Global Revolutionary Aesthetics and Politics after Paris ‘68 (After the Empire: The Francophone World and Postcolonial France) 1793625735, 9781793625731

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Global Revolutionary Aesthetics and Politics after Paris ’68

After the Empire: The Francophone World and Postcolonial France Series Editor: Valérie K. Orlando, University of Maryland Advisory Board Robert Bernasconi, Memphis University; Claire H. Griffiths, University of Chester, UK; Alec Hargreaves, Florida State University; Chima Korieh, Rowan University; Mildred Mortimer, University of Colorado, Boulder; Obioma Nnaemeka, Indiana University; Alison Rice, University of Notre Dame; Kamal Salhi, University of Leeds; Tracy D. SharpleyWhiting, Vanderbilt University; Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike, Tulane University

Recent Titles Global Revolutionary Aesthetics and Politics after Paris ‘68 by Martin Munro, William Cloonan, Barry Falk, and Christian P. Weber Francophone African Narratives and the Anglo-American Book Market: Ferment on the Fringes by Vivian I. Steemers Ethnic Minority Women’s Writing in France: Publishing Practices and Identity Formation (1998-2005) by Claire Mouflard Theory, Aesthetics, and Politics in the Francophone World: Filiations Past and Future by Rajeshwari S. Vallury Refiguring Les Années Noires: Literary Representations of the Nazi Occupation by Kathy Comfort Paris and the Marginalized Author: Treachery, Alienation, Queerness, and Exile by Valérie K. Orlando and Pamela A. Pears French Orientalist Literature in Algeria, 1845–1882: Colonial Hauntings by Sage Goellner Corporeal Archipelagos: Writing the Body in Francophone Oceanian Women’s Literature by Julia Frengs Spaces of Creation: Transculturality and Feminine Expression in Francophone Literature by Allison Connolly Women Writers of Gabon: Literature and Herstory by Cheryl Toman Backwoodsmen as Ecocritical Motif in French Canadian Literature: Connecting Worlds in the Wilds by Anne Rehill Intertextual Weaving in the Work of Linda Lê: Imagining the Ideal Reader by Alexandra Kurmann Front Cover Iconography and Algerian Women’s Writing: Heuristic Implications of the Recto-Verso Effect by Pamela A. Pears The Algerian War in French-Language Comics: Postcolonial Memory, History, and Subjectivity by Jennifer Howell Writing through the Visual and Virtual: Inscribing Language, Literature, and Culture in Francophone Africa and the Caribbean by Ousseina D. Alidou and Renée Larrier

Global Revolutionary Aesthetics and Politics after Paris ’68 Edited by Martin Munro, William J. Cloonan, Barry J. Faulk, and Christian P. Weber

LEXINGTON BOOKS

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Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2020 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Control Number: 2020946703 ISBN 978-1-7936-2573-1 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-7936-2574-8 (electronic) ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Introduction: Global Revolutionary Aesthetics and Politics after Paris 1968 William Cloonan, Barry J. Faulk, Martin Munro, and Christian P. Weber 1 1968—Past, Present, Future: Models of Art and Activism in Jannis Kounellis’s Senza titolo (Untitled), 1969 Chris Bennett 2 The Quebec Spring, A New May 1968? Timo Obergöker 3 Ghosts for the Present: Countercultural Aesthetics and Postcoloniality for Contemporary Italy. The Work of Wu Ming 2 and Fare Ala Tenley Bick 4 La Fac Soixante-Huitarde: The Centre Universitaire Expérimental de Vincennes and the Afterlife of a Revolutionary Moment Paul Cohen

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5 Class Struggle: Ascanio Celestini, Nanni Balestrini, and the Living Legacy of the Italian 1968 Giuseppina Mecchia

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6 Recalibrating Memories: The Divergent Afterlife of Northern Ireland’s 1968 Chris Reynolds

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7 Conflicts of Class, Race, and Sexuality: Reading Leïla Slimani’s Chanson douce (2016) and Dans le jardin de l’ogre (2014) through Julia Kristeva’s Post-‘68 Feminism Valérie K. Orlando

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8 Aftereffects of May 1968 on Men and Women According to Michel Houellebecq Alexis L. Chauchois and Gilles Glacet

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9 A Timeless Spirit: Revolutionary Aesthetics in Roberto Bolaño’s Amulet Augustus O’Neill

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Index 191 About the Authors

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Introduction Global Revolutionary Aesthetics and Politics after Paris 1968 William Cloonan, Barry J. Faulk, Martin Munro, and Christian P. Weber

The year 2018 was the fiftieth anniversary of May 1968, a startling, by now almost mythic event which combined seriousness, courage, humor, and theatrics. Although it began as a relatively typical student protest in Paris against the Vietnam War, consumerism, traditional French institutions, and related ills, the students’ anger touched a raw nerve in the French sensibility, and the frustration with the status quo rapidly spread to all sectors of society. Most dramatically, the burgeoning sense of injustice led to a temporary alliance between students and workers which for a time threatened to bring down De Gaulle’s government and indeed the entire Fifth Republic. Yet the studentworker alliance proved to be fragile and brief; the French Right riposted vigorously with marches of its own, revolutionary enthusiasm began to wane as summer approached and by the end of June the excitement was something of a memory. The general elections held on June 23 led to a resounding endorsement of De Gaulle and his government. May 1968 appeared to have disappeared as rapidly as it had appeared. During May 1968 in France, there was a great deal of posturing, broad proclamations against social injustice, witty, often trenchant posters, and many slogans, but with the abrupt collapse of what might be loosely termed a movement, there is a temptation in some quarters, now, as there was then, to dismiss May 1968 as a very Gallic exercise featuring more sound than sense. Nothing, of course, could be farther from the truth. May 1968 was much more than a curious moment in French history. Its sense of social inequality and impatience with governmental leadership quickly found echoes throughout Europe and the Americas and affected, just as in France, diverse social vii

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strata. During the ensuing years, the particular events of the protests, their aims, strategies, and achievements remained the subject of discussion, debate, and at times angry exchanges. May 1968 has also proven to have commercial value for some. Many of the once fiery leftist leaders of May 1968 have become quasi-official spokesmen for the event. They are now regular guests on French television and radio commemorating the event, where it often seems that their expertise consists almost entirely of their having been in Paris in May 1968. If the time frame of May 1968 was limited to about two months, its ramifications had a much longer life. French student opposition to the Vietnam War added an international dimension to American students’ protests and contributed in both countries to the empowerment of student groups as potential forces for social change. For good or for ill, May 1968 was a factor in the ongoing politicization of campuses. The notion of the university as an Ivory Tower, at best a myth, would never really recover. The short-lived alliance between students and workers has often been the subject of scorn with well-to-do middle-class kids depicted in befuddled dialogue with uncomprehending or bemused members of the proletariat. Yet however wobbly the rapport between the two groups, it certainly managed to scare the Gaullist government in the 1960s, and the possible rapprochement between unions and student groups remains a factor in French politics today. De Gaulle’s reelection in June 1968 provides a convenient marker for the end of May 1968, while at the same time providing the general with his greatest postwar triumph. It was also his last. A year later, after losing a referendum of no great importance but which he had turned into a plebiscite on himself, he resigned. In the end, the student dissatisfaction and frustration with Gaullism won out by contributing to the end of an era of rampant authoritarianism that subsequent French presidents would struggle unsuccessfully to emulate. An aspect of the student revolt which can encourage people to not take it seriously was the use of wit. In response to the clever posters and succinct rejoinders such as the response to a racist-chauvinist attack on Daniel CohnBendit, “We are all German Jews,” a tendency exists to admire the comment as much for its glibness as its content. Yet at times, a well-turned phrase provides a synopsis of a rather complex issue. Created by an unknown author: “Barthes says: structures do not descend to the streets. We say: Neither does Barthes.” At first, this appears to merely be a snide remark about Roland Barthes in his structuralist phase, who played no active role in May 1968. Yet in a broader context it refers to the declining interest among the student population in structuralism whose quasi-scientific, non-humanistic approach to the study of language and reality made it quite popular in the immediate postwar era among intellectuals seeking a method more objective than traditional for

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making sense of the shambolic world about them. Yet by the late 1960s, those who championed the aloofness and alleged absence of subjectivity in structuralism were being superseded by a generation wanting more political and social engagement than was to be found in the structuralist camp. May 1968 was an expression of an intellectual and personal discontent with abiding ideologies which would contribute to the decline of structuralism in Europe. If the embers of May 1968 have never completely died out, the interest in the subject reached incendiary proportions in 2018. There were numerous conferences such as May 1968 at the American University in Paris, Women in the Wake of May 1968 at King’s College, London, 1968: Year of the Revolution, at the University of London. In March 2019, the Winthrop-King Institute for French and Francophone Studies at Florida State University sponsored Does “la lutte continue”? The Global Afterlife of May ’68. The conference date, 2019, was consciously chosen, since our focus would not be on May 1968 as such, not on the factors leading up to it, the particular incidents which occurred, the activities of the protesters nor the strategies of the government. We wanted to explore the ramifications of that springtime protest in the contemporary world; we were interested in papers which would confront the negative as well as the positive impact of May 1968 as it is perceived today. At the same time, we did not wish to limit our enquiry simply to Hexagon France but sought to encourage submissions from all countries that have experienced the lingering impact of those days in May. What has widely become known as the movement of 1968 was not really one movement, but in fact many movements for particular reasons within various nations. Yet the idea of being part of one great movement is not a fabrication of historic retrospection but one that was experienced by many who, like the voice of this student protester recorded in Berlin 1968, imagined to participate in something much larger: “The beginning of this movement in all highly industrialised countries and especially the late capitalistic systems of Western Europe and the western world is the beginning of mass mobilization and not the question of one generation within four or five years.”1 This “mobilization” was triggered by a variety of events worldwide. This period witnessed significant protests around the globe against the Vietnam War, movements of liberal theology popping up across Latin America, the Civil Rights movements in the United States, demonstrations against social and legal injustices in Iran, revolutions of Mao’s China and Castro’s Cuba, revolts against Soviet regimes in Eastern European countries, strikes against income inequalities in industrialized Western societies. Crucially, protesters marched not only on the streets for issues in their home countries but often in solidarity with those suffering injustices abroad. Yet not everybody was mobilized. The year “1968” indicates a turning point on the historical scale only for a new generation of young women

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and men opposed to the ethos of militaristic discipline that had shaped the previous generations of two world wars. “1968” marks a generational break. However, this new generation was divided within itself; the protesters were mostly students at the academic centers of higher education and to a far lesser extent apprentices and workers in the factories. The defining characteristic of this generation was, then, not so much the revolutionary agenda of radical economic and political transformation or the international solidarity with injustices around the globe; instead, this generation was rather unified and mobilized by the new waves of cinema and the new beats of rock and pop music that promoted alternative lifestyles and triggered sexual liberation and spiritual experimentation. This transformation was driven by the possibilities of wider distribution through technological innovations in the mass media and, not least, by economic prosperity and security in the revitalized postwar-industries of the United States and Western Europe that allowed for a certain degree of leisure and cultural exchange beyond national boundaries in the first place.2 In this sense, we may speak of “1968” as an in general prosperous, rebellious generation that imagined a global community but, nonetheless, remained divided by social and educational inequalities. As much as these protests expressed international solidarity, they were also marked by concrete national differences. It is fair to say that each nation experienced its own “1968” based on its unique history that tinged the revolts in the late 1960s and early 1970s to various degrees. Hence, every nation and even every social and political faction within a nation commemorates and values these events differently. The goal of this volume is therefore not to write a global history of 1968, which is impossible, but to present a kaleidoscope of different perceptions, reflections, and receptions of events in various nations that inspired each other without really coalescing in one movement of “mass mobilization.” In this introduction, we would like to highlight some legacies of 1968 that are not addressed in the individual articles to follow but that are indicative of how the movements differ in nations due to historical, cultural, and geopolitical differences: principally, West Germany and the United States, but also, more briefly, across the islands of the Caribbean. While the protests in the United States were triggered by events that impacted the American youth directly and immediately—the draft to the Vietnam War, the racial injustices especially in the South—German protests were motivated mostly from an observer’s perspective by conflicts abroad (the situation in Iran when the Shah visited Berlin in 1967, the movements of liberation in Latin America, and, of course, the Vietnam War); at home, they targeted the haunting, still lingering shadows and specters of the Nazi past in the postwar Federal Republic. As Stephen Spender noticed in his comparative analysis of

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1968 student revolts in the United States, France, and Czechoslovakia, West Germany’s unique geopolitical position between the two power blocks and especially of West Berlin as the German epicenter of the 1968 student protests resulted, in his terms, in a “politics of extreme isolation”: “Some of the leaders . . . have come from the eastern zone. Such men are in the position of being twice disillusioned, by the east and by the west, by the Communists and by the anti-Communists. Inevitably they pursue some third ideology, from Mao’s China or Castro’s Cuba.”3 West Berlin provincialism longed for some global inspiration and triggered a thinking that wished to transcend the national condition. At the same time, the bad conscience of the national past of Germany weighed heavily on the souls of the student rebels. “Their movement is partly in reaction against the densely thick surface prosperity of the West Germans of the ‘Economic Miracle’ behind which the past is hidden as behind a wall.”4 Due to their territorial detachment from the pressing problems of the present and the largely repressed, unresolved trauma of their national history, German students resorted more to theoretical reflection than practical action. Already Spender observed that “the German students are stronger on theory than the other students at Columbia or the Sorbonne.”5 Student protesters formed reading groups to study Hegel, Marx, Benjamin, and Adorno.6 Their attitude toward the revolution they aspired for is more an aesthetic rather than political one, similar to the positions that Kant and Schiller assumed when confronted with the French Revolution in 1789. Herbert Marcuse, whose 1955 Eros and Civilization and especially 1964 book One-Dimensional Man became bibles of German student protesters and the New Left, inscribed himself into this German tradition. In her essay “On Violence” (1970), which is also a critical review of the student protests, Hannah Arendt singled out “disinterestedness”—which is, according to Kant, a precondition of any aesthetic experience—as the most striking feature of these movements.7 For many German student protesters, only the arts and aesthetics promised to dissolve the social, economic, historical, and ideological entwinement of the present by reflecting on its conditions and transcending this “false reality” (Adorno) through the creation of a utopian vision. The more remarkable it is that the 1968 movement in Germany neither spawned new original theoretical thinkers nor had a lasting impact of innovation in the arts. (It exercised perhaps the greatest artistic influence on the theater, a very German institution, and indirectly on the New German Cinema.) To the contrary, in the aftermath of 1968, Germany imported most theory from France and the most popular music from the United States and the United Kingdom. As both Arendt and Spender noted, this aesthetic disinterestedness of the student “revolutionaries” conflicted with the interests of the working class. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, one of the most outspoken student leaders of the revolts

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at the Sorbonne, embraced this attitude in an interview with Jean-Paul Sartre, in which he characterizes the revolution as a spontaneous event that aims to break with society completely and as an “experiment that will not last, but which allows a glimpse of a possibility; something which is revealed for a moment and then vanishes.”8 With their insistence on theory and spontaneous poetry rather than consequential action, the students in both Paris and Berlin alienated the workers from their movements. The question, then, is how the 1968 protest movements, that at their core were less political and revolutionary than aesthetic and fleeting, could have had a lasting effect in German society. There is a great consensus today that 1968 played a major role in the cultural and political development of postwar German democracy, even though now and then opposing voices attempt to construct a secret continuity between the Nazis and the most radical members of the 1968 generation,9 some of which formed terrorist cells during the 1970s and 1980s. Instead of recapitulating the reception history of 1968 in the German news media and academic publications, the lasting impact of this movement can be studied and assessed in the career of one of its protagonists, Daniel Cohn-Bendit. After the May Revolution 1968 in Paris, he became a member of the Frankfurt “Sponti” radicals in the 1970s, to which also Joschka Fischer, later foreign minister and vice-chancellor of Germany from 1998 to 2005, belonged. Cohn-Bendit joined the Green Party and served as co-chairman of the Greens in the European Parliament. Together with Guy Verhofstadt, a Belgian politician who was the Leader of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe from 2009 to 2019, he published a manifesto “For Europe!” in 2012, and he recently served as a political advisor and campaigner for the French President Emmanuel Macron. This career shows the transformation of a revolutionary into a reformer and established politician, from spontaneous actions of protest to the strategic planning of lasting effects. It is representative of the metamorphosis of the 1968 movement that, as such, continues to transform German society within the project of envisioning and building a transnational and multicultural European Union. The United States had long served as a model for a truly multicultural social society. However, by the 1960s, internal divisions including racial segregation, social injustice, economic inequality, and the growing opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam, suggested that the United States could no longer serve as this ideal model. American radical social movements tried to resolve these internal domestic struggles, finding inspiration in the revolutionary movements for liberation abroad, and sharing in a global utopian imaginary as expressed for example, in the Situationist-slogan, “All power to the imagination!” and by other Atelier posters plastered all over Paris streets in May 1968. Radical social movements in America simultaneously imagined that their actions were in solidarity with other national liberation

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struggles, and dreamed of creating an alternative world order together. In the early 1980s, the Marxist cultural critic Fredric Jameson emphasized the importance of these imagined solidarities for America’s social revolutionary actors. As Jameson notes, the opposition to America’s involvement in Vietnam “[remained] organically linked to its Third World ‘occasion’ in the Vietnam War itself, as well as to the Maoist inspiration of the Progressive Labor-type groups which emerge from (the) SDS (Students for a Democratic Society)” (488). The Black Panther Party, formed in 1966 by Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton, two college students from Oakland, California, adopted the program of cultural nationalism from the program of national liberation movements in the “Third World.” The Black Panther Party’s identification with global anticolonial struggle was such that, as Jameson observes, a fierce internal struggle arose among Party leaders on account of a growing awareness “of increasing institutional corruption in many of the newly independent states of Africa.” Third World inspiration would also play a formative role in the emergence of the Women’s movement in both America and the UK. Jameson goes as far as credit President John F. Kennedy, or more precisely, the idea of JFK, as the primary inspiration for the American New Left, despite Kennedy’s own militant anticommunism and his public rows with the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. Not only did JFK’s assassination play a crucial role “in delegitimizing the state itself,” but crucially, his “rhetoric of youth and of the ‘generation gap’” created a climate of opinion conducive to antiestablishment thinking and utopian dreaming. The year 1968 in America is indelibly linked with a series of traumatic political events: the “Tet Offensive” and the escalating death count of U.S. Armed Forces in Vietnam; the assassination of Martin Luther King in April, immediately followed by civil disturbances in Los Angeles, Baltimore, Chicago, and many other major U.S. cities; the shooting of Robert Kennedy on the campaign trail in June; and, at the end of August, the massive street demonstrations outside the Democratic National Convention held in Chicago, which were met by overwhelming police brutality, broadcast on national television. However, 1968 in the United States is best viewed in the context of long term historical emergences rather than as a series of singular but disconnected events. The rise of environmentalism in the United States, along with feminism and the struggle of sexual, racial, and ethnic minorities for rights and recognition all predate 1968 and continue beyond that year. Counterculture revolution carried a potent utopian charge and a sense of infinite possibility. These social movements aimed to transform the world in positive and lasting ways, rejecting the fatalism of an older generation that a new generation of leaders believed was fatally compromised by their continued allegiance to the status quo. It is historically inaccurate, however,

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to equate the counterculture with radical social groups; as Christopher Gair observes, “Black Power, the women’s movement and gay rights were all shaped in part by fractured relationships with political and artistic elements of (the) counterculture”.10 Still, regardless of one’s political commitments, the cataclysmic social events in America in 1968 made it easy to believe that the country was not merely undergoing change but experiencing a full-blown civilizational crisis. As Matt Cardin argues, it is no coincidence that the critically maligned genre of speculative fiction, in particular horror and fantasy writing, undergoes a massive transformation at the same time, assuming what we now take to be its “modern” form (Luckhurst). Given the extraordinarily rapid pace of social change and the seemingly unending series of newsworthy events, horror and fantasy seemed to be the only forms truly capable of expressing daily life in the United States at this time.11 Horror and fantasy represented two antithetical but closely related responses to the dramatic, and often traumatic, social events of the day. On the one hand, there is utopian fantasy as a mystical, imaginal force capable of redeeming a fragmented world. In the late 1960s, J.R.R. Tolkien’s saga of Middle-earth, The Lord of the Rings, began its long journey to the cultural mainstream: but the books were a favorite of young counterculture readers who admired the writer for imaginatively rendering the spiritual history of a magical, pre-Atlantean world. Ever in touch with the Zeitgeist, the Beatles had tried to buy the rights to The Lord of the Rings for their next star film vehicle after Help! (1966), but Tolkien, now in his sixties, wasn’t keen on handing control over his creation to a rock band (Valigate). The writer eventually sold his book series to United Artists in 1969. A persistent John Lennon would contact Stanley Kubrick (like many “heads” of the era, Lennon associated space exploration with the mind-expanding capacities of psychedelic drugs and adored Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, released in 1968), hoping to convince the director to adapt The Lord of the Rings and cast the Beatles in the starring roles. On the other end of the spectrum from Tolkien, there is fantasy horror, as a commentary on the social and political traumas of the day. George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) is saturated with subtextual cultural commentary about American racism and injustice. Regardless of Romero’s conscious intentions, casting Duane Jones, an African American actor, in the star role of “Ben,” who fights for survival against a zombie horde played by white actors, visually framed Ben’s individual struggle for survival in far broader terms. The film makes a strong visual link between Jones’ fight for survival and a larger collective struggle. Like Leroi Jones’ celebrated drama Dutchman (1964), in which a white woman antagonizes and eventually murders a young black college student on a subway car in New York City, Ben’s

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contest against the zombies works on both a literal level, as a pure horror story, and as an expressive metaphor for the African American experience of racist white America. Chris Gair’s summary comment on Jones’ breakthrough play as “symbolic of a deeply disturbed national racial unconscious” applies equally to Romero’s film (141). Romero’s zombie film embodies the worst nightmares of that tumultuous year and created a modern mythos still very much with us today, across our entire media landscape. The zombie figure is of course an import from the Caribbean, notably Haiti, which in 1968 was firmly in the grip of the dictatorship of François, “Papa Doc” Duvalier, and therefore comparatively less free to participate in the global upsurge in liberatory political protest. That said, 1968 saw the publication of one of the most incendiary works of Haitian and broader Caribbean literature: Marie Chauvet’s Amour, colère, folie, a remarkable, courageous work published by Gallimard in Paris, with the encouragement of Simone de Beauvoir. The spirit of revolt that courses through the work was directed principally toward the dictatorship and the racial ideology that underpinned it: it was a very local revolt that nonetheless resonates still in all who read it of whatever nationality in its reminder of the necessarily connected nature of the personal and the political. Across the rest of the Caribbean, the events of May 1968 did not so much spark new revolts as reinvigorate longstanding anticolonial movements that had evolved over the twentieth century in various forms. In Puerto Rico, anticolonial sentiment coalesced around the anti-draft movement that saw more than one hundred Puerto Ricans indicted by U.S. federal prosecutors. The subsequent legal convictions led to students at the University of Puerto Rico in Rio Piedras setting fire to the campus ROTC building and to 10,000 Puerto Ricans marching through San Juan to protest the call-up and the Vietnam War more generally. Similarly, in Guadeloupe, protests preceded those in Paris by a year: the major unrest on the island that followed the police shooting at a crowd of striking workers is known locally as “May ’67.” The claimed number of people murdered ranges between eight and two hundred. The French government blamed and arrested members of the clandestine independence movement, the National Organization Group of Guadeloupe. The activists were supported during their trial by students protesting in Paris and by public figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Aimé Césaire, who stated that Guadeloupe and other French Caribbean departments were “de facto colonies.” The newly independent nations of the Anglophone Caribbean were no less affected by the general spirit of revolt, most notably perhaps in Jamaica, where the gifted Guyanese scholar Walter Rodney was refused reentry following his attendance at the Congress of Black Writers in Montreal. Students at the University of the West Indies campus at Mona staged a peaceful protest

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that ended in violent confrontations and a subsequent ten-day siege of the university that would radicalize many of the students in their subsequent activities throughout the 1970s. In Trinidad in February 1970, there was a black power insurrection that almost overthrew the government of Eric Williams. This revolutionary spirit arguably lasted until the Grenada Revolution collapsed under the American invasion of 1983, but Caribbean intellectualism remains resolutely antiimperial and finds expression in newer strands of protest and contestation, in feminist and LGBTI movements, for example.12 CHAPTER OUTLINE The common strand that runs through this collection is not some simple confirmation that la lutte continue, but rather the strong affirmation that il faut que la lutte continue if May 1968 is to have any enduring resonance. This is not a proclamation of some sort of optimism worthy of Candide, but a cleareyed assertion that the struggle May 1968 called for has no fixed end point. Social change is a continuous process and today’s victory must necessarily become the basis for advancement to the next level. While all social struggles are political, some have deeper, more personal roots that require changes in individual mentalities as well as social structures. The most obvious example of the former involves the rights of women as well as racial and sexual minorities, and these issues play a role in several of the essays included here. Chris Bennett’s “1968—Past, Present, Models of Art and Activism in Jannis Kounellis’s Senza Titolo (1969)” sets the tone for the collection. Kounellis’ Senza Titolo is a work inspired by May 1968. It attempts to look at once backward and forward at French history, ranging from the Revolution to possible functions of art in the contemporary world. The piece consists of a single, lit candle poised on a shelf metaphorically casting light and shadows toward the past and the future. Bennett perceives this artwork as reflecting mourning for the collapse of the actual historical movement in June of 1968, while at the same time reflecting a cautious confidence in the lingering value of the aspirations and ideas inherent in the concept of May 1968. With Timo Obergöker’s “The Quebec Spring, A New May 1968?” the focus shifts to French-speaking Canada. In 2012, a student protest over tuition hikes seemed to echo the events of May 1968. Social dissatisfaction spread to other social groups, and the press was quick to draw the comparison to what happened in France over forty years ago. Obergöker examines the accuracy of this claim by concentrating on each movement’s success in affecting social change, and the effect the canonization of the events of 1968 and 2012 had on the actual achievements, then and now, of the respective groups.

