Nikt nie może się ode mnie domagać, żebym zajmował się matką dzień i noc, mył ją i zmieniał jej pieluchy, przepraszam bardzo. Ja wiem, że wiele kobiet tak robi, że poczuwa się do takiego obowiązku, ale nie tak powinno wyglądać postępowe, demokratyczne społeczeństwo, o jakim marzymy.
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Michal Sutowski: In The Life, Old Age and Death of a Woman of the People you evoke a very telling scene: your brother visiting his mother complains that she has not yet hung up his clothes after washing. Sitting on the couch next to him is his wife, a French woman of African descent. And his mother replies to him that she is already 80 years old and it is hard for her, but after all, it is his own wife who should do his laundry. And he adds that what has it come to, that whites have to work instead of blacks! Here we have a whole family from the hard-working popular class, gender stereotypes and racism - but the cause of what?.
Didier Eribon: They all interlock and intertwine with each other. This scene actually shows several dimensions of their situation at once, but I wanted to emphasize with it first and foremost that my mother was a racist all her life. Although she was the daughter of an immigrant from Andalusia, and sometimes even liked to emphasize that she had "Gypsy" blood, she constantly complained about immigrants in France. She would tell horrible things about them.
The stereotypical view is that workers in France became right-wing racists - instead of voting for the Communists, they started voting for the Le Pen family - only after the factories collapsed did the left abandon them in the name of neoliberalism, the emancipation of women and gays, and all that multiculturalism.
No, I remember these racist statements from a very long time ago, and I can't quite understand where this racism among the French working class came from, not just the French, by the way. The only thing I can think of in my mother's case is that she felt inferior all her life. She was a half-orphan, she supposedly had a mother, but the mother gave her away to an orphanage. When she was 14, she became a servant in bourgeois houses - that's the kind of work she was sent to do from that orphanage. Then she started working in a factory, in a glass factory, under very difficult conditions. The whole world, the whole social system looked down on her.
https://krytykapolityczna.pl/kultura/czytaj-dalej/didier-eribon-dziedziczymy-wykluczenie-wywiad/
And she also wanted to look down on someone .
I think she may have felt someone superior when she said some derogatory things about blacks or people from the Middle East. When she told me this story with her son and daughter-in-law on the phone, I tried to resist: mom, you can't say such things, wasn't it better to tell him to get out of the washing machine and hang up the laundry himself?
Well, I guess that would be a reasonable response from an 80-year-old mother to her son in such a situation? .
Except that my brother is a fool, incredibly proud of his masculinity, with the understanding that for him masculinity means that he won't do the laundry, because that is a task for women. That's why I can't find myself psychologically in such a situation, I live in a completely different world - I go to anti-racism demonstrations, I do my own laundry.... To understand and describe it at all, not to justify it - I have yet to untangle the whole knot of class, race, gender.
You recall in the book what Simone de Beauvoir wrote about the "second sex": despite all the cultural specificity of women's position, in the end she reached for economic categories to "exploitation" as a tool to describe the situation. Doesn't this fit your mother's situation?.
I think so, i.e. in the end her behavior can best be explained sociologically. She couldn't go to high school because, one, she was from an orphanage, and two, the war broke out - and she had a lot of regrets inside her about not continuing her education. I'm not even talking about going to college, but she didn't even manage to complete a typing course - a woman from one of the wealthy homes where her mother served as a child wanted to pay her tuition. The mother liked it very much, but after a year the orphanage, according to the rules, referred her to another home, and she lost that chance.
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That's why I think that her whole mindset, way of thinking, emotions - all this was shaped by her class position. And her reactions, too. Of course, over time she reacted with anger even at the sight of "too many blacks" on a TV talk show, but still, that story there, with her son and daughter-in-law, was after all about onerous work, about who should actually do it. Although this is overlaid by the stereotype of the division of duties between men and women, or gender, and, well, racial hierarchy.
You emphasize many times that the consciousness of workers during your childhood - in the 1950s and 1960s - was shaped by large mass organizations, such as the CGT trade union and the French Communist Party. Didn't they have an anti-racist, internationalist program?.
