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A review by heathward
May '68 and Its Afterlives by Kristin Ross
5.0
Other reviews here have covered Ross' arguments well, so I'll just share a couple of my favourite quotes from the book.
1. “May ’68 had very little to do with the social group- students or “youth” who were its instigators. It had much more to do with the flight from social determinations, with displacements that took people outside of their location in society.” (2-3)
2. “Discourse has been produced, but its primary effect has been to liquidate… or render obscure, the history of May.” (3)
3. “I am less interested in the revisionist terms of the “official story”- whether it be the great rebellion by angry youth against the restrictions of their fathers or its corollary, the emergence of a new social category called “youth”. I am more concerned with how that particular story came to prevail, how the two contradictory methods or tendencies, the experiential and the structural, converged to formulate categories- “generation”, for example- whose effects were ultimately depoliticizing.” (6)
4. “The principal idea of May was a union of intellectual contestation with workers’ struggle. Another way of saying this is that the political subjectivity which emerged in May was a relational one, built around a polemics of equality.”
“The experience of equality, as it was lived by many in the course of the movement- neither as a goal nor a future agenda but as something occurring in the present and verified as such- constitutes an enormous challenge for subsequent representation.” (11)
5. “In May, everything happened politically- provided, of course, that we understand ‘politics’ as bearing little or no relation to… electoral politics.” (15)
1. “May ’68 had very little to do with the social group- students or “youth” who were its instigators. It had much more to do with the flight from social determinations, with displacements that took people outside of their location in society.” (2-3)
2. “Discourse has been produced, but its primary effect has been to liquidate… or render obscure, the history of May.” (3)
3. “I am less interested in the revisionist terms of the “official story”- whether it be the great rebellion by angry youth against the restrictions of their fathers or its corollary, the emergence of a new social category called “youth”. I am more concerned with how that particular story came to prevail, how the two contradictory methods or tendencies, the experiential and the structural, converged to formulate categories- “generation”, for example- whose effects were ultimately depoliticizing.” (6)
4. “The principal idea of May was a union of intellectual contestation with workers’ struggle. Another way of saying this is that the political subjectivity which emerged in May was a relational one, built around a polemics of equality.”
“The experience of equality, as it was lived by many in the course of the movement- neither as a goal nor a future agenda but as something occurring in the present and verified as such- constitutes an enormous challenge for subsequent representation.” (11)
5. “In May, everything happened politically- provided, of course, that we understand ‘politics’ as bearing little or no relation to… electoral politics.” (15)