Claire Marin is a professor of philosophy in preparatory classes for the Grandes Ecoles and an associate member of ENS-Ulm. A philosopher, she works in particular on the trials of life. In his latest book, To be in her place*, she wonders about the possibility of finding her place, in her family, her couple, her work. A subject that she has been thinking about for several years, in particular because of her career, she who grew up in a Nantes middle-class family, before joining the ENS and rubbing shoulders with the academic and intellectual worlds, with , sometimes, the feeling of not being quite in place. A philosophical work that thinks about reality and will undoubtedly reconcile many readers with the discipline.
Why did you become interested in this subject of our place in the world?
First there was the effect of confinement and the pandemic which may have led us to question ourselves about the concrete places we live or frequent and about our movements, in particular those that we undergo. And everyone has asked themselves the question of the social place they occupy. This subject has interested me since I was in my twenties. Annie Ernaux’s work enlightened me on social pathways and the difficulty sometimes in finding one’s place when one discovers a different social environment. And then this question is reactivated especially when you are a woman and enter the professional world or become a mother. There are different times in life when this question becomes sensitive, painful or tense.
Have you asked the question for yourself?
I don’t come from an intellectual background. I had to integrate codes and a language that I did not originally master. I was able to put words to this feeling of discrepancy thanks, once again, to Annie Ernaux, who, in her books, described feelings and emotions that I had confusedly felt, without really succeeding in explaining them. The difference is that for me, it was not heartbreaking. I did not have the feeling of a betrayal or a disloyalty as strong as those which one can read at Annie Ernaux or in Connemarathe latest book by Nicolas Mathieu.
Your previous work evoked the question of the rupture and the disorder that this kind of events causes in a life. Can a rupture paradoxically help to find a place?
There is undoubtedly a form of continuity between these two works. Because in the experience of the rupture, it is a question of the place, either that which we lose, or that which we hope to find when leaving. But this question arose for me long before that of the ruptures of life. She’s been sensitive for a long time.
Why hadn’t you explored it before?
I wanted to be clear with this question before tackling it in order to avoid anything too subjective in this reflection. I didn’t want to be blinded by my experience.
Reading you, we understand that being in one’s place is above all not being assigned to a place, it’s being able to be in motion, isn’t that just being aligned?
Indeed, we can agree on this notion of alignment. In the book, I evoke the testimony of a person who has transitioned, that is to say, who has gone from a woman’s body to a man’s body and who uses exactly this term, d ‘alignment. He finally succeeds in being in his place in his body. It’s like he finally coincides with the person he’s always been inside.
Can this search for a place pass through the body?
The fact of not being in one’s place is not only an abstract representation, it is first of all a malaise, a physical sensation. I arrive in front of a place and I dare not go inside. It can be a luxury store, a great restaurant, a museum, a theatre. Why do these places seem forbidden to me? Why don’t I dare go home? What is this invisible barrier that makes this place seem impassable to me? It’s a malaise, the feeling that I would be “out of place” there that makes me turn around, that makes me tremble or blush. Finding your place also means getting used to it physically, acclimatizing, adjusting your body to other places, other ways of being.
Does this desire to find one’s place correspond to a desire for coherence?
We can indeed speak of coherence, of adequacy to oneself. It can also be formulated in terms of affirmation, because obviously, it goes hand in hand with the themes of recognition and legitimacy. It is not only a question of feeling in one’s place, but also of feeling recognized in this place. It matters that people recognize that I take good care of my children or that I do my job well. The question of place articulates with this theme of the gaze of the other and the judgment that it poses on my legitimacy in such and such a space, symbolic or professional.
This theme of the square seems to meet with a lot of echoes, why?
On the one hand, there is this acceleration of our lives which sometimes forces us to change places: place, work, affective or family configuration. There is an injunction to nomadism, flexibility, movement, which would be a value in itself and which is in fact above all a constraint imposed by the liberal world. This is presented to us in an idealized way as a freedom of the subject which would not be fixed or rooted. However, this is not necessarily how these displacements are experienced. Like many Ile-de-France residents, I traveled 3 hours for ten years to go to work in Cergy, I did not experience it as a carefree nomadism. And then, there are these places that change constantly because there is also an injunction to always evolve, to take another position, to go further as if we should never stop, as if there had a kind of negativity not to evolve permanently. Adapting all the time would be a virtue.
However, asking individuals to be versatile, to move from one task to another, can put them in situations of failure. This logic of musical chairs in force in the company or in the hospital, weakens individuals. But there is also no doubt a positive reason for the echo encountered by this theme. Women, for example, can today wonder about the place they have to take in the professional environment. If we talk so much about class defectors, it is because these experiences are multiplying. This testifies to a rather positive evolution of society.
Let’s come back to Annie Ernaux, whom you often quote in your book. When we re-examine his work in the light of your problematic, we understand that it is never in its place, with the exception of literature…
Annie Ernaux recounts a form of strangeness that has insinuated itself between her and her native environment, even if her feelings mean that she is still deeply linked to it. But she does not hide the fact that she did not manage to fully integrate into the Parisian intellectual milieu. She remains a bit of a spectator, she always has this feeling of remaining at a distance, of not completely adhering to this new environment. On the other hand, writing is its real place. To feel in one’s place is undoubtedly to engage in an activity that seems essential to us. Of course, this activity is not necessarily artistic. For Annie Ernaux, it’s writing, but for someone else, it can be education, it can treat a patient, defend a client, set up a restaurant. It is around this that the other activities are organized. We must succeed in reconciling this place, which is our “true place” with the other social and affective places that we occupy.
And you, is your place writing too?
It’s an important place for me, but so is teaching. I need to have interlocutors, to be in the interaction, the dialogue, in reality. What I liked when I was studying philosophy was reading authors who were really grounded in reality. My interest in philosophical questions was first born by reading works of literature. The two disciplines have always been very complementary in thinking about reality, but literature restores the density of lived experience with greater force.