crushing history

(...) so I began to realize that everything my father had been, which is to say everything I held against him, all the reasons I had detested him had been shaped by the violence of the working class. (...) Yet his condition had been the cause of any number of humiliations and set "bleak boundaries" to his life. It had planted a kind of madness in him that he never overcame and that made him nearly incapable of sustaining relationships with other people. 

(...) I am certain that my father bore whitin him the weight of a crushing history that could not help but produce serious psychic damage in those who lived through it. 

My father's life, his personality, his subjectivity had been doubly marked and determined by a place and by a time whose particular hardships and constraints continually played off each other in a way that only made them proliferate. Here is the key to his being: where and when he as born, the timespan and the region of social space in which it was decided what his place in the world woul be, his apprenticeship of the world, his relationship to the world. The near-madness of my father and the impaired relational abilities that resulted from it had, in the final analysis, nohing psychological about them, if by psychological we mean a link to some kind of individual character train. they were the effect of the precisely situated being-in-the-world that was his. 

- Returning to Reims, Didier Eribon