, cest en renonant une partie de sa spontanit, en sengageant dans le monde par des organes stables et des circuits prtablis que lhomme peut acqurir lespace mental et pratique qui le dgagera en principe de son milieu et le lui fera voir. Et condition de replacer dans lordre de lexistence jusqu la prise de conscience dun monde objectif, nous ne trouverons plus de contradiction entre elle et le conditionnement corporel: cest une ncessit interne pour lexistence la plus intgre de se donner un corps habituel. Ce qui nous permet de relier lun lautre le physiologique et le psychique, cest que, rintgrs lexistence, ils ne se distinguent plus comme lordre de len soi et lordre du pour soi, et quils sont tous deux orients vers un ple intentionnel ou vers un monde. Sans doute les deux histoires ne se recouvrent jamais tout fait: lune est banale et cyclique, lautre peut tre ouverte et singulire. (Merleau-Ponty, 1945: 103)

When Bourdieu attempts to graft Gaston Bachelards concept of an epistemological break on to his sociological re-reading of Merleau-Pontys phenomenology, he unwittingly reasserts the mindbody dualism that Merleau-Ponty had worked so hard to think through and reject. As I have sought to demonstrate, when he recounts both his own rejection of his working-class identity and the rejections and violent impotent rages of his parents, Eribon implicitly also undermines this dichotomy between mind and body, epistemological break and doxic adherence a dichotomy his adherence to an orthodox Bourdieusianism constantly works to reimpose. Merleau-Pontys insistence that there is no contradiction between une prise de conscience and le conditionnement corporel, and his call for us conceptually to reintegrate the physiological and the psychic, even as we acknowledge that these two ne se recouvrent jamais tout fait, surely offers a more convincing theoretical model through which to make sense of both Eribons and his parents ambivalent affective responses to their class identity. One indication of what a sociology of working-class experience might look like, if it reformulated Bourdieus social theory on the lines suggested here, is offered by British sociologist Beverley Skeggs in her Formations of Class and Gender (1997). Skeggs does not engage with the work of Merleau-Ponty per se, but, in her efforts to engage with and reformulate the tenets of Bourdieusian sociology, she does reject the mindbody dualism, while retaining an emphasis on the centrality of affect in ways broadly consistent with Merleau-Pontys approach. Formations of Class and Gender is a study of young working-class British women training to be care assistants. Skeggs applies Bourdieus concepts of class identity and cultural capital to her research subjects but rejects his assumption regarding the immediate or unproblematic manner in which working-class subjects supposedly adhere to existing class or gender identities. In the behaviour of her subjects, Skeggs observes strenuous efforts to deny, disidentify, and dissimulate their working-class identity (Skeggs 1997: 94). Yet these efforts are in no way contingent on prior academic success or social advancement, or on staging an epistemological break with their social milieu, as Bourdieu and Eribon would both assume. These are rather, as Skeggs puts it, affective responses motivated by a sense of injustice at their social and cultural positioning. Such responses also reveal aspirations to social betterment, and to the kind of middle-class respectability,

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femininity and material comfort embodied in the person and politics of Margaret Thatcher and her form of market populism (Skeggs 1997: 76). Skeggs important contribution here is to allow for the possibility of processes of incorporation going awry, and for affective responses or reactions against ones allotted social identity which produce real social and political effects. Yet she does this in such a way as to avoid the tendency to idealise or romanticise the realm of affect, hence acknowledging that such responses and reactions can often produce quite conservative political or social effects. Affect, in Skeggs work, is neither idealised as inherently creative, as a Sedgwick or a Massumi would imply, nor is it characterised as a realm of immediate doxic investment, of unthinking inertia, as Bourdieu would have it. Skeggs shows how affective reactions against a working-class milieu can generate impulses towards significant political and social changes. There is nothing essentially affirmative or progressive in such affective reactions, yet any social theory worth its name must surely be able to acknowledge and account for their possibility and potential effects. In Retours sur Retour Reims, Eribon argues that to provide a realistic account of the inherent limitations of working-class life and culture is necessarily to invite the accusation that one is guilty of reproducing a form of class prejudice. As he puts it:
Mon livre entend sinsurger contre cet ordre social, contre la violence sociale quil vhicule, contre le racisme social qui le cimente. Mais pour parler des domins sans tomber dans la mythologie ouvririste, populiste, on est oblig de dire des choses qui renvoient des ralits parfois peu glorieuses, et peu enviables, et cela peut tre ressenti par ceux qui sont concerns comme du racisme de classe. Je le sais. Cest un paradoxe indpassable. (Eribon 2011:25)

