May 68 and the crisis of philosophy of history (original) (raw)
Related papers
May '68 and its Subject (some Philosophical Archives of a Revolution)
Crisis & Critique, vol. 5, issue 2, 2018
This article concerns the philosophico-political archive of May '68 in France, dating from the beginning of the 1970s until the 40th anniversary of 2008. Through a comparative analysis of the texts of Badiou, Rancière, Daney and Deleuze, I question the difficulty of thinking the singularity of a militant subjectivity, caught between a Marxist hegemonic language and the wavering of its political grammar. I examine certain games of writing and legibility of this difficulty, by considering testimonial registers and philosophical analyses along with problems encountered by militant cinema of the 1968 years. Finally, I turn towards another "archive" of events, one characterized by anomie, traced by Maud Mannoni alongside a psychotic patient in May '68, to interrogate from the standpoint of such an "other scene" the hyperbolization of historico-political indentifications that, in May '68, had shaken strands of the universal instituted in the State and its sovereignty, the nation and its community, society and its exchanges, as well as the instituted figures of the individuality, or the normative constructions of the "person" and the attributes that our juridico-moral metaphysics bestow on it. We are thus confronted with a mode of effectiveness of historical signifiers that have given to a type of revolutionary subjectivity both its militant intensity and an extension of its universe of reference. These have also given rise to its "impolitical" side, that is to say the least prone to reappropriation, or the least to be grasped by the work of historical knowledge, and memory.
“You Can’t Always Get What You Want”: Mexico ’68 and the Winter of Revolutionary Discontent
The American Historical Review, 2018
LATE IN 1968, JUST DAYS BEFORE the opening of the first Olympics hosted by a "Third World" country, security forces arrested, injured, and assassinated a still-unknown number of students and supporters who had rallied in the Plaza of Three Cultures in Mexico City. The movement had been triggered months earlier by a police assault on a rumble between rival secondary schools, reverberating in clashes at a subsequent march celebrating Cuba's challenge to capitalist imperialism. Imbibing that classic student alchemy of rage and joy, thousands of students then carried the '68 onda ("scene") and demands into markets, schoolyards, buses, and homes, galvanizing hundreds of thousands to protest. Here we offer a rolling retrospective on subsequent ways in which Mexican activists have understood the legacies of '68. Scholars of Mexico '68 and other key '68 sites bemoan the lack of changes in political economy but applaud the sociocultural transformations that expanded participation in multiple realms. To paraphrase the song, "You don't always get revolution, but if you try sometimes, you get. .. environmentalism, feminism, gay liberation, acid rock, etc." Bifurcation offers "no satisfaction," especially when it separates sociocultural from politico-economic change. Our oral histories of Mexican '68ers (sesentayocheros), taken at ten-year intervals, expose a paradox: the satisfaction of expanded polity in fact obscures a foreclosing of revolution. Reading expanded sociopolitical participation through the lens of political economy reveals that at certain conjunctures, this expansion no longer matters-it no longer indexes emancipatory politics. As sesentayocheros tell it, today is one of those "downer" conjunctures: expansion of national belonging comes cheap when politics leave capital unfettered. At a more "happening" conjuncture, just after the twentieth anniversary, we had traveled to Mexico City to conduct oral histories-ourselves then students, too strapped to buy interviewees a coffee, so strapped that we ended up getting taken home by one of those interviewees, who lived, improbably enough, in the former Olympic village. We ended up interviewing over sixty activists, most not leaders but rather the base of this We thank History Department colloquium participants at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, as well as
Thinking about the Mexican Revolution: Philosophy, Culture and Politics in Mexico: 1910-1934
Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, 2010
The commemoration of the two hundredth anniversary of the War of Independence and the centenary of the Mexican Revolution make this a good moment for some analysis and reflection on the influence that both events have had on the form and the meaning that Mexican intellectual production and cultural institutions have conserved throughout that time. The aim of this essay, is to examine in how, and by what cultural and institutional means, a process of historical transformation as violent, convulsive, complex and radical as the Revolution ended up producing a remarkably favourable set of conditions for literature, music, the visual arts, education and, in particular, philosophy, whose earliest developments and contributions came between 1910 and 1934.
