What can family memories tell us about the major social and political movements of our time? In Returning to Reims (Semiotext(e), 2013), Didier Eribon, one of the most respected contemporary French intellectuals, manages to harness the story of his own experience of social ascent and family estrangement to explain both the disconnection of the French working classes and the discourse of the left. And in The Life, Old Age, and Death of a Working-Class Woman (Semiotext(e), 2025), in another display of literary talent, Eribon tells the story of his mother’s move to a nursing home to reflect on the vulnerability facing people from disadvantaged classes as they age. 

This conversation between Didier Eribon and Àlex Vicente, a cultural journalist and former correspondent for El País in Paris, is intended to explore class struggle and the tensions between personal identity and political consciousness at a time marked by populism and the rise of the far right. A session aimed at rethinking the social fractures in our turbulent present.