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Tenley Bick’s “Ghosts for the Present: Countercultural Aesthetics and Postcoloniality for Contemporary Italy. The Work of Wu Ming 2 and Fare Ala” examines the influence of May 1968 on another group, even though this Italian collective is strongly, albeit respectfully, critical of May 1968 perceived shortfalls. For Wu Ming 2 (from literary collective Wu Ming) and Fare Ala, an artist collective based in Palermo, May 1968 seems to have unintentionally pushed into the background the neocolonial Other, leading to a reassertion of Eurocentric and imperialist worldviews. It is this lapse that Wu Ming 2 and Fare Ala, always mindful of their debt to May 1968, struggles to correct. If some oversights in May 1968 were unconscious, Paul Cohen shows that at least in a very famous incident, the French Left contributed mightily to the weakening and eventual collapse of what could have been one of the movement’s finest achievements. “La fac ’68: the Centre Universitaire Expérimental de Vincennes and the Afterlife of a Revolutionary Moment” discusses the creation and development of Vincennes as a university branch with nontraditional pedagogical philosophy, open enrollment, and an unabashedly leftist faculty. Vincennes sought to reflect the ethos of ’68 and imagined itself as the incarnation of the political and social aspirations of May 1968. However, if, as Cohen argues, Vincennes in its inception represented “the most incandescent of [May ’68’s] afterlives,” this idealism was run aground through leftist infighting and the realities of French university politics. Nanni Balestrini (1935–2019) was an Italian poet and activist whose social views, largely formed before May 1968 received impetus and inspiration from the events taking place in France during the Spring of 1968. In “Class Struggle: Ascanio Celestini, Nanni Balestrini and the Living Legacy of the Italian 68” Giuseppina Mecchia analyzes the legacy of Balestrini’s novel Vogliamo Tutto (We Want it All) as the founding text for post-operaismo (post-workerism) in terms not only of workers’ movements but also the political commitment and direction of the artists who came after Balestrini. Mecchia concludes that with regard to contemporary political art in Italy, it is the international legacy of 1968 that is helping new generations of artists and activists to keep the flame alive. A modest yet important aim of Chris Reynolds’ “Recalibrating Memories: the Divergent Afterlife of Northern Ireland’s 1968,” is to remind people that May 1968 had a significant impact in Northern Ireland. It created a spirit of openness and a new willingness to examine longstanding problems. However, this optimistic impulse was quickly buried in the Troubles which poisoned the relationship between the North and South for years after. This article, through the example of the influential collaborative project between the author and National Museums Northern Ireland argues that the current

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post-Troubles context provides a fertile terrain for a recalibration of how Northern Ireland’s 1968 is remembered and suggests paths of development where the enthusiasm of the Irish 1968 can be channeled to contribute to the creation of a more equitable society in the present and future. Valerie Orlando’s “Conflict of Class, Race and Sexuality in Two Novels by the French-Moroccan Feminist, Leila Slimani” clearly demonstrates that while the struggle continues and has scored some successes, the fight is far from over. Spurred by May 1968, the establishment of le Mouvement de Libération des Femmes insisted that the core belief of French feminism is that women’s rights are part of the human rights which are accessible to all. Slimani’s novels dramatize the difficulty of realizing that seemingly self-evident premise. In Chanson douce (2016) and Dans le jardin de l’ogre (2014), she chronicles the mostly unsuccessful struggle of women to overcome the social obstacles blocking their path to equality in post-1968 society. For the moment at least the language of feminism is well in advance of the reality of women’s rights. Valerie Orlando illustrated the repression of woman on a social level. In “Effects of May 68 on Men and Women in the Work of Michel Houellebecq,” Alexis Chauchois and Gilles Glacet provide an example of the same phenomenon in individuals. Focusing on Soumission (2015), the authors show how the main character, François, is no friend of May 1968, since it was easier to control women before that fateful date. The election of an Islamic president in France draws François into the new Muslim sphere of influence, not for any intellectual or religious beliefs, but because of the prospect of controlling and belittling women in the guise of maintaining socially acceptable male–female relations. In this darkly ironic novel, Houellebecq is certainly exaggerating French passivity in the face of the present social problems, but the implicit critique of May 1968 seems quite serious. In “A Timeless Spirit: Revolutionary Aesthetics in Roberto Bolaño’s Amulet,” Augustus O’Neill shows that the Mexican Movement of 1968 paralleled student uprisings throughout the world, and argues that its commonly understood terminus—the Tlatelolco Massacre on October 2—is exceptional in its brutality. As O’Neill shows, contemporary historiography of Mexico 1968 has attempted to decenter the massacre in relation to the movement; the focus has shifted to the scope and vitality of the resistance to state repression in Mexico born in the movement and lasting to the present day. The reading of Roberto Bolaño’s novella Amulet underscores the revolutionary aesthetics apparent in the text, emphasizing acts of resistance and temporal deconstruction as crucial steps toward a non-repressive society, as described in the aesthetic philosophy of Schiller, Nietzsche, and Marcuse. O’Neill seeks to transform the accepted reading of Amulet and constructs a new narrative of Mexico 1968, one which subverts the massacre as the telos of the student movement and affirms the spirit of revolution unextinguished by state violence.

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NOTES 1. Cit. in Stephen Spender, The Year of the Young Rebels (New York: Random House, 1969), 86. 2. For a survey of the emergence of various youth cultures in the West, see Axel Schildt and Detlef Siegfried, Between Marx and Coca-Cola: Youth Cultures in Changing European Societies, 1960-1980 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006). For a more specific account of youth culture in West Germany, see Detlef Siegfried, 1968: Protest, Revolte, Gegenkultur (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2018). 3. Spender, 92. 4. Ibid., 94. 5. Ibid., 85. 6. Peter Gente, the founder of the Merve publishing house for theoretical texts, serves as an interesting case study in Philipp Felsch, Der lange Sommer der Theorie. Geschichte einer Revolte 1960-1990 (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 2016). 7. Hannah Arendt, “On Violence,” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1972), 125. 8. As cited in Spender, Year of the Youth Rebels, 111. 9. Most notorious is a title that appeared to celebrate the 40th anniversary of this movement: Götz Aly, Unser Kampf: 1968—ein irritierter Blick zurück Berlin: Fischer, 2008. 10. See Gair 140. 11. What Gair says about the novelist Kurt Vonnegut, whose writing career began in the 1940s but only gained commercial success in the 1960s, also applies to Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel Delaney, and other speculative fiction writers of the era: “the popular and the fantastic serve as the best weapons in an effort to represent alternatives to the master narrative of American scientific, military and economic triumphalism . . . that had become depressingly self-perpetuating” (144). 12. For more on the long history of pan-Caribbean revolt, see Romain Cruse, Le Mai ’68 des Caraïbes (Montreal: Mémoire d’encrier, 1968).

Chapter 1

1968—Past, Present, Future Models of Art and Activism in Jannis Kounellis’s Senza titolo (Untitled), 1969 Chris Bennett

I believe that a work of art, to exist as such, must be born of historical necessity, that is, it must be of a historical situation and constitute the indispensable language of that moment. —Jannis Kounellis, “Interview with Franco Fanelli”1 The mode in which a work touches us most deeply, that is, on the unconscious level, depends on an arrangement, on its composition. [. . .] Looking through works for a few traces that might tell us something about their author does not constitute analyzing the significance of the work as such. For us, the significance derives from its structure. [We] are interested in the whole of the work, its articulation . . . these are what give it its depth, what establish the superimposition of levels within which the true dimension of human subjectivity, the problem of desire, may find its place. —Jacques Lacan, “Hamlet”2

Shortly after a trip to Paris in September–November 1969 to participate in two group exhibitions and on which he witnessed ongoing unrest in the French capital, the postwar Italian artist Jannis Kounellis envisaged Senza titolo (figure 1.1). First displayed in Naples in December 1969 at Galleria Lucio Amelio, Untitled consisted of a single lit candle poised on a shelf extending from a sheet of iron marked with the handwritten phrase in white chalk “Libertà o Morte VV Marat VV Robespierre,” or “Liberty or Death 1

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Long Live Marat Long Live Robespierre”—a locution carrying unmistakably political resonances. The flame and its surrounding components are enigmatic. Pulling the viewer in and even stopping them in their tracks, these combined elements evoke something elusive and ungraspable, a trait of incomprehensibility; of being in front of something that productively evades (in a pronounced way and as if by design) total, on-the-spot comprehension and slips away. In addition, the flame, mediated by the text on the iron ground, suggests larger meanings—some overt and even grandiose in their historical scope and implications, and others more discreet and subterranean. The work, which clearly involves a kind of poetics, is, again, slightly puzzling and undecidable, setting in unsteady correspondence an immersion in basic gestures, the sensate properties of materials in their concrete, utterly factual physicality, and a kind of mute material literalism, on one hand, with resonances and responses of a more interpretive or hermeneutic order, on the other, including the possibility of its generating larger metaphorical and/or allegorical associations. The appositeness and insights that can be derived from interpretive possibilities of this last type, however, I intend to argue, best come into view when allowed to emerge in glimpses. Such hypothetical and, indeed, historically tinged meanings in Kounellis’s art seem all the more resonant in direct proportion to the degree, paradoxically, that they are kept somewhat out of sight, never interfering too much with the work’s primary impression unless called to show themselves.3 Only then, perhaps—cutting past an approach that would pose mere analogies or correspondences between the work of art and its larger sociopolitical circumstances, putting them out in the open and leaving it at that—are such hermeneutic associations made properly accessible at all. Only then are they made to appear in a way befitting the different levels of response such works generate and the experience at times of sudden slippages and breaks in continuity between them: indeed, the overall effect when standing before such an artwork is one in which a number of different levels of response not only interact (sensuous and impressions of the work primarily as an utterly literal, physical presence; responses of a more associative and symbolic order; and potentially others as well), but also vanish unstably into one another. Between 1967 and 1972, Kounellis created a vivid line of works primarily based on setting forward two main elements that are heterogeneous and disjunctive, yet evidently interconnected—in this case, the open flame and the iron ground. The result is an alternation between two facets set in relation with one another, here mediated, again, a bit like a third term, by the semicursive text. Kounellis’s setting forward of these two elements also generates an empty interval or fissure between them—attesting to a larger orientation that aims to open gaps in the fabric of the visible.4 Broadly, the work’s effects emanate from the putting of a foundational difference (or, at least initially, a

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Figure 1.1  Jannis Kounellis, Senza titolo (Untitled), 1969. Chalk written on iron sheet with candle, 100 × 70 cm (39 3/8 × 27 9/16 in). Cologne: Reiner Speck Collection. Courtesy Archivio Kounellis, Rome. Photo: © Archivio Claudio Abate.

“disarticulation,” to use a term Kounellis deployed in 19685), and from the unsteady interplay between two self-consciously “contradictory” facets—in this instance, the candle, or fire, and the iron ground; active and inert; searing and cool; critical assertion, or dissensus, and its limits/constraints.6 Untitled belongs to a larger sequence of works that Kounellis initiated in summer-fall 1967. Around this time, Kounellis arrived at the bipartite (although never strictly binary) approach sketched above. Indeed, as he put it to me in an interview in 2013, the advent of this two-part schema amounted to “una scoperta”—“a discovery.”7 Multiple works along these lines were advanced at a key solo exhibition at Rome’s Galleria L’Attico in November 1967 (figure 1.2): cotton stuffed into an iron container with fissures running

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Figure 1.2  Jannis Kounellis, One-Person Exhibition at Gallery L’Attico, Rome, November 1967. Courtesy Archivio Kounellis, Rome. Photo: © Archivio Claudio Abate.

along its corners; iron bins filled with soil and young cacti; or an aquarium with live fish atop a vertical plinth. Art historian Alex Potts, calling such works “almost minimalist in their formal austerity,” has spoken of their literalism, or air of the factual, immediate, and fairly commonplace or everyday, as extending to “giving a strong physical sense of materiality . . . presenting within the abstract structure the spectacle of some actual, [concrete] thing, animate or part-inanimate.”8 He says of the bins with cacti, The installation is both very formal and very plain . . . . The matter-of-factness of their presentation makes them puzzling. [. . .] Viewing them there is immediate recognition, but also a sense of estrangement, which gives one pause precisely because it hardly seems worth worrying about.9

Another striking configuration that November was Untitled featuring a live, polychromatic parrot perched between water and seed against a grey, static field. Looking back on this signal exhibition shortly before his passing away in 2017, and in which he pushed past the traditional parameters of painting on a flat support toward a practice including numerous fully threedimensional components, Kounellis commented, “I went out of the canvas to have an open dialectic space. [. . .] In terms of freedom, this gesture opened a world for me.”10

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As has been established in the Kounellis literature, the artist himself called the two elements he had inaugurated, and which became a platform for ongoing permutation and transformation in later decades, “sensibility” (or, in the Italian, “sensibilità”) and “structure” (“struttura”).11 Kounellis first deployed these terms in 1972 in an interview with Willoughby Sharp. While I do not want to put these terms front and center per se, they convey much about each configuration’s underlying structure and prove highly productive when tracing larger implications. At the same time, it is important to note, too, that it was only after such work’s more impromptu elaboration between 1967 and 1972 that Kounellis seems to have arrived at these terms, mapping them retrospectively onto his earlier production.12 Generally, while in Kounellis’s output “sensibility” consists of the everyday, at times slightly reworked substances advanced for consideration—be it fire, cotton, coal, cacti, stones, or (at another of L’Attico’s locations in a converted parking garage in January 1969) live horses—“structure” is that which frames and delimits these instances of “sensibility,” including iron panels, bins, trolleys, metal bed frames, lines painted on the floor, or in a few pivotal instances (as at L’Attico with the horses) the parameters of the art gallery or museum itself. More allegorically (and indeed crucially), whereas Kounellis has associated “sensibility” with opposition, dissent, and “criticism of the structure,” he has aligned “structure,” by contrast, with power, assent, and “the common mentality.”13 In Untitled with the parrot, much rides on how the work might affect the viewer at an unconscious level. Standing before the parrot, at times shifting about its perch, preening, or letting out a squawk, there is, again, an aspect of enigma. Encountered in person especially, there can be a sense—even after having seen reproductions in books and viewed, in one’s time, many works of a vaguely ready-made type—of surprise; of standing there, astonished, before this “I don’t know quite what.” The artist has set forward something beguiling, something that does not fully compute, thus revealing a facet of non-knowledge; at once highly literal and conceptual, or even imagistic, there is something to the work that resists the process of interpretative transformation itself. Having left the room, this quality of surprise, which is bound to eventually close up and to slip out of view, can also send one back, retracing one’s steps to look at the same work again. Untitled with the parrot stems from a bipartite, self-consciously “dialectical” logic—a logic that unfolds at the level of the action as a continuing, spatialized process.14 To be sure, that logic, discovered in 1967, issues from a breakthrough of a decisively linguistic order, or what Kounellis has called “un’apertura linguistica,” or “a linguistic opening” (consisting of the advent of “sensibility” and “structure,” qua polarity).15 Kounellis operates from clear, irreducibly linguistic parameters. At the same time, I would like to

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suggest, he also tries to make works—as Birgit Pelzer has said of Gerhard Richter’s paintings—that “have a content distinct from the meaning conveyed by words.”16 Kounellis’s works’ more unconscious dimension speaks to us precisely because of their implicit pictorial logic—to wit, their recurrent conjunction of apparently contradictory properties and/or forces falling within the general rubric of “sensibility” and “structure.” By advancing two aspects that, to borrow a phrase from Pierre Macherey, conflict more than they unite, Kounellis arrives at a clash or “endless dialectical opposition” that in effect has to be taken up each time it is viewed.17 Moreover, running alongside this, there is a case to be made, too, for non-meaning: for the ample place in Kounellis’s artistic practice for immersion in—and highly motivating, enjoyable contact with (and introjection of)—external materials and/or living entities, albeit evanescently, in their opaque, nonmeaningful materiality. In their sheer, at times paradoxical and enigmatic being-there, the materials Kounellis deploys, ranging from live animals to coal, cotton, and tufts of hand-manipulated wool, can function, amid their various symbolic or allegorical significations, as a site at which meanings are proactively canceled or foreclosed, thereby asserting larger freedom, on the artist’s and/or subject’s part, from the demand that the work has to “mean” anything in particular at all and from all meanings altogether.18 Such imperatives were part of the larger international context of artistic endeavor around 1968. This was a time when, as Jo Applin has perspicaciously observed, a new generation of artists “proposed new modes of seeing and experiencing objects, which promised, in turn, alternative means through which subjects might encounter their environments as embodied, physical, and, above all, material, lived experience.”19 The advent of “sensibility” and “structure,” more specifically, compellingly parallels American artist Robert Smithson’s elaboration in 1967–1968 of the similarly self-consciously “dialectical” and contradictory framework of “site” and “non-site,” for instance, and in 1969 Smithson traveled to Rome where he enacted Asphalt Rundown with Galleria L’Attico’s backing, no less. Further, regarding an aesthetic that disjunctively combines an effect of insistently literal and even nonmeaningful materiality with a range of other possible implications and/or imagistic associations, in March–April 1969 Kounellis participated in the landmark exhibition of the later sixties, curated by Harald Szeemann and debuted at the Kunsthalle Bern, titled Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form; there, Kounellis exhibited works exploring “sensibility” and “structure”—to wit, commonplace materials including flour, stones, coal, and dried peas, set inside jute sacks, some featuring labels like “Vialone RB Extra” and “California Almond Growers Exchange,” and mostly open at the top—in a stairwell nearby Lawrence Weiner’s A 36″ × 36″ Removal to the Lathing or

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Support Wall of Plaster or Wallboard from a Wall (1968). Neighboring galleries included works by other European and American artists, such as Hanne Darboven and Joseph Beuys (in a room near the main entranceway, Beuys exhibited Fettecke, or “Fat Corner” (1969), consisting of margarine spread into the groove between the floor and the wall and a nearby corner); Richard Serra enacted Splash (1969) in the main atrium (a few feet away from an action by Kounellis’s Italian peer Gilberto Zorio), and Eva Hesse and Bruce Nauman contributed as well. Returning to Kounellis proper—situated before “sensibility” and “structure,” it is largely left to the onlooker to somehow hold these two main elements together and sort out their broader meanings. Speaking with the “acritical” art critic and eventual cofounder of Rivolta Femminile (Feminine Revolt), Carla Lonzi, in 1966, Kounellis, early on, conveyed what he saw as the recipient’s pivotal role. Discussing a painting from 1965 in which large red letters spell the word “Giallo,” or “Yellow”—and addressing, specifically, the discrepancy between the red letters, as signifiers, and the idea they signify, “yellow”—he affirmed, “I don’t want to give the viewer a readymade object . . . . That’s why I wrote ‘Giallo’ in red . . . . The viewer immediately imagines yellow, but you don’t really offer it to them, you force them to make an effort . . . [to] participate . . . with their mind.”20 The great majority of works to come between 1967 and 1972 exhibit freshness and animation, conveying a sense of the artist’s imagination as an ever-present force giving its character to all it touches. Informing everything, too, is a singular commitment to artistic practice—as Kounellis said in later decades—as an “obligation,” a “life project,” or something he “could not do without.”21 Put another way, in Kounellis’s purview the artistic project emerges as nothing short of indispensable to the subject pursuing it. Further, the mode of practice that comes into view clearly takes unselfconscious behavior seriously, allowing to a degree for a spontaneous, or free and open, sensuous exploration of materials and the world within an equally elaborated set of framing limitations. Allotting for this more unconscious dimension also means that, immersed in such a project, its practitioner need not be fully aware, or conscious, of precisely what he or she is doing in the moment of fabrication or construal to do it.22 In Untitled 1969, a lit candle, in some instances of display burned down almost to its base, appears poised, vigil-like, against a ground citing the values of 1789, “Liberty or Death . . . .” Around 1969, the double, interlocked “V,” signifying “viva” or “long live,” was common in Italian street graffiti, and still is today. This mark can be found, for example, on an urban façade marked “VV Lenin” in filmmaker Roberto Rossellini’s neo-realist classic Roma Città Aperta (Rome, Open City) from 1945, or shifting to the late 1970s a wall tagged “VV La Retorica,” or “Long Live Rhetoric,” in Renato

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Donati’s photographic archive of anonymous graffiti in Bologna—along with, tellingly by 1977, “68 is over.” Advanced in 1969 at a moment of widespread disidentification with the state, Untitled with the candle communicates admiration for two leaders of the French Revolution and their intensity of commitment, which for both eventually resulted in death. Yet Kounellis does not align his agency with these figures at the expense of more ambiguous qualities. Jaleh Mansoor, alluding to Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat of 1793 (figure 1.3) (and in which Marat’s body appears, “sensibility”-like, against a stripped-down, planar background), offered this synopsis: Untitled [with the candle] evokes the . . . French Revolution, as the signal event of the European Enlightenment, the period when history painting came into its own as a formalized aesthetic practice at once transcendental on secular grounds and inscribed in history, indeed the very medium of history. This work cites [David’s] The Death of Marat. [. . .] Two hundred years later, Kounellis conjures the “great” revolutions of the historical past, caught somewhere in the dialectic of history and myth in their aggrandizement, so as to make those historical revolutions act as a parameter within which to think the role of painting in the present. As such, Kounellis opens up the . . . meaning of painting, to contemporaneity, understood either as a way to reconfigure collective histories caught in contradictory temporalities [or, to rephrase, the distinct phases of past, present, and future] brought about by uneven development or as a vehicle for the larger logic of (capitalist) abstraction (coded, in Arte Povera [the postwar Italian movement to which Kounellis principally belongs] as “a mechanism,” an “assembly line”).23

Later in an Untitled from 1975, Kounellis referenced David’s painting overtly: produced in a multiple of ninety—in each example in this sequence (figure 1.4), a single expired butterfly, distinct and put in a slightly different spot every time, appears atop a lithographic reproduction of The Death of Marat suspended inside a zinc frame. Stretching into the present context of display, the flame in Untitled 1969, set against the cool, slightly foreboding iron, possesses, as something so easily burned down or snuffed out, a poignant fragility. (For my own part, I last saw this work in person in 2005 at Rome’s Scuderie del Quirinale; in that context, the flame, evoking critique and the impulse to disrupt oligarchic domination, paired with the panel conveying equally a sense of constraint, burned directly across from the official residence of the Italian President and around the corner from a headquarters for Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party.) Such a work of art has the ability to resonate across distinct and discontinuous, yet in some ways overlapping timeframes—especially within its

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Figure 1.3  Jacques-Louis David, La Mort de Marat (The Death of Marat), 1793. Oil on Canvas, 165 × 128 cm (65 × 50 in). Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium.

present-time consideration. Indeed, much rides on the works being actively taken up here and now. At the same time, Kounellis has signaled that trying to view such production outside of the historical and sociopolitical context that first generated it “doesn’t make sense”; he goes on, outlining the fundamental role history plays in his project: “Art like all poetry is born

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Figure 1.4  Jannis Kounellis, Senza titolo (Untitled), 1975. Lithograph, Butterfly, and Zinc Frame, 57.2 × 41.9 × 7.6 cm (22 ½ × 16 ½ × 3 in), Edition of 90. Courtesy Archivio Kounellis, Rome.

of a lack and is also visionary for the same reason. The language which is born with the artist is invested therein, and represents historical reality.”24 And though Kounellis himself embraced one of Germano Celant’s primary assertions about Arte Povera circa 1967–1968 (Celant coined the phrase “Arte Povera,” or “poor” or “impoverished” art, in August–September 1967 and organized all the group exhibitions under this banner in the later sixties), namely that it pursues an art that does not “represent, but presents,” as profoundly relevant to his production, here the artist bends the stick in the opposite direction, clarifying dialectically how, in the end, representation still plays a significant role.25 Numerous authors have attributed an “allegorical” dimension to Kounellis’s output. For example, in 1986, Thomas McEvilley pointed out how “often a living or once-living substance is found upon or within a metal ground or

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frame. The situation is an allegory for human presence within an unforgiving causal structure.”26 He then perspicuously explains how such elements suggest “less the flower-child approach characteristic of America at the time than a postwar European sense [after fascism and the 1939–45 war] of the delicacy of life and the forces that threaten it.” Or, more recently in 2018, Philip Larratt-Smith called “the structure-sensibility matrix” a “metaphor for the human condition, forever caught between the competing claims of freedom and necessity.”27 “Allegory” is at its best in Kounellis’s output, however, when allowed to operate in a more unconscious or pre-reflective manner, and as something fragile, ephemeral, and sporadic rather than being merely illustrative of outside events or advancing meanings thought to be entirely settled or fixed once and for all. At one level, such works resist attempts at symbolic decoding, or readings principally based, as Celant stated in 1967 outlining Arte Povera as a tendency, on “historical and narrative superstructures” or “other” meanings extending beyond the “materic quality of physical reality.”28 Yet, pivotally, these works’ main, co-present elements also have the capacity to provoke reflection on an entire range of sociopolitical occurrences around 1967–1969. The flame in Untitled, in addition to tautologically pointing back to itself (and its self-referential being-there as fire or raw “nature” is certainly part of its effect), possesses a power of disarticulation, separating out the space as it existed to that point into a zone of “sensibility,” or “criticism of the structure,” opposition, and dissent, on one hand, and of “structure,” or power, assent, and “the common mentality,” on the other. By generating a rupture of this kind, such art brings about, as Kounellis phrased it, “un’apertura in spazio,” or “an opening in space,” “che prima non c’era,” or “that before was not there”—or, similarly, an “imaginative opening” or “critical aperture” from which to then work and perceive.29 In addition, the artist has spoken of the impetus to arrive at an image capable of suggesting “una cambia,” or “a change.”30 The flame and iron ground, qua polarity, thus impart a sense, as Kristin Ross has put it telegraphing the achievements of the Ateliere Populaire in Paris, “of the dizzying opening created when the social refuses to stay ‘out there,’ distinct from art, or when art achieves presentation, rather than representation.”31 The two elements set in tension can induce reflection on even more specific events. In one of the most widely reported conflicts, on March 1, 1968, roughly 4,000 activists converged upon Rome’s Villa Borghese Park to “take back” La Sapienza’s Faculty of Architecture, attacking police in a siege. Known as the “Battle of Valle Giulia,” the tumult spilled into the surrounding park, including the grounds of the nearby Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna (GNAM), Rome’s modern and contemporary art museum. In a photograph taken that day sold for some time as a mass-produced poster

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Figure 1.5  Battle of Valle Giulia, March 1, 1968, Rome.

(figure 1.5)—echoing Kounellis’s founding of a dichotomy between forces of critique, off on one side, and those representing, at face value, the established order, on the other—protestors gathered on steps, with some of those at the front belonging, in fact, to the neo-fascist Right, peer at police in FIAT jeeps, and vice versa, across a gap of empty space or road before teargas was used to disperse demonstrators. Altogether, Valle Giulia left about 500 activists and 150 police injured, shifting the tone of the student-police conflict to that point toward even greater polarization.32 The journal Bit issued a report on Valle Giulia, accusing artists represented at GNAM of triviality: “The most violent clash took place in front of the contemporary art museum. This clash . . . established a clear dichotomy between those who were fighting in the street, weapons in hand, and those who fight to have some meters of wall in the museum rooms.”33 Further highlighting complexities, on June 16, in L’Espresso, filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini provocatively aligned his sympathies not with the protestors, but the police: “When yesterday at Valle Giulia you [the students] and the policemen were throwing blows, I sympathized with the policemen. Because the police are sons of the poor . . . from the rural or urban outskirts.”34 Pasolini’s tack highlights how student protestors, typically self-identifying on the Left, often hailed from more affluent social brackets. Soon, Pasolini envisaged his “Paper Flower

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Figure 1.6  Still from Pier Paolo Pasolini, La sequenza del fiore di carta (The Paper Flower Sequence) in Amore e rabbia (Love and Anger), 1 h 42 min, 1969.

