Is 68's thought exhausted? The discussion between Elisabeth Roudinesco and Marcel Gauchet

Is 68's thought exhausted?

At the Controverses du “Monde”, within the framework of the Festival d'Avignon, the psychoanalyst Elisabeth Roudinesco and the historian Marcel Gauchet discussed the relevance of the ideas of May 68 to understand the world of today and invent that of tomorrow .

Interview by Nicolas Truong Posted on July 28, 2015 at 1:39 p.m. - Updated September 2, 2015 at 10:48 a.m.

Under what conditions did you encounter what is called “68th thought”?

Elisabeth Roudinesco : In 1966, Les Mots et les Choses by Michel Foucault and Les Ecrits de Jacques Lacan appeared simultaneously , a literary and theoretical avant-garde which offered a new reading of history based on structures. There was something innovative and equivalent to what we had experienced in 1945 with Jean-Paul Sartre: a new commitment. But before being political, this one was initially university, through a new way of teaching. At the time, I was in Bachelor of Letters at the Sorbonne, but this sector was appallingly frozen in its academicism.

Letters teachers considered that modernity stopped at the end of the 19th century. The students who, like me, read the Nouveau roman and discovered new approaches like that of Michel Foucault or Roland Barthes, were in revolt against this type of dusty teaching. Impossible to pronounce the word "New novel" in class. And we don't even study Marcel Proust at university!

From the year 1967-1968, at the Sorbonne, a feeling of superiority of the pupils compared to the teachers was born, especially towards the linguistics professors, who despised Roman Jakobson or Claude Lévi-Strauss, whereas we admired them. Paradoxically, we were looking for good teachers, real teachers, not handout teachers who kept repeating the same course.

However, there is no such thing as 68 thought, it is an afterthought. With Les mots et les Choses by Michel Foucault, I discovered an author who was both a philosopher, historian and writer. He had a style, something that made sense. It was beautifully written. At the time, I was also reading Hellenists, like Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet. But I was perfectly aware that all these authors were not alike, that they had theoretical conflicts between them. That was what appealed to me, this opportunity to spark debate. For me, May 68 was above all the opportunity to dismiss bad teachers.

Marcel Gauchet : Elisabeth Roudinesco recalled the university dimension of May 68, which was also an intellectual revolt against universities completely fossilized and out of step with respect to an intellectual scene of prodigious productivity. Whatever I may have thought of this galaxy of authors afterwards, they made me enter intellectual life under the sign of enthusiasm.

1966 is the date of the breakthrough of structuralist thinking. It had been initiated a long time ago

by Lévi-Strauss, but at that time it took its strength as a program, with the relaunch of psychoanalysis by Lacan and the resumption of the linguistic model by literary theory, not to mention the dazzling philosophical nebula that revolves around.

Like many others, I had the feeling of witnessing the emergence of a unified theory of the human sciences. We had the impression that we could bring together a theory of the individual subject renewed by psychoanalysis, a renewed theory of society through Levi-Straussian structuralism, all based on a most specific science of human production: the language. Faced with this opening world, the official university looked like a sclerotic and outdated institution. May 68 was a movement marked by an extraordinary appetite for knowledge. Relays of all kinds functioned to give this theoretical impetus a wider impact, since the movement was animated by an ultrademocratic spirit.

Same theoretical dazzling, but important political differences. For what reasons?

Marcel Gauchet : Where I stand out from Elisabeth Roudinesco is politically. In all the authors that have been cited, there is one that I first read with interest to quickly see its limits, it is Louis Althusser. The great political division of the time, among those who claimed to be the intellectual avant-garde, was between communism, the majority, and the ultra-left, a minority. The chance of the meetings made me benefit from the heritage of Socialism or barbarism, the group of Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort. In fact, there were two May 68. A first politically Leninist, whether Communist, Trotskyist or Maoist, and a second more difficult to label but that we can say libertarian, with its spontaneist nuances, anarchist or ultraleftist, alongside which I stood.

Elisabeth Roudinesco: When I join the Communist Party, it is already in the process of deStalinization. Aragon, for example, had already criticized everything from within while remaining a member of the party, just like Althusser. The Communist Party was for me the legacy of the October Revolution and the Popular Front, the French Revolution, everything that I loved in history. In addition, the party was open to debates on structuralism, to a criticism of the university, in particular with the colloquiums of De la Revue La Nouvelle Critique.at the abbey of Cluny where we spoke of Jacques Derrida or Michel Foucault. The party was progressively moving towards the signing of the common program. Paradoxically, Althusser advocated a return of Leninism, a new reading of Marxism, but defended the opposite in some of his writings. However, politically, the party was already social-democratic and I think that then explains the break with the union of the left, which is obviously a takeover of the party. That said, the word "totalitarianism" did not exist in our vocabulary, we were talking about the failure of the communist. I read Hannah Arendt very late, and it was she who made me understand what he was.

