Between needles and pins: becoming Gavroche

This essay reads like a story of apprenticeship. The story of Gavroche’s years on the streets, between needles and pins, or daily punk life and drug addiction. It is made up of existential tableaux that do not constitute a life story, but rather represent a number of founding moments. They allow us to address a classic question in the sociology of marginal subcultures in a new way: that of becoming a deviant or, in this case, a punk and drug addict. Following some of the decisive steps in this journey allows us to trace the contours of a phenomenology of in-dependence. The hyphen introduces a level of tension to the independence won on the margins of society (a certain hero-isation of the street) and the necessities of addiction (or heroin as a substratum of a drug dependence).