Growing Up in Cultural Contempt

28 January 2026. Published by Benoît Labourdette.

7 min

Contempt is not an accident of the cultural system; it is its fuel. What François Dubet analyzes on a societal scale, I experienced from childhood in my very flesh as the child of modest artists.

The Child in Front of Télérama: An Original Wound

From the 1970s, as a child in a family where culture was overvalued as a marker of social and symbolic ascension, I felt a persistent malaise when reading *Télérama*. This magazine, present in our modest yet culturally capital-rich home, constantly reflected my own illegitimacy back to me. My parents, the first in their lineage to access the cultural world, were in a permanent quest for recognition. This quest is a legacy I inherited without choosing it.

What I was experiencing then, without having the words to name it, was what Axel Honneth calls a “moral injury.” In The Struggle for Recognition (1992), the philosopher shows that contempt strikes at one’s practical relation to oneself: self-confidence, self-respect, and self-esteem. The experience of contempt, he writes, “opens a kind of psychic breach in the personality through which negative emotions, such as shame or anger, enter.” I have carried this breach for decades.

I was passionate about cinema, theater, and literature. I wanted to write, to create films. But every page of these cultural magazines screamed at me that I did not belong. The system of domination intrinsic to the thinking of the cultural sector sent me messages that did not resemble me. I had no desire to be a dominant figure. I drew no pleasure from having power over others. I sensed the intrinsic perversity of the system—the fundamental bias that transformed a supposed space of emancipation into a machine for producing humiliation.

François Dubet, in Le Mépris (2025), sheds light on this phenomenon with great precision. He shows how, in a society where the individual is summoned to be responsible for their own destiny, every inequality becomes a personal feeling, “insidiously corrosive.” Contempt is no longer just the concern of the discriminated: it becomes generalized, fragmented, and multiplied. “Small inequalities and small contempts flourish,” he writes. Everyone is alternately despised and despising. This is exactly what I experienced: the cultural sector, which claims to emancipate, actually distributes assignments of place within a ruthless symbolic hierarchy.

The Sociology of Contempt: When Dubet and Honneth Meet

To understand what I went through, one must cross two intellectual traditions. On one side, Axel Honneth’s critical theory, which places recognition at the heart of the social fabric. On the other, François Dubet’s sociology of inequalities, which is attentive to contemporary transformations in the perception of injustice. These two approaches converge on an essential point: contempt is not an epiphenomenon; it is structural.

Honneth distinguishes three forms of recognition—love, rights, and solidarity—to which three forms of contempt correspond: physical injury, legal exclusion, and social humiliation. It is the latter that is at work in the cultural sector. Social humiliation strikes at the “honor” and “dignity” of the individual by denying them any value in the social division of symbolic labor. It produces what Honneth calls a “phenomenology of moral injuries”: shame, anger, and withdrawal.

Dubet extends this analysis by showing how, in contemporary society, contempt has become individualized. Where industrial society produced relatively legible class conflicts, the exhaustion of this model has fragmented experiences of injustice. Each person feels singularly despised. This transformation is vital to understanding my experience: I did not feel like a victim of a clearly identifiable class domination, but of a multitude of symbolic micro-aggressions that sent me back to my own unworthiness.

Pierre Bourdieu had already shown, in Distinction (1979), that “cultural taste is never neutral; it is always an instrument of social classification that distinguishes the legitimate from the illegitimate.” But Dubet goes further: he shows that this classification no longer just produces exclusion; it produces generalized resentment. “When citizens say they are despised by the system, democracy is threatened by resentment and the denunciation of culprits.” The cultural sector, far from being a bulwark against this drift, is unfortunately one of its most active hubs.

Cinema as a Laboratory of Domination

As a young adult, I discovered that the malaise I felt in front of *Télérama-* was structural to the entire sector. At university, my classmates dreamed of the Cannes Film Festival. When they told me about the systems of back-door deals, the social hierarchies, the parties one absolutely had to attend, and their submissive efforts to obtain the “Open Sesame” to the grand hall, what they described as the alpha and omega of their dreams sounded to me like a description of hell.

This system of domination was exercised upon the bodies themselves. To “climb the steps,” men had to wear a standardized tuxedo. Without a tuxedo, there was no entry. This dress code constraint, seemingly trivial, reveals the deep nature of the mechanism: it is not about celebrating cinema, but about signifying membership in a caste. The ethnologist Mary Douglas showed how rituals of purity always serve to draw boundaries between the pure and the impure, the legitimate and the illegitimate. The Cannes Film Festival is a ritual of social purification disguised as an artistic celebration.

On film sets, the domination was even more brutal. The stories from my friends—young professionals—described a hierarchical system of unheard-of violence. One had to start as a production intern, then assistant, then production manager—years of swallowing bitter pills. The cinematographer, for example, was systematically someone insufferable and hot-tempered, whom everyone had to obey. This violence was not a malfunction: it was legitimized by the system in its very modes of organization.

The sexist and sexual violence revealed since #MeToo is only the tip of this iceberg. It can only take place because it is authorized by a broader system of domination. Sexism is not an anomaly in the film industry: it is consistent with the overall power relations that structure it. One cannot deconstruct one without deconstructing the other. I formulated this analysis long before #MeToo because I was living it in my flesh since childhood.

The Theatricalization of Mistrust: When Welcoming Becomes Exclusion

Recently, an evening at a national drama center allowed me to see the same logic at work in public theater. Right at the entrance, bags are searched. This gesture, presented as a security necessity, is in reality a sham: a quick glance, a half-opened bag. Someone who truly intended to cause harm would not be stopped by this superficial inspection. So why maintain it? Because it institutes a silent narrative: that of our potential dangerousness.

