Returning to reims, Didier Eribon 씀, Michael Lucey 옮김, Semiotext(e), 2007

드디어 이 책을 다 읽었다. 예전 학교에서 빌렸다 앞부분 좀 읽고 반납하고, 이 학교에서 다시 빌려서 계속 끼고 있다가, 몇주 전에 대기자 있으니까 반납하라는 메시지를 받고 그래도 찔끔거리다가, 반납일인 오늘 남은 부분을 다 읽었다. 마감이 없이는 하지 않는 나를 어쩌면 좋을지..

그렇다고 이 책이 재미없었던 것도 아니고, 오히려 상당히 공감하면서 읽었음에도 불구하고, 영어라서 잘 손이 가지 않았다. 쉬고 싶을 땐 한국어 책을 먼저 잡게 되고, 안쉴 때는 닥친 일들이 있으니 그걸 하기 바빴다.

어쨌든 끝을 내서 기쁘다. 예전 학교에서 읽었던 앞부분에 대한 북마크들은 없다. 사실 앞부분을 읽으면서 많이 울었는데. 그래도 그냥 내버려둔다. 다시 읽으려면 시간이 얼마나 또 걸릴지 몰라서..ㅠ

 

86

As I look at my mother today, her body stiffened and painful as a result of the harsh tasks she performed for nearly fifteen years, standing on an assembly line attaching tops to glass jars, with only one ten-minute bathroom break each morning and another in the afternoon, I can't help but be struck by what social inequality means concretely, physically. (...) A worker's body, as it ages, reveals to anyone who looks at it the truth about the existence of classes.

* (1) 강조는 내가 함

 

87

It is impossible for me to understand how and why the issue of harsh working conditions and all the slogans that denounced them - "Slow down the assembly lines!" - have disappeared from discourse on the left, and even from its perception of the social world. Because after all, what are at stake are the most concrete realities of many individual lives - people's very health, for example.

* (1) 

 

89

For me, the "proletariat" was an idea that came straight out of a book, something abstract. My parents didn't fit the image.

 

90

While reading Marx and Trotsky, I imagined myself at the avant-garde of the people. But really I was finding my way into a world of people of privilege, into their kind of temporality, their modes of subjectivation: the world of people who had the leisure time available for reading Marx and Trotsky.

* 내가 겪는 분열이기도. 가난한 사람들을 위해 무언가를 하고 싶다고 생각하지만 가난하게 남아 있고 싶지는 않다. 

 

100

What strikes me as particularly undeniable is that the absence of the feeling of belonging to a class is characteristic of children of the bourgeoisie. People in a dominant class position do not notice that they are positioned, situated, within a specific world (...).

 

106

An interest in art is something that is learned. I learned it. It was part of my project of nearly complete self-reeducation, necessary in order to move into a different world, a different class - and to put some distance between myself and the world and the class from which I came.

 

118

Wideman forces us to admit the following: the irrefutable fact that certain people - doubtless a good number of people - deviate from "statistics" or elude the implacable logic of "numbers" in no way nullifies the sociological truth of those statistics and those numbers.

 

126

When I was a young leftist (Trotskyist) in high school, my father was constantly ranting about "students" who were "always trying to tell us what to do" and who "in ten years will be coming back and giving us orders."

* (2) 강조는 내가.

 

127

It is said that one day in May 1968, Marcel Jouhandeau, seeing a column of student protestors passing by, sneered at them: "Go back home! In twenty years, you'll all be bankers."

* (2) 강조는 내가. 경험에서만 가능한 통찰/냉소.

 

132

Dignity is a fragile feeling, unsure of itself; it requires recongnition and reassurances. People first of all have a need not to feel like they are being treated as a negligible quantity, or merely as an entry in a statistical table or on a balance sheet, which is to say mute objects about which political decisions are made. If a time comes when those in whom you have palaced your confidence seem no longer to deserve it, you place your confidence in others. Even if it happens bity by bit, you end up turning to new representatives.

* (3)

 

138

Surely the essential factor is the feeling of knowing or believing that you are being both individually and collectively represented, even if it is in an incomplete and imperfect kind of way. That is, what counts is that one feels supported by those one supports; one has the impression of existing and of counting for something in the life of politics by means of participating in an election, by means of a decision to act in this way.

* (3) 사람들은 자신이 사회에서 셈 되는 존재, 보이는 존재이길 바람. 내가 사회에서 고려되는 존재라는 느낌이 중요. 

 

146

The "common sense" that was shared by the "French" popular classes underwent a profound transformation, precisely because the quality of being "French" became its central element, replacing the quality of being a "worker," or a man or woman of the "left."

* (3)

 

149

And more generally, your self affirmation depends on perceiving yourself as the natural master and owner of a country, as the sole legitimate beneficiary of the rights accorded by that country to its citizens. The very idea that "others" could profit from those rights - few though they may be - becomes unbearable, (...)

* (3)-1

 

173

When my father died, one of my close friends - an heir! - to whom I mentioned that I wasn't going to be attending my father's funeral, but that I nonetheless had to go to Reims to see my mother, made the following observation: "Of course. In any case you'll have to be there when the lawyer reads the will." These words, spoken in an utterly matter-of-fact tone of voice, reminded me of the truth of the fact that parallel lines never meet, even in the course of a friendship. The reading of the will? What will? Good heavens! As if anyone in my family drew up wills with their lawyers. What, precisely, would they be leaving to anyone? In the popular classes nothing passes from generation to generation, no securities, no capital, no houses or apartments, no antique furniture or valuable objects, nothing.