Sequence” released in 1969 as part of the multidirectorial compilation Amore e rabbia (Love and Anger). Sparing no critique, in his segment Pasolini has a happy-go-lucky hipster youth—a kind of Italian variant of the American hippie flower child—stroll down Rome’s streets clasping a large red paper flower. At the climax, Pasolini has his protagonist (figure 1.6), after a loud blast in the sky—intercut with a voice declaring “I must kill the innocents” and visual footage of bombings over Vietnam and Lyndon Johnson accepting an honorary doctorate—drop stone dead on the pavement. The two predominant elements in Kounellis’s works figure two sides of a single, unfolding situation. Read in light of Valle Giulia, it can at times seem most appropriate to speak of outright incommensurability, or what Ross has called “an antidialectic of absolute difference” allowing “no possible dialogue between the ‘beaters’ and the ‘beaten.’”35 At such moments, these two elements’ connection-in-difference becomes attenuated, on the brink of severance. The to and fro between “sensibility” and “structure” functions even more broadly, to borrow a formulation from the Brazilian literary critic Roberto Schwarz, as a “structural reduction” of a social situation external to art, or an “aesthetic formalization” of a generalized rhythm in Italian society in the late 1960s.36 These two aspects, however, do not merely illustrate social phenomena but construct an imagined world of their own, one fabricated in accord with historical reality. Such works instigate a back and forth between art and politico-social reality, but rather than being simply conflated or confused, these two levels remain distinct, almost separate—each off on its own side yet acutely linked. Kounellis, put succinctly, aims at a formal, poetic construct meant to be taken on its own terms but one that is permeable, too, to history and to ideology, all the while stopping short of espousing any notion of art as directly picturing political life as such.

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Yet another way to think about “structure” and “sensibility” resides in the concept of “sociodrama,” which appeared in the 1910s within psychotherapy and was later adopted in the 1960s by American Civil Rights activists, such as James Bevel, as a tactic of nonviolent agitation and protest. As Bevel once observed, highlighting the need for the putting of an irreducible difference to arrive at an image capable of generating awareness and change, “Every nonviolent movement is a dialogue between two forces, and you have to develop a drama . . . to reveal the contradictions in the guys you’re dialoguing with [and] in the social context. That’s called sociodrama.”37 Kounellis’s artistic images are likewise based on the posing of such a clash, between a force of critique that challenges things as they are and those seeking to maintain the existing order or status quo. That said, here it seems immediately necessary to point out how any such “change” brought about by the work of art, and within the orbit of a post- or neo- avantgarde project like Kounellis’s, is bound to remain more or less entirely within the domain of its own artistic discourse, and how the passage from the political to the artistic can itself be the first step toward the subsumption, or “compensatory tolerance,” of political action or dissent in its own right. The pairing of two contradictory elements in Kounellis’s production across 1967 to 1972 derives effectiveness from its very generality and openendedness. Read in light of their historical moment, their interplay may also call to mind the pro-women’s liberation Belle Ragazze or “Beautiful Girls,” who in April 1968 took to Turin’s streets to denounce the arrest of a fellow activist and contest Italy’s still largely patriarchal culture.38 Moving into late 1968 and 1969–1970, “sensibility” and “structure,” as a larger formal and social constellation, equally evokes the actions of factory laborers vis-à-vis the apparatus of industrial production. In Turin on July 3, 1969, in the leadup to the “Autunno caldo,” or “hot autumn,” roughly 500,000 FIAT workers went on strike, occupying the city’s thoroughfares. Upon being dispelled by police, the “Battle of Corso Traiano” ensued. Workers intercepted a truck leaving a FIAT factory loaded with new cars, and soon after, the vehicles were set aflame. At FIAT Mirafiori, workers were known as well during work stoppages and meetings to use the conveyor belts on the assembly line to transport themselves from one part of the factory to another, thus diverting the existing framework of production toward a critique of their own circumstances. As Karen Pinkus has noted, Kounellis and his Arte Povera peers “never felt themselves to be part of a political collective.”39 Nevertheless, Kounellis’s disjunctive couplings of “criticism” and “things as they are” are redolent of the types of noncompliance that unfolded at plants like Mirafiori in 1969–1970. Suspended side by side in their unsteady push and pull, they are thus evocative of what Walter Benjamin once

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termed in his essay titled “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” the larger “historical trial” or “process.”40 As an extension of this, Kounellis’s approach tends to amp up rather than reduce the tension within the work of art. Further, at moments “sensibility” can evoke life’s vulnerability in relation to forms of “structure” that are indifferent and even harsh. Reaching further into film, “sensibility,” in this sense, could be the warmth and awkwardness of Domenico (played by Sandro Panzeri), in Ermanno Olmi’s film Il Posto (The Position) of 1961 (figure 1.7) set in contrast with the anonymous, highly efficient workings of a large postwar Milan firm. From the provincial outskirts and set within the larger context of Italy’s postwar “economic miracle” or “boom” from 1958 to 1963, in his first days in the city, for Domenico, as cultural historian John Foot has suggested, simply crossing Milan’s busy streets and ordering a coffee with a bright female coworker is “a major achievement.”41 Starting out in the mailroom, eventually a death in the finance office upstairs opens a slot for Domenico. The film comes to a close with him taking a seat at a desk in the back corner among his far from munificent senior colleagues—wanly gazing out.

Figure 1.7  Still from Ermanno Olmi, Il Posto (The Position), 1 h 38 min, 1961.

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During the “boom,” as Anna Maria Torriglia has summarized, Italy underwent a transition from a traditional, predominantly agricultural country to “an industrialized . . . urbanized and socially . . . atomized one”; the “boom,” she continues, “marks Italy’s [in many respects ‘late’ or tardy, and hence all the more accelerated] plunge into modernity, tout court.”42 The “miracle” marked a turn, too, toward a consumer society along American lines: Italians began seeking out “those consumer durables—cars, fridges, washing machines, etc.—hitherto classed as luxuries . . . . The 1950s [and early 1960s] saw the expansion in Italy of those industries which could supply these goods . . . or elettrodomestici, as the Italians neatly called them.”43 Bearing these last transformations in mind—Kounellis has also aligned “sensibility” with the cultures and lives of the poor, such as the peasant civilizations depicted in Luchino Visconti’s La Terra Trema (The Earth Trembles) from 1948,44 and has spoken of his admiration of “the peasant farmer civilization[s] so clearly portrayed by Pasolini . . .” in films like The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964), and of “blacksmith artisans able to make roses and leaves of hand-wrought iron . . . [and] goldsmiths who . . . embroider heraldry . . . on stone pediments.”45 Indeed, sometimes Kounellis’s selection of materials appears to stem more from poetic feeling and a sense of affiliation with such cultures—the cactuses dotting the coastline of Acitrezza, the simple bed frames in the peasants’ homes, a bag of dry goods carried over the shoulder and put in a cart and pushed uphill, or sardines stored in barrels filled with salt with a rock placed on each lid, as seen in The Earth Trembles, for instance—than a preoccupation with “sensibility” and “structure” as an analytical framework per se. Sometimes these human and cultural resonances can inflect “structure” too, as found in Kounellis’s works of 1968 featuring metal bed frames (typically a place for laying prone, resting, and dreaming) loaded with cotton, tiles topped with lit fuel pellets, and, at one point, even a cage filled with live rats. In a review of When Attitudes Become Form in Bern, art critic Tommaso Trini became one of the first to track such resonances. As he put it in Domus, translated from a paratactic Italian (here, Trini addresses the burlap sacks filled with flour, coal, and so forth): Evident in Kounellis is the sense of ordinary, quotidian existence; the Roman artist remedied his works’ unexpected failure to arrive in Bern by buying everyday supplies (beans, flour, peas) that he then exhibited in sacks, as if to indicate the status of the museum itself as a kind of wholesale market. If [Americans like Robert] Morris or Smithson, by selecting rocks and combustibles . . . develop an archeology of the industrial era, Kounellis avoids this with . . . coal and dried vegetables—thereby offering an archeology of peasant life [un archeologico deposito contadino].46

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Trini’s pinpointing of the development of “an archeology of peasant life” tags an important part of Kounellis’s self-positioning in relation to the explosion of industry and consumerism brought on by the “economic miracle” and some of the allegiances built into his largely implicit politics. Those politics relate, as McEvilley has noted, to the artist’s “aggressively physicalist” [or materialist] and “Marxian” outlook, having been raised, for starters, in a family in Greece (before moving to Rome in 1956 to study painting) very much of the Left.47 There are precedents for the fire in Untitled 1969 within Kounellis’s practice. There is the flame shooting out from Senza titolo (Margherita di fuoco) (Untitled (Daisy of Fire)), displayed at a vital group exhibition at L’Attico in June 1967 titled Fuoco, immagine, acqua, terra (Fire, Image, Water, Earth). Or, in Paris in March 1969 at Galleria Iolas, Kounellis lined up licks of gaspowered flame appended with s-hooks to horizontal bars. In terms of art historical precursors, as early as 1961 Yves Klein advanced a jutting jet of fire outdoors, shooting out from the ground, in Krefeld. Despite such empirical precedents, I have emphasized appeals to the unconscious and surprise. This last dimension hinges on each arrangement’s pictorial composition, and specifically the advent of two apparently contradictory elements and their ongoing interplay. Additionally, the approach that emerges proves open to moments of unexpected reversal, in which one polarized element can swap places with and/or partly take on aspects of the other—protestors on the front lines at Valle Giulia turn out to be proponents of the fascist Right; Pasolini, of the Left, aligns himself not with the students, but the police, and such inversions (as relayed in a moment) can occur in Kounellis’s actual production as well. In closing, Untitled 1969 with the candle follows from the advent of “un’apertura linguistica,” or a plainly linguistic opening.48 At the same time, Kounellis’s approach results in a slightly strange (and in some ways, playful) presence that, to a degree, resists interpretive transformation and escapes the economics of any signifying substitution. In addition, a more subterranean allegorical aspect emerges, suggesting other possible meanings and connections, and disconnections as well, with politico-historical reality. Both the effect of enigma and more hermeneutic responses, in the end, are sites of linkage to the social and take on social value. In the first cases of display circa 1969, the fire, or lit candle, and iron ground would have carried an immediate resonance. As Celant, reflecting on that initial context in 2019, has stated, At the time, the function of fire was to coagulate, recalling the passion and heat of a participation in the invigorating trauma of 1968, as well as the need for a revitalization of art . . . . In history, fire has been a symbol of a vision of the future, as well as the primordial principle of all change.49

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What such arrangements have to say today, in our own time, comes across to the extent that they resonate with our own desire. To be sure, in the “now” of reception, the poetics of flame and panel, mediated by the white granular script, inscribe a dimension of loss, of missed political opportunities and/or unrealized possibilities, wherever one might happen to be. Stepping onto a more timeless terrain, the fire might call to mind an “eternal flame,” aiming to keep the spirit of ’68 alive while locating it within a broader temporal trajectory stretching back, at least, to the watershed of 1789, and into the future as well. Regarding politics, it would be amiss, too, not to point out how the advent of a gap and foundational difference between “sensibility” and “structure” emulates the moment of rupture, of breaking out of an established cycle, and—while the work, by its very logic, remains undecidable and openended—the (necessary and definitive) taking of sides associated with a political revolutionary event. That said, the elegance and efficacy of Kounellis’s formations derives from their invoking these politically charged patterns in a principally artistic and symbolic register: rather than simply depicting or describing such events and analytical processes, Kounellis’s works, while setting forward something very precise, largely leave the making or drawing up of such reflections and connections to us, and, consequently, these decipherings have a precarious, fleeting status. Any effect of incessant bifurcation, ceaseless division, or endless oscillation in Kounellis’s arrangements is supplemented, it seems, by the conclusiveness of the pairings and definitive closures they pose, and by this figure’s singular commitment to artistic practice and process. Yet conclusive existence—to introduce a last, crucial dimension—is not the same thing as finality or completion, particularly for an artist who insisted, as Kounellis did explicitly and repeatedly, that each of his configurations was perennially “unfinished,” or always ongoing. Or as the artist himself once asserted, “Voglio esprimere una critica dell’oggetto finito. Per me nessun oggetto è mai finito” (I want to convey a criticism of the finished object. For me no object is ever finished).50 In 1997 in an interview with Bruno Corà, Kounellis spoke of this orientation at greater length: “I don’t believe that there is such a thing as a finite formalization. [ . . .] I’ve always possessed a different sort of certainty, that is . . . having a formalization that would justify an opening. [. . .] I wanted to experience what was unfinished, since it was no longer at all possible to have a finished thing.”51 In 2010, Ines Goldbach linked this dimension back to politics, stating that for Kounellis what is of primary importance is to create a . . . situation that . . . [prompts] the viewer to actively perceive and shape: to re- and co-shape social processes.

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It is in this sense that Kounellis can also be seen as a political artist, who prioritizes . . . the experience of cultural connections . . . . For him there is no complete object, for reality is also involved each time, impacting the object and demanding action.52

Each of Kounellis’s arrangements, to reassert a central claim, is “unfinished” in that it awaits an onlooker to take up its contrasting elements each time it is viewed—thereby laying the groundwork for a process of reception that, as long as the work keeps being encountered, never ends. What is more, situated within a longer view that takes developments in this figure’s art after 1972 into account, each of Kounellis’s works (while providing its own distinct and even necessary enjoyments) is also “unfinished” in that in later decades this artist developed a regular practice of slightly altering his earlier works, including those from the later sixties, each time they were re-exhibited, thus subjecting them to a process of continual change. As Kounellis told Corà about this facet: “In many cases I made works and then, after selling them, continued to change them. [. . .] I have never exhibited finished pieces, I always update them . . . by putting something close to them that always indicated change and the possibility of further change.”53 For example, in 2005 at the Botanical Gardens of Isola Madre located in Lake Maggiore (figure 1.8), Kounellis remounted Untitled with the parrot, along with other portions of the first, rather paradisial installation at L’Attico from November 1967.54 There, however, the parrot—this time with a green crown, yellow chest, and sapphire blue wings—and main iron panel appeared against two sheets of lead, a material known for its toxicity, and another iron plane behind; before the parrot, the soil and cacti were placed not in bins, as in 1967, but across rolled lead scrolls. Fabric, specifically suits, rolled up inside the stacked scrolls added bursts of color—beige, white, blue, and bright red—and human associations (hinted at by the clothes) to the typically mute, impassive domain of “structure,” thus allowing “sensibility” and “structure” to undergo a sort of reversal and swap some of their expected contents. While keeping much of their initial shape, such remakings of preexisting works add up to something curiously unstable. “Structure” and ‘sensibility’s” very irresolution and open-endedness, to borrow a formulation from Mikhail Bakhtin, were born “of a zone of contact with unresolved contemporaneity,” a reality still unfolding, in the making.55 It may be, too, that the very uncertainty or lack of reconciliation between “sensibility” and “structure” propels the artistic practice and, by extension, the viewer’s attention, to sociopolitical reality—a propulsion that suggests an ethics on Kounellis’s part; an urgency to engage in history and, when appropriate, to become invested in a change. Rereading such works in terms

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Figure 1.8  Jannis Kounellis, Senza titolo (Untitled), 1967 (on Back Wall), Remounted at the Borromeo Palace and Botanical Gardens, Lake Maggiore, Italy, 2005. Parrot, iron, and lead, small panel with parrot 100 × 70 cm (39 3/8 × 27 9/16 in). Photo © Manolis Baboussis 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

of these two elements also reveals the degree to which his approach exceeds a focus on the artwork as a discreet, closed entity, pushing instead toward a mode of artistic practice and seeing that—even after the loss of Kounellis himself—is ever re-commencing, always underway.

NOTES 1. The author thanks Jannis Kounellis for an interview in New York on May 4, 2013, and Michelle Coudray, Alessandra Bonomo, and Sarah Choi. For this quote, see Franco Fanelli, “Interview (1988),” in Echoes in the Darkness, Jannis Kounellis:

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Writings and Interviews 1966–2002, eds Mario Codognato and Mirta d’Argenzio (London: Trolley, 2002), 239. 2. Jacques Lacan, “Hamlet,” Ornicar? 25 (1982): 15–18. 3. This part of my analysis is indebted to Edgar Allan Poe’s observations about allegory in “Tale-Writing,” Godey’s Lady’s Book, November 1847, 252–256. See http:​/​/www​​.ibib​​lio​.o​​rg​/el​​dritc​​h​/nh/​​nhpo​e​​2​.htm​​l, accessed March 6, 2019. 4. Jacques Rancière, Dissensus (New York: Continuum, 2010), 12. 5. Jannis Kounellis, “Thoughts and Observations on the Body, on Behavior, on the ‘Natural’ on the ‘Living,’ as Theatrical Authenticity,” in Jannis Kounellis: Works, Writings, 1958-2000, ed. Gloria Moure (Barcelona: Poligrafa, 2001), 333. 6. Regarding “contradiction,” Kounellis said of “sensibility” and “structure,” terms examined in this essay, “There is a contradiction in each of my works . . . a contradiction between the two elements” (Codognato and d’Argenzio, Echoes, 158). Kounellis also stressed these terms’ inseparability, telling Willoughby Sharp about Untitled with the parrot, a work discussed soon, how without “structure,” “you cannot have a dialectic,” or, considering fire, “Fire for me is the equivalent of the parrot . . . neither of them . . . would have made sense without its iron support” (Echoes, 144, 100). 7. Jannis Kounellis, interview with the author, 2013. 8. Alex Potts, “Minus Objects: the Situation of Sculpture in the 1960s,” unpublished manuscript presented at the University of Michigan, 2004, 21. 9. Potts, “Minus Objects,” 26–27. 10. William Grimes, “Jannis Kounellis, Leader in ’60s ‘Poor Art’ Movement, Dies, at 80,” New York Times, February 24, 2017, B13. 11. Willoughby Sharp, “Structure and Sensibility,” in Codognato and d’Argenzio, Echoes, 140-51; first published in Avalanche, summer 1972. 12. Kounellis’s partner, Michelle Coudray, has recounted that while Kounellis may have mentioned “structure” and “sensibility” in the months leading up to his discussion with Sharp, the interview in Avalanche in 1972 constituted the first time these terms widely appeared and confirmed Kounellis saw them as relevant to his production from November 1967 onward (Coudray in conversation with the author, Kounellis Archive, Rome, June 25, 2018). In April 1972, around the time of his conversation with Sharp, Kounellis also staged a small-scale retrospective at L’Attico, by then located at via Paradiso, which included a re-mounting of works first displayed in November 1967, and this may have had him thinking—in a proactively recollective, reconstructive way—about developments in his output to that point. 13. See Echoes, 144, and Adachiara Zevi, “An Engaged Modern Painter,” in Jannis Kounellis (Oxford: Modern Art Oxford, 2004), 18. 14. Kounellis, interview with the author, 2013. During our discussion, Kounellis used the phrase “una dialettica” multiple times. As he explained, what made Untitled with the parrot and other works displayed at L’Attico in November 1967, so significant was the recognition that in them he had arrived at a “dialectic.” Further, Kounellis noted he initially conceived such propositions as a riposte to American Minimalism, which, in his view circa 1967, “did not possess such a dialectic.” These days Minimalism’s dialectical concerns are widely acknowledged, including those issuing from its phenomenological engagement of the viewer. Yet

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in the 1960s, Minimalism was broadly viewed in Italy as emblematic of the United States’ rise as a hegemonic force internationally and this country’s pervasively standardized, industrialized culture. If elements falling within “structure,” such as stripped-down panels, bins, and repetitive shelving, at times echo a Minimalist aesthetic, at once emulating and critiquing such forms, Kounellis viewed the assertions of “sensibility” in his output, and their relatively raw, unfiltered poetic presence and suggestion of energy, as standing in marked contrast, and hence establishing a “dialectic,” with “structure’s” more severe, repetitive features. Teresa Kittler, writing on Marisa Merz’s Scultura vivente (Living Sculpture) of 1966–1967 made from stapled aluminum, has similarly noted how for Merz this work’s “serial nature . . . offered a vision of excess, of vitality, that stood in marked contrast to the so-called reductionism of Minimalism as it was interpreted in the Italian press” (see Marisa Merz: The Sky is a Great Space, ed. Connie Butler (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, 2017), 236). In 1987, Kounellis also noted, “you have to discover your own . . . interests, and accept the fact of being dialectical in terms of the linguistics of art” (Echoes, 234). 15. Kounellis, interview with the author, 2013. 16. Birgit Pelzer, “The Tragic Desire,” in Gerhard Richter, ed. Benjamin H.D. Buchloh (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 62. 17. Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production (New York: Routledge, 2006), 74. Kounellis reflects on posing a “visual clash” in Echoes, 42. 18. Here I am deploying the “later” Lacan’s ideas about artistic commitment, specifically regarding James Joyce’s writing, in relation to Kounellis. With reference to Joyce, Lacan adumbrates a model of artistic practice that, adopting “enigma” and “undecidability” as its favored modes of transmission, proactively “forecloses” and “undoes” meaning: rather than anchoring itself in mimesis and a construal of meaning along conventional semantic lines or demanding meaningfulness from the artwork, such a trajectory, Lacan argues, is fundamentally oriented toward “opaque jouissance,” or the pursuit of a type of highly motivating, enjoyable contact with things and/or living entities in their opaque, nonmeaningful materiality. Joyce carries out this type of procedure in Finnegans Wake (1939), which Lacan argues proactively “massacres” conventionally construed meanings and syntax so as to produce, instead, a sequence of riddles that call for decoding and aim to establish their legitimacy on a foundation other than, or outside of, conventional sense. As it turns out, Kounellis called Joyce “a personality and extreme work which caused me to become a painter” (Echoes, 314). For more on these concepts, see Roberto Harari, How James Joyce Made His Name: A Reading of the Final Lacan (New York: Other Press, 2002). 19. Jo Applin, Eccentric Objects: Rethinking Sculpture in 1960s America (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012), 5. 20. Codognato and d’Argenzio, Echoes, 123. 21. For some of Kounellis’s allusions to his practice along these lines, see Moure, Jannis Kounellis, 314. 22. Again, I am touching on the “later” Lacan’s ideas—to wit, such an artistic project’s providing “a decisive irreplaceable support” for the subject and as something “that must not be gotten rid of.” Lacan calls this type of “indispensable” project

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the “sinthome.” Such a mode takes unselfconscious behavior, or “the unanalyzed psyche,” seriously. Lacan argues that the subject pursuing a project of this kind remains largely unconscious—and, by definition, cannot be fully conscious—of what he or she is doing while doing it. For Kounellis on “the unanalyzed psyche” and its “importance . . . in art,” see Echoes, 182. 23. Jaleh Mansoor, Marshall Plan Modernism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 173–174. 24. Codognato and d’Argenzio, Echoes, 211. 25. Germano Celant, “Arte Povera (1968),” in Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Arte Povera (London: Phaidon, 1999), 222–224. Regarding his art, Kounellis once affirmed, “I am asked if I am a realist . . . the answer is no. Realism represents while I present” (Echoes, 100). 26. Thomas McEvilley, “Mute Prophecies,” in Jannis Kounellis, ed. Mary Jane Jacob (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1986), 52. 27. Philip Larratt-Smith, Jannis Kounellis (London: Phaidon, 2018), 60. 28. Germano Celant, “Arte Povera–Im Spazio (1967),” in Christov-Bakargiev, Arte Povera, 221. 29. Kounellis noted his pursuit of “un’apertura in spazio” in our interview in 2013. The impulse is mentioned, too, in Arte Povera 2011, ed. Germano Celant (Milan: Electa, 2011), 254. For “imaginative opening,” see Zevi, “An Engaged Modern Painter,” 23, for “critical apertures,” Echoes, 88. 30. Kounellis, interview with the author, 2013. Kounellis also broached “change” in 2012 when he said of the horses at L’Attico, “I was . . . interested in . . . creating an image that would stand for change” (Grimes, “Jannis Kounellis,” B13). 31. Kristin Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 15–16. 32. Robert Lumley, States of Emergency: Cultures of Revolt in Italy from 1968 to 1978 (New York and London: Verso, 1990), 67–68. 33. Jacopo Galimberti, “A Third-worldist Art? Germano Celant’s Invention of Arte Povera,” Art History, 36:2 (April 2013): 426. 34. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “IL PCI ai giovani,” http:​/​/tem​​i​.rep​​ubbli​​ca​.it​​/espr​​esso-​​ il68/​​1968/​​06​/16​​/il​-p​​ci​-ai​​​-giov​​ani/?​​h​=0, accessed July 21, 2018. 35. Ross, May ’68, 30. 36. Roberto Schwarz, Two Girls and Other Essays (New York: Verso, 2012), 13–14. 37. Maurice Berger, For All the World to See (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), 120. Here, I’m comparing Kounellis’s approach to “sociodrama” as a technique of protest and a type of aesthetic image, not as a psychotherapeutic method. 38. Stuart J. Hilwig, Italy and 1968 (London: Palgrave, 2009), 30. For a reproduction of a photograph of the Belle Ragazze protesting in the streets of Turin, see the cover of this last book by Hilwig. 39. Karen Pinkus, “Italy in the 1960s: Spaces, Places, Trajectories,” in Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 1962–1972, eds Richard Flood and Frances Morris (Minneapolis and London: Walker Art Center and Tate Modern, 2001), 103–104.

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40. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938-1940 (Cambridge Massachusetts and London: Belknap, 2003), 258. 41. John Foot, Milan since the Miracle (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2001), 73. 42. Anna Maria Torriglia, Broken Time, Fragmented Space: A Cultural Map for Postwar Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 79. 43. Penny Sparke, “‘A Home for Everybody?’: Design, Ideology and the Culture of the Home in Italy, 1945-72,” in Culture and Conflict in Postwar Italy, eds Zygmunt G. Barański and Robert Lumley (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 230–231. 44. Kounellis, interview with the author, 2013. 45. Codognato and d’Argenzio, Echoes, 105. 46. Tommaso Trini, “Quando le attitudini diventano forma,” Domus (March 1969), n.p. 47. Celant, Arte Povera 2011, 257. 48. Kounellis, interview with the author, 2013. 49. Germano Celant, Jannis Kounellis (Venice: Fondazione Prada, 2019), 19. 50. Celant, Arte Povera 2011, 260. 51. Bruno Corà, “Fragments of an Open Formalization,” in Arte Povera from the Goetz Collection, ed. Rainald Schumacher (Munich: Kunstverlag Ingvild Goetz, 2001), 114. 52. Ines Goldbach, “Jannis Kounellis,” in Che fare? Arte Povera – The Historic Years, eds Friedemann Malsch, Christiane Meyer-Stoll, and Valentina Pero (Liechtenstein: Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, 2010), 151. 53. Corà, “Fragments,” 114. 54. This fully three-dimensional, “paradisial” quality calls to mind the antecedent of Carla Accardi’s environmental works, such as Tenda (Tent) and Ambiente arancio (Orange Environment) of 1966-68 (Tenley Bick in conversation with the author, March 28, 2019). 55. M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 346.