Participatory Politics and the Legacy of Mexico ’68
Thread Journal, 2018
If 2018 is the Year of the Strongman, then is participatory politics-a la '68just a chimera? This mounting political crisis had been eroticized fictionally in last year's television series Ingobernable (Ungovernable), wherein a sexily-ethical First Lady must heroically save the nation, "The First Lady of Mexico has big plans to improve conditions for the country… a woman of conviction and ideals. But when she loses faith in her husband, she'll need all her strength to uncover the truth." Now, in 2018, a real-life electoral triumph reasserts male Presidential(elect) vigor, so much so that, we might argue, the charismatic, personalist populism permeating the Obrador campaign has been something of a political big-man aphrodisiac. This sexualized gendering of political struggle feels like a strange coming home for us thinking through 1968. he conjuncture of the fiftieth anniversary of Mexico'68 with proclamations of the "collapse of civil society" presses the question, "where is participatory politics?" Mexico 1968-1988 On October 2, 1968, local police and soldiers fired on the several thousand demonstrators, mostly students, gathered in Mexico City's Plaza of Three Cultures. Hundreds of people were massacred and hundreds more arrested and detained. Demonstrators were part of a student-led movement that began in late July in a year already regarded as a historic: Mexico was hosting the Olympics, the first so-called third world country to do so, and eagerly awaited its high-profile chance to showcase the "Mexican Miracle," the state-driven development project depicted as an instantiation of the aims of the 1910 Mexican Revolution. Given these stakes, when a small rumble between students from two city vocational schools occurred, the president ordered in the police. The response to this incursion was swift: students from colleges and high schools around the city came together to challenge the action, as well as cases of state torture, disappearance, and extrajudicial killings. Two weeks later, activists again protested, this time in a massive march to support the 26th of July Cuban Revolution, which they saw as a symbol of the triumph over imperialist capitalism. Students mobilized, taking over Mexico City's National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).
The Ideological Basis of Mexican Muralism and May '68 Protests Against Establishment Culture
2023
This paper will discuss the ideological basis of the Mexican Muralism and the student protests in May '68 against the older generation manifested in the Establishment culture. The Mexican cultural Establishment, the cultural elite, mainstream cultural workers, was manifested mainly in the nationalist attitude of los tres grandes of Mexican muralism: David Alfaro Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco, and Diego Rivera. This essay will investigate why students rebelled against art that was initially revolutionary art. In order to do so this paper will explore the ideological basis of Mexican Muralism and the Mexican revolution together with the concept of mestizo as essential to understanding the struggle of people of Mexico for liberation. It will start by exploring Latin America falsely understood through the lens of Spanish colonial optic as this place without history, the role of Mexican muralism together with Mexican cultural revolution in forming the modern Mexican state. Next discussing rebellion of 'rupture figure’ José Luis Cuevas against the older generation of Mexican muralists with his own type of the individualist approach trying to distance himself from politics and his own position against socially revolutionary art. This paper will argue that student rebellions against Mexican muralism can be understood through the lens of decolonization, where Mexican muralism that was once revolutionary and used in protest against Spanish colonialism eventually became part of the state ideology and served a very conservative role.
LSE , 2017
blogs.lse.ac.uk /lsereviewofbooks/2017/03/14/book-review-a-persistent-revolution-history-nationalism-andpolitics-in-mexico-since-1968-by-randal-sheppard/ In A Persistent Revolution: History, Nationalism and Politics in Mexico since 1968 , Randal Sheppard explores the major political transformations in Mexico since 1968 through the prism of Mexican revolutionary nationalism to show how nationalist mythology surrounding the revolutionary state has been used to bolster both the elite and growing opposition movements. Sheppard astutely demonstrates the complexities of the post-1968 Mexican context, offering an excellent snapshot of a 'persistent revolution', writes Myriam Lamrani.