There was a question that had begun to trouble me a bit earlier, once I had taken the first steps on this return journey to Reims. I would manage to formulate it still more clearly and more precisely in the days that followed the afternoon of the day after my father’s funeral, the one I spent with my mother going through old photographs: “Why, when I have written so much about processes of domination, have I never written about forms of domination based on class?” Or, “Why, when I have paid so much attention to the role played by feelings of shame in processes of subjection and subjectivation, have I written so little about forms of shame having to do with class?” Finally, it came to seem necessary to me to pose the question in these terms: “Why, when I have had such an intense experience of forms of shame related to class, shame in relation to the milieu in which I grew up, why, when once I had arrived in Paris and started meeting people from such different class backgrounds I would often find myself lying to them about my class origins, or feeling embarrassed when admitting my background in front of them, why had it never occurred to me to take up this problem in a book or an article?” Let me put it this way: it turned out to be much easier for me to write about shame linked to sexuality than about shame linked to class. It seemed that the idea of studying the constitution of subordinated subjectivities, and, simultaneously, the establishment of a complicated relationship between remaining silent about oneself and making an “avowal” of who one is, had become these days valorized and valorizing, that it was even strongly encouraged in the contemporary political context—when it was sexuality that was in question. Yet the same kind of project was extremely difficult, and received no support from prevailing categories of social discourse, when it was a question of working-class social origins. I wanted to understand why this would be the case. Fleeing to the big city, to the capital, in order to be able to live out one’s homosexuality is such a classic trajectory, quite common for young gay men. The chapter that I wrote on this phenomenon in Insult and the Making of the Gay Self can be read—as, in fact, the whole first section of that book can be—as an autobiography recast as historical and theoretical analysis, or, if you prefer, as a historical and theoretical analysis that is grounded in personal experience.6 But the “autobiography” in question was a partial one. A different historical and theoretical analysis would also have been possible beginning with a similarly reflexive look at the path I had followed. This is because the decision at the age of twenty to leave the town in which I was born and where I spent my adolescence in order to go live in Paris also represented part of a progressive change in my social milieu. On thinking the matter through, it doesn’t seem exaggerated to assert that my coming out of the sexual closet, my desire to assume and assert my homosexuality, coincided within my personal trajectory with my shutting myself up inside what I might call a class closet. I mean by this that I took on the constraints imposed by a different kind of dissimulation; I took on a different kind of dissociative personality or double consciousness (with the same kinds of mechanisms familiar from the sexual closet: various subterfuges to cover one’s tracks, a very small set of friends who know the truth but keep it secret, the taking up of different registers of discourse in different situations and with different interlocutors, a constant self-surveillance as regards one’s gestures, one’s intonation, manners of speech, so that nothing untoward slips out, so that one never betrays oneself, and so on). When, after writing a number of books dealing with the history of ideas (including my two books on Foucault), I began the project of writing about subjection, it was on my gay past that I chose to draw. I chose to reflect on the workings of subordination and “abjection” (how a person is “abjected” by the surrounding world) experienced by those of us who contravene the laws of sexual normality, thereby leaving aside everything in me, in my own existence, that could—and should—have led me to turn my gaze on relations of class, to class domination, to the processes of subjectivation linked to class affiliation and to the subordination of the working classes. Of course it’s not as if I totally neglected these questions in Insult and the Making of the Gay Self, or in Une morale du minoritaire [A minoritarian morality] or in Hérésies.7 My ambition in these books was larger than the specific framework of the analyses found in them. I wanted to sketch out an anthropology of shame and from it to build up a theory of domination and of resistance, of subjection and subjectivation. Surely that is why, in Une morale du minoritaire, I kept juxtaposing the theoretical elaborations of Genet, Jouhandeau, and several other writers who deal with sexual subordination with the thinking of Bourdieu on class subordination or of Fanon, Baldwin, and Chamoiseau on racial and colonial subordination. Yet it remains the case that these dimensions are only dealt with in the course of my demonstration as other parameters that contribute to an effort to understand what the fact of belonging to a sexual minority represents and carries along with it. I call on approaches produced in other contexts; I make an effort to extend the range of my analyses; but these other approaches remain a bit secondary. They are supplements—sometimes offering support, sometimes suggesting ways of extending my analysis. As I pointed out in the preface to Insult and the Making of the Gay Self, I wanted to transpose the notion of a class habitus developed by Pierre Bourdieu to the question of sexual habitus: do the forms of incorporation of the structures of the sexual order produce sexual habitus in the same way that the forms of incorporation of the structures of the social order produce class habitus? And even though any attempt to develop a response to a problem like this one must obviously confront the question of the articulation between sexual habitus and class habitus, my book was devoted to sexual subjectivation and not social or class subjectivation.