What I call the “theatricalization of mistrust” is the process by which the reception mechanisms of cultural venues stage a systematic suspicion toward the very people they claim to serve. Erving Goffman, in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), showed that our interactions are ritualized performances. Theater, in the sociological sense, begins long before the stage: it is in the spatial arrangement, in the gestures of those who welcome us, and in the words spoken or withheld.

The paradox is cruel: at the McDonald’s next door, you enter freely, but in the cultural venue subsidized by public money, you are treated as a suspect. This comparison, which may seem provocative, reveals the uncomfortable truth: cultural institutions, which present themselves as spaces of tolerance and openness, often produce—through their concrete mechanisms—the exact opposite of their discourse. A colleague, an Officer of Arts and Letters who has lived in the city for twenty years, confided to me that she did not dare enter that theater. She had a “knot in her stomach,” afraid of being judged, of not being “intelligent enough” to have the right to enter.

This testimony perfectly illustrates Dubet’s thesis: contempt does not only affect the obviously “discriminated.” It reaches individuals within all groups who feel “disdained, ignored, looked down upon.” The fragmentation of contempt means that even those with all the cultural resources can feel illegitimate. It is the mark of a deeply pathological system, in the sense that Honneth defines “social pathologies”: disturbances that reduce or destroy the conditions for a successful life.

The Damages of a Life: What Contempt Has Cost Me

Naming what I have lived through allows me today to measure the damages suffered (and yet I am a man, white at that, so one could argue I have no right to complain):

The first is a form of preventive self-exclusion. For years, I avoided places and events where I sensed I would be reminded of my illegitimacy. I preferred to “wait a few months” to see films in theaters rather than submit to the humiliating rituals of festivals. I organized my own screenings at home, then at university, to create spaces where domination would have no place.
The second damage is a persistent difficulty in feeling legitimate. Despite a career as a filmmaker, author, and consultant, imposter syndrome follows me. Honneth explains this phenomenon: without the intersubjective recognition of our abilities, we cannot relate to ourselves in a whole manner. The repeated experience of contempt leaves lasting traces in the construction of identity. The “psychic breach” he speaks of does not close easily.
The third damage is a form of dull anger, which Dubet identifies as one of the major effects of generalized contempt. This anger can turn against oneself or against others. It can feed resentment, the denunciation of “culprits,” and identity-based withdrawal. I was fortunate enough to be able to transform it into critical analysis. But how many others, less endowed with intellectual resources, have turned it against themselves or converted it into support for populist discourses that “speak in the name of the despised,” as Dubet notes?
The fourth damage, perhaps the most insidious, is having internalized that this situation was “normal.” Dubet insists on this point: we have been “colonized by fear.” Mistrust has become the foundation of human relations. We find it normal to be searched at theater entrances, normal to be judged on our clothing, normal to have to prove our legitimacy at every moment. This normalization of contempt is perhaps its most devastating effect, for it prevents us from even perceiving it as such.

Deconstructing the System: Toward a Culture of Recognition

Can we do things differently? My entire experience tells me yes. From my youth, I organized screenings where Super 8 films had the same legitimacy as 35mm films, where documentaries stood alongside fiction, and where films by women were as numerous as those by men. I wanted to create spaces “outside the system of domination.” It was possible, and it produced an incomparable quality of encounter.

The Faro Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society (2005), ratified by France in 2023, opens a path. It affirms the right of everyone to participate in the cultural life of their choice and recognizes that citizens create heritage through their daily practices. This vision implies a complete reversal: moving from a logic of “cultural democratization”—top-down, normative, and carrying an implicit judgment on what people should like—to a logic of “cultural democracy”—horizontal, participatory, and recognizing the legitimacy of every individual.

Jean-Michel Lucas, a theorist of cultural rights, called the conviction that some people know what is good for others “cultural arrogance.” This arrogance is at the heart of the system of contempt I have described. Deconstructing it requires abandoning the posture of the “expert” to adopt that of the mediator—the one who facilitates exchanges rather than directing them. The NOTRe (2015) and LCAP (2016) laws inscribed cultural rights into French law. It remains to truly implement them.

Concretely, this means rethinking the reception mechanisms of cultural venues: removing unnecessary searches, training staff in a posture of trust, diversifying programming in dialogue with residents, and abandoning discourses of peer-legitimation in favor of discourses in dialogue with citizens. It also means questioning working methods in the sector: deconstructing brutal hierarchies, refusing to legitimize domination in the name of artistic excellence, and creating spaces where recognition is the rule.

Dubet ends his book with a question: “How can we find other cultural and political expressions for this anger?” My answer is that the cultural sector itself must transform. It cannot claim to be a space of emancipation if it continues to produce contempt. The real difference is not between democratization and cultural democracy as two competing policies. It is between a power exercised over others—a power of domination, dehumanizing—and a power exercised over oneself that enriches others. It is this second power that should be at the heart of any cultural project funded by public money.

A Trust to be Regained

By writing this text, I am taking the risk of being intimate. But as Honneth shows, it is in the lived experience of contempt that the moral dimension of social struggles is revealed. My personal story is not an anecdote: it is the symptom of a systemic malfunction. Thousands of others, less equipped to analyze it, live the same thing. Some withdraw into resentment. Others adhere to discourses that denounce “elites” without proposing an alternative. Others still, like my colleague in front of the theater, simply give up on entering.

Democracy presupposes trust in the other, the gamble of shared humanity. Contempt produces the opposite: withdrawal, suspicion, and mistrust—the fertile ground for all forms of authoritarianism. The cultural sector, if it wants to be faithful to its republican mission, must stop producing what it claims to fight. It must move from a culture of domination to a culture of recognition. It is only on this condition that it can finally keep the promise it has kept all too rarely: to be a space of emancipation rather than an instrument of contempt.