Editors’ Introduction

The essays in this volume comprise the second part of a double issue of Contemporary French & Francophone Studies/SITES on the topic “Mai 68: Sous les pavés,” which was the theme of the 2018 Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century French and Francophone Studies Colloquium, hosted in Providence, Rhode Island, by Brown University in partnership with Université de Paris 8.

2018 marked the fiftieth anniversary of May ’68, and the colloquium broadly asked how this anniversary might provoke us to (re)imagine radical histories and their impact on politics, aesthetics, and philosophy today. Participants sought to think alongside the insurrectionary events and potential of May, to reactivate the political futures it once seemed to promise, and to study forms of contestation within and outside the long shadow it still casts. The first issue of CF&FS devoted to the conference theme deals directly with May ’68: the events themselves as well as social movements, intellectual genealogies, and textual forms that can be situated broadly within May ’68’s orbit. This second issue, by contrast, adopts a more contemporary perspective and contains essays that address new intersections of aesthetics and politics, asking critical questions that speak pointedly to twenty-first-century contexts.

Although the spirit of May ’68 is still very much present in these essays, we cannot necessarily detect it in the mode of Kristin Ross’ “afterlives” (1). An afterlife suggests spectral prolongation, uncanny reappropriation and repurposing, or even grotesque disfiguration. The essays here, however, take up political histories and aesthetic debates that are adjacent or orthogonal to May ’68: they intersect in broad ways with its insurrectionary impetus and history but ultimately move in new directions. This is how we might understand work on the Algerian War (1954–1962), for example, or on postcolonial migration to France from overseas departments under the auspices and false promises of the BUMIDOM (Bureau pour le développement des migrations dans les départements d’outre-mer), which was founded in the early 1960s. It is also how we might understand work on twenty-first-century cultural phenomena like superhero fiction that takes aim at the political rhetoric the state uses to talk about itself. Instead of afterlives, then, these are refractions of May ’68, variations on its political and cultural wavelength that suggest new and divergent histories and political possibilities. Refraction implies illusions of continuity as well as sharp changes of direction, as happens, for example, when light bends on a water surface and makes a submerged object appear closer than it really is. It also implies dispersion, as in optics when white light is separated into many colors of different wavelengths. As a kind of political physics, then, refraction is a perspective that stresses alternative genealogies of established histories, attention to adjacency and dispersed political phenomena, divergent or unexpected political futures.

Recent scholarship in French and Francophone Studies, as well as recent work in “French Theory,” have engaged with refraction as a method for re-routing histories and imagining new forms of political praxis. Françoise Vergès, for instance, reads the history of postwar feminism in the metropole against the absence of women from the DOM from its political imaginary. She also points to moments of political activism from the 1950s and 1960s that challenged the state’s rhetoric and logic of departmentalization (82–93)—these are insurrectionary histories that are adjacent to May ’68 but also broadly within its orbit. Similarly, Gary Wilder rereads Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor’s thinking on decolonization and departmentalization in order to imagine contemporary decolonial political futures that might emerge from older political projects that never came to be (14–15). Refraction here becomes reactivation as speculative political thought that redirects once-foreclosed political possibilities. And in his introduction to the 2018 English translation of Alain Badiou’s Peut-on penser la politique?, Bruno Bosteels argues that Badiou’s response to the late twentieth-century collapse of Soviet communism offers a “destruction and recomposition of Marx’s legacy in terms of its lessons for thinking emancipatory politics today” (1). Already, in the 1985 original, Badiou was concerned with thinking a new political subject that would follow a “Marxism destroyed by its own history” (34). For Badiou, political subjectivity can only be re-founded through a dismantling of older politico-philosophical narratives that sets in motion a divergent (but reminiscent) mode of political periodization, yet another instance of what we are calling refraction.

Political theorists commenting on the Gilets Jaunes protests that began in late 2018 have located these social protests within refracted histories of May ’68—here, May ’68 becomes a point of comparison or a foil against which to measure the newness of the contemporary moment or the radical difference of current struggles. This is how Antonio Negri weighs May ’68 against what he coyly calls the “insurrection” of the Gilets Jaunes: in a post on the Euronomade website, that has since been translated into English, he writes that “’68 was 10 million industrial workers on strike, a storm that hit at the highest point of post-war reconstruction and development. Today’s situation is closed. To me […] it recalls the prison revolts more than the mass worker’s joy of sabotage” (Negri). For Negri, what signals the newness of the Gilets Jaunes movement is its mobilization of a multitude (that quintessentially Negrian category) that rejects intermediary social bodies that would make its demands legible to the state—mediation that, Negri argues, President Macron has foreclosed anyway. But Negri also returns to the Leninist idea of “dual power” to describe how “an autonomous multitude can function as a counter-power and, that is, as a vision able to weigh long and heavily on the ‘government of capital’ to force it to concede new spaces and funds to the wellbeing of society.” Without neglecting May ’68, then, Negri refracts its history forwards into new configurations of the multitude in today’s “closed” political environment and backwards into older categories that provocatively speak to “new forms of solidarity” today.