When I returned to Reims, I was confronted by the following question, a tenacious one I had not acknowledged (at least I had not really acknowledged it in my written work, or in my life): in taking as my point of theoretical departure—by which I mean establishing a framework for thinking about myself, my past, and my present—the seemingly obvious idea that the complete break I had made with my family was due to my homosexuality, to my father’s deeply rooted homophobia, to the homophobia rampant in the milieu in which I was living (and doubtless all this was absolutely true), had I not at the same time offered myself noble and incontestable reasons for avoiding the thought that this was just as much a break with the class background I came from?
In the course of my life, following the typical path of a young gay man who moves to the city, builds up new social networks, and learns what it means to be gay by discovering the gay world that already exists, inventing himself as gay on the basis of that discovery, I had also followed another path, a class-based one: this is the itinerary of those who are frequently labeled “class traitors.” And surely a “traitor” or a “renegade” is what I was, one whose only concern, a more or less permanent and more or less conscious one, was to put as much distance as possible between himself and his class of origin, to escape from the social surroundings of his childhood and his adolescence.8
Of course I retained a political solidarity with the world of my early years, to the extent that I never came to share the values of the dominant class. I always felt awkward or incensed when hearing people around me talking scornfully or flippantly about working class people and their habits and ways of life. After all, that’s where I came from. I would also experience an immediate hatred on encountering the hostility that well-to-do, well-established people would express towards strikes, political activism, protests, and forms of popular resistance. Certain class reflexes persist despite all our efforts to separate ourselves from our social origins, even those efforts aimed at personal transformation. And on those occasions in my daily life, rare but not non-existent, in which I gave way to hasty and disdainful opinions that characterize a view of the world and other people that we might as well call class racism, my reactions nonetheless more often than not resembled those of Paul Nizan’s character, Antoine Bloyé. A portrait of Nizan’s father, Bloyé is a former worker who has become bourgeois, and he still feels hurt by the derogatory remarks about the working class that he hears made by those people around him who now constitute his social milieu. It feels as if he were being targeted along with the milieu to which he used to belong: “How could he share their opinions without completely betraying his own childhood?”9 Every time I would “betray” my own childhood, by sharing in deprecatory opinions, inevitably a nagging bad conscience would make itself felt, if not sooner, then later.
And yet, an enormous distance seemed to separate me now from the universe I had once belonged to, a universe that I had devoted so much energy—the energy of despair—to breaking with. I have to admit that however much I felt close to and in solidarity with working class struggles, however loyal I remained to those political and emotional values that are stirred in me whenever I watch a documentary about the great strikes of 1936 or 1968, still, deep inside myself I experienced a rejection of working class life as I knew it. The “organized” working class, or the working class perceived as organizable, and thereby idealized, even rendered heroic, is different from the individuals from whom it is made up, or who potentially make it up. And it became more and more unpleasant for me to find myself in the company of those who were—of those who are—members of this class. In my early days in Paris, when I still visited my parents, who were still living in the same public housing project in Reims where I had spent my adolescence (it was only many years later that they would move from there to Muizon), or when I had lunch with them on Sundays at my grandmother’s, who lived in Paris and whom they would sometimes visit, I felt a nebulous and indescribable discomfort in the face of their ways of speaking and being, so different from those that characterized the circles in which I was now moving; or when faced with the subjects that preoccupied them, so different from my own preoccupations; or when faced with the deep, obsessive racism that flowed freely, no matter what we were talking about, and left me without any way of understanding why or how any and every subject of conversation brought us back to that. These meetings became more and more of a burden the more I went on changing into someone new. When I read the books that Annie Ernaux devotes to her parents and to the “class divide” that separates her from them, I recognized in them precisely what I was going through at this time. She provides an amazing description of the uneasiness or distress a person feels upon returning to her or his parents’ house after not only moving out, but also after leaving behind both the family and the world to which she or he nonetheless continues to belong—the disconcerting experience of being both at home and in a foreign country.10
To be perfectly honest, in my case this kind of return became nearly impossible after a very few years.
Two different paths, then. Each imbricated in the other. Two interdependent trajectories for my reinvention of myself, one having to do with the sexual order, the other with the social order. And yet, when it came to writing, it was the first that I decided to analyze, the one having to do with sexual oppression, not the second which had to do with class domination. Perhaps in the theoretical gesture made by my writing I only increased the existential betrayal I was committing. For it was only one kind of personal implication of the writing subject in what is written that I took on, not the other. Indeed, one ended up excluding the other. My choice was not only a way of defining myself, of constructing my subjectivity in the present moment, it was also a choice about my past, a choice regarding the child and the teenager I had been: a gay child, a gay teenager, and not the son of a worker. And yet …