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. -- from "Returning to Reims"

After his father dies, Didier Eribon returns to his hometown of Reims and rediscovers the working-class world he had left behind thirty years earlier. For years, Eribon had thought of his father largely in terms of the latter's intolerable homophobia. Yet his father's death provokes new reflection on Eribon's part about how multiple processes of domination intersect in a given life and in a given culture. Eribon sets out to investigate his past, the history of his family, and the trajectory of his own life. His story weaves together a set of remarkable reflections on the class system in France, on the role of the educational system in class identity, on the way both class and sexual identities are formed, and on the recent history of French politics, including the shifting voting patterns of the working classes -- reflected by Eribon's own family, which changed its allegiance from the Communist Party to the National Front.

"Returning to Reims" is a remarkable book of sociological inquiry and critical theory, of interest to anyone concerned with the direction of leftist politics in the contemporary world, and to anyone who has ever experienced how sexual identity can clash with other parts of one's identity. A huge success in France since its initial publication in 2009, "Returning to Reims" received enthusiastic reviews in "Le Monde, Liberation, L'Express, Les Inrockuptibles," and elsewhere.

迪迪埃·埃里蓬（Didier Eribon，1953— ），法国哲学家、社会学家、思想史家，法国亚眠大学哲学人文科学学院教授，美国伯克利大学、英国剑桥大学国王学院、普林斯顿高级研究所客座教授，在哲学、文学、社会学等研究领域已出版十几种著作，很多作品被认可为经典，如《米歇尔·福柯传》《回归故里》《少数派道德》《逃脱精神分析》《亦近，亦远——列维-斯特劳斯谈话录》等，被国际公认为当今世界最重要的思想家之一。