In another blog post on the Gilets Jaunes from late 2018, Étienne Balibar also uses the term “counter-power,” but he means something quite different. Whereas Negri assimilates the term to the dual power of the multitude located outside established social institutions, for Balibar counter-power refers to the extension of a political struggle through its “anchoring” in institutions that already exist (Balibar). In the Gilets Jaunes Balibar sees not the potential reactivation of Leninist double power but the potential transformation of social institutions from the inside out, in the face of repressive and “condescending” political power. Balibar imagines that local municipalities might open themselves to the demands of a political movement, thereby serving as representative linchpins between the movement and the upper reaches of the state. By moving into local institutions, a political movement can counteract state power and, somewhat paradoxically, renew a sense of “autonomous,” active citizenship:

And there is no reason, in the middle of a social crisis in which the power [responsabilité] of a political leader appears overwhelming, to wait for him to dictate the modalities, the moment, and the limits of the consultation he needs to relegitimize himself. On the contrary, it is necessary that the “natural” place of active citizenship, where from the beginning and in principle constituent power (the people) and constituted powers (local elected officials) can exchange roles and means, take back its autonomy and proclaim its prerogatives. (Balibar)

For Balibar, then, institutional “anchoring” goes hand in hand with the redirection of political autonomy into the space of the state.

This act of renewal and reinvigoration of citizenship is part and parcel of what Balibar calls a “political idea,” referring to “the understanding of situations, of seizing the moment, and of the levers that must be grasped” (Balibar). Inspired by Balibar’s reading of the Gilets Jaunes and by the refraction of the principles of citizenship it implies, can we understand the concept of a “political idea” differently, as opening onto the “place” of aesthetics and of art’s engagement with social crises of all kinds? What new forms of political knowledge and “understanding” can art generate as it refracts subversive histories into new political configurations today? And how can a twenty-first-century critique proclaim new “prerogatives” that could remake social institutions?

The work in this volume responds broadly to these and related questions as it attends to refracted histories and futures of May ’68 and other forms of contestation. The pieces here outline new intersections of aesthetics and politics that draw our attention to less-studied moments of social protest, to other histories of unrest in the orbit of May, and to contemporary rewritings of the narratives the state tells about itself. Raluca Manea’s essay on Oulipian writer Michelle Grangaud highlights critiques of the state’s ways of knowing its population, for example, as does Philippe Brand’s piece on French superhero fiction. Élise Bouhet’s interview with playwright Michel Simonot brings the state’s response to the 2005 riots to the forefront of debates about the ethics of representation today. In a different register, we revisit histories of colonial and postcolonial Algeria in essays about La Bataille d’Alger (Cory Browning) and Maïssa Bey (Brigitte Stepanov). The question of empire also takes center stage in essays about DOM-TOM migration (Dawn Fulton) and Marie NDiaye’s vision of fraternité (Laura Jensen). Émilie Ieven and Véronique Flambard-Weisbart deal with the question of unseen, marginalized, and utopian spaces in essays on Maylis de Kerangal and Agnès Varda, respectively. Still other pieces examine literary responses to economic crisis (Vincent Message, Morgane Kieffer) and to twenty-first-century redirections of revolutionary histories (Cécile Chatelet). This issue also contains pieces that grew out of the conference’s keynotes, such as an interview with Maylis de Kerangal (conducted by Hannah Freed-Thall and Thangam Ravindranathan) and four reflections on the rise of “Big Old Theory” by Geoff Bennington, Peggy Kamuf, David Wills, and Elizabeth Weed. While they may differ in their particular focus, taken together, the essays in this volume highlight refracted histories and futures of contestation and our critical, political, and aesthetic responses to it.

Justin Izzo Roger Célestin, Eliane DalMolin

Guest Co-EditorEditors

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Roger Célestin

Roger Célestin is Professor of French and Comparative Literature and chair of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Connecticut. He has written on travel literature, detective fiction, film, and translation, among other topics. He is the author of From Cannibals to Radicals. Figures and Limits of Exoticism (U of Minnesota P, 1996), co-editor (with Isabelle de Courtivron and Eliane DalMolin) of Beyond French Feminisms: Debates on Women, Politics, and Culture in France, 1980–2001 (Palgrave/St. Martin’s, 2002), and co-author (with Eliane DalMolin) of France From 1851 to the Present: Universalism in Crisis (Palgrave, 2007).

Eliane DalMolin is Professor of French at the University of Connecticut. She has published numerous articles on modern and contemporary poetry and on cinema and is the author of Cutting the Body: Representing Women in Baudelaire’s Poetry, Truffaut’s Cinema, and Freud’s Psychoanalysis (U of Michigan P, 2000), co-editor (with Roger Célestin and Isabelle de Courtivron) of Beyond French Feminisms: Debates on Women, Politics, and Culture in France, 1980–2001 (Palgrave/St. Martin’s, 2002), and co-author (with Roger Célestin) of France From 1851 to the Present: Universalism in Crisis (Palgrave, 2007).

Justin Izzo is Assistant Professor of French Studies at Brown University. He is the author of Experiments with Empire: Anthropology and Fiction in the French Atlantic (Duke UP, 2019). He has also published articles in Research in African Literatures, Small Axe, and the African Studies Review.