Chapter 2

The Quebec Spring, A New May 1968? Timo Obergöker

May 1968 seems to have become the global matrix for youth protest and indeed one of the first globalized rebellions. Powerful images of young people challenging the establishment circulated quickly around the globe, thus creating a language of dissent encapsulated in slogans, posters, music, happenings. In 2012, when students in the province of Quebec protested massively against an increase of their tuition fees, many commentators in the media compared this event to “May 68.” Indeed, we find striking similarities between Paris 1968 and Montreal 2012. But are things really that easy? We will explore how far a common set of signs and symbols might, potentially, hide deep structural differences. In 2012, the student uprising in Quebec became a significant mass protest. Given that this took place at a similar time as the so-called Arab Spring in North Africa and Syria, this movement was quickly included in a global context of dissent. From then on, what we understand by the term “Quebec Spring” is a university movement on an unprecedented scale, principally against the $1,625 rise in tuition fees which was approved by the government of Prime Minister, Jean Charest, and his Minister for Education, Line Beauchamp, both members of the Quebec Liberal Party. After its rather hesitant beginnings in November 2011, the protest got up a new head of steam in February and March of 2012, eventually bringing 250,000 people on to the streets of Montreal on March 22, making it the largest student demonstration ever in North American history. Eluding government control and increasingly resembling a broader mass social protest, Jean Charest’s government passed Bill 1978 to put an end to what had begun as a student demonstration. Bill 1978 limited fundamental civil rights and restricted the right to strike in universities with heavy sanctions threatened for any contravention. However, this law was seen as an 25

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illegitimate infringement of basic rights and led to an even larger movement. United by the slogan “This is not a student protest but a society waking up,” the citizens came out on to the streets in May and June 2012, protesting against what was nicknamed “the truncheon law” by its critics. From then on, enormous demonstrations took every 22nd of the month in Montreal.1 Very quickly, the French and Quebecois press began to compare events in Quebec with another large popular uprising, May 1968. Le Point called it a Quebecois May 1968; Le Journal de Montreal talked about it in similar terms; le Courrier International celebrated Montreal, the rebel city; Le Devoir’s reporting of it read “May 68, basically.”2 Although the notion of a Maple Spring is an attempt to suggest continuity in a context of dissent, which, like 1968, was global, the continuity between the “Maple Spring” and the “Arab Spring” must be nuanced. Indeed, in an article in Le Devoir dedicated to this thorny issue, we read: [. . .] le profil d’un étudiant en mai 1968 et celui d’un étudiant d’aujourd’hui n’est pas du tout le même. L’avenir qu’on lui propose, le destin probable, s’avère complètement différent. Aujourd’hui, ce qui est en jeu, c’est la préservation d’un acquis jugé raisonnable. [. . .] . . . Dans les années 1960, il y avait un contexte social-révolutionnaire. Les jeunes lisaient des auteurs qui les encourageaient à révolutionner la famille, l’autorité, le travail, l’école, la sexualité. Il n’est plus question de ça.3

Despite this difference in ideological weight and in the degree of politicization, I have observed striking similarities between the two events. However, despite these noticeable parallels, there are also profound structural differences between the two events. In 1968, Roland Barthes, still strongly influenced by the impact and urgency of the Paris events, published a short text entitled L’Ecriture de l’événement. This short text provides an important analytical toolbox to investigate the language of dissent mentioned earlier and his analysis applies to most post-1968 protest events. This brief text bears witness of the extent to which May 1968 may be considered a matrix and this is on a global scale. Roland Barthes questions “modes of writing” the event while also stressing that “la conjonction polygraphique constitue peut-être son originalité historique.”4 (“polygraphic conjunction forms, perhaps, its historical originality”). Barthes’s text lays the groundwork allowing us to better grasp the specific characteristics of both the Parisian May and the Quebec Spring. He identifies three modes of writing particular to May 1968: speech, symbol, and violence. According to the semiologist, the first of these refers to the immediacy and spontaneity of the media coverage, so much so that “le transistor devient l’appendice corporel, la prothèse auditive, le nouvel organe

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science-fictionnel de certains manifestants, mais encore, par la compression du temps le retentissement immédiat de l’acte, elle [la parole, TO] infléchissait, modifiait l’évènement, en un mot, l’écrivait: fusion du signe et de son écoute.”5 In addition, we must also consider the fact that speech was everywhere, functioning as “la parole conquise” or “captured speech,” for a generation deemed by Barthes to be “une génération frustrée de parole” or “a generation frustrated by speech,” a generation which, according to Michel de Certeau’s arresting image, “pris la parole comme les révolutionnaires de 1789 ont pris la Bastille”6 “took speech like the revolutionaries took the Bastille in 1789.” The second mode of writing Barthes identifies is the Symbol: Même avatar symbolique pour la barricade: symbole elle-même, dès avant que la première fût construite, de Paris révolutionnaire, et elle-même lieu d’investissement de tout un réseau d’autres symboles, celui de la propriété, par exemple, loge désormais pour les Français, à ce qu’il est apparu, beaucoup plus dans l’auto que dans la maison. D’autres symboles ont été mobilisés: le monument (Bourse, Odéon), la manifestation, l’occupation, le vêtement et bien entendu, le langage.7

The symbol can thus be seen both as part of a dense historical grouping, and as part of a network of significations with which it establishes semiological relations. It is this symbolic dimension that provides us with a starting point for our analysis here. We will examine both its historical importance and the network of significations surrounding it. However, before turning to May 1968 in Quebec, I will briefly touch upon what Montreal represented in the 1960s. As Sean Mills notes in his study The Empire within: Post-colonial thought and Political Activism in Sixties Montreal, Montreal, as a result of its unique sociohistorical makeup, became a laboratory for postcolonial practices and theories: “In reality the growing unrest in Montreal was the result of a growing movement of unrest that had begun years earlier. But this movement grew not only out of local conditions and circumstances; it was also forged with a deep knowledge of political, intellectual, and social developments around the world, and through an engagement with a global language of dissent.”8 A meeting point for the many anticolonial movements of the 1950s and 1960s, the fact that Kourouma’s great novel Le Soleil des indépendances (The Suns of Independence) was published in Quebec before being published in France two years later is far from anecdotal, and indeed the separatist movements there were subject to influence from two sides. They rapidly adopted the anticolonial rhetoric of newly independent states, and, due to their geographical proximity, also appropriated for themselves the full range of ideas coming out of the United States at the time, notably

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from the student protests at Berkeley and the African American civil rights movement. Jacques Vallières’s Nègres blancs d’Amérique, founding text of the separatist movement, demonstrates this double influence. Its title evokes the profound influence of the American civil rights movement. For Vallières, the black population of Canada was the francophone workers: impoverished, marginalized, devoid of capital—both symbolic and actual. The opening of the text gives a flavor of its tone: Être un nègre, ce n’est pas être un homme en Amérique, mais être l’esclave de quelqu’un. Pour le riche Blanc de l’Amérique yankee, le nègre est un soushomme. Même les pauvres Blancs considèrent le nègre comme inférieur à eux. [. . .] Très souvent, ils ne se doutent pas qu’ils sont, eux aussi, des nègres, des esclaves, des nègres blancs. Le racisme blanc leur cache la réalité, en leur donnant l’occasion de mépriser un inférieur, de l’écraser mentalement, ou de le prendre en pitié. Mais les pauvres Blancs qui méprisent ainsi le Noir sont doublement nègres, car ils sont victimes d’une aliénation de plus, le racisme qui, loin de les libérer, les emprisonne dans un filet de haine [. . .].9

It was after reading Vallières’s text (in May 1968, while on the other side of the Atlantic the Parisian students were unleashing their anger), that Michèle Lalonde wrote her most famous poem, Speak white, which was performed in public at a fundraising event for political prisoners of the separatist movement.10 The poem, imbued with the postcolonial spirit mentioned above, pits an “us” (the francophone oppressed) against a “them” (the privileged English-speaking community), and includes the suffering of the Quebecois workers within Frantz Fanon’s broader term “the wretched of the earth.” The poem’s tone leaves little room for ambiguity: Speak white il est si beau de vous entendre parler de Paradise Lost ou du profil gracieux et anonyme qui tremble dans les sonnets de Shakespeare nous sommes un peuple inculte et bègue mais ne sommes pas sourds au génie d’une langue parlez avec l’accent de Milton et Byron et Shelley et Keats speak white [. . .] qu’on vous entende de Saint-Henri à Saint-Domingue oui quelle admirable langue

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pour embaucher donner des ordres fixer l’heure de la mort à l’ouvrage et de la pause qui rafraîchit et ravigote le dollar speak white tell us that God is a great big shot and that we’re paid to trust him speak white parlez-nous production profits et pourcentages speak white c’est une langue riche pour acheter mais pour se vendre mais pour se vendre à perte d’âme mais pour se vendre11

Was there a May 1968 in Quebec? I am convinced that there was not one, but several May 1968s in Quebec. The Quiet Revolution, which began with the death of Maurice Duplessis and the election of Lesage in 1960, reinforced the importance of a Quebecois identity and in particular its language. At the same time, Quebec set out to democratize access to education via the creation of the CEGEP, institutions which straddled secondary and higher education. Created in 1967, and one of the cornerstones of the Quiet Revolution, this was where the students’ dissatisfaction was focused in 1968. The Beaux-Arts students soon joined the battle and the red flag flew over Montreal’s Ecole des Beaux-Arts. The separatist movement, still divided at that time, was legitimized and reinforced by Général de Gaulle’s “Vive le Québec libre” speech in June 1967. The linguistic-cultural question was pushed to the forefront on June 24, 1968, the night before the federal election, on St Jean the Baptist Day, during which the presence of Pierre-Elliott Trudeau, well-known enemy of separatism, was considered to be a provocation. Cars were torched and hundreds of demonstrators were arrested by the police.12 Paradoxically, this event would usher in a new way to celebrate Quebec’s National Day: The day after the riots there had been 292 arrests including 81 minors, the number of injured stood at 123 including 42 police officers, 12 police cars had been torched, six horses injured and Claude-Jean de Virieux, journalist for RadioCanada, had been suspended for having dared to show his indignation on air and described the event as “Monday of the truncheon.” Neither Pierre-Elliott Trudeau, elected Prime Minister of Canada the next day, nor Pierre Bourgault ever showed the slightest remorse for the riot of June 24, 1968.13

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The Quebecois events must be seen in the context of a much longer timeframe than those which took place in Paris, beginning with de Gaulle’s speech in 1967, and finishing with the crisis of October 1970. Another significant moment in this wave of social dissent was Opération McGill français, a sequence of demonstrations in 1969 which aimed to “Frenchify” the great English-speaking University, considered to be a bastion of Anglophone privilege. Opération McGill français represents an important step in the struggle inasmuch as the link between power, language and imperialism was being renegotiated and the impact of the question of education became clear, as Sean Mills puts it: Opération McGill français represented an important moment in the development of oppositional politics in Montreal. It was the first in a series of mass demonstrations that made the claim that cultural deprivation could only be reversed if the root problems of capitalism and imperialism were opposed. Or, to put it another way, if an alternative North American society based on social justice and human dignity was to be built, the cultural and economic power of the English language was to be overcome.14

Very little work has been done on the postcolonial dimension of May 1968 in Paris. Be this as it may, May 1968 indisputably has colonial origins—an area which has seen very little research, with the exception of that of Nils Andersson, which highlights the significant array of publications on decolonization that form fertile ground for protest movements across the globe.15 Todd Shepard explores the postcolonial reach of May 1968 as apparent in certain far right publications.16 While it is indisputable that the postcolonial thinking that began during the Algerian War created fertile ground for protest in 1968, its underlying causes do seem to be solely French issues: badly managed expansion in the education sector, a huge discrepancy between Gaullist forms of political representation and new ways of protesting, and a general sense of boredom.17 Given the intensity of the debate surrounding decolonization in Quebec, the influence of the founding texts of anticolonialism (especially Fanon) goes without saying. Building on this postcolonial dimension, semantic similarities begin to appear centering on the idea of the “matraque”—the truncheon. The truncheon came into the French language via the Arabic, designating a relatively short baton which the Bedouins used when riding camels. Quickly adopted by the police as an instrument of maintaining public order, the truncheon became omnipresent in French public discourse and rapidly transformed into a synecdoche for police violence. In fact, in the French context, the truncheon revealed police violence inherited from the Algerian

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War, which at that time had been over for only six years. As Kristin Ross notes in her analysis of accounts of political awakening in Mai 68 and its Afterlives, it was the direct experience of police brutality, perceived as unjust and outrageous, which propelled young people to ally themselves with the student movement. Indeed young people who were not directly involved in the students’ movement stated that: It was an excellent lesson on the nature of the State that maintains itself through the force of a matraque: it was direct education. I saw street battles up close, I saw cops break people’s heads open. When you see cops charge, it marks you for the rest of your life. For me, May ‘68 started when I was hit with a police club (matraqué) walking out of an apartment. It was one of the first demos in the Latin Quarter. The cops were charging. I had heard about what was going on out at Nanterre, but that was still very far away for me.18

In the context of student protest, I was therefore extremely surprised to notice that in the discourse established between May and June 2012, the term “matraque” appeared several times in Quebec, again used to talk about violence carried out by the forces of law and order and deemed to be inappropriate. Nonetheless, we should keep in mind that in a Quebecois context the term also recalls two major events in the struggle for independence during the 1960s: Saturday of the truncheon in 1964 during a visit of her Royal Highness to Canada, and St Jean the Baptist Day in 1968, which has been previously discussed. The term therefore seems profoundly rooted in the collective consciousness, where it means capitalist violence complicit with Anglophone power. During an event called “We” (a sort of rerun of the concept of the Night of Poetry in 1970), Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, leader of the 2012 student movement, explains: “Depuis 54 jours, je suis en grève. Depuis 54 jours, je suis en lutte. 54 jours de grève, 54 jours de matraques, de gaz, de poivre, moi, mes amis, mes camarades, les étudiantes et étudiants du Québec.”19 As in 1968, the truncheon became the synecdoche for inappropriate police violence. Indeed, in the month of May, the government would bring in a law significantly limiting civil liberties, and this “Bill 78” would immediately be nicknamed the “truncheon law” by its opponents. I am certain that there is a comparative semantic study to be done here, which should take into account the postcolonial significance of the term and would reveal the use of this word within the Alger—Paris—Montreal triangle. There is another striking parallel: the importance of popular music as a means of protest.20 While the soundtrack to May 1968 was The Rolling Stones and their Sympathy for the devil in retrospect (with, as a bonus, a

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film which would popularize the aesthetic of May 1968, although both were released at the end of 1968), there were also French songs, often aired live. In his song, La Cavalerie (The Cavalry), Julien Clerc invited young people to “abolish boredom”; for Renaud, the Général’s France was a whore who had to die; Jacques Higelin took his piano to the Place de la Sorbonne where he played continuously. As for Sheila, in a way she represented the voice of the silent majority in her song Petite Fille de Français moyen (Average Frenchman’s Daughter). Undoubtedly, we should also remember the song which beat all sales records in 1968 and then fell into oblivion: Riquita by Georgette Plana. On the other side of the Atlantic more than forty years later, music also played an essential part in “creating a generation,” a subject to which we will later return. The songs of Yann Perreau, notably Le Bruit des bottes (The Sound of Boots), but also the hymn of the French left, On lâche rien (No backing down) by HK et les Saltimbanks were played widely on social media, as well as about thirty other less well-known songs, in particular those sung by the strike choir. In addition, on both sides of the Atlantic there was an astonishingly rapid canonization of events. Barely a few weeks after the end of the events, publications of varying quality appeared, attempting to analyze the historical significance of what had occurred. Edgar Morin, Georges Lefort and Cornelius Castoriadis would devote a text to the events, Mai 68 La Brèche, which aimed to understand them in the face of the return to normal life which threatened the survival of this moment of pure freedom. Claude Lefort bluntly admitted: “‘Le désordre nouveau’ a été écrit à la hâte, sous le coup de l’événement, comme les autres essais de La Brèche. Ce texte porte trace d’une passion susceptible d’étonner les lecteurs qui le découvriront de nos jours. Je ne la renie pas, mais juge excessive ma confiance en l’avenir.”21 The immediate post-1968 also saw the publication of La Prise de parole by Michel de Certeau, which has now been republished many times. This text is precious both as an account of the events, but also because it questions the process of the canonization of events in the press from July 1968 onward. Notably, De Certeau insists on the collective and therapeutic function of the text: En mai le silence des uns combinait avec la prise de parole des autres, rapport qui s’est inversé en juin. Signe quasi-physique d’un partage entre des options fondamentales, quelquefois insoupçonnées jusque-là et soudain révélées, qui divisaient dans leur épaisseur les mots eux-mêmes et rangeaient un vocabulaire apparemment identique sous des significations devenues incommunicables. L’irruption de la parole créait alors des différences irréductibles qui lézardaient le réseau continu des phrases et des idées. L’écrit semble vouloir correspondre à la volonté de recouvrir ou de surmonter ces béances. Il est texte, tissu. Il recoud. Il tend à combler, mais dans le silence de la lecture, de la solitude et du loisir,

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la distance qu’avait dévoilée, entre gens de même parti ou de même conviction, entre collègues de même “idées” ou de même secteur, la parole indissociable d’un “face-à-face.”22

In the same way, many publications which attempted to sum up the Quebec Spring appeared immediately “after 2012.” They include the beautiful collective work Je me souviendrai (I will remember), containing comic strips, poems, and all kinds of literary texts, which sought to hold on to the wind of freedom which blew through Quebec in 2012. Photographs with radical texts written by the participants of the student and general mass movement would be published in the collection Carré rouge (Red Square) by Jacques Nadeau. Sophie Yanow, an American student who was in Montreal during the protests, created a graphic novel entitled La guerre des rues et des maisons (War of Streets and Houses). Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois retraced the events of spring 2012 in his essay, Tenir tête (In Defiance).23 It is clear that on both sides of the Atlantic there was an urgent desire not just to take part in a historic movement, but to make that movement last. A rebellion should be beautiful, it should deploy a clean and immediately recognizable aesthetic; the beauty of rebellious speech achieved through image and verb. During both events, a multitude of graphic texts were produced: posters, leaflets, all kinds of banners. The similarities between the aesthetic used by the Quebecois and French posters are striking; indeed l’Ecole de la Montagne Rouge was largely inspired by the aesthetic of 1968. A brief examination of the literary aesthetic used in Quebec in 2012 reveals a very singular dynamic, within which can be found, in my opinion, a whole host of Quebecois particularities. There is also a verbal aesthetic, which, in the Parisian context, is expressed through poésie de circonstance, or poetry which is born in the urgency of the moment. In the Quebecois context, I was struck by the reappropriation of poetic speech, notably the omnipresence of certain poems by Gaston Miron and Emile Nelligan (at least on an aesthetic level, rather less on a strictly literary level). One of the most-watched videos of the Quebec Spring is a reappropriation of the poem Speak white, which, as a result of the symbolic red square, became Speak red. The text is structured in exactly the same way as Michèle Lalonde’s original: Speak red Parlons d’éducation et de justice sociale Parlons du rapport Parent ou de la Révolution tranquille des luttes de nos prédécesseurs pour des acquis aujourd’hui balayés Parlons de la déroute de notre gouvernement nous sommes une génération sacrifiée mais avide de savoir et d’une société plus juste où l’éducation n’est pas un luxe et quand vous really speak red quand vous get down in the streets

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pour parler de vos idéaux et parler d’égalité des chances et du Québec que vous voulez vôtre un peu plus fort alors speak red haussez vos voix de citoyens de second-ordre. Ils sont un peu durs d’oreille ils vivent trop près des patronats et n’entendent que notre souffle depuis leur tour d’ivoire speak red and loud qu’on vous entende de Montréal à la Côte-Nord usez de votre admirable langue pour revendiquer demander des comptes refuser qu’on vous ignore pour des histoires de chiffres et de lunettes cassées24

Another striking element is the ubiquity of Gaston Miron’s poem, La route que nous suivons (The Road we Follow). Great poet of the Révolution tranquille, bard of the desire for independence, this politically engaged poet is profoundly anchored in the life of the city, as André Brochu puts it: C’est, en somme, la question du devoir du militant, de ses obligations éthiques et communautaires, confrontées à son amour en lequel s’affirment d’abord ses aspirations individuelles, qui est ici posée et qui rappelle peut-être, très adouci, le fameux dilemme entre l’amour et l’honneur cher à l’héroïsme cornélien. Sans remonter aussi loin, on peut marquer ce que comporte de romanesque la situation énoncée par le poète militant, la situation de la militance elle-même dans un contexte national, historique, comme le nôtre. Il faut en effet se souvenir que le “combat devenu total,” qui désigne le combat de libération nationale, n’a jamais rien eu de proprement militaire, au Québec et que le militant mironien, avec ses “camarades,” ne prend pas part à une guérilla—de là le côté excessif et faux, pour ne pas dire fictif, des soldats d’octobre 1970, qui prenaient au mot la révolution québécoise. Peut-on dire que le poème de Miron appelle implicitement une radicalisation et une militarisation du combat ? Qu’il appelle l’instauration d’un ordre nouveau, où se poseraient les vrais problèmes de la révolution comme dans les grands romans de notre époque ? En tout cas, on ne peut lire les poèmes “militants” de Miron sans ressentir comme virtuelle la guerre qu’ils évoquent.25

The use and appropriation of Quebec’s literary heritage in the context of a protest movement is situated at the intersection of two parallel movements. Indeed, if we compare the level of tuition fees in Quebec with those of the rest of Canada and the United States, they are certainly relatively modest. Why, then, is the question of access to higher education seen to be the Achilles heel of the Quebecois education system? To better appreciate the significance of this question, we must briefly go back to Canada at its inception. Following the uprising of the Patriots in 1837–1838, the English crown sponsored a report bearing its author’s name—the Durham Report—proposing a suite of solutions to the Lower Canada crisis: the forced Anglicization

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of the Quebecois, the reunification of the two Canadas, as well as certain social measures. Lord Durham analyzes the cultural malaise of the FrancoQuebecois in the following way: There can hardly be conceived a nationality more destitute of all that can invigorate and elevate a people, than that which is exhibited by the descendants of the French in Lower Canada, owing to their retaining their peculiar language and manners. They are a people with no history, and no literature. The literature of England is written in a language which is not theirs; and the only literature which their language renders familiar to them, is that of a nation from which they have been separated by eighty years of a foreign rule, and still more by those changes which the Revolution and its consequences have wrought in the whole political, moral and social state of France. Yet it is on a people whom recent history, manners and modes of thought, so entirely separate from them, that the French Canadians are wholly dependent for almost all the instruction and amusement derived from books; it is on this essentially foreign literature, which is conversant about events, opinions and habits of life, perfectly strange and unintelligible to them, that they are compelled to be dependent.26

French Canadians are therefore confronted by acute cultural alienation; rarely in a position to enjoy English literature, they only have access to FrancoFrench literature, which as a result of the realities of geography, cannot reflect their experience. There is a lot to be said about the false perception upon which such a judgment rests. The only phrase in this report which people remember (and this says a great deal about the extent of cultural insecurity suffered by French Canadians) is: “people with no history, and no literature.” With a few exceptions—Louis Hémon’s Maire Chapdelaine (a work actually written by a Frenchman), Félix-Antoine Savard’s Menaud, maître-draveur, and Nelligan’s poems—Quebecois literature has not really gained any further visibility since the time of the Révolution tranquille. Nevertheless, it is possible to consider its mere existence to be a symbolic victory; due to the negation of Quebecois culture, even the survival of a form of a poetry can be considered a triumph over the act of forgetting and assimilation. This victory can clearly be seen in the literary texts variously used during the protest movements of Spring 2012; texts which are, moreover, unifying, for example, “the fierce beasts of hope,” a line taken from the great poem La route que nous suivons in the collection L’homme rapaillé.27 The line “we are beasts fierce with hope” was quoted by Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois in his speech during the event We in Montreal, while one of the iconic images of the movement shows young female students baring their breasts and brandishing a sign which reads “We are beasts fierce with hope.”

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This, then, is where the particularity of the Quebecois events becomes apparent. Indeed, although the two events are marked by significant poetic aspects, in the Quebecois context the frame of reference clearly remains largely Quebecois. Taking speech, as Roland Barthes and Michel de Certeau said, must be seen in the context of a social group taking speech, a group which has been refused that right for centuries. On the subject of the idea of generation, another difference emerges. CREATING A GENERATION? In his text “Génération” published in Les Lieux de mémoire (Realms of Memory), Pierre Nora insists on the importance of May 1968 in a world which, stripped of its historiographical landmarks, adopts new ones to establish what we could call a historical consciousness. The historian affirms that: L’effacement du relais historiographique ne contribue qu’à souligner dans la dynamique générationnelle de 1968 et le contenu purement symbolique que revêt alors l’expression, l’aboutissement d’un vaste cycle historique, commencé précisément à la Révolution qui se clôt à ce moment-là. C’est l’émergence d’une génération à l’état pur, intransitif qui a fait apparaître la souveraineté opératoire et rétrospective de la notion, la constituant ainsi, d’entrée de jeu et en un sens premier, tout temporel, en lieu de mémoire.28

Nora continues his argument on the concept of generation by insisting on the fact that this is first and foremost about the decline of a set of connections according to which “the man before” understood himself: family, village, trade. Freed from these ties, postmodern man can still then be part of something, feel a sense of belonging. Nora insists strongly on the fact that the emergence of one-upmanship between generations since 1968 is the result of the referential vacuity of a human being no longer rooted in memory. Generation is an idea with which one identifies when all other possible identifications have disappeared. We are reminded of what it means to faire génération, to create a generation, each time the founding event is commemorated: the permanence of May 1968 with its countless commemorative festivities, is indeed proof that once a generation has acquired discursive hegemony; its members celebrate the changes in society for which they consider themselves to have been responsible. I do not believe that the Quebec Spring is an event that the province will commemorate in the same systematic manner, but perhaps history will prove differently. As a matter of fact, those involved in the movement were students who attended the demonstrations regularly, when in France, at the peak of the crisis millions of workers were on strike. In

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France, the 1970s were marked by a change in hegemonic discourse and the country underwent profound changes in terms of abortion, divorce, women’s rights. No such wave of modernization was palpable in Quebec and the timid attempts put into place by Pauline Maurois when the Parti Québécois briefly returned into power in 2012 remained unfruitful. It could be argued that this feeling of failure will prevail, at least for some years.29 At the end of the 1960s and 1970s, although the same ideology prevailed in both places, it had opposite effects in France and in Quebec. While the Parisian May 1968 effectively favored the rights of the individual over those of the group, the Quebecois took the courageous decision—and one that was necessary to their survival as a distinct society—to disregard the rights of the individual. By passing the Charter of the French Language, which later became Bill 101, they acted on their desire to survive as a distinct society, even if it came at the price of limiting the linguistic freedom of each individual. In both cases, in Paris and in Montreal, this period was considered to be enormously liberating. Bizarrely and doubtless paradoxically, we are today experiencing the end of a cycle that began with May 1968. The effects of May 1968 in France and in Quebec are at once both similar and yet different. While young Quebecois were demonstrating against the rise in tuition fees in 2012, young French people, for the most part Catholic, were expressing their disagreement with the draft bill giving couples of the same sex the right to marry. Bruno Parreau has quite rightly shown the influence of May 1968 on the Manif pour Tous movement, particularly evident in its posters.30 Effectively, the aesthetic parallels between the 1968 and the 2012/2013 protests are both obvious and deliberate. La Manif pour Tous, also called the Republican Spring by some, is above all emblematic of the takeover of the Republican right by Catholic movements radicalized since the 1990s. Moreover, this movement makes use of numerous literary references, with its Antingones and its Gavroches. La Manif pour Tous represents the beginning of the end of a Gaullist and secular right-wing in France; in just a few short years, the liberal elements have come together in their vast majority to form the centrist La République en Marche. Across the Atlantic, we can see a similar change: while the classic battles of the 1960s opposed federalists and nationalists, this distinction will be gone by the time of the student conflict of 2012. The lines of convergence now follow more of an “anti-authoritarian and participative left” versus a “neo-liberal right,” incarnated by Prime Minister Jean Charest, and leading to a certain normalization of the Quebecois political landscape. Finally, there are two similarities which seem to be simply fortuitous, but may perhaps be more than that. May 1968 took place during exceptional spring weather, as did the Quebec Spring in 2012. The hope that spring brings with it seems to encourage the desire for revolution. Furthermore, it is difficult not to notice the resemblance between the leaders of both movements:

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Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois looks remarkably like a young Daniel Cohn-Bendit, and both of them chose political careers—Cohn-Bendit with the German Green Party, Nadeau-Dubois in the creation of the left-wing Québec Solidaire, fairly lukewarm when it comes to protecting the French language and to fighting for independence.

