Introduction to a Forum on May ’68 and Its Philosophers

What is it about?

Conceived fifty-one years after the global workers’ and student revolt of May ’68, this Focus will break down the theoretical and literary legacy of May into three intervals of seventeen years. In 1985, seventeen years after 1968, Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut published a book, La pensée 68, in which they canonized the view that the theoretical underpinning of May ’68 was provided by French structuralist thinkers, notably Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Lacan. Seventeen years later, in 2002, Kristin Ross’s book May ’68 and Its Afterlives effectively replaced this canonical image with the notion that French structuralists were all either completely absent or at least highly reserved during the events of May and that, moreover, the closest theoretical allies of the protesters and strikers were in fact the main philosophical targets of structuralist anti-humanists, namely Jean-Paul Sartre and Herbert Marcuse with their schools of humanist Marxism. Today, seventeen years after Ross’s seminal book, it may be time to negate both the thesis from 1985 and her antithesis from 2002, and ask the following simple question: Why, despite the massive presence of Sartre and Marcuse, and the equally massive absence of Foucault, Derrida, Bourdieu and Lacan, but also Gilles Deleuze and Louis Althusser, has the memory politics of May ’68 during the past half-century included the canonization of structuralism and post-structuralism at the expense of none other than humanism, be it Marxist or non-Marxist?

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