Publish at March 16 2022 Updated March 24 2025
Whether it is "staying in one's place" or "finding one's place," many expressions refer to a physical but especially social space that would suit us. They invite modesty or measured ambition. In Be in your place, Claire Marin, a philosopher, makes us distance ourselves from the representations these expressions convey and the limits they impose on us.
The expression "staying in your place" expresses an injunction to be humble, to shrink, to accept defeat by forfeit. Many uplifting stories feature a proud hero who tries to rise above his condition and is overtaken by his fate. The frog that would like to be as big as an ox explodes. Icarus pretends to rise to the height of the sun. When he approaches the star, the wax that held the wings to his arms melts, these wings burn. This is the fall.
In more contemporary stories, trying to leave one's place means risking confronting habits, customs that one does not master. Michel Serres tells the story of how his Southwestern accent cost him an academic position. It didn't sound serious. When they are not victims of glottophobia (article), people who try to extricate themselves from their condition can also suffer from impostor syndrome. They develop a sense of having usurped a place, as if they were hearing a voice that regularly told them, "Don't forget where you came from!" To succeed in a new social environment would be in a way to deny one's origins by claiming another place.
Some live it badly, others make a standard of it. Michel Serres suffered doubly from a haughty look on his origin and from a rejection of the good student he was by his family. In a form of reversal, he was later able to claim his modest rural childhood. Claire Marin cites other examples and supports her reflection on writers such as Annie Ernaux, Didier Eribon or Jean-Baptiste Pontalis.
Taking up François Noudelmann's arguments in Outside of Me, Claire Marin shows us how this lineage does not completely lock us in. We always have the choice to adhere to it or to move away from it. In The Carpenter's Shop, Chronicle of a Foretold Closure, Aurel tells the story of how his father, a graduate of an engineering school, gave up everything and took over the family's carpentry shop. He then explains how he himself made the choice of comic books, at the risk of seeing the family business disappear.
Each of us is at the intersection of two family trees. We can therefore choose and select our determinisms. These narratives in which individuals tell how they have freed themselves or inscribed themselves in a family determinism are above all narratives and constructions in which the author retains a significant degree of freedom! It is up to us to invent what we do with these filiations, how we recompose them to integrate them or not into our life projects.
While in retrospect those who extracted themselves from one environment to enter another gain a certain amount of glory, things are less straightforward when experienced firsthand, as a teenager. History books of ideas and science accumulate images of Western men and do not present other models.
How can you believe you belong in college or a top school when you don't know anyone who has experienced it. How can we hope when no alumni or student of a school shares our geographical or social origins, or even our skin color. Associations are fighting against this self-stigmatization and are setting up meetings with mentors. They give young people opportunities to project themselves into spaces where they don't think they belong. One example is the association Handinamique.
Experiments like "Women in Sciences", (women in science) or the Without Pages on Wikipedia provide concrete answers, giving more visibility to women's success stories.
We are not lizards, warns Claire Marin. When we daydream in the sun on a chaise lounge or in a hammock, we certainly look like reptiles basking in the sun. Except that the lizard does not choose it, it does not give any sense to this action. It is in its nature and it answers first of all to a physiological need. It is in its place. He is constrained "in a limited number of gestures, attitudes and actions".
The idea of a place that is meant for us is a fable, like those tales where fairies gather around cradles to tell the life the infant will have. Each of us would be like a piece of a puzzle looking for the right space...
This idea that somewhere there would be a place for us is combined with the need to undertake work on ourselves, to modify ourselves, to exercise ourselves to best occupy that place. Become what you are, go towards your vocation... so many deceptive and guilt-inducing injunctions that invite us to be the sculptors of ourselves, and make individuals responsible for their failures. If you haven't found your place, it's probably because you haven't looked hard enough or fought for it!
Claire Marin quotes A. Sanders. To belong, to be in an environment that seems to have been made for us teaches us nothing about ourselves and impoverishes us. The German philosopher, forced to work in jobs unrelated to his training or his interests, built himself up from these experiences.
Yet, we experience many, many places. My virtual identities are multiple. I am not the same person on Instagram, on my email inbox and on Linkedin. And these identities do not coincide with my professional or family identities either. The telecommuting and videoconferencing that came into families during the pandemic brought surprises. Family members were able to discover each other in ways they never imagined, seeing their loved ones interact with colleagues.
You've always been looking for fulfillment, and nothing else. And, from time to time, you've even been unlucky enough to stumble upon fulfillment. [But [...] I will tell you that these episodes have been the most false parts of your life. Only the periods of dearth that have alternated with these moments have been right. The years full of chances. The jobs you cursed. And if you have gained a modicum of experience, you owe it exclusively to those periods when, supposedly, you wasted your time."
Günther Anders,Diaries of Exile and Return.
At the beginning of her book, Claire Marin talks about those who flee and can no longer bear the place that is assigned to them. She also dwells on these people, always on the move. Nomads who leave a place as soon as they feel they belong there. Being in one's place and tidy is reassuring but it is also worrying, distressing as in those dystopias that present hyper-organized societies.
Claire Marin's book is the opposite of those books that would like to help you find your place, with a lot of questionnaires, personality studies and opportunities. It invites movement, experimentation and openness. It is not about living "as if in a pipe that neither expands nor shrinks," to quote Martin Heidegger's words.
References
Being in Your Place - Living Your Life, Living Your Body - Claire Marin
https://www.decitre.fr/livres/etre-a-sa-place-9791032915165.html
Hors de moi - François Noudelmann - Editions Léo Scheer
https://www.decitre.fr/ebooks/hors-de-moi-9782756107370_9782756107370_1.html
La menuiserie - Chronique d'une fermeture annoncée - Aurel
https://www.decitre.fr/livres/la-menuiserie-9782754814263.html
25 of the Most Innovative Female Engineers in History
https://engineeringmanagement.org/women-in-engineering/
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