The scholarship of Michèle Petit positions the public library at the epicentre of a structural tension between social reproduction and symbolic emancipation, transcending without dismissing the determinism of cultural capital. Drawing upon sociology and psychoanalysis, Petit reconceptualises reading not as a bourgeois embellishment but as a cultural right intrinsic to human dignity. Her empirical inquiries within disadvantaged French neighbourhoods demonstrate that, although poverty erodes privacy and restricts access to cultural goods, the library may function as a space of institutional hospitality wherein fractured life trajectories are rearticulated. Against the disciplinary conception of texts analysed by Roger Chartier, there emerges the reader as an agent of appropriation, consonant with the “poaching” paradigm advanced by Michel de Certeau, who re-inscribes meaning through desire and interpretative agency. The case study of ninety young library users in marginalised districts reveals that even episodic reading reshapes self-representation, enlarges the imaginative horizon, and enables a conception of citizenship grounded in the capacity to take the floor and the pen. The library, therefore, operates neither primarily as a mechanism of social control nor as a custodial refuge, but as a laboratory of subject formation where professional mediation—anchored in non-ambivalent commitment to books and deliberate spatial intelligence—bridges symbolic order and lived experience. Ultimately, when conceived beyond institutional prestige, the public library may constitute a discreet yet potent infrastructure of democratic transformation, empowering individuals to become authors of their own destinies.