What Skeggss work shows is that Eribon has presented us with a false dichotomy here, for it is quite possible to acknowledge and account for the ambivalence and complexity of working-class agents relationships to their social identity without in any way endorsing la mythologie ouvririste, populiste. The paradox Eribon evokes here is in no way indpassable, provided one eschews one-dimensional depictions of working-class agents and hence rejects or at least reworks certain of the fundamental assumptions underpinning Bourdieus sociology. These assumptions are very closely and logically interrelated, so that a classical, if strenuously disavowed, mindbody dualism generates the assumption that working-class agents relationship to the social world is defined by a pre-reflexive, doxic immediacy. This, in turn, validates Bourdieus and Eribons constant slippage from registering material inequalities to making the illegitimate assumption that these must correspond to inequalities of inherent intellectual capacity. It cannot be emphasised enough that to question these fundamental tenets of Bourdieusian sociology is not to seek to deny the continuing importance of class to the shockingly divergent life chances of those born and brought up in the developed Western economies. Inasmuch as Eribons Retour Reims has brought these important questions of class once more to the fore of the French intellectual field, the book is to be warmly welcomed. However, in a context where the relevance of social class is routinely, and hypocritically, dismissed as hopelessly outdated, the onus on those undertaking class analysis to get it right, to avoid simplistic or one-dimensional accounts of working-class identity, is all the greater. As this article has sought to demonstrate, in his excessive reliance on Bourdieus social theory, Eribon unwittingly risks reproducing a damagingly one-dimensional account of working-class experience. As we have argued, avoiding this danger is surely not as difficult as Eribon implies. It is sufficient to acknowledge that the possibility of human agents not immediately adhering to the values contained in their class habitus and identity, and the potential for affective reactions of disgust, horror or rejection of such values,

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is intrinsic to us all, and it forms part of our very species-being. To argue this is not to embrace a nave idealism, which ignores the weight of social conditions and the very different life chances and opportunities these offer agents of different social origins. For one can assert the universality of the innate capacity to reject or react against ones class habitus, while still acknowledging that the chances of being able successfully to move from that affective response to escape ones social destiny vary greatly depending upon ones social origin. The image of Eribons father drunkenly smashing all the bottles in the family home in a violent rage, or, perhaps more movingly still, carefully conserving the notebooks that bear witness to his thwarted ambition to escape his social destiny, surely bears witness to both of those truths. Notes
1 For two useful critical surveys of this turn to affect, see Leys (2011) and Papoulias and Callard (2010). Within this broad body of work, affect is conventionally considered to be conceptually distinct from emotion. For reasons that will become clear in the main body of my argument, I concur with Leys (2011: 435) in considering this distinction to be ultimately unsustainable and will hence employ the two terms interchangeably throughout my analysis. 2 The key reference here is Sedgwicks essay Shame, Theatricality, and Queer Performativity: Henry Jamess The Art of the Novel (in Sedgwick 2003: 3565). For Sedgwick, the shame felt at societys rejection of ones sexuality as deviant possesses a potentially transformative force inasmuch as it can provide the basis for a sexual identity defined by its resistance to, rejection of, or rebellion against the status quo. 3 As Papoulias and Callard (2010: 38) point out, for affect theorists attending to affect is about stepping closer to lived, fleshed experience, a stepping closer that is frequently regarded as a kind of re-enchantment. Derbyshire (2011) has made this same accusation of Romanticism in his critique of Beasley-Murrays book Posthegemony (2010), itself an attempt to synthesise a Deleuzo-Spinozist reading of affect with Bourdieus theory of practice.

References
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Sedgwick EK (2003) Touching, Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sedgwick EK and Frank A (1995) Shame in the cybernetic fold: reading Silvan Tomkins. In: EK Sedgwick and A Frank (eds) Shame and its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 128. Skeggs B (1997) Formations of Class and Gender. London: SAGE. Jeremy F. Lane is Associate Professor in the Department of French and Francophone Studies at Nottingham University. He is author of Pierre Bourdieu: A Critical Introduction (2000) and Bourdieus Politics, Problems and Possibilities (2006).

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