Late youth begins not where a person takes too long to grow up, but where adult life itself is arranged as an endless transit. Formally, everything has already happened: departure, education, work, another language, another circle of people, another system of coordinates. The biography moves forward, sometimes it even looks successful. But inside this movement there remains a strange emptiness: as if the person is not entering life, but constantly proving their right to be in it.
In Return to Reims, Didier Eribon writes precisely about this non-coincidence. His book cannot be reduced either to a story of class shame, or to a history of homosexual liberation, or to a sociology of the family. All of that is there, but something else matters more: Eribon shows that social ascent does not necessarily produce adulthood. One can leave, acquire a language, become an intellectual, a public figure, a person with a name, and still remain suspended between what one came from and what one never fully entered. Late youth, in this sense, is not a psychological delay and not a private melancholy. It is the political condition of a person whose trajectory was built on rupture. In order to move forward, he had to renounce one world without receiving a natural right to another. He had to learn to speak, but not rid himself of silence; to work through shame, but not erase its traces; to become himself not through wholeness, but through the constant reassembly of the self.
For Eribon, adulthood is built at the intersection of two trajectories. The first is to become a homosexual man not only in the secrecy of desire, but in the form of life. The second is to become an intellectual — that is, to exit the social destiny that had, almost from birth, already assigned to him a speech, a body, a future profession, a horizon of the possible. The two lines are closely connected, but they move differently. The first, as he himself writes, is realized relatively quickly. The second gets stuck, breaks, circles around itself, finds a way out not through the direct route of academic legitimation, but through detours, accidents, connections, journalism, a subcultural milieu, late recognition. What matters more, however, is this: neither of these lines ends in wholeness. Eribon leaves for Paris, begins to live as a gay man, enters intellectual circles, writes books, receives public recognition, becomes a professor. But all these markers of a successful biography do not produce what the bourgeois imagination usually calls adulthood: a calm coincidence with oneself, a confident right to one’s place, the feeling that life has finally taken form. Success does not gather him into a whole; it only makes visible the price for which that wholeness had been promised.
In this sense, Return to Reims undermines the familiar plot of social ascent. This is not the story of a self-made man who, thanks to work and talent, overcomes his milieu and finally becomes himself. Eribon shows something more unpleasant: one can overcome social distance without overcoming it inside oneself. A new life built on the rejection of the old one never becomes entirely innocent. External movement forward does not abolish the inner rupture. It only makes it less obvious, but no less active.
Adulthood is usually imagined as the end of division. A person supposedly enters their own life one day, takes their place in it, stops proving their right to be who they have become. Adulthood promises form: composure, legitimacy, inner coincidence. For Eribon, this promise is not fulfilled. The rupture turned out not to be an episode in his biography, but its early structure: on the one hand, the renunciation of social origin; on the other, the appropriation of a sexual identity that the world had already managed to turn into an object of shame. Such a subjectivity cannot simply “mature.” From the very beginning, it is formed as conflict. Sexuality, for him, is not a private truth of desire that society then accidentally or cruelly stigmatizes. It is arranged differently. What comes first is not desire, but the language of humiliation. First comes the word, the mockery, the threat, the risk of public exposure. Insult appears before self-understanding. The world already knows how to humiliate you before you yourself understand what that humiliation refers to.
That is why his famous formulation — that he was produced by insult, that he is a “son of shame” — is not a gesture of self-pity, but an indication of how social language produces a person. Insult does not merely cause pain: it creates in advance the place into which the subject is forced to enter, and turns the future into the expectation of threat. It announces: humiliation will be waiting for you ahead, even if you do not yet know that it is already addressed to you. His “I” emerges not in the free unfolding of desire, but in the field of someone else’s knowledge, someone else’s laughter, someone else’s suspicion.
What arises, then, is not simply an identity, but a way of living under the constant pressure of another’s gaze. Vigilance becomes a habit. Discord with oneself ceases to be a thought and becomes a bodily habit. A person lives under a gaze that has already managed to define him, and for that reason even solitude ceases to be fully private: within it there is another’s norm, another’s suspicion, another’s language. Eribon does not deny the possibility of turning “shame into pride.” But his thought is more precise and less consoling. To appropriate an insult does not mean to destroy its history. To reverse the sign does not mean to erase the wound. Pride does not cancel shame; it works with its material. It is built not instead of shame, but out of it. That is why liberation, for Eribon, is never absolute. There is no clean exit from the past, no point at which the subject finally becomes unharmed. There is only work with what has already been inscribed into the body, speech, memory, reactions. We do not create ourselves anew. We merely redistribute the meaning of what has already been done to us.