They had, their leaders, such as Georges Marchais or even earlier Jacques Duclos, were officially anti-racist, although they rarely raised these issues in their speeches or rally speeches. But my mother's vote for the left and her political affiliation did not translate at all into her personal beliefs and feelings about people from North or Sub-Saharan Africa. And in the other direction, her personal opinions on the subject did not influence how she voted or participated in demonstrations. My parents could even go to a union demonstration in defense of Algerian independence - and still remain racist.
https://krytykapolityczna.pl/swiat/ue/tutaj-topimy-algierczykow/
And did your mother have non-white workmates in that glass factory?
Of course she did - there weren't many blacks then, but Algerians, for example, were already quite numerous. Mother worked alongside these immigrants, went on strikes, which were often called for by communist labor unions, and was proud of her fight for their rights, for better wages and working conditions. And she still didn't like them, blacks or Algerians, although I know that at the time she went on strike, it didn't matter much. For when, in her old age, she said something about them, my remarks she always dismissed: I am at home, I can say what I like.
Annie Ernaux recalls her folksy parents - small shopkeepers in the French countryside - who were very supportive, especially her mother, of her educational aspirations. Was it different with you? Were your parents skeptical .
Maybe not skeptical - they supported me when I went to high school, my mother was then working de facto two jobs, outside the factory she was making extra money by distributing leaflets. She also engaged me in this, which was an object of shame for me, I was afraid that one of my schoolmates would see me with her. When I wanted to go to college, she did not resist. Only that for my parents, my high school graduation was already something unimaginable, it did not fit in their heads. They both hoped that I would finish my education and go to work to contribute to the family budget. And this is the moment when I left the family. I didn't want to give up my studies to go to work.
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But the late 1960s and early 1970s are still, I think, the times of social advancement through education, a great opportunity for children from families who previously could not count on it. For many parents, this was probably important?.
For them it was, too, but from the perspective of parents, my high school was just an advancement and something of a miracle - my older brothers to high school did not go. But already the prospect of studying for another 5-6 years was too much for them. And still when I said that I wanted to study philosophy.... it was from their point of view a waste of time and money.
When did you feel like a traitor to your class?
Immediately and not immediately. Because this process of distancing myself from my family and environment started very early, when I was 15-16 years old. I read Marguerite Duras, her texts on racism and on Algeria, but also Marx and Hegel. My whole family was working-class, but no one in it read about class struggle. In high school, I also started listening to classical music, my mother used to make me tease that when I played it on the adapter, it felt like mass. I went to the films of Godard, the Czechoslovakian New Wave, the Brazilian cinema of Glauber Rocha. All of this distanced me from them.
https://krytykapolityczna.pl/kultura/czytaj-dalej/didier-eribon-powrot-do-reims-fragment/
And when did you realize that you were from another world?
How I left my family, hometown and went to Paris, to study philosophy at the Sorbonne. Different people, a different world - and then still working as a journalist, writing for newspapers. Except that I didn't see it in terms of "class betrayal" at all, i.e. it was just that, but I didn't think so.
You were a class traitor in yourself, but not to yourself?
Yes, I think you were. But the reflection on this came to me many years later, in fact only with Return to Reims, which I started writing in 2006 and published three years later - I was already in my fifties by then. Sure, I had thought about it before, but it was only after my father died that I had to seriously confront my whole predicament: why do I hate him so much? Because he's a ditzy homophobe, that's clear. But also because he is a laborer with no education. And then I began to face the very fact that my distance from my own family came from this desire....
To become someone else .
Someone different, that is, part of the cultural world, where one goes to the theater, reads philosophers and discusses theories, which was never the case in my family. And with this confrontation, I began to wonder why I left and what it means that I am returning after 30 years. And in what sense am I "coming back," because neither me there nor that city is no longer there, after all. To unravel it all somehow, to understand it, I use the same tools - sociology, philosophy, literature - for which, to know them, I wanted or had to leave.