CONCLUSION A comparative study of 1968 makes the postcolonial dimension of the events clear. In the French context, it can be seen in the rejection of immobilism and political violence, both inherited from the Algerian War. On the Canadian side, it is the product of the 1960s, during which the city of Montreal in particular was a laboratory of postcolonialism. Although different, as we have seen, these situations present us with the same issues crystallizing around the notion of the truncheon, symbol of excessive police violence. Indeed, a number of common aspects seem to justify a comparison between the two events: popular culture, canonization, postcolonial semantics. While both events have what is effectively poetic significance, the Quebecois events refer very pointedly to Quebecois literary heritage and are a delayed response to the Durham Report, which presented the Quebecois as a people with no history and no literature. The real difference, then, lies in a strong sense of vulnerability and cultural insecurity on the part of the Quebecois students. Moreover, the symbols of May have been used widely, both on the right and the left. May 1968 was both a political and an aesthetic event. Its aesthetic dimension is still omnipresent, the political claims and the general strike in France paralyzing the country for weeks have been increasingly enubilated over the last fifty years. Therefore, it can be argued that the signs, symbols, slogans, posters, when taken out of their radical context, become empty containers which can then, quite easily, be filled with a new content. This is what happened when the French supermarketchain Carrefour used a 1968-inspired poster to fight against “la vie chère,” the high cost of living. Similarly, if we reduce the events of 1968 to mass protests and an underpinning “us against the establishment” pattern, it is quite simple to adapt the aesthetics to an ideological context which is, in the context of the Manif pour tous, at the antipode of what the students in 1968 had fought for. It is this elasticity which creates numerous global afterlives of 1968—but it also reminds us of the importance of a critical discourse. The future will show how the Quebec spring will be remembered.

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NOTES 1. Frédéric Jullien, “Le printemps érable comme choc idéologique,” Cultures et conflits 87 (automne 2012), 152–159. 2. Stéphane Baillargeon, “Mai 68 en gros,” Le Devoir, 9 juin, 2012, https​:/​/ww​​w​ .led​​evoir​​.com/​​socie​​te​/ed​​ucati​​on​/35​​2083/​​mai​​-6​​8​-en-​​gros;​ “Le ‘mai 68’ de Québec et de Montréal,” Le Point, mai 24, 2012. 3. “The profile of a student in May 1968 and that of a student today are very different. What the future looks like for them, their probable prospects, are completely different. Today, what is at stake is the preservation of a benefit judged to be reasonable . . . In the 1960s, there was a socio-revolutionary context. Young people were reading authors who encouraged them to revolutionize the family, authority, work, school, sexuality. This is no longer the case.” “Mai 68, en gros,” Le Devoir, juin 9, 2012. 4. Roland Barthes, «L’Écriture de l’événement» Œuvres complètes, t.3, 1968– 1971, 46. 5. Barthes, “L’Écriture de l’événement” 47. “the transistor became the bodily appendage, the auditory prosthesis, the new science-fiction organ of certain demonstrators, but even, by the compression of time, by the immediate resonance of the act, it (speech, TO) inflected, modified the event; in short, wrote it: fusion of the sign and its hearing.” (“Writing the Event” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 150. 6. Michel de Certeau, La Prise de parole et autres écrits politiques (Paris: Seuil, 1994), 71. 7. Barthes, “L’Écriture de l’événement” 47. “The same symbolic avatar for the barricade: itself the symbol of revolutionary Paris, and itself a significant site of an entire network of other symbols . . . that of property, for example, henceforth lodged, for the French, that it appeared much more in the car than in the house. Other symbols were mobilized: monument (Bourse, Odéon), demonstration, occupation, garment, and of course, language . . .” (Barthes, “Writing the Event,” 152). 8. Sean Mills, The Empire within: Postcolonial thought and Political Activism in Sixties Montreal (Montréal: McGill UP, 2010), 61. 9. Pierre Vallières, Nègres blancs d‘Amérique (Montréal: typo, 1994 [1968], 61). “To be a ‘nigger’ in America is not to be a man but someone’s slave. For the rich white man of Yankee America, the nigger is a sub-man. Even the poor whites consider the nigger their inferior . . . Very often they do not even suspect that they too are niggers, slaves, ‘white niggers.’ White racism hides the reality from them by giving them the opportunity to despise an inferior, to crush him mentally or to pity him. But the poor whites who despise the black man are doubly niggers, for they are victims of one more form of alienation—racism—which far from liberating them, imprisons them in a net of hate [. . .]” (White Niggers of America, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 21. 10. For a sense of the enormous emotional power of the poem as read by its author, I recommend this recording, which dates from the Night of Poetry in 1970: https​:/​/ww​​ w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=0hs​​ifsVi​​​2po​&t​​=44s

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11. Michèle Lalonde, Speak white (Montréal; L’Hexagone, 1974), 4. Speak white It sounds so good when you Speak of Paradise Lost And of the gracious and anonymous profile that trembles In Shakespeare’s sonnets We’re an uncultured, stammering race But we are not deaf to the genius of a language Speak with the accent of Milton and Byron and Shelley and Keats Speak white . . . So that we can hear you From St-Henri to St-Domingue What an admirable tongue For hiring Giving orders Setting the time for working yourself to death And for the pause which refreshes And invigorates the dollar Speak white Tell us that God is a great big shot And that we’re paid to trust him Speak white Talk to us about production profits and percentages Speak white It’s a rich language For buying But for selling But for selling your soul But for selling out. (trans. Albert Herring, https​:/​/um​​aine.​​edu​/t​​eachi​​ngcan​​ada​/ w​​p​-con​​tent/​​uploa​​ds​/si​​tes​/1​​76​/20​​15​/06​​/​1​-Sp​​eak​-W​​hitee​​n​.pdf​) 12. Pierre Godin, La poudrière linguistique (Montréal, Boréal, 1990), 52–58. Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Mémoires politiques (Montréal, Le jour, 1993), 100. 13. Jean-Claude Germain, “L’émeute qui a transformé la Saint-Jean Baptiste en fête nationale,” Le Devoir, 21 juin, 2003. 14. Mills, The Empire within, 56. 15. Nils Andersson, Mémoire éclatée (Lausanne: Éditions d’en bas, 2016), 544. 16. Todd Shepard, “L’extrême droite et” Mai 68, Clio. Histoire‚ femmes et sociétés [En ligne], 29|2009, mis en ligne le 11 juin 2009, consulté le 30 avril 2019. 17. “La France s’ennuie” or “France is bored” was originally the title of a Le Monde article. The phrase has now become emblematic: Pierre Viansson-Ponté, “Quand la France s’ennuie,” Le Monde, mars 15, 1968. 18. Kristin Ross, Mai 68 and its Afterlives (University of Chicago Press, 2002), 27–28.

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19. “For 54 days, I have been on strike. For 54 days, I have been fighting. 54 days of strike, 54 days of truncheons, tear gas, pepper gas, me, my friends, my comrades, the students of Quebec.” https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=EdQ​​vqsEY​​​BO4​&t​​=58s 20. On this topic, see my contribution given at the “Mai 68. Protest—Provokation— Pop” colloquium at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany, November 2018: “Mai 68 in der französischen Popmusik—On abolira l’ennui” 21. “The new disorder” was written hastily, just after the event, like the other essays in La Brèche. This text shows a passion which is likely to surprise today’s readers. I certainly don’t disown it, but I do judge my confidence in the future to be excessive.” Claude Lefort, «Mai 68. Relecture (1988)», Edgar Morin/Claude Lefort/ Cornelius Castoriadis, Mai 68.La Bréche suivi de Vingt ans après (Paris: Fayard, 2018), 274. 22. de Certeau, La Prise de parole, 79. In May, some were silent and others took speech, a situation which was reversed in June. It was an almost physical sign of the division in fundamental choices, which had been sometimes unexpected until that point and were suddenly revealed, and which, as a result of their importance, divided words themselves and pushed aside an apparently identical vocabulary under significations which had become uncommunicable. The irruption of speech thus created insurmountable differences that cracked the endless network of phrases and ideas. What is written appears to want to cover up or overcome these yawning gaps. It is text, material. It sews things together. It tries to fill the gap, but in the silence of reading, in solitude and in leisure time, distance was revealed, between people of the same party or of the same conviction, between colleagues with the same “ideas” or from the same area, and speech became indissociable from confrontation. 23. Collectif, Je me souviendrai. Mouvement social au Québec (Antony: La Boîte à bulles, 2012). Jacques Nadeau, Carré rouge (Montréal: Fides, 2012), Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, Tenir tête (Montréal: Lux éditeurs, 2013), Sophie Yanow, La guerre des rues et des maisons (Montréal, La Boîte à bulles, 2013). 24. https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=zkb​​BeQ21​​​d1c​&t​​=54s Speak red We speak of education and social justice We speak of le rapport Parent and of la Révolution tranquille (the Quiet Revolution) the struggles of our predecessors or the achievements now being swept away We speak of the failures of our government we are a generation sacrificed but hungry for knowledge and a more just society where education is no luxury and where you really speak red when you get down in the streets To speak of your ideals

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and speak of equity of opportunity and the Québec you would like to be yours a little louder then, speak red raise your second-class citizen’s voice they’re a little hard of hearing and live a little too close to the management and hear nothing but our breath from their ivory tower Speak red and loud to be heard from Montreal to the Côte-Nord use your extraordinary language to claim to demand the final tally to refuse to be ignored in favour of stories about numbers and broken glasses tr. Amy Mm https​:/​/tr​​ansla​​tingt​​hepri​​ntemp​​serab​​le​.tu​​mblr.​​com​/p​​ost​/2​​36324​​03200​​/spea​​k​ -red​​-by​-c​​ather​​ine​-c​​%C3​%B​​4t​%C​3​​%A9​-o​​stigu​​y​-tra​​nslat​​ed 25. “In short, it is a question of what a radical should do, their ethical and community obligations, when confronted by a love in which first their individual aspirations are affirmed, a question which is asked and which reminds us, perhaps, in a milder form, of the famous dilemma between love and honour, so beloved of Cornelian heroism. Without going so far back, there is something romanesque about the situation of the militant poet, the experience of militancy itself, in a historical and national context like ours. We have to remember that the ‘total combat,’ which is the national fight for liberation, was never truly military in Quebec and that the Mironien militant and his ‘comrades’ are not taking part in a guerrilla war—thus, there was a misleadingly excessive and perhaps fictional side to the soldiers in October 1970, who took the Quebecois revolution literally. Can we say that Miron’s poem implicitly calls for the radicalisation and militarisation of the fight? Is he calling for the establishment of a new order, where we could face the real problems of a revolution, as in the great novels of our time? In any case, one cannot read Miron’s ‘militant’ poems without feeling the war that they evoke to be virtual.” André Brochu, “Gaston Miron ou la contradiction illuminante—Jacques Rancourt—Hélène Dorion.” Voix et Images 36, no. 2:107 (hiver 2011), 36. 26. “Lord Durham’s Report on British North America,” Institute of Responsible Government, accessed March 6, 2020, https​:/​/ww​​w​.ior​​g​.ca/​​resso​​urce/​​lord-​​durha​​ms​ -re​​port-​​on​-br​​itish​​-no​rt​​h​-ame​​rica/​. 27. Gaston Miron, L’Homme rapaillé (Paris: Gallimard, 1999). 28. Pierre Nora, “La génération,” in Les Lieux de mémoire, t. III, 1, (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 932. “The elimination of the historian as intermediary only highlighted the generational dynamic of 1968 and the uniquely symbolic content attached at the time to expression, culminating a vast historical cycle that began with nothing less than

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the French Revolution and ended in the events of May. The emergence of a ‘generation’ in its pure, intransitive state revealed the sovereignty of the notion’s retrospective explanatory power, thereby constituting it, from its inception and in a primary, purely temporal sense, as a lieu de mémoire.” (Pierre Nora, “Generation,” Realms of Memory, Vol. 1, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Columbia University Press, 1996, p. 500) 29. Hubert Aquin, “L’Art de la défaite. Considérations stylistiques,” Liberté, vol 7, no. 1–2 (1965) 34–41. 30. Bruno Perreau, Queer theory. The French response (Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 2016).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Andersson, Nils. Mémoire éclatée. Lausanne: Éditions d’en bas, 2016. Baillargeon, Stéphane. “Mai 68 en gros,” Le Devoir, 9 juin, 2012, https​:/​/ww​​w​.led​​ evoir​​.com/​​socie​​te​/ed​​ucati​​on​/35​​2083/​​ma​i​-6​​8​-en-​​gros Barthes, Roland. “L’Écriture de l’événement” Œuvres complètes, t.3, 1968–1971, 46–51. “Writing the Event” in The Rustle of Language. Translated by Richard Howard. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Brochu, André. “Gaston Miron ou la contradiction illuminante—Jacques Rancourt— Hélène Dorion.” Voix et Images 36, no. 2:107 (hiver 2011): 160–165. Certeau, Michel de. La Prise de parole et autres écrits politiques. Paris: Seuil, 1994. Collectif, Je me souviendrai. Mouvement social au Québec. Antony: La Boîte à bulles, 2012. “Lord Durham’s Report on British North America,” Institute of Responsible Government, accessed March 6, 2020, https​:/​/ww​​w​.ior​​g​.ca/​​resso​​urce/​​lord-​​durha​​ms​ -re​​port-​​on​-br​​itish​​-no​rt​​h​-ame​​rica/​. Germain, Jean-Claude. “L’émeute qui a transformé la Saint-Jean Baptiste en fête nationale,” Le Devoir, 21 juin, 2003. Godin, Pierre. La poudrière linguistique. Montréal, Boréal, 1990. Jullien, Frédéric. “Le printemps érable comme choc idéologique,” Cultures et conflits 87 (automne 2012): 152–159. Lalonde, Michèle. Speak white. Montréal; L’Hexagone, 1974, 3–6. Lefort, Claude. “Mai 68. Relecture (1988),” Edgar Morin/Claude Lefort/Cornelius Castoriadis, Mai 68.La Bréche suivi de Vingt ans après. Paris: Fayard, 2018. Mills, Sean. The Empire within. Postcolonial thought and Political Activism in Sixties Montreal. Montréal: McGill UP, 2010. Miron, Gaston. L’Homme rapaillé. Paris: Gallimard, 1999. Nadeau, Jacques. Carré rouge. Montréal: Fides, 2012. Nadeau-Dubois, Gabriel. Tenir tête. Montréal: Lux éditeurs, 2013. Nora, Pierre. Les Lieux de mémoire, t. III, 1. Paris: Gallimard, 1996, 930–970. Perreau, Bruno. Queer theory. The French response. Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 2016. Ross, Kristin. Mai 68 and its Afterlives. University of Chicago Press, 2002.

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Shepard, Todd. “L’extrême droite et ‘Mai 68’,” Clio. Histoire‚ femmes et sociétés [En ligne], 29|2009, mis en ligne le 11 juin 2009, consulté le 30 avril 2019. Trudeau, Pierre Elliott. Mémoires politiques. Montréal, Le jour, 1993. Vallières, Pierre. Nègres blancs d‘Amérique. Montréal: typo, 1994 [1968]. White Niggers of America. Translated by Joan Pinkham. New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1971. Viansson-Ponté, Pierre. “Quand la France s’ennuie,” Le Monde, mars 15, 1968. Yanow, Sophie. La guerre des rues et des maisons. Montréal, La Boîte à bulles, 2013. https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=0hs​​ifsVi​​​2po​&t​​=44s https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=EdQ​​vqsEY​​​BO4​&t​​=58s https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=zkb​​BeQ21​​​d1c​&t​​=54s https​:/​/tr​​ansla​​tingt​​hepri​​ntemp​​serab​​le​.tu​​mblr.​​com​/p​​ost​/2​​36324​​03200​​/spea​​k​-red​​-by​-c​​ ather​​ine​-c​​%C3​%B​​4t​%C​3​​%A9​-o​​stigu​​y​-tra​​nslat​​ed

Chapter 3

Ghosts for the Present Countercultural Aesthetics and Postcoloniality for Contemporary Italy. The Work of Wu Ming 2 and Fare Ala Tenley Bick

In 2018, members of two different Italian collectives made a work of art. The first was Wu Ming 2 (a pseudonym for Giovanni Cattabriga), of the literary collective Wu Ming (Mandarin for “No Name” or “Anonymous”; est. 2000). The second was Palermo-based artistic collective Fare Ala (Luca Cinquemani, Andrea Di Gangi, and Roberto Romano; est. 2009). Together, they made an interventionist, multimedia, participatory project in Palermo, entitled Viva Menilicchi! (Long Live Menelik!) (Figure 3.1). The project referred to the late Ethiopian Emperor Menelik II (1844–1913), who famously defeated Italy in the Battle of Adwa in 1896, and thereby ended Italy’s first attempted colonial conquest of the country. More specifically, the project’s title reprised a historic anticolonial rallying cry, heralding the continued life of a long-deceased leader not through analepsis but through an insistence on the inextricable, if often disregarded, connectedness of that specific past to Italy’s present. But the project’s practices also connected it to another moment of contestation. This essay builds upon and departs from recent scholarship in Italian Studies by examining how this work by Wu Ming 2 and Fare Ala draws upon aesthetic forms of contestation associated with 1968. It specifically examines the work’s engagement of forms associated with the post-Marxist sociopolitical Italian Autonomia movement of the 1970s and its creative affiliates.1 In Viva Menilicchi!, Wu Ming 2 and Fare Ala employ antihierarchical collectivism, interventionist media experimentation, and creative revolutionary activities—including Autonomia’s “own forms of social 45

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Figure 3.1  Wu Ming 2 + Wu Ming Foundation in collaboration with Fare Ala, Viva Menilicchi! (2018). A screenshot of the video teaser (10 min. 21 secs., color, sound) shows paper party horns, known in Italian as lingue di menelicche (tongues of Menelik), scatter over the monument of Francesco Crispi (1905, 1923), Piazza Crispi, Palermo. Video teaser was shot and edited by Andrea Di Gangi. Reproduced with the permission of Wu Ming 2 and Fare Ala (Luca Cinquemani, Andrea Di Gangi, and Roberto Romano). Wu Ming 2 + Wu Ming Foundation in collaboration with Fare Ala, Viva Menilicchi! (2018), Manifesta 12, Il giardino planetario: Coltivare la Coesistenza (The Planetary Garden: Cultivating Coexistence), Palermo, curated by “creative mediators” Bregtje van der Haak, Andrés Jaque, Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli, and Mirjam Varadinis. Viva Menilicchi! was commissioned by Manifesta 12 with the support of Ammodo.

‘war-fair’,” as Sylvère Lotringer later put it.2 I argue this work constitutes a delayed artistic postcoloniality in Italy that has formed in response to revitalized neocolonial, racist, and xenophobic discourses. I also argue that the project’s connection to Autonomia and artistic tactics of the late 1960s and 1970s in Italy sheds light on the paradoxically Orientalist, primitivist, and neocolonial motifs of the avant-garde associated with 1968 and its ensuing events. In so doing, I consider the complex cultural politics of Italian postcolonial, interventionist practice today—and the stakes of these practices in light of Italy’s histories. Viva Menilicchi! was created as a commission for the twelfth edition of the European so-called “nomadic” contemporary art biennial Manifesta, held in Palermo in 2018. A major component of the project was an anticolonial urban walk, which included the participation of community members and organizations. For the majority of Manifesta 12, however, Viva Menilicchi! existed as an installation, comprising a large map of Palermo and videoviewing station, notebook, and stack of the artists’ “fanzines” that were

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published as part of the project, tucked in the rear wing of Palermo’s Teatro Garibaldi (Figures 3.2–3.3). All of this, along with an interactive digital mapping project, aimed to resurrect and “hunt . . . the ghosts of Italian colonialism” and to consider their ties to a haunted and haunting present (Figure 3.4).3 Mounted vertically on a table in Teatro Garibaldi, the map documented thirty-seven sites associated with the history of Italian colonialism and contemporary violence against migrants and immigrants in Palermo. By contrast, the video-viewing station was placed low on the ground, so that the map loomed above the viewer. The viewing station played a ten-minute “teaser” video on loop, including footage of a number of interventionist actions. The restrictive space assigned to Viva Menilicchi! in Manifesta 12 encouraged viewers to pay close attention to the project’s research-dense, informationheavy media.4 Below the map, reproductions of historical newspaper reports on Italy’s colonial invasions and losses covered the tabletop. The notebook invited visitors to contribute their own stories or knowledge to the project by writing inside its pages or emailing the artists. The reports focused most on the Battle of Adwa and later invasions of Ethiopia in the Second ItaloEthiopian War (1935–1936), a central component of Mussolini’s conquest

Figure 3.2  Wu Ming 2 + Wu Ming Foundation in collaboration with Fare Ala, Viva Menilicchi! (2018). Installation, Teatro Garibaldi, Manifesta 12, Palermo, June 16–November 4, 2018. Photo by Roberto Romano (Fare Ala), courtesy of Fare Ala. Reproduced with the permission of Wu Ming 2 and Fare Ala (Luca Cinquemani, Andrea Di Gangi, and Roberto Romano).

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Figure 3.3  Wu Ming 2 + Wu Ming Foundation in collaboration with Fare Ala, Viva Menilicchi! (2018). Installation, Teatro Garibaldi, Manifesta 12, Palermo, June 16–November 4, 2018. Photo by Roberto Romano (Fare Ala), courtesy of Fare Ala. Reproduced with the permission of Wu Ming 2 and Fare Ala (Luca Cinquemani, Andrea Di Gangi, and Roberto Romano).

of East Africa and establishment of Italy’s East African colonial state, Africa Orientale Italiana (1936–1941), which included most of Somalia, Eritrea, and Ethiopia.5 Online and in person, viewers encountered sites of Mussolini’s declarations of Italian empire, piazze named for colonial battles, and sites of racist violence in Palermo today. In these maps—digital, physical, and imaginary—maps of colonial and fascist pasts were overlaid and recoded with maps of these pasts’ living (and deadly) presents. The project also included many interventionist actions, such as the addition of documentary images and written accounts of Italian colonialism onto existing signage and advertising spaces in Palermo’s streets. The artists added images and placards, for example, to the Via Generale Vincenzo Magliocco, a street dedicated to the fascist general from Palermo who organized and directed the use of chemical weapons in Italy’s colonial conquest of Ethiopia (Figures 3.5–3.6). The namesake of another site, Piazza Vittorio Bottego, the celebrated explorer of East Africa, was newly explained by Viva Menilicchi! to be both “explorer and mass murderer.” The artists focused on Palermo with the hope to incite community desire to learn about one’s own home city.6 As part of this endeavor, the project title itself resurrected a late nineteenth-century anticolonial rallying cry in Palermitano dialect. In its original

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Figure 3.4  Wu Ming 2 + Wu Ming Foundation in collaboration with Fare Ala, interactive digital map project, Viva Menilicchi! (2018). This home page of the digital project reads: “Exploring the streets of Palermo, on the hunt for ghosts of colonialism.” See “Viva Menilicchi! Esplorando le vie di Palermo, a caccia dei fantasmi del colonialismo” (2018): https​:/​/up​​loads​​.knig​​htlab​​.com/​​story​​mapjs​​/aa75​​8891d​​750e6​​edbfb​​bcee3​​48247​​22a​/v​​iva​ -m​​enili​​​cchi/​​index​​.html​. Reproduced with the permission of Wu Ming 2 and Fare Ala (Luca Cinquemani, Andrea Di Gangi, and Roberto Romano).

incantation, the call was fueled by socialist and anarchist frustrations with the politics of the years following Italian Unification in liberal Italy. Viva Menilicchi! Abbasso Crispi! Abbasso l’Italia! (Long Live Menelik! Down with Crispi! Down with Italy!) was the full cry, as recalled in Cinquemani’s text in the fanzine. The cry targeted Italy’s then prime minister, the Sicilian Francesco Crispi (1818–1901). Crispi was a major figure in the process of Italian national unification known as the Risorgimento and in Italy’s early colonial project. Indeed, Crispi was prime minister during the occupation of Eritrea and invasions into Ethiopia, including the Battle of Adwa.7 By the mid-1890s, Menelik and Crispi, Ethiopia and Italy, had emerged as counterweights around a fulcrum of colonial conflict across the Mediterranean. Criticizing this legacy in 2018, Wu Ming 2 and Fare Ala’s Viva Menilicchi! made the following clear: fighting for the preservation of freedom and liberal sovereignty—in Italy, Ethiopia, or anywhere else—means, on the one hand, an abasement of Crispi, of ethnocracy, and nationalist imperial desire, and on the other, a celebration of Menelik, of antiracist activism, and anticolonial discourse.8 The historical title of their contemporary work positioned Palermo once again, in the present (or perhaps better, always still), as a site of anticolonial contestation against ethnocratic nationalist and fascist

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Figure 3.5  Viva Menilicchi! Included Interventions in Street Signs around Palermo. The Interventions on Via Generale [Vincenzo] Magliocco Featured Images of Victims of Italian Chemical Warfare, Organized by Magliocco in Ethiopia. The caption added to the street sign reads: “Organized and directed bombings with chemical weapons during the fascist invasion of Ethiopia.” Wu Ming 2 + Wu Ming Foundation in collaboration with Fare Ala, Viva Menilicchi! (2018), Manifesta 12, Palermo. Photo: Roberto Romano (Fare Ala), courtesy of Fare Ala. Reproduced with the permission of Wu Ming 2 and Fare Ala (Luca Cinquemani, Andrea Di Gangi, and Roberto Romano).

imperialism. In so doing, Viva Menilicchi! asks: Can you recognize an echo as a reverberation if you didn’t hear the first sound?9 Can you be haunted by a ghost if history has disregarded its human origins? As in its title, Viva Menilicchi! mapped two histories: first, sites of contemporary racist and xenophobic violence in Palermo; and second, the ignored, unseen, dismissed, and often unknown history of Italian colonialism in north and east Africa, specifically as registered in the city of Palermo (in monuments, street names, and the built environment). Italy’s colonial history extended from the mid-to-late nineteenth century (1869) through the fascist regime (and, in Somalia’s case, to 1960, through Italy’s postwar trustee government). In Viva Menilicchi!, these histories were importantly explored not only as forms of the same topography but also as that topography’s generative forces, which shape and sustain the same cultural geography and history. As Fare Ala member Luca Cinquemani put it: “There is this double knot in the present—violent italians against migrants and fascist chorus. Somehow they are telling the same story . . . a racist machine continues.”10 The project

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Figure 3.6  Viva Menilicchi! Included Interventions in Street Signs around Palermo. The Interventions on Via Generale [Vincenzo] Magliocco Featured Images of Victims of Italian Chemical Warfare, Organized by Magliocco in Ethiopia. The caption added to the street sign reads: “Organized and directed bombings with chemical weapons during the fascist invasion of Ethiopia.” Wu Ming 2 + Wu Ming Foundation in collaboration with Fare Ala, Viva Menilicchi! (2018), Manifesta 12, Palermo. Photo: Roberto Romano (Fare Ala), courtesy of Fare Ala. Reproduced with the permission of Wu Ming 2 and Fare Ala (Luca Cinquemani, Andrea Di Gangi, and Roberto Romano).

represents neocolonial violence by creating a synchronic map of historical colonialism under liberal and fascist Italy. Wu Ming 2 similarly reflected on the work’s conceptualization: “This type of practice, of routes . . . [I thought] I could organize an urban walk, a walk for the streets of Palermo, through which I would register as evidence exactly which ghosts live in the city with respect to its history and which ghosts, also in the sense of invisible presences, live there today, in the sense of migrants or episodes of violence and racism against the people who live in Palermo.”11 What the map makes us see is what has been willfully unseen in Palermo: neocolonial violence in the present. What comes into view through the project is that Palermo is a prominent site for the history of Italian colonialism—during the eras of both liberal and fascist Italy, but also thereafter, into today, specifically with regard to the violence that migrants and immigrants are experiencing in contemporary Italy.12 While contemporary artistic response to migration in Italy is widespread, Wu Ming 2 and Fare Ala’s work is distinguished by its overt linkage between contemporary racist violence in Italy and the history of Italian colonialism.