But sexual shame is only one side of his book. The other, recognized later and perhaps more difficult, is class shame. Eribon already knew how to write about subordination, humiliation, insult, and subjectivation. He had a language for homosexual shame. But his own working-class origin long remained a zone of muteness. This is not an accidental omission. By that point, sexuality already had a political vocabulary: recognition, coming out, pride, minoritarian subjectivity, the right to speak in the first person. Class did not offer such a language. Or, more precisely, it offered another language — collective, party-political, sociological — but not one in which it would be possible to say without remainder: I was ashamed of my family, my address, my father’s profession, my mother’s speech, the world I came from. It is here that the true form of his division becomes visible. Paris was not only liberation. It was also shelter. The move allowed him to become visible as a homosexual man and, at the same time, invisible as someone from the working class. One closet opened; another closed.
The class closet in Eribon is not just a figure of speech, but a daily practice of self-control. It is not simply a matter of not speaking about one’s origins. It is watching one’s voice, intonation, gesture, word choice, the way one sits at the table, the way one pronounces names, the way one reacts to jokes, the way one hides family facts that, in another circle, immediately become social evidence. Class reveals itself not through confession, but through detail. That is why it has to be controlled not occasionally, but constantly. In this way, class origin becomes a second secret. Not something forbidden by law or morality, but something that can at any moment show: you are here not by right of inheritance, but by effort. To be exposed means to become not only gay, but an impostor: a person who has learned the language, but has not inherited the right to speak it.
In this sense, late youth in Eribon begins not before the escape, but after it. Escape does not end youth; it transfers it into the new life. The person no longer belongs to the former world, but the new world accepts him only conditionally, as someone who must constantly confirm his right to be inside it. He is no longer where he came from, but neither is he here in the calm, inherited manner in which those who are “from here” exist here. He has mastered the language, but he has not acquired the right to carelessness. He has learned to read, write, interpret, argue, recognize names, distinguish styles, but he has not rid himself of the feeling of illegitimate presence. To be an outsider does not mean to be ignorant. Sometimes it is precisely the one who has learned too much, because from the very beginning he knew: the smallest mistake would give him away.
School and university, in Eribon, turn out to be not so much places of knowledge as mechanisms of selection and translation into another social language. They offer a chance, but they demand payment. For a working-class child, studying means not only mastering a curriculum; it means reworking oneself. One has to change one’s voice, gesture, speed of reaction, relation to time, to the body, to authority, to culture. One has to learn not to laugh where one would have laughed before, not to speak the way people speak at home, not to reveal the old awkwardness before what others received as a natural environment. Thus adulthood ceases to be a biological plot. It is distributed by institutions. Family, school, cultural capital, knowledge of routes, confidence in one’s own right to continue further — all of this determines in advance whether adult life will be experienced as a natural entrance or as a series of tests. For Eribon, education does not end adolescent instability; it transfers it into adult life.
It is here that a notion emerges which I have already called the privilege of reversibility: the right to experience instability, crisis, or marginality as a temporary episode rather than as the final arrangement of life. In My Own Private Idaho, this asymmetry is almost literally visible: for one character, the road remains a prolonged experiment from which one can return to an adulthood prepared in advance; for the other, it becomes not a road, but a place in which one has to live. In Eribon, the same logic is transferred from the space of the road into the space of class, education, and memory. His exit from the old world was not protected by the possibility of a return route. He could not simply try on another life and return unharmed. Every step forward required renunciation, and precisely for that reason adulthood did not become for him a natural entry into life, but turned into a long labor with the consequences of his own exit.
What I recognize in Eribon is not a biography, but a structure of experience. The moment when external movement ceases to coincide with inner adulthood is, for me, connected to the defense of my doctoral dissertation. From the outside, it was supposed to look like completion: a stage passed, a status obtained, a transition accomplished, entry into another world confirmed by a document. But inside, no final composure appeared. There was no feeling that now I had the right to be where I had arrived. Rather, the opposite: legitimation itself made the absence of inner arrival more visible. In this sense, the new status turned out not to be a sign of adulthood, but a sign of its deferral. It confirmed movement, but did not bring peace. It showed that social achievement and adult wholeness do not coincide. This is what makes Eribon so close. Not a similarity of circumstances, but a similarity of fracture. Class splitting, shame, escape, the attempt to assemble oneself through intellect, the impossibility of returning — all of this, for him, is not a set of themes for analysis, but the very fabric of life. In order to move forward, it was necessary to become another person. Not to develop, not to unfold, not to “find oneself,” but precisely to remake oneself. Such remaking can become a habit, even a second nature, but it does not become innocent. It fuses with life, leaving the seams visible.