When I read about how you got perhaps the closest in your conscious life to your mother - when she felt free after the death of her husband and entered into an affair at a very ripe age - it was not sociological theories that helped you understand her, but simple, or perhaps extraordinary, empathy.
Indeed, we were close at the time. During one conversation on the phone, her mother asked pointedly, "do you think it's possible to fall in love, being my age?" "And why do you ask? Do you love someone?" Well, she finally told me that yes, but that I shouldn't tell my brothers, because they wouldn't understand. She began to tell me who it was, that she had fallen in love with a neighbor - and it was actually a very intense affair between two people already in their 80s, on top of that he still had a wife with whom he lived in a house nearby. She asked me what she should do.
Were you in favor?.
I said she shouldn't ask me that - let her do what she thought was right and what would give her happiness. And she was happy. Only she couldn't help herself and told the other sons, and of course they were furious. It didn't fit into their...
...petty bourgeois morality?.
Rather working-class - how can this be, was the mother crazy, and in general, who saw this, barely three years after the death of the father! They began to send me messages that it was unthinkable. I replied that it was none of their business.
https://krytykapolityczna.pl/kultura/czytaj-dalej/olga-wrobel-edouard-louis-wywiad/
Your mother just asked first because she believed you would understand her? .
That's also what my partner, Geoffroy, told me: "she told you because you're gay." And indeed, after my sexuality, my emotionality, my emotions had been insulted, mocked, stigmatized with guilt, rejected all my life - I was the right person to ask the question: what should I do? After that, we started talking on the phone much more often, and I also saw her more often in Reims. This went on for several years.
It was her happiness and your acceptance that also brought you closer .
My mother was unhappy all her life, she didn't like my father, she didn't love him, I would even say she hated him. And that is, she suffered from the age of 21 until my father died, for 55 years of marriage. When she met this guy, she fell in love up to her ears. It wasn't just a streak of joy - she was jealous and resented that he didn't want to divorce his wife and move in with her. They argued constantly, but really loved each other very much. It was a better time for us, too.
Your book is about aging in an affluent, if rather unequal, 21st century country. You described the last years of your mother's life, increasingly less independent, with the first symptoms of mental disorders, increasingly dependent on others. Finally, when she could no longer live on her own, you persuaded her, i.e. you together with your brothers, to live in a public nursing home - you could afford one, there was room in one, and besides, supposedly private ones are not better at all. It used to be the family's responsibility to take care of the elderly.
Yes, it meant in practice: the duty of daughters, granddaughters, sometimes sons-in-law.
And now people are moving to other cities, to this the proportions have reversed: there are a lot of old people and few young people. Parents and grandparents live a long time, there are fewer children to take care of them - your family with four sons was already rather a rarity, at least in the city..
It is the duty of the state, to which we pay taxes, to take care of dependent people, or at least to help their relatives take care of them. The structure of the family has changed over the last half century, and the way of living has changed too - there is no whole village to raise children or take care of the elderly, of whom there used to be far fewer. In an article published on the book in Poland, the author asked why I didn't take my mother to live with me.
Have you considered it? Or your brothers?".
One lives with his partner in Reunion - that's 700 kilometers east of Madagascar. The other in social housing in Wallonia. The third with his family in the southwest of France.
A gentleman in Paris. .
Yes, in a two-room, 50-square-meter apartment. I like them very much, but there is not so much space there, moreover, my mother would not agree to live there anyway. No one can demand that I take care of my mother day and night, wash her and change her diapers, sorry very much. I know that many women do, that they feel such a duty, but it shouldn't be like that. There are plenty of women over 50 in our country who spend years taking care of their parents, but this is not the progressive, democratic society we dream of. The whole story about family responsibilities is about shifting solutions to systemic problems onto individuals and absolving the state, politicians or officials of their responsibilities. Because yes, taking care of the elderly is the duty of the welfare state, that's what it was invented for, among other things.
Purportedly cared for, but you write that the mother called you at night, recorded herself on the answering machine and complained that she couldn't move, no one there wants to take care of her, and nurses perpetually have no time. .
