Didier Eribon


Didier Eribon is a French author and philosopher, and a historian of French intellectual life. He lives in Paris.

Life

Didier Eribon was born in Reims into a working-class family. He was the first in his family to finish secondary education and abandon his working-class identity. He credits his mother with helping him achieve this; a factory worker, she had to work overtime to be able to pay for his education. Working as a hotel porter at night and going to college during day, abandoning his parents' ways of life, Eribon felt like a working-class "traitor". He never became part of the rich elite, whose children even in education have different routes, the grandes école for the elite. The non-elite attend the universities.

Work

Didier Eribon is professor at the School of Philosophy and Social Sciences of the University of Amiens. He has for years been running a seminar at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. He has also been Visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkeley for several years, and at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.
Eribon has lectured in a great number of countries and, in the U.S., at The New School, University of Chicago, Harvard University, Yale University, New York University, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, Columbia University among others. He was one of the speakers at the Conference "Foucault in Berkeley. Twenty Years Later", held in Berkeley October 2004, with Leo Bersani, Judith Butler, Paul Rabinow, Hubert Dreyfus, Michael Lucey, and others.
He is the author of several books, including his Réflexions sur la question gay, Une morale du minoritaire, and Echapper à la psychanalyse. His biography of Michel Foucault, published in English in 1991, has been praised by Pierre Bourdieu, Paul Veyne, Paul Rabinow and Hayden White, among others. His 1988 book of conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss was also published in English in 1991.
Between 1984 until recently, Eribon wrote frequently for Le Nouvel Observateur, the French weekly magazine. He reviewed books in the fields of philosophy and social sciences.

Autobiography

His 2009 memoir Returning to Reims has had an influence beyond the field of sociology. French novelist, Édouard Louis cites the book as having "marked a turning point for his future as a writer."
Additionally, the book was adapted for the stage by :fr:Laurent Hatat|Laurent Hatat, in a play that debuted at the Festival Avignon in July 2014. It was directed by Thomas Ostermeier as part of the 2017 Manchester International Festival. The book also received enthusiastic reviews in the French press, such as Le Monde, Libération, L'Express and Les Inrockuptibles.

Prizes

Eribon is the recipient of the 2008 Brudner Prize. He returned the prize in May 2011.

Publications