* 강조는 내가. 저자가 어이없어 하는 대목이 공감가서 웃겼음.

 

178

I had no knowledge of the existence of the prestigious Grandes Ecoles in Paris, with their competitive entrance exams, nor of the preparatory courses for them, called hypokhâgnes and khâgnes. In my final year in high school, I didn't even know such things existed. It is not just access to these institutions that was, and still is (perhaps to an ever greater extent) reserved for students from the privileged classes. The simple knowledge that such possibilities exist is even unavailable to many, with the result that I never even considered them as a possibility.

* (4) 이 부분도 동의하고, 개인적 기억도 떠올랐다. 중학교 때 선생님이 가고싶은 대학을 써서 내라고 했었는데, 옆에 앉았던 애가 '서울대학교'라고 썼길래 여기가 어디냐고 서울에 있는 대학을 말하냐고 했더니 나를 이상하게 바라보았다. 당시 내가 알던 대학은 티비 농구 경기에서 보는 이름들이 전부였다. 우리 집에서는 진로나 대학과 같은 이야기가 전무했다. 어떤 곳에서는 가능성에 대한 접근 뿐 아니라 가능성이 있다는 지식/정보 자체가 부재한다.

 

193

(...) such a diploma does not have the same worth, will not open the same doors, for people who lack social capital or for people who don't possess the information that is needed to strategize about thow to convert the diploma into a professional possibility. In these kinds of situations, help from families, relatives, friendship networks, and the like all contribute to the value a diploma is able to have when you are looking for a job. As far as social capital is concerned, it has to be said that I really didn't have much. Or, to be absolutely, precise, I didn't have any. And as for strategic information: none of that either. Taken altogether, this meant my diploma was worth nothing, or next to nothing.

* (4) 졸업장을 직업으로 바꿔낼 전략적 정보나 사회자본이 없는 사람에게 졸업장은 똥이라고. 여기 와서 보니 정말 유럽은 인적 네트워크가 중요하구나 싶고, 한국은 이 정도까진 아닌 것 같지만 대신 능력주의의 부작용이 있고 또 요즘은 그냥 다 필요없고 돈 있으면 장땡이라는 분위기 같다.

 

209

Reading the pages in which Sedgwick discusses these questions, especially in her dazzling chapter on Proust, stirred up many memories from my past.

* 이 책을 포함해서, 요즘 뭐만 읽으면 자꾸 옛날 기억들이 불쑥불쑥 튀어나와서 심각하다 싶었는데, 나만 그런 게 아니구나. 다행이다. 

 

222

there comes a moment when, being spat upon, you turn the spit into roses; you turn the verbal attacks into a garland of flowers, into rays of light. There is, in short, a moment when shame turns into pride. This pride is political through and through because it defies the deepest workings of normality and of normativity.

* (5) 저자는 호모섹슈얼리티에 대해 부끄러움이 자부심으로 바뀌는 순간이 있다고, 이 자부심은 정상성과 규범성의 기제를 거부하는 정치적인 것이라고 말한다. 가난에 대해서도 이런 전환이 가능할까?

 

223

If shame is, in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's wonderful expression, a "transformational energy," we should note that self-transformation never happens without the integration of traces from the past. It preserves the past, simply because that past is the world in which we were socialized and it remains within us to a considerable extent, just as it continues to surround us within the world in which we go on living. Our past is still there in our present.

 

224

It came to apply both in the domain of sexuality and in the domain of class, but in contradictory ways. In the former domain, it was a case of appropriating and claiming my insulted sexual being. But in the latter it was a case of uprooting myself from my origins. I could put it this way: in one case I needed to become what I was, but in the other I needed to reject what I was supposed to have been. Yet fr me these two activities went hand in hand.

* (5) 그러게 말이다. 후자의 경우, 거부하는 것 외에는 방법이 없나.

 

229

Gay cruising does allow for a certain amount of mixing between classes.

* 그래서 저자는 게이 크루징에서 만난 친구가 초대해준 모임에서 건너 건너 '리베라시옹' 일간지에서 일하는 이를 알게 되고, 그녀로부터 컬럼 기고를 제안받는다. 지식작품들에 대한 리뷰를 쓰는 이 일을 통해 그는 부르디외와 푸코를 비롯한 당대 유명 지식인들과 가까워지고 커리어를 열어나간다. 계급이 섞이는 이런 모임이 아니었더라면 그는 이런 기회를 얻기 어려웠을지도 모른다. 그리고 이런 기회의 시작은 여전히 종종 친분이다.

 

231

"You need some way to earn a living," Bourdieu kept telling me, in order to convince me to take itl. "I'll give you an interview and then they'll leave you in peace for two years."

* 자신의 영향력을 아는 부르디외가 좀 웃겨서.

 

241

(...) all other forms of "struggle" seemed "secondary" - or they might even be denounced as "petite bourgeois distractions" from the place where attention should be focused, the only "true" struggle, the only struggle worthy of interest, that of the working class.

* 내가 쉽게 이끌리는, 하지만 주의해야 하는 생각

 

243

I understood that a project like this - to write about a "return" - could only succeed if it was mediated by, or perhaps filtered through, a wide set of cultural references: literary, theoretical, political, and so on. Such references help push your thinking along, they help you formulate what you have to say. But most importantly, they permit you to neutralize the emotional charge that might otherwise be too strong if you had to confront the "real" without the help of an intervening screen.