I am talking about decent nursing homes that employ enough staff, doctors, nurses and provide decent conditions. I really think that this is a political demand and that parties and candidates in elections need to be held accountable for it. Do they even have this on the agenda? This cannot be put on the shoulders of families. I don't even have a wife because I'm gay, but I also can't imagine friends in San Francisco or London taking care of their infirm parents at home. And, still this reviewer asked why I don't take someone to help me. What is, excuse me, feminism, if it is proposed as a solution to hire an expatriate woman from Poland?
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Polish families hire immigrant women from the East.
The solution is the public sector, subsidized and organized - places where relatives can visit their parents and grandparents. Meanwhile, in France, the situation is scandalous. That was one of the reasons I wrote the book: it hit me when I heard from my mother what it really looks like, and then I read about what elderly care is like in France. It's not some marginal problem, because the same changes in demographics show that more and more families are suffering.
In your book, you write about the problem of the expression of more of the "cursed peoples of the earth": workers, blacks, women, sexual minorities. They all struggled or are still struggling to speak with their own voice - for a place in the factory, at home, in offices, in public debate. And now we come to the next group, the dependent elderly....
Who cannot speak for themselves. When you are a worker, you can go to a May Day demonstration, join a labor union, go on strike. When you are a woman, you can be active in the feminist movement or just various women's groups. Blacks, gay or transgender people, even illegal immigrants have different organizations, movements, campaigns, they can write petitions. If you're like my mother, bedridden in a nursing home and barely understand what's going on around you, just suffering and knowing you're about to die - those are poor conditions for mobilizing for collective action.
https://krytykapolityczna.pl/kultura/film/ken-loach-wywiad-marsili/
Sure they are, but there are, after all, children, relatives, sisters, daughters, sons-in-law. Other groups that fought for subjectivity also tended to delegate their voice to someone else: the suffragette movement was made up of educated white women from middle-class strata, the social democratic parties were dominated by skilled workers - and yet these movements spoke for larger collectivities. Your mother could not demonstrate, but there are, after all, more and more people like you - their relatives, including those who care for her like directly.
Yes, but when you go to visit your mother or grandmother in a nursing home, you don't particularly have time to get to know other families in a similar situation, it's not a good setting for gaining mutual trust and plotting a joint demonstration. We come from different cities, also from different social classes, many of us do not have the time, strength or simply the desire to organize for political action. These are not circumstances for mobilizing a protest movement.
And how do you see your role? You have finally written a book that has political overtones. .
Of course, after all, I demand more state support for people like my mother. When Simone de Beauvoir published her book on old age in 1970, she said she wanted to be the voice of the pariahs - and I'm all about the same thing. To be a spokesperson for people who can't speak for themselves. I won't organize a political movement, but at least I can speak, publish a book, give interviews in the press, radio and television.
In the book, you invoke Pierre Bourdieu's notion of the "theory effect". In other words, that in order for, for example, the working class or gender to emerge as a certain social phenomenon, someone must first narrate it, in other words: frame social reality. .
To see a social class, one needs a concept of it, a cognitive frame. And once it is visible, the consequence can be an organization, such as a trade union or a political party, and a new way of playing out social conflict. Of course, this is quite a complex process, these conceptual frameworks are not arbitrary - rather, the point is that a certain existing social reality is given meanings, and these meanings allow us to co-shape reality.
With class somehow succeeded, with gender, too, I think - these concepts, cognitive frameworks were followed by changes in consciousness and political organization..
Yes, a new reality began to form, women also began to talk about themselves in terms of "we", although it was not obvious before. But I guess you are heading to the question: whether "age" can be treated in the same way, as a new category.
https://krytykapolityczna.pl/gospodarka/utrzymac-sie-na-powierzchni-wywiad-komuda/
Can it?