The family appears in Eribon precisely at this point. The return to Reims has nothing to do with a soft scene of returning to one’s roots. It is not the search for a lost home, but a confrontation with the fact that home has long ceased to be a place, yet has not ceased to be a force. For years he takes no interest in his family, answers his mother evasively, promises to visit and does not come, does not want to know how they live. This lack of curiosity about “his own” is almost cruel. But it is precisely this cruelty that makes the book honest. Eribon does not try to appear nobler than he was. He admits: the rupture happened not only to him, but also by his own will. His brother became for him a reminder of the fate from which he wanted to save himself. Distance from the family was not a side effect of success, but part of success itself. He chose himself, and the book begins where that choice ceases to be a clean justification.
At the center of the book, therefore, there is not one escape, but two: from a homophobic world and from the working class. One required recognizing himself; the other required renouncing the fate assigned to him. It is from this contradiction that his intellectual life grows. To be an intellectual, for Eribon, meant not simply to love books, but not to resemble his family. His intellectuality was built partly through the negation of the cultural forms of his own origin. This is a very unpleasant truth, and that is why it matters so much. It contains not only liberation, but also snobbery, shame, and social mimicry. Later he understands this and tries to play it back: to recognize that the small social promotions that seemed ridiculous to him were, for his parents, almost a question of dignity; that love for “high” culture is not neutral, but always tied to the desire to be different; that an intellectual biography, too, can be built on repression.
Here I stop reading Eribon from the outside. Until the age of eighteen, I have no gratitude toward the past, only the desire to distance myself from it. That distancing was also bound up with shame, silence, the impossibility of being myself, with the social point that defined me more strongly than I would like to admit. Later, between twenty and thirty, a more complex feeling appears: not gratitude in the pure sense, but the ability to see that this very past is what formed me. And yet no real return takes place. As with Eribon, what matters here is not reconciliation with the past, but the understanding that it continues to work inside you. From this perspective, the notion of late youth as a political condition becomes especially precise. For me, it is above all the feeling of deferred adulthood, the impossibility of fully belonging to any world, a social leap that did not bring inner peace, and the constant reassembly of the self. It is no accident that, in Eribon, the decisive moment is connected not to final success, but to the realization that even after recognition, travels, lectures, books, international prizes, and a university position, he has to rethink his own history all over again. And he does this only after the political and theoretical categories he had previously used begin to seem insufficient.
It is here that the book ceases to be only an autobiography. It does not merely describe a personal drama. It asks a question about the political languages through which a subject becomes able to remember himself at all. Eribon notes that collective movements give us categories for self-understanding. When sexuality, minoritarian subjectivity, shame, insult, and the process of becoming a subject move onto the stage, he can finally speak about his homosexual experience. But class remains a blind spot. This means that the problem is not only personal avoidance. The problem is that different forms of oppression are historically supplied with different languages of visibility. And for this reason adulthood cannot be whole not only at the individual level, but also at the political one: we are constantly taught to think ourselves fragmentarily.
From here follows the book’s main conclusion, important for a broader understanding of unfinished adulthood. Late youth becomes a political condition precisely because it does not fit into a single line: neither class, nor sexuality, nor shame, nor the plot of social ascent. The subject is formed at their intersection. And for that reason, the subject cannot be whole where the political map itself forces him to choose one language at the cost of silence about another.
In this sense, Return to Reims is not a book about return in the literal sense. One cannot return. It is impossible to re-enter the former world as one’s own. It is impossible to restore a wholeness that, perhaps, never existed in the first place. But one can measure the distance. One can understand what it consists of. One can stop mistaking one’s inner split for a personal failure and see in it the trace of a social history. That is why this book resonates with me so strongly. It shows that a person can go very far, become public, recognized, intellectually formed, and still remain in an unfinished conversation with himself. Not because he has not grown enough. But because the world he came from and the world he entered have never composed themselves inside him into a single, non-contradictory figure. Late youth is precisely this life after the exit has already taken place, when adulthood still does not feel like home. When there was movement, but no arrival. When you have already become someone else, but still carry inside you what you were leaving behind. When you have managed to enter history, language, the city, the profession, but have not managed to feel that this life is yours.
And perhaps this is precisely where his greatest accuracy lies: he allows us to stop romanticizing wholeness. He allows us to see that maturity sometimes consists not in agreement with oneself, but in the capacity to endure one’s own inner contradictoriness. Not in final coincidence with oneself, but in the precise knowledge that one is assembled from conflicting trajectories. Not in the illusion of liberation from zero, but in the difficult, never-ending work with what the social world has already managed to make of you.