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Figure 3.7  A Member of Fare Ala Carries a Bag of Paper Party Horns—Lingue Di Menelicche (Tongues Of Menelik)—through the Streets of Palermo. Wu Ming 2 + Wu Ming Foundation in collaboration with Fare Ala, Viva Menilicchi! (2018), Manifesta 12, Palermo, Screenshot of the Video Teaser. Reproduced with the permission of Wu Ming 2 and Fare Ala (Luca Cinquemani, Andrea Di Gangi, and Roberto Romano).

Colonialisms past and present are positioned as racist, imperialist projects that are ongoing in the present. They are connected by a fil rouge, a red thread, as Cinquemani puts it.13 It is there that Viva Menilicchi stages its intervention: on this red thread, or at the site of imperialist confluence and return, of mobility controls past and present—at the twist in what Stephanie Hom has named “empire’s Mobius strip”: “[a] formation . . . [that] stretches out across time and folds back on itself.”14 Examination of an action-based artistic intervention that was central to the project (as suggested by its re-presentation in print and video media) elucidates the specificities of Wu Ming 2 and Fare Ala’s intervention on this red thread. Their intervention was anarchic and celebratory, as well as focused on empire as a trans-historical force that is registered in the built environment and the actions that take place there. The teaser video underscored the project’s use of interventionist action to connect past and present violence. In a key passage, also revisited in the fanzine, we see someone carry a clear plastic bag of paper party horns through the streets of Palermo (Figure 3.7). Through cinematic cues, both in genre and composition, our focus is drawn to the portability of the bag and its horizontal traversal across traffic in Palermo’s busy streets. It is held unobtrusively at the ready, at the side of a person who walks with purpose, as if he is carrying a gun or hand grenade. The frame is closely cropped, centering the party horns: They are our

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collective protagonist. These strategies and cues together position the bag of toys as a weapon. These are visual cues that code this action as anarchic and revolutionary; the scene reminds us of armed clashes between students and police in May 1968 and in Italy, especially, in the dark years of the so-called anni di piombo or “years of lead” that followed. In Italian, as Cinquemani subsequently explains in the video, the horns are known as lingue di Menelik (tongues of Menelik)—lingue di menilicche in Palermitano dialect.15 Typically used in Carnevale, they refer to the “capacità linguistica” (linguistic capability) and negotiating abilities of Menelik II, to use Cinquemani’s term. More specifically, as Cinquemani explains—pausing to blow the paper horn as another unfurls across the image field—the term refers to Menelik’s protection of Ethiopian sovereignty in the Amharic version of article 17 of the Italian-Ethiopian Trattato di Uccialli (1889), despite Italy’s claim to Ethiopia as a protectorate in the Italian version of the article.16 After this explanation, we now recognize the horns as the colonial traces they are. Rather than delivering the full view of the member of Fare Ala throwing the horns onto the monument—a view illustrated instead in the fanzine—the shot subsequently shifts to the Crispi monument (Figures 3.8–3.9). We see the inflated paper horns again, this time rising up from the bottom of the frame like a forked tongue, masking Crispi’s body in the video frame and, perhaps, celebrating his visual and symbolic castration (Figure 3.9). The camera shifts to a low-angle shot, and we see the tongues of Menelik—a toy, a party favor—thrown in celebratory fashion onto the monument dedicated to Crispi in the piazza dedicated to his memory. The monument by Mario Rutelli, realized from 1903 to 1905 in the wake of Crispi’s death, was built in recognition of Crispi’s service to the nation; it was not long thereafter recoded, in 1923, under the fascist regime, by the addition of an honorary plaque bestowed by the fascist government. The plaque positioned Crispi’s colonial and state efforts as a progenitor of fascist history. As we then close in on the plaque, facing it directly, the tongues of Menelik seem to multiply. The patterned paper horns scatter over the claws of the eagle (the symbol of Palermo), whose talons grip the fasces (the symbol of the Italian fascist party) that span the plaque. We hear the cheap yellow, blue, and green plastic tubes clink on the patinated bronze form. As a revolutionary action that also reads as a form of celebration—Fare Ala’s own form of social war-fair, recalling Lotringer—this gesture intervenes in the monument, its associations, and logics.17 It recodes the monument yet again, this time as an anticolonial victory by Menelik. In the context of Viva Menilicchi!, the action also registers as a memorial gesture for those murdered in Italy’s colonial invasions and by neocolonial violence in the present. The action forms and performs a counter-monument for Palermo and Italy. As a temporary gesture, ephemeral work, and celebratory intervention, the action and video articulate a countercultural aesthetic for a postcolonial Italy in the

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Figure 3.8  A Photograph of Fare Ala’s Intervention at the Monument to Francesco Crispi Captures a Member of Fare Ala Throwing Lingue Di Menelicche onto the Statue. The photograph was printed in black and white in the fanzine, on pages that revisited (and recreated) the interventionist action. Wu Ming 2 + Wu Ming Foundation in collaboration with Fare Ala, Viva Menilicchi! (2018), Manifesta 12, Palermo. Photo: Roberto Romano (Fare Ala), courtesy of Fare Ala. Reproduced with the permission of Wu Ming 2 and Fare Ala (Luca Cinquemani, Andrea Di Gangi, and Roberto Romano).

present. The central significance of this action is suggested by the intervention’s reappearance and recreation in the fanzine, alongside cutouts of the tongues of Menelik strewn across the page next to photos of the Crispi monument (Figure 3.10). This gesture doubles the video’s formation of a counter-monument with

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Figure 3.9  A Screenshot of the Video Teaser Depicts the Horns Being Blown (By Fare Ala, Off Screen); The Inflated Paper Tubes Rise up in Front of the Monumental Figure. Wu Ming 2 + Wu Ming Foundation in Collaboration with Fare Ala, Viva Menilicchi! (2018), Manifesta 12, Palermo. Reproduced with the permission of Wu Ming 2 and Fare Ala (Luca Cinquemani, Andrea Di Gangi, and Roberto Romano).

Figure 3.10  Wu Ming 2 + Wu Ming Foundation in Collaboration with Fare Ala, Viva Menilicchi! (2018), Manifesta 12, Palermo, Fanzine, Designed by Adriano La Licata. Reproduced with the permission of Wu Ming 2 and Fare Ala (Luca Cinquemani, Andrea Di Gangi, and Roberto Romano).

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the tongues of Menelik, licking the blue Palermo sky; in the fanzine, we see a member of Fare Ala as he throws and blows the horns, emphasizing the artist’s original action. This valence is also underscored by the revisions to the monumental figure of Crispi imagined in the fanzine. There, solid, monumental figure of Crispi is subsequently edited to a transparent ghostly presence. He is then literally knocked off his base: “Down with Crispi!” (Abbasso Crispi!), indeed. The colonial and subsequently fascist monument is unseated by anticolonial interventionist criticality—against Crispi, against the history of Italian colonialism, against the enduring traces of colonialism in Italian popular culture, and against the unwillingness of mainstream Italian culture to recognize these signs. Such actions make us think of the tumultuous years of the late 1960s and 1970s, a moment of global protest against neofascism, authoritarianism, and imperialism, mobilized by the rise of anticolonial and the so-called “Third world” liberation movements. In Italy, these events culminated in the “hot autumn” (autunno caldo) of 1969. Motivated largely by the Workerist movement that had long contested racist treatment in Italy’s industrial north, the hot autumn was distinguished from the majority of its global counterparts by its criticism of internal racism.18 Other concerns emerged in the dark years that followed. The “years of lead” or “contestation” (as John Foot has referred to them) were distinguished by paramilitary terrorism on the Right and Left, economic crisis, and state persecution of the Left, as well as the proliferation of feminist, reformist, and countercultural movements.19 In the hot autumn and its surrounds, workers’ and sociopolitical movements including neoMarxist Potere Operaio (1967–1973), Lotta Continua (1969–1976), and especially post-Marxist Autonomia Operaia (1973–1979), a self-described diffuse movement, called for anti-authoritarianism, freedom of speech, youth activism, and a refusal of orders of power—all values that would be central to the so-called “creative” wing of Autonomia.20 Despite the antiracism and anti-imperialism espoused by May 1968 and subsequent movements, Italian countercultural and avant-garde aesthetics of the period frequently reinscribed motifs of racialized, Orientalist, neocolonialist, and primitivist others. Italian artists, theater practitioners, writers, poets, and filmmakers, including Carmelo Bene, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Antonio Porta, experimental theater group Lo Zoo, radical architecture group Superstudio, Arte Povera, and Luigi Ontani, variously deployed these tropes in their practices as vanguard countercultural motifs. As Silvia Bottinelli has discussed in her study of 1960s and 1970s Italian art and architecture, artists in Italy at the time frequently engaged “modern nomadism,” following Georges-Hubert de Radkowski and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s ideas of a “non-hierarchical” politicized aesthetic and countercultural platform, which Bottinelli argues was engaged as a form of anticapitalist utopia.21 In a similar vein, Jacopo Galimberti has discussed the proximity of Germano Celant’s writings on Arte Povera and its “humanist poverty” to Maoism

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and “third-worldist” aesthetics.22 What needs examination, however, is how these motifs problematically and seemingly paradoxically reinscribed white Eurocentric and imperialist worldviews that the events of 1968 were, in part, directed against. While Italian avant-gardes’ fascination with so-called nonWestern cultures at this moment reflected broader desires on the cultural Left to align with the perceived anticapitalist, liberatory, countercultural potential of these regions, discussion of the problematic within artistic practice has yet to be conducted. It is a problem that Wu Ming 2 and Fare Ala’s work brings into focus.23 While this view did not last long for intellectuals of the Italian Left, as Shelleen Greene has discussed, the endurance of this problem in Italian art suggests that artists and creative practitioners were slower to adopt this shifting view.24 Instead, they continued to engage reinscriptive practices at precisely the moment that political movements were working against these ideologies—even after these movements had become disillusioned with them. The seemingly paradoxical resurgence of neocolonialist tropes in Italy in the late 1960s and early 1970s therefore constellated a pervasive visual landscape of what Cristina Lombardi-Diop and Caterina Romeo have called diffuse “colonial traces in contemporary Italian literature, cinema, music, and popular culture.”25 Indeed, postcoloniality in Italy has, in relation to its previously imperial European counterparts, come at a delay. Later migrations from former colonies and Italy’s distinctly prominent position in contemporary cross-Mediterranean mass migration has led scholars to contend that Italy’s postcoloniality “must be understood in a post-Cold War and globalized European context . . . The postcolonial era began decades after the colonies were lost.”26 This discussion highlights the distinction of Wu Ming 2 and Fare Ala’s engagement of a politicized creative platform associated with the period of 1968. Their antiracist, anticolonial creative work makes us think differently not only about the afterlives of 1968 but its original lives, as well. Examination of the artists’ respective histories strengthens their connection to forms of contestation in 1968 and after, in Autonomia. Wu Ming was established in Bologna in the year 2000 with five writers who separated from a larger literary collective known by the pseudonym Luther Blissett. While Wu Ming initially published their novels under their collective pseudonym, since 2012 they have also pursued individual projects, executed under individually enumerated monikers. The group’s name was intended in part as “a tribute to dissidents . . . as it is commonly used to call for democratic free speech in China,” and to eschew the value allocated to singular authorship.27 Wu Ming has also positioned themselves in line with Autonomia’s ideology more directly. Robert Baird has noted in an interview with Wu Ming that they have also called themselves “an autonomous political enterprise,” in their own “Declaration of Intent.”28 Importantly, Wu Ming has

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also contributed to an earlier project that directly relates to the Workerist movement and Autonomia, as in their screenplay for the film Lavorare con lentezza (Working Slowly, 2004, dir. Guido Chiesa). The film addresses the self-proclaimed “mao-dadaist” Radio Alice hub of the Italian free radio movement that was integral to Autonomia in mid-to-late 1970s Bologna. Much of Wu Ming’s ideology and practices echoes that of Autonomia and the Collective A/traverso of Radio Alice, especially their commitment to decentralized media and civic participation.29 (A/traverso was also the name of the group’s radical, experimental journal for Autonomia, established in 1975.) Indeed, Wu Ming and Fare Ala share creative Autonomia’s dedication to anti-hierarchical pluralist collectivity, to the framing of creative interventionist and often urban-oriented strategies as revolutionary tactics, and media.30 The fanzine itself, which used digital collage techniques, also recapitulated tactics of radical vanguard publications in the years of lead— especially the cut-and-paste aesthetic of A/traverso, whose first issue called for percorsi della ricomposizione (paths of recomposition).31 When we consider these earlier connections to Autonomia, it is perhaps unsurprising that Wu Ming 2 and Fare Ala’s recent work re-asserts this tie. More importantly, however, Viva Menilicchi! illuminates a blind spot of the artists’ political and cultural precedents: namely for histories of colonialism and especially for Italy’s own. While Wu Ming has engaged previously in postcolonial practice and pastiche in their writing—as in their self-conceived “postcolonial diptych” (dittico post-coloniale)—the multimedia, interdisciplinary project of Viva Menilicchi! is unprecedented in their oeuvre.32 Further examination of postcolonial critique as the central element of collectivist practice in Wu Ming 2 and Fare Ala’s interdisciplinary work demonstrates that countercultural aesthetics and collectivism associated with the late 1960s and 1970s in Italy find a corrective in their postcolonial critique articulated in—and for—the present. Because Wu Ming 2 is from Bologna, he insisted on collaborating with Fare Ala as Palermo-based artists for the project, in order to prevent performing a colonial gesture of his own.33 Established in 2009, Fare Ala has investigated urban history, architecture, and memory, specifically in Palermo, for over a decade. For them, this investigation has always been linked to present action: “Not simply to re-evoke colonial memory . . . but to reconnect memory with a link to the present to ask ourselves about this violence.”34 Through their collaboration, Wu Ming 2 and Fare Ala identified sites of recent neocolonial violence. There are frequent acts of racist violence against immigrants and migrants in Palermo today. In the paper and digital mapping projects for Viva Menilicchi!, we learn of a mob attack on Mohanrai Yoganathan and Naguleashwaran Subramaniam, both Sri Lankan nationals, on October 18, 2011 on Via Re Tancredi, resulting in horrible injuries (Figure 3.11). We learn of the murder on February 6, 2012 of Loveth Edward

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Figure 3.11  These Sites (in Figure 3.11 and Figure 3.12) Document Sites of Racist Violence in Palermo against Mohanrai Yoganathan, Naguleashwaran Subramaniam, and Loveth Edward. Wu Ming 2 + Wu Ming Foundation in collaboration with Fare Ala, Viva Menilicchi! (2018), Manifesta 12, Screenshot of Interactive Digital Map. Reproduced with the permission of Wu Ming 2 and Fare Ala (Luca Cinquemani, Andrea Di Gangi, and Roberto Romano).

Figure 3.12  Wu Ming 2 + Wu Ming Foundation in collaboration with Fare Ala, Viva Menilicchi! (2018), Manifesta 12, Palermo, Screenshot of Interactive Digital Map. Reproduced with the permission of Wu Ming 2 and Fare Ala (Luca Cinquemani, Andrea Di Gangi, and Roberto Romano).

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(1990–2012), a Nigerian immigrant and legal resident of Palermo, who was found dead in front of an apartment building on Via Juvara (Figure 3.12). We learn about the attack on Yusupha Susso, a Gambian migrant who was shot in the head (an attack he survived), on Via Fiume on April 2, 2016. We learn of Noureddine Adnane (1983–2011), a licensed Moroccan street peddler who lit himself on fire on Via Ernesto Basile 22 on February 19, 2011, following constant harassment from police. In the interactive digital map, images and stories are often paired with portraits of victims or with images from Italian colonial-era media. The juxtaposition of contemporary photography with colonial materials positions colonialism in Italy as an enduring agent of racist violence and vision today. This attention to violence against immigrants and migrants in Palermo should be understood as part of the project’s revolutionary praxis. I mean praxis here in the Marcusian sense: as part of a struggle against a culture of violence, as a “new sensibility” of being and working, staked out through different forms of creative work.35 Indeed, another stop in Viva Menilicchi! was Palermo’s former psychiatric hospital, Vignicella, where, along with other colonial subjects, Tunisian poet Mario Scalesi (b. 1892, Tunis, d. 1922, Palermo) was held and subsequently died at the age of thirty. While Scalesi’s father was Sicilian, Scalesi was treated for marasma (confusion and wasting away) and “madness”—a commonly used diagnosis, as a text by Wu Ming 2 in the fanzine suggests, to detain migrants and colonial subjects, as well as Italians.36 (Wu Ming and Fare Ala’s inclusion of Scalesi also reminds us of Radio Alice’s embrace of “the absent and the mad” in their revolutionary work).37 As part of the anticolonial walk near Vignicella, scholar Gabriele Montalbano read his translation of a poem by Scalesi (originally published posthumously in French), entitled “Lapidation,” the second stanza of which I quote here: “Se contiene tanti versi funebri/ questi versi sono l’urlo di rivolta/di un’esistenza di tenebre/e non di uno spleen premeditato” (If it [this book] contains many funerary verses, these verses are the cry of revolt, of an existence of darkness, and not of a pre-meditated spleen.).38 The reading of Scalesi’s poem served more than to highlight the atrocities of colonial detention under the guise of psychiatric treatment: it aligned the poetic documentation of racist violence in Viva Menilicchi! in Palermo as a cry of revolt and rebellion. To corroborate this point, we might consider the following. Experiments with media that accompany these physical mappings remind us of the extensive involvement of Italy’s publishing industry in colonial propaganda and experimental publications of Autonomia alike. For example, Wu Ming 2 and Fare Ala printed an image in the fanzine of the cover of the guide book to the Mostra Eritrea (Città di Castello, 1892), a colonial exhibition which included human exhibitions, held at the national exhibition in Palermo (Figure 3.13). For the cover of the fanzine, the artists superimposed a photographic portrait of Menelik II from a 1910 issue of the French publication

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Figure 3.13  Wu Ming 2 + Wu Ming Foundation in Collaboration with Fare Ala, Viva Menilicchi! (2018), Manifesta 12, Palermo, Poster. The poster is a digital elaboration of a photographic portrait of Emperor Menelik II by R. F. Bernardin, as published in the French publication L’Illustration, n. 3488 (January 1, 1910), with maps of Palermo and Asmara from the Touring Club Italiano (Milan: Vallardi, 1929). Digital image of the poster, courtesy of Fare Ala. Reproduced with the permission of Wu Ming 2 and Fare Ala (Luca Cinquemani, Andrea Di Gangi, and Roberto Romano).

L’Illustration, which narrated the de facto end of Menelik’s reign, over maps of Palermo and Asmara (the latter from 1929 Touring Club Italiano materials). The artists’ use of the strategies of cropping of the photograph (around Menelik’s face) and of superimposing the image over digitally merged maps lends Menelik an atmospheric scale in the resulting work.

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Figure 3.14  Fare Ala, Il Germoglio dell’Altro (The Origin/Sprout of the Other), 2011. Mixed media mural, 7 × 21m, Atrium of the Oratorio di Santa Chiara, Palermo. Part of the exhibition IO SIAMO/SANTACHIARA. Photo by and courtesy of Fare Ala.

Menelik haunts Palermo as the space of the colonizer and Asmara as the space of the colonized. It is an image of a haunted and haunting city that resonates with anticolonial potential. Indeed, the exploration of cartography, local history and identity, colonialism, migration, and interventionist practice in Palermo has been central to Fare Ala’s work. Precedents to Viva Menilicchi! include their mural intervention in the courtyard of the Oratorio Santa Chiara, entitled Il Germoglio dell’Altro (The Origin/Sprout of the Other, 2011) (Figure 3.14). In that project, migrants and immigrants who live in the area painted an imagined genealogical tree. They created relationships between figures from the early nineteenth century to the present, drawing attention to the integration of immigrants in Palermo.39 The ethics and strategies of Fare Ala’s work are reflected in their name, which means to step aside, to make room for someone—but also, to take flight.40 Fare Ala’s practice and connections to their community are reflected in other interventionist scenes captured in the video for Viva Menilicchi!. Twothirds in, the video plays the colonial song, “L’Abissino vincerai” (“You’ll defeat the Abyssinian,” using the former European term for Ethiopia) (Figure 3.15). The lyrics and unsettlingly catchy melody comprise a rallying song that forecasts successful colonial conquest. It urges the capture of the Negus, the Ethiopian leader, and heralds the changing of the color of his skin, lauding the benevolence of fascist empire (while positioning, indirectly, Italian national identity as white). The song is accompanied by video footage of

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Figure 3.15  A Screenshot from the Video Teaser Shows Footage of the Armed Attack on Yusupha Susso, on Palermo’s Via Fiume on April 2, 2016. The footage was captured by street cameras (and annotated in Italian media). The subtitles correspond to the fascist Italian colonial song, L’Abissino vincerai! (You will defeat the Abyssinian), that Wu Ming 2 and Fare Ala paired with the footage in the video teaser for Viva Menilicchi!. Wu Ming 2 + Wu Ming Foundation in collaboration with Fare Ala, Viva Menilicchi! (2018), Manifesta 12, Palermo. Reproduced with the permission of Wu Ming 2 and Fare Ala (Luca Cinquemani, Andrea Di Gangi, and Roberto Romano).

the attack on Susso (caught by street cameras in Palermo on Via Fiume, and annotated by Palermo local news to encircle the attacker, distinguishing him from the crowd).41 The use of the song codes the act of contemporary violence as fascist and colonial—that is, as neofascist and neocolonial—and as connected to Italy’s fascist colonial history.42 The pairing of contemporary video recording and historical colonial song makes the attack on Susso function as metonymic document (of racist violence against migrants in Italy today) and metaphor (contemporary racist violence is the endurance of ethnocratic Italian colonialism). These strategies return at the end of the video, which closes with contemporary footage of the port of Palermo. In the closing moments of the video, the opening lines of L’Abissino vincerai play in distorted yet recognizable form; in the twisted reprise, it is uncanny, ominous. Such experimentation with meaning and media reminds us of Roland Barthes’ discussion of semiotic functions: “in metaphor, selection becomes contiguity, and in metonymy, contiguity becomes a field to select from. It therefore seems that it is always on the frontiers of the two planes that creation has a chance to occur.”43

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The central and culminating element of Viva Menilicchi! was the anticolonial urban walk, sixteen kilometers in length, held on October 20, 2018, in Palermo. As part of the walk, entitled 1º Grande Rituale Ambulante contro il Colonialismo (the 1st Great Walking Ritual against Colonialism also available online as an interactive digital map), Wu Ming 2, the Wu Ming Foundation, and Fare Ala annotated existing public signage in Palermo’s streets with documentary archival images of the horrors of chemical warfare used by fascist Italy during their invasions in Ethiopia, now in spaces reserved for advertisements (rented by Fare Ala).44 They posted text-based annotations under street signs and placards, using a strategy modeled after an existing resistance collective in Italy, Resistenze di Cirenaica (Resistances of Cirenaica).45 QR codes were posted that linked to additional histories, reminding passersby of the horrific actions of those honored by the streets of Palermo. Other elements comprised acts of creative memorialization. Fare Ala constructed coded memorials to those who had been murdered by racist violence. They included works of street art, such as Egyptian artist Khalid’s poster at the site of the armed attack on Susso, and plantings at the site where Loveth Edward was murdered. These memorials needed to be able to go unnoticed, Fare Ala explained, so as not to be defaced by a community that was often hostile to memorialization of victims of such violence.46 Wu Ming has positioned this work as a psychogeographic walk, aligning the anticolonial walk with the Situationist urban practice of dérive or drifting. It is often forgotten that Situationism was cofounded by an Italian artist (Giuseppe “Pinot” Gallizio), positioning part of this history within Italy’s avant-garde. Wu Ming 2 recalled his first conversation with Manifesta curators as “a long chat [that] produced the first crystal of the project: to bring to Palermo, in the days of the demonstration, a narrative walk, a walk of urban exploration, a psychogeographic ritual by foot on the contrail of those already organized in other territories and cities.”47 This specific reference also positions Viva Menilicchi! within the recent “proliferation of neo-Situationist activities” in contemporary art, described by Claire Bishop.48 Bishop has highlighted the function of dérive as a “research tool” rather than participatory platform for the Situationists.49 In Italy, creative movements associated with Autonomia also explored desire and situations in strategies that were aligned with Situationist practice. In a 1980 text from the important issue of Semiotext(e) on Autonomia, Radio Alice called for the voices of the “unstated,” of those not in power, questioning who radio would be for: “Radio for the participants, or radio for the uncanny?”50 By the latter, they hoped to use diverse media practices as a means to open up spaces, life, and language, specifically to “draw out,” as Nicholas Thoburn has discussed, the uncanny and the unstated.51 They also

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called for the new “collective subject.” In a particularly poignant section, reflecting on the imprisonment of their members during the 1977 Bologna riots, Radio Alice offered: “What makes me crazy is the uncanny . . . This is an invitation to speak and to think, an invitation to be always present in the situations in the town the neighborhoods the schools the barracks the factories the roads, let’s exhaust the enemy, let’s wear out the giant monster by beating it all over its body. Let’s not talk about desires anymore, let’s desire: we are desiring machines, machines of war.”52 The stakes of the uncanny in Autonomia were tied to state control, to repeated experiences of authoritarian containment and repression. Wu Ming 2 and Fare Ala’s work in Viva Menilicchi! shares Situationist ideas, such as the recovery of suppressed images, investigating the psychic effects of the urban environment. But their project also critically addresses the uncanny targeted by creative Autonomia: as a re-emergence of state desire. Wu Ming 2 and Fare Ala use the uncanny to ask viewers of Viva Menilicchi! to encounter repressed colonial histories and neocolonial violence in the present as returns and disruptions, and to question why these points are unsettlingly familiar and yet unknown. Wu Ming 2 and Fare Ala’s engagement with interventionism and the built environment complicates neo-Situationist activities; they do not want to emulate a psychogeographic walk as a recuperation of “forgotten desires” for the present moment, borrowing Lettrist and Situationist Ivan Chtcheglov’s phrase.53 Instead, their psychogeography comprises things that most people in Italy desire to not be remembered and rather to leave forgotten. The project makes visible things and places that were hidden in plain sight for most while being painfully apparent for others. Viva Menilicchi! operates on two forms of the uncanny in Italian history: (1) the uncanny for Autonomia as repeated experiences of subjugation and repression under reassertions of state power in the mid-to-late 1970s and (2) returns and echoes of racist, xenophobic violence in (and by Italy) under colonialism and the present. What viewers of Viva Menilicchi! come to realize is that the latter echoes are allowed to exist when we realize that the uncanny of Autonomia continues. Perhaps the question is not whether these things are desired but rather by whom. In her mapping of unacknowledged histories of colonialism in Rome, Roma negata (2004), Igiaba Scego narrates her encounter of a memorial placard which dedicates two columns, located at Piazza di Porta Capena, as a memorial to the events of September 11.54 Scego reveals that the piazza was the former display site of the stolen Obelisk of Axum, the fourth-century Axumite stele taken by Italy as war spoils during the second invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, after which it was kept on display in Rome until the early 2000s.55 In

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the absence of a memorial dedicated to the tens of thousands of Eritreans, Ethiopians, Somalis, Libyans, and other Africans killed under Italian colonialism, Scego expresses her bewilderment and fury about Italy’s dismissal of its own colonial history. After an encounter with a woman who dismisses Italy’s colonial evils as less destructive than that of the French, Scego narrates her frustration in the face of willed ignorance and erasure: Volevo gridare, “I wanted to scream,” she writes. Undergirding her fury is a desire for long overdue acknowledgment and memorialization, so that mourning can be facilitated, histories acknowledged, and people recognized.56 Scego describes standing in Porta Capena: “I can’t forget it, this story. I don’t want to forget it . . . For this, perhaps, I walk.”57 If memory and memorials are built in response to impegno, or engaged duty, as Scego writes, then the absence of memorials to those murdered under Italian colonialism reflects a popular forgetting, accomplished by a conscious dismissal of the need and desire to remember.58 Perhaps a postcolonial psychogeography is a better framework through which the “odonomist guerrilla war” (guerriglia odonomastica) of Viva Menilicchi!, as the artists have called it, is better understood. An odonomist

Figure 3.16  In Response to Pressures from Municipal Officials, Manifesta’s Organizers Removed Wu Ming 2 and Fare Ala’s Intervention on the Street Placard for Piazza Vittorio Bottego. The interventionist addition to the placard read: “Explorer and Mass Murderer.” Wu Ming 2 + Wu Ming Foundation in collaboration with Fare Ala, Viva Menilicchi! (2018), Manifesta 12, Palermo. Photo by and courtesy of Fare Ala. Reproduced with the permission of Wu Ming 2 and Fare Ala (Luca Cinquemani, Andrea Di Gangi, and Roberto Romano).