As a category - political, intellectual, cultural - of course you can and should. Only that, unlike those: class, gender, race, etc., the category of age will not build us an analogous new reality, for reasons we have already discussed: this group will not mobilize on its own, it cannot exist independently, it needs some kind of spokesperson. And it won't be the anguished daughters or sons-in-law who no one wants to listen to, either. Alternatively, someone recognizable, some great writer, such as Annie Ernaux in The Reliable Woman, can tell this story, externally frame this category. She will write, for example, a novel about her mother, it will be widely read and awarded - the daughter will thus say something both about her mother and about the system....
But I have the impression that the biggest problem is not that someone speaks on behalf of someone, for someone, some part for the whole - because this is nothing new in politics. It's just that at the end of the day, those "represented" can't prove themselves.... productivity? Utility? For the economy? For democracy?.
And once again Simone de Beauvoir bows down: just as one of the keys to gender analysis for her was economic exploitation, so in the case of old people - unproductivity, uselessness. This is why we push the old to the margins, assign such a place for them in the social world that they disappear from our sight. But, after all, outside the market, productivist logic, there is such a thing as a democratic community.
That is to say?.
In such a community, "unproductive" people deserve to be taken care of if only for the fact that they once worked, that they paid taxes, that it was on their shoulders to support their families, the economy, the state. And therefore they have the right to a comfortable old age in a nursing home, where there are no staff vacancies, where there are doctors, nurses, psychiatrists. But in addition to democratic-political values, there are also purely humanistic ones: as a society, we have a duty to take care of the weakest, the abandoned, the most fragile among us.
Since my circle has published Thomas Piketty's books in Poland, I have to ask you about your attitude to this economist. You, it seems, do not like him, and yet he postulates a new socialism for the 21st century!.
Piketty is a liberal, a proponent of meritocracy, and his first famous book, Capitalism in the 21st Century, was very conservative. Of course, he writes that inequality is too high and that it's unfair, but right in the introduction he admonishes the left for their alleged "laziness in thinking" and states that after all, some inequality is fair, provided it's based on merit or effort, and on work.
And they are not?.
My mother lived the way she did, and earned little because she was a working-class woman, not because she lacked merit and shirked work. She worked very hard, and so did my father and the rest of my family. One can ask the same of the woman who cleans his office at the university - does she not put enough effort into her work? Piketty practically erased the concept of social class from his work, he doesn't write about the importance of cultural capital for class reproduction. There, by the way, there is no theory of capital at all, although the word falls in the title - we have plenty of data and figures that show that inheritance comes out better than labor.
https://krytykapolityczna.pl/kultura/historia/nad-wlokniarkami-nikt-nie-zaplakal/
As in Balzac, in the scene of the conversation between Vautrin and Rastignac from Ojec Goriot.
All this is true - that capital is passed from generation to generation. But how does it get produced in the first place? He seems to have forgotten about colonialism, too. He, after a wave of criticism, including from my side, began to admit that yes, that indeed, social classes exist. Although at the same time he doesn't like "19th century Marxism." But my parents still managed to work in a big factory, they lived the conflict of labor and capital! Piketty once complained in an interview that, as an academic, he had no money to buy himself an apartment in Paris - this was apparently the impetus for writing his book. But my mother couldn't buy herself an apartment either in Paris or Reims, she lived in social housing all her life. My impression is that he lives such an opposition between the different factions of the bourgeoisie: the educated ones, like himself, and the big property owners; but the world of social classes really disappears in this picture. I was very, very annoyed by this book of his.
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Didier Eribon - French sociologist and philosopher. He works at the University of Amiens and has taught at many universities, including Berkeley, Princeton, Cambridge and Valencia. He has written more than a dozen books on sociology, philosophy, history of ideas and gender studies. Publications in Polish include a biography of Michel Foucault, a conversation with Georges Dumézil On the Track of Indo-Europeans. Myths and Epics, a conversation with Claude Lévi-Strauss From Near and Away and Return to Reims. The book has received translations into many languages and has been transferred to the theater several times, including by Laurent Hatat, Thomas Ostermeier and Catherine Kalwat. In 2024, his latest book The Life, Old Age and Death of a Woman of the People was published in translation by Jacek Giszczak.
