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·埃裏蓬（Didier Eribon，1953— ），法國哲學傢、社會學傢、思想史傢，法國亞眠大學哲學人文科學學院教授，美國伯剋利大學、英國劍橋大學國王學院、普林斯頓高級研究所客座教授，在哲學、文學、社會學等研究領域已齣版十幾種著作，很多作品被認可為經典，如《米歇爾·福柯傳》《迴歸故裏》《少數派道德》《逃脫精神分析》《亦近，亦遠——列維-斯特勞斯談話錄》等，被國際公認為當今世界最重要的思想傢之一。