Figure 3.17  In Response to Pressures from Municipal Officials, Manifesta’s Organizers Removed Wu Ming 2 and Fare Ala’s Intervention on the Street Placard for Piazza Vittorio Bottego. The interventionist addition to the placard read: “Explorer and Mass Murderer.” Wu Ming 2 + Wu Ming Foundation in collaboration with Fare Ala, Viva Menilicchi! (2018), Manifesta 12, Palermo. Photo by and courtesy of Fare Ala. Reproduced with the permission of Wu Ming 2 and Fare Ala (Luca Cinquemani, Andrea Di Gangi, and Roberto Romano).

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guerrilla war targets street signs and nomenclature for public spaces. In the video for Viva Menilicchi!, for example, we see Cinquemani and other members of Fare Ala go door to door in Palermo, asking local residents about the murder of Loveth Edward, but no one will discuss it with them. Residents claim they don’t remember, didn’t live there at the time, or are too busy to talk. Distinct from Italy’s “memory wars” in the postwar period, discussed by John Foot, this memory war cannot be fought precisely because of the lack of desire to do so for the majority of the Italian populace.59 The responses to Viva Menilicchi! affirm this point. Manifesta organizers themselves removed some of the signage mounted during the project in response to pressures from municipal officials (Figures 3.16–3.17).60 Here we are reminded of Wu Ming’s point about the persistence of empire: “These are troublesome actions: remembering that Italy was—and remains—an imperialist country is taboo, today more than ever.”61 Wu Ming 2 and Fare Ala’s work critically engages and entertains a dialogue between two historical trajectories in creative practice: first, with postcolonial creative practice in Italy that deals with the endurance of coloniality in public space and the built environment; and second, with post-Marxist collectivism as a political and creative platform associated specifically with countercultural, revolutionary action of the Italian cultural Left in the late 1960s and 1970s. While other contemporary creative practitioners in Italy have engaged in postcolonial interventions in public space, Wu Ming 2 and Fare Ala’s postcolonial practice is distinguished by their emphasis on antihierarchical collectivism and social practice. Specifically, their engagement with the artistic and political legacies of 1968 draws our attention to the persisting, “almost total repression,” as Angelo Del Boca has called it, “of colonialism and its crimes in Italy.”62 It is precisely the intersection of these political and cultural histories in Viva Menilicchi!—that is, the re-engagement of the well-intentioned if problematic counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s with postcolonial collectivism of today—that calls attention to the blind spots of Italy’s recent history. Wu Ming 2 and Fare Ala offer us a different countercultural aesthetic, which finally deconstructs colonial imagery rather than reinscribing it. While Viva Menilicchi! has been combated as a work—removed in part by Manifesta and defaced by others—the project has galvanized popular attention across Italy. Similar additions and corrections to street signs popped up in Catania, Bologna, Torino, and other locales in the weeks that followed the project, continuing the odonomist guerrilla war. Such a war refers to an internal, surprise, unofficial attack on street signs and nomenclature for public spaces, echoing theories of the late 1960s that positioned

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Italian avant-garde practice as a guerrilla war.63 Fare Ala have also continued these efforts. The Piazza Giorgio Almirante in Castellamare del Golfo near Palermo now bears a marker that labels Almirante as the editing secretary of the fascist publication La difesa della razza (Defense of the Race; 1938–1943), which disseminated the regime’s racial theories, including the biological and moral dangers of nonwhite and interracial subjects.64 Through these actions, in Wu Ming 2 and Fare Ala’s guerrilla war, colonial memory—much discussed by scholars of postcolonial Italy—is the countercultural.65 Such actions seem to be gaining ground in other forms as well. In February 2020, Liliana Segre, Holocaust survivor and honorary senator, decried the proposed naming of a piazza in Verona in honor of Almirante. But the war is far from over. Neofascists have been photographed projecting historical photographs of fascists onto the walls of Italian cities in honor of Mussolini’s regime. As guerrilla actions stir in Italian cities again after the riots of 1968, 1969, and 1977, perhaps this time their anti-imperialist rallying cry may not be “the struggle continues,” echoing their 1968 precursors, but perhaps better a different echo: VIVA MENILICCHI! ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am indebted to Fare Ala (Luca Cinquemani, Andrea Di Gangi, and Roberto Romano) and to Wu Ming 2 (Giovanni Cattabriga) for their generous time and attention during Skype and video call interviews in January and November 2020, email correspondence regarding their work, and permissions to reproduce images from their project. Grazie infinite. Versions of this paper were presented at the Florida State University Winthrop-King Institute for French and Francophone Studies 2019 Conference, “Does ‘la lutte continue?’ The Global Afterlives of May ’68,” the 2020 College Art Association Conference in Chicago, and to the Department of Art and Art History at Carleton College, as a 2020 Edwin L. Weisl Lectureship in the Arts, sponsored by the Robert Lehman Foundation. My thanks to Ross Elfline for the opportunity to share this research there. I am especially grateful to the conference organizers at the Winthrop-King—William Cloonan, Barry Faulk, Martin Munro, and Christian Weber—for the opportunity to first constellate and share these ideas. The final stages of research and writing were supported by a 2019–2020 Scholar-in-Residence Fellowship from Magazzino Italian Art Foundation. My sincere thanks to Nancy Olnick, Giorgio Spanu, and Vittorio Calabrese for their support. I also thank my colleagues at Florida State University, especially Silvia Valisa, Meredith Lynn, and Chari Arespacochaga.

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NOTES 1. Recent scholarship in Italian studies has addressed postcolonial time lags, following Homi Bhabha, and returns of empire in contemporary Italy. See Cristina Lombardi-Diop and Caterina Romeo, “The Italian Postcolonial: A Manifesto,” Italian Studies 69, no. 3 (2014): 425–433; Rhiannon Noel Welch, “Anachronism, Displacement, and Trace: ‘Scarred Images’ and the Postcolonial Time Lag,” California Italian Studies 7, no. 1 (2017): 1–26; Stephanie Malia Hom, Empire’s Mobius Strip: Historical Echoes in Italy’s Crisis of Migration and Detention (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019). 2. Sylvère Lotringer, “In the Shadow of the Red Brigrades,” trans. John Johnston, in Autonomia: Post-Political Politics (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007), v. 3. Volunteer organizations and individuals included the Associazione di Volontariato Donne di Benin City Palermo, CLEDU, Festival delle Letterature Migranti, Francesca Di Pasquale, Moltivolti, Oratorio Salesiano Santa Chiara, and Progetto Ragazzi Harraga. “Wu Ming 2 + Wu Ming Foundation,” in Manifesta 12. Palermo. Il Giardino Planetario. Coltivare la Coesistenza. La Biennale Nomade Europea. The Planetary Garden. Cultivating Coexistence. The European Nomadic Biennial (Milan: Editoriale Domus, 2018), 156. The original Italian for one of the interactive digital maps reads: “on the hunt for ghosts of Italian colonialism” (a caccia dei fantasmi del colonialismo). See Wu Ming 2 + Wu Ming Foundation, with the collaboration of Fare Ala, “Viva Menilicchi! Esplorando le vie di Palermo, a caccia dei fantasmi del colonialismo”: https​:/​/up​​loads​​.knig​​htlab​​.com/​​story​​mapjs​​/aa75​​8891d​​ 750e6​​edbfb​​bcee3​​48247​​22a​/v​​iva​-m​​enili​​​cchi/​​index​​.html​. 4. Fare Ala disclosed that the space was assigned in an interview with the author. Fare Ala (Luca Cinquemani, Andrea Di Gangi, and Roberto Romano), Skype video interview with the author, 1:01.54, Palermo and New York City, January 28, 2020. 5. Italy’s colonial conquest of Libya, dating to the mid-late nineteenth century, would be consolidated into Italian North Africa (Africa Settentrionale Italiana, including Libya, briefly Tunisia and western Egypt; various dates from 1911–1941). 6. Wu Ming 2, Skype video interview with the author, 1:03.42, Bologna and Cold Spring (NY), January 14, 2020. 7. Luca Cinquemani, “Viva Menilicchi!” in Wu Ming 2 + Wu Ming Foundation, in collaboration with Fare Ala, Viva Menilicchi! fanzine (Palermo: Manifesta 12, 2018), np. Also, see Carmen Belmonte, “Staging Colonialism in the ‘Other’ Italy: Art and Ethnography at Palermo’s National Exhibition (1891/92),” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 59, Visualizing Otherness in Modern Italy (XIX–XX Century) (2017): 86–87. 8. Italian political theorist Giovanni Arrighi’s reflections on the nuances of state, nation, and empire in early twentieth-century imperialist theory, specifically on the work of J. A. Hobson, were helpful in working out these ideas. See Giovanni Arrighi, The Geometry of Imperialism, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 1978). On Adwa as end to Crispi’s career, see Christopher Duggan, Fascist Voices: An Intimate History of Mussolini’s Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 10.

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9. These thoughts were inspired in some part by Stephanie Malia Hom’s discussion of historical echoes in Empire’s Mobius Strip, 2019. 10. Fare Ala (Luca Cinquemani, Andrea Di Gangi, and Roberto Romano), Skype video interview with the author, Jan. 28, 2020. Translation by the author. Original Italian: “C’è questo doppio nodo al presente—italiani violenti verso i migranti e ritornello fascista. In qualche modo raccontano la stessa storia . . . c’è questa macchina razzista che continua . . . [.]” 11. Wu Ming 2, Skype video interview with the author, January 14, 2020. Translation by the author. Original Italian: “Questo tipo di pratiche, di percorsi . . . potrei organizzare una passeggiata urbana, una camminata per le vie di Palermo, attraverso la quale metterei in evidenza appunto quali fantasmi abitano nella città rispetto alla sua storia e quali fantasmi anche nel senso di presenze invisibili abitano oggi, nel senso dei migranti oppure episodi di violenza e di razzismo contro le persone che abitano a Palermo.” 12. Nicola Labanca has drawn attention to distinctions between colonialism in liberal and fascist Italy. See “Studies and Research on Fascist Colonialism, 1922–1935: Reflections on the State of the Art,” in A Place in the Sun: Africa in Italian Colonial Culture from Post-Unification to the Present, ed. Patrizia Palumbo (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), 37–61. 13. Fare Ala, Skype video interview with the author, January 28, 2020. 14. Hom, Empire’s Mobius Strip, 4. 15. In conversation with the author, Wu Ming 2 described learning about other references to Menelik and Ethiopian empire in Palermo and in Palermitano dialect, some racialized. Wu Ming, Skype video interview with the author, January 14, 2020. 16. Cinquemani explains in the video that Menelik’s version only permitted Italy to act as a representative of Ethiopia in international affairs. 17. Lotringer, “In the Shadow of the Red Brigrades,” v. Also see note 2. 18. Robert Lumley, States of Emergency: Cultures of Revolt in Italy from 1968 to 1978 (London: Verso, 1990), 28. 19. Foot also discusses the rise of neofascism and anarchist movements at this time, which he also refers to as the “years of contestation.” John Foot, The Archipelago: Italy Since 1945 (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 186–196. 20. For a primary overview of Autonomia, see Franco Berardi (Bifo), “Anatomy of Autonomy,” trans. Jared Becker, Richard Reid and Andrew Rosenbaum, in Autonomia: Post-Political Politics, eds. Lotringer and Marazzi, 148–171. First published in 1980 in Semiotext(e) III, n. 3 (1980). 21. Silvia Bottinelli, “The Discourse of Modern Nomadism: The Tent in Italian Art and Architecture of the 1960s and 1970s,” Art Journal 74, no. 2 (2015): 62–80. 22. Jacopo Galimberti, “A Third-worldist Art? Germano Celant’s Invention of Arte Povera,” Association of Art Historians 36, no. 2 (April 2013): 419–441. Galimberti evokes the term “‘third-worldist’ art” in earnest. He aligns it with a non-figurative aesthetic and political “metaphor” for “resolute and impetuous action whose rationale he likened to that of guerrillas, but whose means never followed suit.” See Galimberti, 424.

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23. Exceptions to this include study of literature on Italian art from this period, specifically Nigel Lendon’s argument that writings on Alighiero Boetti’s work constituted a kind of Orientalism. See Lendon, “A tournament of shadows: Alighiero Boetti, the myth of influence, and a contemporary orientalism,” Electronic Melbourne Art Journal 6, no. 1 (2015): 1–32. 24. As Shelleen Greene has written: “With the rise of neocolonialism, internal political turmoil, and economic downturn, the early 1970s was a period of disillusionment for Italian left intellectuals as it became evident that the ‘non-West’ would not serve as a site for resistance to the capitalist system or as a refuge from Western modernity.” Greene, Equivocal Subjects: Between Italy and Africa—Constructions of Racial Identity in the Italian Cinema (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), 54. 25. Lombardi-Diop and Romeo, “Introduction: Paradigms of Postcoloniality in Contemporary Italy,” 20. In Postcolonial Italy, Challenging National Homogeneity, eds. Lombardi-Diop and Romeo. Also, see Giovanna Trento, “From Marinetti to Pasolini: Massawa, the Red Sea, and the Construction of ‘Mediterranean Africa’ in Italian Literature and Cinema,” Northeast African Studies 12, no. 1 (2012): 273–307. 26. Lombardi-Diop and Romeo, “The Italian Postcolonial: A Manifesto,” 426–427. 27. Wu Ming 1, in an interview with Robert Baird, “Stories Are Not All Equal: An Interview with Wu Ming,” Chicago Review 52, no. 2–4 (2006): 250, also quoted in Nicholas Thoburn, “To Conquer the Anonymous: Authorship and Myth in the Wu Ming Foundation,” Cultural Critique, n. 78 (Spring 2011): 124. 28. Baird, “Stories Are Not All Equal,” 252. 29. See Ursula Frohne, “Radio as a ‘Minor’ Art Practice,” 142, in Radio as Art: Concepts, Spaces, and Practices, eds. A. Thurmann-Jajes, et al., Schriftenreihe für Künstlerpublikationen 8 (Bielefeld: Verlag, 2019). Robert Lumley also briefly outlines Radio Alice in relation to social movements in Italy and the objectives of “autonomous practices” in post-1968 Italy. See Lumley, States of Emergency, 304–306. 30. Christian Marazzi and Sylvère Lotringer, “The Return of Politics,” in Autonomia: Post-Political Politics (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007), 8–10, 13. 31. See A/traverso, q. 1 (October 1975). 32. On Wu Ming’s postcolonial writing, see especially Alessandro Triulzi, “Hidden Faces, Hidden Histories: Contrasting Voices of Postcolonial Italy,” in Postcolonial Italy, Challenging National Hegemony, eds. Cristina Lombardi-Diop and Caterina Romeo (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 103; Lombardi-Diop and Romeo, “Paradigms of Postcoloniality in Contemporary Italy,” in Postcolonial Italy, 9. 33. Wu Ming 2, interview with the author, January 14, 2020. 34. Fare Ala, interview with the author, January 28, 2020. Translated by the author. Original: “Non semplicemente a rievocare la memoria coloniale . . . ma per riconnettere la memoria con un collegamento per il presente per domandarci questa violenza.” 35. Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 26. 36. Fare Ala provided details of the reading and poem, and of Scalesi’s hospitalization. “Real Casa dei Matti,” Viva Menilicchi! digital map: https​:/​/up​​loads​​.knig​​htlab​​

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.com/​​story​​mapjs​​/aa75​​8891d​​750e6​​edbfb​​bcee3​​48247​​22a​/v​​iva​-m​​enili​​​cchi/​​index​​.html​. Also, see Wu Ming 2, “Ali Ben Hrahim Suezzin,” in Viva Menilicchi!, np. 37. Radio Alice used this phrase themselves. See Adriano Sofri, “Sessantotto. La corsa nei sacchi,” Micro-Mega 1 (1988) 176. My thanks to Lumley’s text, which drew my attention to this reference. 38. The poem was published posthumously in Scalesi’s Les Poèmes d’un maldit (Poems of a Cursed Man) (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1923). I thank Gabriele Montalbano for his permission to quote his translation. In email correspondence with the author, Montalbano suggested a perhaps more accurate translation of Scalesi’s “le cri revolté” to “l’urlo ribelle” instead of the “urlo di rivolta” he read during the performance. I have used the translation that Montalbano read at the event, provided by Fare Ala, in fealty to the performance, but I would like to also credit his more recent translation here. Mario Scalesi, Lapidazione (1923), Italian translation from the original French by Gabriele Montalbano, 2018. English translation by the author. Original French: “S’il contient tant de vers funèbres, Ces vers sont le cri révolté, D’une existence de ténèbres, Et non d’un spleen prémédité.” Email correspondence with the author regarding the recited poem, from Fare Ala, March 20, 2020; from Montalbano, May 11, 2020. 39. In an interview with the author, Fare Ala cited this work as a key precedent for some of the strategies and ideas in Viva Menilicchi! Additional details from Sergio Troisi, “Il Museo va in città,” La Repubblica, December 17, 2011; reposted in Fare Ala, “Io Siamo/Santachiara,” Fare Ala (blog) (December 2011): http:​/​/www​​.fare​​ala​ .c​​om​/20​​11​/12​​/io​-s​​iamos​​antac​​hiara​​.html​​?q​=​sa​​nta​+c​​hiara​. 40. The reference to taking flight comes from the name’s recollection of both Spanish and Italian (in a nod to Fare Ala’s own member demographic). Fare Ala discussed their name in an interview with Giuseppe Mendolia Calella, Balloon Project (March 2, 2012): http:​/​/www​​.ball​​oonpr​​oject​​.it​/i​​nterv​​ista-​​ai​-fa​​​re​-al​​a/. 41. The footage circulated Sicilian media. See, for example, “Sparo alla testa del giovane africano, un fermato. Il video dell’aggressione,” Giornale di Sicilia, cronaca online (April 4, 2016). 42. The commingling of documentary and sound reminds us of the emergence of sound pictures in Italian cinema history during the second half of the regime, which facilitated the film industry. See Greene, Equivocal Subjects, 72. Greene also references Carlo Celli’s work on this topic. 43. Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), 88. 44. Luca Cinquemani, video call interview with the author, Tallahassee and Palermo, November 3, 2020. See Wu Ming 2 + Wu Ming Foundation with Fare Ala, “Viva Menilicchi! Il 1° Grande Rituale Ambulante contro il Colonialismo. Palermo, 20 ottobre 2018”: https​:/​/up​​loads​​.knig​​htlab​​.com/​​story​​mapjs​​/aa75​​8891d​​750e6​​edbfb​​bcee3​​48247​​22a​/ v​​iva​-m​​enili​​cchi-​​​grac/​​index​​.html​. 45. Cirenaica refers to the territory in Libya that was consolidated with Tripolitania into the ASI. 46. Fare Ala recounted the planting and explained this reasoning for me in our interview. 47. Translation by the author. Original Italian: “una lunga chiacchierata produce un primo cristallo di progetto: portare a Palermo, nei giorni della manifestazione,

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una passeggiata narrativa, un cammino di esplorazione urbana, un rituale psicogeografico fatto coi piedi, sulla scia di quelli già organizzati in altri territori e città.” Wu Ming, “Viva Menilicchi!: #Palermo a piedi contro il colonialismo per coltivare la coesistenza,” Wu Ming Foundation (June 6, 2018): https​:/​/ww​​w​.wum​​ingfo​​undat​​ion​ .c​​om​/gi​​ap​/20​​18​/06​​/viva​​-meni​​licch​​i​-pal​​ermo-​​a​-pie​​di​-co​​ntro-​​il​-co​​lonia​​lismo​​-per-​​​colti​​ vare-​​la​-co​​esist​​enza/​ 48. Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012), 78. 49. Bishop, 78. 50. Radio Alice—Free Radio, “Collective A/Traverso,” (1980), trans. Richard Gardner and Sybil Walker, in Autonomia: Post-Political Politics, eds. Lotringer and Marazzi, 134. 51. Nicholas Thoburn, Deleuze, Marx and Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 134–135. Thoburn makes this reading based on the same text of my engagement by Collective A/Traverso. 52. Radio Alice—Free Radio, “Collective A/Traverso,” 134. 53. This is a phrase that Greil Marcus aptly cites in his discussion of psychogeography. See Greil Marcus, “The Long Walk of the Situationist International,” in Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2002), 4–5. 54. Igiaba Scego, “Inizio a camminare,” in Roma negata: Percorsi postcoloniali nella città (Rome: Ediesse, 2014). Photos by Rino Bianchi. 55. Scego, Roma negata, 18. 56. Scego, 18. 57. Scego, 18. Translation by the author. Original: “Non la posso dimenticare IO questa storia. Non la voglio dimenticare . . . Per questo forse cammino.” 58. Scego, 16–19. 59. See Foot, “Republic of the Dead,” in The Archipelago: Italy Since 1945, 12–13. 60. Fare Ala, interview with the author, January 28, 2020. 61. Wu Ming, “I fantasmi del colonialismo infestano le nostre città. A #Palermo un esorcismo di massa, viva Menilicchi!” Wu Ming Foundation (October 19, 2018): https​:/​/ww​​w​.wum​​ingfo​​undat​​ion​.c​​om​/gi​​ap​/20​​18​/10​​/viva​​-m​eni​​licch​​i​-4/. Translation by the author. Original: “Queste sono azioni scomode: ricordare che l’Italia è stata—e rimane—un paese imperialista è tabù, oggi più che mai.” 62. Angelo Del Boca, “Obligations of Italy Toward Libya,” in Italian Colonialism, eds. Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Mia Fuller (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), 195. 63. Germano Celant, “Arte Povera: Appunti per una guerriglia,” Flash Art, no. 5 (Nov./Dec., 1967): 3–4. 64. Greene, Equivocal Subjects, 61. 65. See Lombardi-Diop and Romeo’s discussion in Postcolonial Italy (2012) and Angelo Del Boca’s 2005 text (see note 62).

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Peters, Franziska Rauh, and Sarah Rothe, Schriftenreihe für Künstlerpublikationen 8, 127–160. Bielefeld: Transcript-Verlag, 2019. Galimberti, Jacopo. “A Third-worldist Art? Germano Celant’s Invention of Arte Povera.” Association of Art Historians 36, no. 2 (April 2013): 419–441. Greene, Shelleen. Equivocal Subjects: Between Italy and Africa—Constructions of Racial Identity in the Italian Cinema. London: Bloomsbury, 2012. Hom, Stephanie Malia. Empire’s Mobius Strip: Historical Echoes in Italy’s Crisis of Migration and Detention. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019. Labanca, Nicola. “Studies and Research on Fascist Colonialism, 1922–1935: Reflections on the State of the Art.” In A Place in the Sun: Africa in Italian Colonial Culture from Post-Unification to the Present, edited by Patrizia Palumbo, 37–61. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003. Lendon, Nigel. “A Tournament of Shadows: Alighiero Boetti, the Myth of Influence, and a Contemporary Orientalism.” Electronic Melbourne Art Journal 6, no. 1 (2015): 1–32. Lombardi-Diop, Cristina and Caterina Romeo. “Introduction: Paradigms of Postcoloniality in Contemporary Italy.” In Postcolonial Italy, Challenging National Homogeneity, edited by Lombardi-Diop and Romeo, 1–29. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012. Lombardi-Diop, Cristina and Caterina Romeo. “The Italian Postcolonial: A Manifesto.” Italian Studies, 69, no. 3 (2014): 425–433. Lotringer, Sylvère. “In the Shadow of the Red Brigades.” Translated by John Johnston. In Autonomia: Post-Political Politics, edited by Sylvère Lotinger and Christian Marazzi, v–xvi. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007. Lumley, Robert. States of Emergency: Cultures of Revolt in Italy from 1968 to 1978. London: Verso, 1990. Marazzi, Christian and Sylvère Lotringer. “The Return of Politics.” Translated by Peter Caravetta and John Johnston. In Autonomia: Post-Political Politics, edited by Lotringer and Marazzi, 8–22. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007. Marcus, Greil. “The Long Walk of the Situationist International.” In Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, 1–20. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2002. Marcuse, Herbert. An Essay on Liberation. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. Radio Alice—Free Radio. “Collective A/Traverso.” Translated by Richard Gardner and Sybil Walker. In Autonomia: Post-Political Politics, edited by Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi, 130–135. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007. Scalesi, Mario. “Lapidazione” (1923). Unpublished translations by Gabriele Montalbano, 2018 and 2020 provided by the translator. Email correspondence with the author, May 11, 2020. Originally published in French as “Lapidation,” in Mario Scalesi, Les Poèmes d’un maldit (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1923). Scego, Igiaba. Roma negata: Percorsi postcoloniali nella città. Rome: Ediesse, 2014. Photos by Rino Bianchi. Sofri, Adriano. “Sessantotto. La corsa nei sacchi.” Micro-Mega 1 (1988). “Sparo alla testa del giovane africano, un fermato. Il video dell’aggressione,” Giornale di Sicilia, cronaca online (April 4, 2016).