Marcel Gauchet : It is on this term that we have diverged existentially and intellectually, because the word totalitarianism has been central to me. My decisive question was that of the nature of the regimes born out of the Leninist communist movement. It is around this that my whole intellectual journey has shifted. At the time, I did not see the Communist Party in deStalinization but in deconstruction. The problem which seized me and which became the engine of my personal course, is that of the failure of Marxism to account for the regimes which claimed to be of a Marxist inspiration. I quickly came to the idea that the essential question was to develop a thought of history which would allow us to escape the dead ends of Marxism, in particular in its appreciation of so-called democracy."Bourgeois" . It is this question that separated me from thought 68, which cannot be used for this purpose.

On the left, it is argued that the thought of the sixties finally accompanied and justified that of contemporary neocapitalism. And on the right, we think that May 68 is the cause of the deconstruction of the hierarchy, of the authority, of the family and of the school, in a word of the dismissal, even of the destruction of the greatness of France. . What happened to French society to make it so critical of thought?

Marcel Gauchet:May 68 was a political failure which did not have immediate practical consequences. It should be remembered that the left was crushed in the 1969 elections, following the departure of General de Gaulle. However, political failure was accompanied by tremendous cultural and societal success. The spirit of 68 penetrated and transformed French society. The multiplier event was the 1974 crisis, following the oil shock of autumn 1973. Globalization begins: change of world, change of capitalism, change of society under the sign of individualization. Revolutionary politics are swept aside, but on the other hand, liberallibertarian sensitivity becomes dominant. It is not only a French development, it is a general movement which affects all Western societies.This is what a right-wing critic like that of Eric Zemmour does not see. He acts as if everything came out of 1968 when the transformation is global. May 68 was ultimately only the French version of the entry into this transformation which upset the economy, social relations and institutions, starting with the family.

At the moment, there is an interesting and revealing confusion surrounding Michel Foucault's famous 1979 course on biopolitics. It makes it possible to grasp on the fly how a particularly agile mind accompanies these transformations. Even the most zealous followers of Foucault are led to recognize this, not without embarrassment, he feels in affinity with the neoliberal turn in the process of taking place. The course is exactly contemporary, in fact, with the election of Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain which will shortly precede that of Ronald Reagan in the United States. The fact itself doesn't bother me. What I blame him and his peers for is not having grasped the scope of what was happening in its positive and negative aspects. This is precisely the great infirmity of the intellectual equipment provided by this thought 68:it does not allow to face this new reality.

Elisabeth roudinesco : What Foucault, Derrida and all this so-called 68th thought brought was the idea that one could criticize the communist system through theories of subjectivity. For me, on the contrary, they made it possible to think about the turning point in globalization, by seeking a subjectivity that is not complicit in the domination of the State. And then I was a globalist, I could not not be one since I was an internationalist. Communism had brought the idea of globalism with the revolution. It was the end of borders, of the nation state‌ I was deeply European, that's why the idea of Eurocommunism seduced me. The failure was obvious. Until Mikhail Gorbachev, I really hoped that the Communist parties would turn into social democratic parties with very heated debates on thought.

But hasn't this thought 68 in its turn become a new academicism?

Elisabeth Roudinesco : The stronger a thought, the more dogmas it produces and the more they must be criticized. Derrida said that the best way to be faithful to a heritage is to be unfaithful to it. I felt a permanent infidel, I could not admit that I was transmitted dogmas, such as those of

Lacanism in particular. When a thought is so strong, it produces epigones, repeaters, imitators, but I didn't mind. They had to be criticized on the basis of this heritage, but by being unfaithful.

Let us take two authors whose political and academic posterity is obvious, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. Are their thoughts still fruitful or are they leading to dead ends?

Marcel Gauchet : The success of the concepts of “rhizome” , “desiring machines” , “networks” , “micropower” or “biopower” is very understandable. These notions and the thoughts that carry them perfectly match the movement of our societies. But do they make it possible to understand and analyze it? I do not believe that. Foucauldian thought provides an effective theoretical translation of the libertarian sensitivity which is the backdrop for our individualistic societies. But do micro-powers and governmentality account for what is happening in our societies? I think not.

Bourdieu's sociology is considerable and firmly articulated, but just as little in touch with the effective functioning of our world. In the case of the school, for example, his philosophy of reproduction offers a vision of domination and its incorporation through habitus which misses the role of school in our societies and the acute problems that this institution meeting in the current context. Is the role of the school reduced to reproduction? There is reason to doubt it. This is not an academic debate: this criticism has done terrible damage.

The heirspresented a certain type of literary culture as the instrument of class connivance. For once, the criticism has been heard. It led to the power of mathematics as a legitimate instrument for classifying minds. Because mathematics appeals to the simple logic of reasoning, it is assumed to be socially neutral and involve no cultural class connivance. Experience has shown us exactly the opposite. Mathematics is an even more ruthless instrument of social selection than humanist culture. The problems facing the school system today are essentially the fruit of the individualization of society, that of families and that of students, a phenomenon before which Bourdieu's theory leaves us helpless. In short,we are faced with an inoperative analysis grid. It has had virtues, but when it becomes a kind of dogma, it's a disaster and things have to be taken on new bases.

Elisabeth Roudinesco : I liked Pierre Bourdieu's permanent contradiction between what he said and what he was. He had problems with his social background and psychoanalysis. Let us recognize all the same that he rediscovered the "misery of the world", at a time when no one was trying to understand the people anymore, when an intellectual counter-revolution was taking place. On the other hand, he did not think of societal questions in terms of individuality or subjectivity, that did not interest him, whereas Foucault and Derrida were very concerned about them. My generation was seized by questions of individual emancipation, which is why the question of homosexuality was crucial. It made it possible to think about the family and its evolutions. Individualist claims seemed to me to be the culmination of the theory of subjectivity, such as Sigmund Freud had brought it. Politics took the form of individual emancipation. It is obvious that feminism was collapsing because it was becoming too dogmatic,just like the majority of the ideals of emancipation. But minority rights were and remain a struggle.

Are we witnessing a counter-movement of May 68 in contemporary France, notably embodied by the Manif pour tous?

Elisabeth roudinesco : We are witnessing a radical right-wing movement. With the rise of populism, the people today go more towards Marine Le Pen than towards the extreme left. As for the demonstrations of the Manif pour tous, they do not look anything like May 68, they in no way take over the aestheticism of May 68. There was something extremely festive and aesthetic in the demonstrations of May 68, he had great beauties of language, which I absolutely did not find in the Manif pour tous with these kinds of monarchists with ridiculous, homophobic and sometimes racist slogans. I had never seen toddlers in strollers waving flags at protests before. I wonder what these children will think when they see that they have been the object of such manipulations.

Marcel Gauchet : May 68 has become on the right an absurd foil that hides from the people who make it a target the real springs of the immense transformation in which we are all caught and in which they participate in spite of themselves. The big problem of the left, in the face of these developments, is that it has no valid analysis. Suddenly, it accompanies the movement without understanding it, sometimes an accomplice, sometimes hostile, by trying to remedy its most destructive effects on the side of its reformist wing, or by taking refuge in an incantatory protest on the side of its radical wing. She no longer has a social transformation project. The choice, today, is between a powerless indignation and the reconstruction of a grid of reading of the history being made able to give us again a grip on the conduct of our societies.

Elisabeth Roudinesco : Beware of excess critical lucidity. I think the outrage is brewing and will eventually lead to something. Of course, it can also lead to the worst, it can lead to fascism or neopopulism, but it should not lead us to inaction. Making history makes sense. But this little flame that has existed in me since May 68 remains. And when a movement is triggered, I think you have to be in the event. We live in an era of mad capitalism with only numbers for the horizon. We have to re-politicize political life and stop talking about the economy every morning, this is not the only determining factor. I cannot stand the vocabulary of experts which has settled everywhere. Great moments can return which should not prevent us from acting on a daily basis.

Marcel Gauchet : I am sensitive to this unpredictability of which you speak, but I think that we can give ourselves the means to welcome it. To have closely followed the evolutions of the family and the homosexual liberation since May 68, for example, it seems to me that one could anticipate a request for legal redefinition of the relations whose nature had completely changed on a private level. We are probably not at the end of this movement. What was held to be anthropological invariants might not resist. We can imagine that incest is called into question in our societies as an absolute taboo. From the moment you defend a pure philosophy of individuals with rights, mutual recognition under the sign of love escapes all social regulation. I'm not saying this will happen,I say that it is in the logic of the current movement.

I am not indignant at the indignation. I see the limits and I do not believe in the spontaneous emergence of solutions. We must give ourselves the intellectual means to understand the

movement of our societies. Otherwise we are doomed to suffer it. We have at least learned that there is no big night to wait.

Elisabeth Roudinesco is a historian, associate professor at the history department of Paris VII-Diderot, in charge of a seminar on the history of psychoanalysis (ENS-GHSS).

She has notably published “Philosophes dans la tormente”(Fayard, 2005), “La Part obscure de nous-nous. A history of perverts ” (Albin Michel, 2007); “History of psychoanalysis in France” , t. 1 and 2 (1982-86); "Jacques Lacan. Sketch of a life, history of a system of thought"(1993); “Lacan against all odds ” (Seuil, 2011) and “Sigmund Freud in his time and in ours” (Seuil, 2014) Marcel Gauchet is a historian and philosopher, director of studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales , at the Center for Political Research Raymond Aron and editor-in-chief of the review Le Débat (Gallimard), which he founded with Pierre Nora in 1980. He notably published La Condition historique ( Stock, 2003); What to do ?

Dialogue on Communism, Capitalism and the Future of Democracy , with Alain Badiou (Philo, 2014); The Advent of Democracy , t. 1, The Modern Revolution , t. 2, The Crisis of Liberalism (Gallimard, 2007);The Advent of Democracy , t. 3, A test of totalitarianisms, 1914-1974 (Gallimard, 2010).

Nicolas Truong (Interview by)