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Thoburn, Nicholas. “Conquer the Anonymous: Authorship and Myth in the Wu Ming Foundation.” Cultural Critique 78 (Spring 2011): 119–150. Thoburn, Nicholas. Deleuze, Marx and Politics. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. Trento, Giovanna. “From Marinetti to Pasolini: Massawa, the Red Sea, and the Construction of ‘Mediterranean Africa’ in Italian Literature and Cinema.” Northeast African Studies 12, no. 1 (2012): 273–307. Troisi, Sergio. “Il Museo va in città.” La Repubblica, December 17, 2011. Triulzi, Alessandro. “Hidden Faces, Hidden Histories: Contrasting Voices of Postcolonial Italy.” In Postcolonial Italy, Challenging National Hegemony, edited by Cristina Lombardi-Diop and Caterina Romeo, 103–113. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012. Welch, Rhiannon Noel. “Anachronism, Displacement, and Trace: ‘Scarred Images’ and the Postcolonial Time Lag.” California Italian Studies 7, no. 1 (2017): 1–26. Wu Ming. “I fantasmi del colonialismo infestano le nostre città. A #Palermo un esorcismo di massa, viva Menilicchi!” Wu Ming Foundation (October 19, 2018): https​ :/​/ww​​w​.wum​​ingfo​​undat​​ion​.c​​om​/gi​​ap​/20​​18​/10​​/viva​​-m​eni​​licch​​i​-4/. Wu Ming. “Viva Menilicchi!: #Palermo a piedi contro il colonialismo per coltivare la coesistenza.” Wu Ming Foundation (June 6, 2018): https​:/​/ww​​w​.wum​​ingfo​​undat​​ ion​.c​​om​/gi​​ap​/20​​18​/06​​/viva​​-meni​​licch​​i​-pal​​ermo-​​a​-pie​​di​-co​​ntro-​​il​-co​​lonia​​lismo​​ -per-​​c​olti​​vare-​​la​-co​​esist​​enza/​. Wu Ming 2. Skype video interview with the author, 1:03.42, Cold Spring (NY) and Bologna. January 14, 2020. Wu Ming 2 + Wu Ming Foundation, in collaboration with Fare Ala. Viva Menlicchi! (Palermo: Manifesta 12, 2018). Fanzine. Cited texts include Luca Cinquemani, “Viva Menilicchi!” and Wu Ming 2, “Ai Ben Hrahim Suezzin,” both np. Wu Ming 2 + Wu Ming Foundation with Fare Ala. “Viva Menilicchi! Il 1o Grande Rituale Ambulante contro il Colonialismo. Palermo, 20 ottobre 2018”: https​:/​/ up​​loads​​.knig​​htlab​​.com/​​story​​mapjs​​/aa75​​8891d​​750e6​​edbfb​​bcee3​​48247​​22a​/v​​iva​-m​​ enili​​cchi-​​​grac/​​index​​.html​. Wu Ming 2 + Wu Ming Foundation, with the collaboration of Fare Ala. “Viva Menilicchi! Esplorando le vie di Palermo, a caccia dei fantasmi del colonialismo” (2018): https​:/​/up​​loads​​.knig​​htlab​​.com/​​story​​mapjs​​/aa75​​8891d​​750e6​​edbfb​​bcee3​​ 48247​​22a​/v​​iva​-m​​enili​​​cchi/​​index​​.html​. “Wu Ming 2 + Wu Ming Foundation.” In Manifesta 12. Palermo. Il Giardino Planetario. Coltivare la Coesistenza. La Biennale Nomade Europea. The Planetary Garden. Cultivating Coexistence. The European Nomadic Biennial, 156. Milan: Editoriale Domus, 2018.

Chapter 4

La Fac Soixante-Huitarde The Centre Universitaire Expérimental de Vincennes and the Afterlife of a Revolutionary Moment Paul Cohen

INTRODUCTION When people today recall the history of the Centre Universitaire Expérimental de Vincennes, the French university which opened its doors in Paris’s bois de Vincennes park in January 1969, they almost always associate it with May 1968. The journalists, scholars, and former soixante-huitards who fed a flood of retrospectives commemorating the fiftieth anniversaries of May 1968 and of the university’s foundation regularly affirmed the latter to be both a product and a prolongation of the former: “a university born in the effervescence of May 68”1; “a direct product of the student revolt of May– June 1968” indelibly marked by “its soixante-huitard filiation”2; “the enfant terrible of May 68”3; “Heir to the May 68 movement”4; “one of the greatest legacies of May 68.”5 Today known as the Université Paris-8, the institution is now located in Saint-Denis, a diverse, working-class suburb just north of Paris, but almost everyone who was associated with its first decade refers to it simply as Vincennes. It is a naming practice that declares the university’s identity to be enduringly rooted in its radical post-1968 origins rather than in its more quotidian present as an increasingly ordinary institution of mass higher education. To be sure, Vincennes did take shape in May 1968’s immediate aftermath, and the fierce political conflicts that shaped the university’s tumultuous early years mapped soixante-huitard faultlines. And, as I will argue in the first part of this essay, Vincennes did become a privileged space in which, perhaps more than in any other in 1970s France, many sought to make good on 79

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1968’s political, social, and cultural aspirations. The university functioned, at least in part, as a refuge from post-1968 France’s return to order, a space where political and social norms remained suspended and individual actors and groups could pursue the various political struggles and cultural practices that had first been elaborated during the student uprising. This was, in short, a space where May 1968 enjoyed an incandescent, even supercharged afterlife—if not a new, nearly decade long lease on life. To take statements proclaiming Vincennes to have been an authentic incarnation of May 1968’s spirit at face value, however, is to accept this filiation as obvious, transparent, not necessitating explanation or analysis. To leave it there, in short, amounts to accepting that, in the same way the radical republican leader Georges Clemenceau declared in 1891 in the Chamber of Deputies that “the French Revolution is a bloc . . . from which nothing can be removed,”6 May 1968, too, is “a bloc” of which Vincennes is an inalienable part. Clemenceau’s assertion was less historical argument than political battle cry, an attempt to parry monarchist criticisms of particular aspects of the Revolution and mount a defense of the Third Republic. So too with recitations of Vincenne’s soixante-huitard pedigree, which often function more to affirm a certain vision of May 1968 than to tease out the nuances in the university’s multidimensional history. In the second part of this essay, I will argue that an attentive reading of the university’s history invites us to interrogate its relationship with May 1968. From the very start, the experimental university was a place where various actors—the French government, the school’s founders, its faculty and students, and the various political formations and groupuscules which worked to carve out a presence on campus—all sought to impose their vision for the institution. Self-consciously pinning their efforts to the banner of 1968, they made Vincennes into a site for contestation, a battleground on which they fought to see their version of May triumph. To rehearse this history, then, is to complicate May 1968’s history, to recognize its plural, polyphonic dimension, and to see in even the most emblematic soixante-huitard spaces like Vincennes a complex kaleidoscope of subjectivities, aims, and experiences, an arena for negotiation and struggle. Finally, Vincennes, like May 1968 more broadly, has become an object of commemoration and celebration. Though les événements did not figure in Pierre Nora’s monumental Sites of Memory project, it has loomed increasingly large in France’s collective memory ever since.7 Veterans of Vincennes’ birth and first decade have revisited their experiences there with increasing frequency in recent years, putting their memories to paper or sharing them with journalists. A series of books, newspaper and magazine features, and documentary films mark the university’s consecration as a monument of sorts in May 1968’s increasingly vast landscape of memory. I

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argue here that Vincennes has come to function as a site of memory in the collective soixante-huitard imaginary. To tie the experimental university to May 1968, then, is to intervene in broader conversations about the national past and its meaning. Such interventions represent an effort to fix Vincennes within French historical memory at large, to enshrine the unruly campus in the collective consciousness of the generation that came of age with May 1968. In the third part of this essay, I will analyze what is at stake in these recollections. In particular, I will argue that the ways in which Vincennes’ relationship to May 1968 are figured in these accounts typically aim to downplay the conflictual character of its first decade of existence—in short, to present May 1968’s Vincennes afterlife as “a bloc.” This essay thus represents a contribution to two distinct scholarly literatures. First, it explores a defining feature of Vincennes’ own history,8 which should in turn be understood as an important chapter in the broader history of higher education in France.9 Second, joining the growing scholarly literature on May 1968, it proposes to think about Vincennes as a particularly interesting example of May 1968’s “afterlives,” understood as those terrains where the aspirations, goals, and faultlines first made visible during the events of May continued to be negotiated, fought over, and remembered (or misremembered).10 ORIGINS In what, in the light of all its subsequent history, can only be seen as a grand historical irony, the experimental university was at its origin a Gaullist project, part of a broader strategy of university reform aimed at defusing student discontent and turning the page on May 1968. De Gaulle was already thinking along these lines at the very moment students were clashing with police in the quartier latin, sharing his thoughts with his cabinet on May 23. When le général named the centrist politico Edgar Faure minister of education in June 1968, he charged him with expanding and modernizing the university system.11 Faure for his part dreamed of a new kind of institution, liberated from the intrusive Ministry interference so characteristic of France’s conservative, highly centralized higher education system, so that students and faculty could tear down disciplinary boundaries, collegially govern their own affairs, and pursue innovative research and teaching. Faure sketched out plans for several new experimental universities, including Dauphine in western Paris, Marseille Luminy, Antony south of Paris (never built), and one to be erected on land in the Bois de Vincennes which the army had been leasing from the city of Paris.12 When Faure went before the National Assembly shortly after taking up his cabinet post to present his reform, he made his aims of coopting

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the spirit of May on behalf of the government explicit: “Since those who claimed to have a hold over imagination did not take power, it falls upon those in power to seize imagination.”13 That hard-line Gaullists opposed this vision of university reform demonstrates how such efforts represented in their eyes a dangerous capitulation to gauchistes’ and enragés’ wild demands. Alain Peyrefitte, who had the curious fortune of holding the education portfolio when the events of May began, voiced his forceful opposition to de Gaulle’s ideas from the start. Michel Debré, the Fifth Republic’s constitutional architect and then-minister of foreign affairs, barely concealed his contempt for Faure. De Gaulle’s éminence grise, Jacques Foccart remarked that many rank-and-file Gaullists, including deputies in the National Assembly, were unhappy with Faure.14 It wouldn’t take long for Gaullists’ worst fears to be realized. Three left-leaning specialists of anglophone literature—Bernard Cassen, Hélène Cixous, and Pierre Dommergues—seized on whispers of the Ministry’s intentions to sketch out their own project: an avant-garde university, modeled in part on the American liberal college arts model, that would welcome both nontraditional students and faculty and encourage interdisciplinarity and nonhierarchical modes of teaching. Faure embraced their vision, and put the three in charge of making the university slated for the Bois de Vincennes a reality.15 Cassen and Dommergues piloted the construction of the university’s new campus, completed in three breakneck months. Its innovative architecture reflected its pedagogical and social ambitions: seminar-rooms took the place of lecture halls; language labs, computer facilities, and a close-circuit television network designed to broadcast programming produced in the university’s own studios into every classroom; and a daycare center and kindergarten open to students and employees alike.16 Cixous, a thirty-one-year-old single mother who was teaching English literature at Nanterre when May 1968 began, and who would go on to become a celebrated feminist, novelist, poet, playwright, and translator, took charge of assembling the new university’s faculty.17 She assembled a recruitment committee composed of well-known scholars and intellectuals, including Roland Barthes, Georges Canguilhem, Jacques Lacan, and Cixous’s good friend Jacques Derrida, who were instructed to consider only candidates with left-wing sympathies—the first real sign that Faure’s project had taken on a politicized life of its own. The young university lived up to its avant-garde promise. Hired to build the philosophy department, Michel Foucault recruited Alain Badiou, Étienne Balibar, Jacques Rancière, and Michel Serres, followed in short order by Gilles Deleuze and Jean-François Lyotard—making it a global capital for poststructuralist thought. Vincennes became home to France’s first departments of Cinema, Computer Science, Linguistics, Plastic Arts,

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Psychoanalysis, and Urbanism—as well as its first women and gender studies program, founded by Cixous herself.18 Breaking with the traditional modes of pedagogy in force throughout France’s hidebound and deeply hierarchical university system, faculty led small discussion seminars rather than large lectures, and junior and senior faculty shared equal teaching responsibilities. Graded based on continuous assessment rather than capstone final examinations, students were also free to build individualized courses of study. Just as Faure had hoped, Vincennes invented a new model of autonomous faculty governance, in which faculty, staff, service personnel, and students all elected the university’s president, deans, and governing committees.19 The university dropped the traditional French admissions requirements, welcoming students without a baccalauréat high school diploma; it scheduled classes in the evening to allow full-time workers to enroll. Vincennes may have been born in the 1968 moment, but it drew from a diverse, even contradictory, range of sources. It was planned first in gilded meeting rooms in the Élysée Palace and the Education Ministry on rue Grenelle, then reconceived in the living rooms of a generation of young, left-leaning academics. It was funded and built by a de Gaulle government still shaken by May 1968, while its design was supervised by a team of academics considerably more sympathetic to the student movement. For their part, Vincennes’ academic architects shared a critical mass of aims and values. They imagined Vincennes as a kind of higher education utopia, designed as an experiment in democratizing education and university administration and renewing intellectual inquiry in socially transformative ways. But they also represented a range of political sensibilities, as well as a range of attitudes toward May 1968 itself. Few had taken direct part in les événements. Some, like Cixous, had followed them with considerable sympathy. Foucault was in Tunis during the uprising, and he always credited the March 1968 student movement in Tunisia, rather than the unrest in France two months later, for sparking his own political engagement, remarking later “That’s what Tunisia meant for me: I had to join the political debate. It wasn’t May 1968 in France, but March 1968, in a Third World country . . . When I returned to France in November–December 1968, I was rather surprised, astonished and even disappointed in comparison to what I had seen in Tunisia.”20 Lacan, at first sympathetic to the protests, quickly adopted a more critical posture, quipping to students at Vincennes in late 1969, “The revolutionary aspiration, has only one chance of completion, always in the discourse of a master. . . . What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master. You will have one.”21 May 1968 provided necessary context, even impetus, for Vincennes’ creation. But it was not a banner behind which everyone on the avant-garde campus marched in lockstep.

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A DECADE OF CONTESTATION Many veterans of the Nanterre and Sorbonne occupations in turn saw in the new university rich revolutionary possibilities, a terrain where the domain of struggle could be extended. Before Vincennes opened its doors, a student group published a lengthy tract in the pages of Action, an influential if shortlived weekly created in May 1968 and which gave voice to a range of far-left voices. The tract laid out a detailed set of demands for the new university, to be submitted for discussion to an audience assembled at the Sorbonne on November 6, 1968, composed of future Vincennes students and members of the SNESUP faculty labor union and the UNEF students’ union. After first acknowledging the university’s origins as a government project and the role of prominent intellectuals in its planning, the tract’s authors minimized their importance, arguing that Vincennes in fact owed its existence to the students who had taken to the streets during May 1968. But Faure had hijacked the project, fooling everyone with “smoke and mirrors” and “machinations” entailing the “nomination of teachers behind students’ backs. They want to present students with a fait accompli.” The new university’s faculty, including figures like “Michel Foucault, one of the stars of ‘structuralism’,” should therefore be viewed with suspicion, as nothing less than instruments of the Gaullist regime, appointed “in the hopes we ignore everything else. Students didn’t fight to settle these professorial quarrels.” What then was to be done? “What do students want? . . . They want to use the university to deepen the students’ and workers’ common struggle which began in May. They want workers in the universities and the university in the factories.” In their stead, the tract’s authors emphasized the student movement itself as the driving agent of the experimental university’s history: “We won Vincennes in May. Not thanks to professorial grievances deploring the absence of buildings, not thanks to corporatist pressures. But thanks to the barricades and the action of the student and worker masses.22 In short, it was necessary for students to seize Vincennes for themselves.

The tract is interesting for two reasons. First, it represents perhaps the earliest concrete effort to transform the future campus into a revolutionary battleground. It outlined “a struggle . . . in which the university is at once the object and the theater,” aimed at making the campus a place for “permanent critique of the bourgeois university” and a “base for the preparation of actions outside the University.” In this, the tract’s authors envisaged Vincennes as a permanent outpost of May 1968 itself, a site where this moment of exception could be extended forward in time indefinitely, a circumscribed space where revolutionary contestation could take place on an ongoing basis. Second, in

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discounting the role of the government, Faure, or its faculty in defining how Vincennes had come into being, and what it should become, the tract sought to rewrite the infant university’s still young history, to tie it decisively and inextricably to May 1968, and erase any reference to its other myriad sources. This in short represented the first of many attempts to annex Vincennes wholesale to May 1968, to appropriate it in the service of a specific vision of soixante-huit’s history and legacy, to invest it with an origin myth and a univocal identity consubstantial with les événements. Their wish was quickly granted. Within two weeks of its opening in January 1969, faculty and students who had occupied the university to protest the arrest of students occupying the Sorbonne found themselves fending off police assaults. Politicized faculty and students brought all the faultlines of a left that May 1968 had left bitterly divided onto campus, where they fought to impose their influence. Notwithstanding their mutual animosity, the Communist Party (PCF) and Trotskyists were united by the common goal of ensuring the university functioned more or less normally. Maoists associated with the Gauche Prolétarienne (GP), under the leadership of Gérard Miller, his brother Jacques-Alain Miller (a professor in the psychoanalysis department), and Jacques-Alain’s wife Judith Miller (who was a professor in the philosophy department, as well as Lacan’s daughter), invested the campus in strength, seeking to undermine the university in furtherance of their revolutionary aims. As one Maoist tract put it, “The destruction of the University . . . [is] a process by which the student masses may come to understand the inanity of the University, of its system of exams, of the futility of its perverse teachings.” GP practiced what it preached, sabotaging the university’s first elections by throwing ballot-boxes into the fountain at the center of campus. Determined to set the university back on course, the PCF dispatched the party’s security service onto campus, where, bearing iron bars, they made sure the rescheduled election took place unimpeded, and that the party’s unopposed slate won. The non-communist left fought back against the university’s communist-controlled administration, vandalizing buildings, disrupting classes, and clashing frequently with Communist militants.23 Foucault’s best efforts couldn’t pacify his own department.24 In Rancière’s classes, students voted to kick PCF members out of the classroom. Weary of students heckling him for his PCF membership in class, Balibar resigned from the university and took up a post as a high school teacher.25 And just as the campus was heating up, it lost its political patrons. Whatever they really thought of left-wing factionalism at Vincennes, neither de Gaulle nor Faure seem to have been particularly troubled by it. When Foccart relayed the Gaullist rank-and-file’s wish for a strong response to the very first occupation of Vincennes, de Gaulle was “extremely annoyed” with his adviser, and insisted there was no need for government intervention.26 Showing more

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resignation than indignation, de Gaulle on another occasion declared with a sigh, “Vincennes, it’s for emmerdeurs.”27 When Maoists heckled Faure during a visit to the campus, the minister—who had traveled to China to meet with Mao at de Gaulle’s behest—shot right back: “the President Mao, I know him better than you do!”28 But others on the right shared neither de Gaulle and Faure’s bemused patience for Vincennes’ gauchiste doings, nor their commitment to the university’s future. Even before the university opened, right-wing deputies in the National Assembly worked to short-circuit the government, discreetly pressuring lower-level Education Ministry officials to undermine Vincennes’ development.29 De Gaulle’s resignation in the spring of 1969 transformed the political configuration backing Vincennes. Le général’s successor, Georges Pompidou, had been an opponent of Faure’s new universities from the beginning, and he wasted no time ejecting Faure from the cabinet, naming the far more conservative Olivier Guichard in his stead. Meanwhile, the political civil war raging on Vincennes’ campus quickly drew wide public attention, emboldening the university’s enemies in their campaign against the institution. In an interview published in L’Express in March 1970, Judith Miller explained she awarded course credit to all students, whether or not they completed any coursework, as part of a broader strategy to make the university “function worse and worse” and advance the destruction of this “organ of the state, a piece of capitalist society.” Not amused, the Education Ministry wasted no time removing her from her post at Vincennes and transferring her to a lycée.30 The Ministry also took a dim view of the philosophy department’s radical left-wing teaching—in 1969– 1970, course offerings included Rancière’s “Theory of the Second Stage of Marxism-Leninism: Stalinism” class—and it stripped the department of its accreditation and the right to award degrees. Vincennes now faced a hostile ministry, cuts to its funding, and unfriendly scrutiny from a popular rightwing press quick to seize upon evidence with which to allege dysfunction, low academic standards, a crazed curriculum that included sexology courses, and drug trafficking. Wracked by chaos—several of Balibar’s colleagues followed his example and quit the university in frustration—and facing an array of formidable foes, Vincennes almost closed within its very first year of existence. More broadly, the array of actors that fought political battles at Vincennes and over its very character and existence were all, in various ways, waging a war over May 1968’s meaning and legacy. The PCF whose attitude toward May 1968 had mixed hostility with incomprehension, sought to impose its authority over this unruly institutional child of soixante-huit—just as it had tried and failed to do during the événements themselves. In contrast, anarchists and Trotskyists had felt far greater affinities with the student movement

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and saw promise in Vincennes’ libertarian possibilities. As for the GP, a political configuration that came of age during May 1968, Vincennes represented at once a base for organization, a terrain for revolutionary action, and a target, one whose very destruction was an explicit goal. The Gaullist regime, and the right more broadly, also viewed the experimental campus through the lens of May 1968, even if many in their midst disagreed about what conclusions to draw. De Gaulle and Faure may have thought May 1968 itself was a senseless chienlit, but they also understood it to be an expression of a broader desire for social change. They never wavered in their support of Vincennes, each committed, if not to any revolutionary ideal, to the modernizing project they believed it could advance. (It should be said that the oft-repeated theory that Vincennes was a clever Gaullist stratagem aimed at corralling and containing leftist agitators in a wooded park situated at a convenient remove from center-city Paris is entirely consistent with this project.) But many in the Gaullist camp and on the non-Gaullist right took a less sanguine view, seeing in Vincennes a deplorable extension of gauchiste disorder and the worst libertarian impulses that had been unleashed in 1968, a dangerous institution that needed to be brought under control or closed. After waxing with a ferocious force that came near consuming the university, Maoist activity quickly waned, bringing some measure of calm to the campus for the first time since it had opened. Communists and gauchistes brokered a truce, tacitly agreeing that the university should begin functioning more or less normally.31 Vincennes’ experiment in non-hierarchical, dialogic pedagogy could begin. Teachers and students addressed each other with the informal tu rather than the formal vous, negotiated course expectations, initiated teach-ins, and participated in UV sauvages (“guerilla courses”) in metro stations, parks, and open-air food markets.32 Vincennes had not only delivered on its promise of reinventing higher education, it had succeeded in attracting a broad student public, whose diversity was unprecedented. Originally conceived for 8,000 students, by 1975 over 30,000 were enrolled.33 By the end of the decade, 34 percent of its students didn’t hold a high-school degree; among its French students, 46 percent held full-time jobs and another 23 percent part-time jobs; and 40 percent of courses took place in the evenings. Over 40 percent of students were foreign.34 Vincennes, in short, can be seen as a laboratory in which the “the long May 68” could unfold in relative peace, a uniquely favorable ecosystem for postsoixante-huit reflection and political action. Its innovative teaching can be understood as one response to demands voiced by students during May 1968 for a more democratic university, a place where students from both workingclass backgrounds and the bourgeois milieus from which university students traditionally hailed could study side by side, a community responsive to feminist aspirations and directly plugged into a broader transnational context.

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It was a natural habitat where a range of important political movements that coalesced in May 1968’s direct wake could take root or lean on for support. The Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (MLF) held its first public meeting on campus on May 21, 1970.35 During the farmers’ protests against a move to expropriate their lands on the Larzac plateau to build a military base, Vincennes geography faculty and students traveled there to examine the situation firsthand; when the Larzac’s farmers organized a protest march to Paris in 1978, they made Vincennes their final destination.36 For many, the decision to enroll at Vincennes represented a conscious choice, a means to extend the May 1968 experience and pursue political action. Consider “Gilles,” one of the many life-trajectories Julie Pagis studied for her “counter-history of Mai 68, that of anonymous people.” For Gilles, a postal employee who had grown up in a working-class family and married a fellow PCF member, May 1968 proved a political, intellectual, and sexual revelation. A young woman studying at university and active in Maoist politics with whom Gilles had begun a relationship brought him along to Nanterre and the Sorbonne during les événements, before convincing him to enroll at Vincennes, where people without the bac like him were welcome. Once there, he quit the PCF for the campus GP branch. In 1972, he met another woman at Vincennes active in the Tunisian protest movement, who introduced him to feminist and environmental politics and spurred his involvement with the MLF.37 Or take Daniel Lindenberg, who would go on to teach in the political science department at Paris-8. Already a Maoist when May 1968 erupted, Lindenberg saw in his choice to pursue his studies at Vincennes a logical next-step in his political and intellectual formation.38 In 1979, a future high school philosophy teacher decided to enroll “at the fac soixante-huitarde at Vincennes, Paris-8, in the woods. Because of my age, I had a revolution to catch up on.”39 While Vincennes was without doubt a privileged stage upon which “the long May 68” could play itself out, it would nonetheless be a mistake to reduce it to this. If the campus at times resembled a Situationist happening, a battleground between streetfighting militants and club-wielding riot police, and a hothouse for endless political debate, it was also a state-funded, staterun institution that, at least once the Maoist firestorm had spent itself, operated with some degree of normalcy. Many of the students and teachers there were highly politicized, but there were a myriad of other, considerably less radical trajectories as well. There were students who landed at Vincennes not out of any soixante-huitard affinity or gauchiste vocation, but quite simply because it was possible for them, notwithstanding their lack of a baccalauréat or a valid visa, to enroll there. There were students who chose Vincennes because its evening courses made it possible to conjugate full-time employment with their studies. For people like these, there were simply no other

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higher-education options available to them. And there were some who, fed up with the crumbling state of the campus, the dysfunction, or the political clashes, fled to other, more tranquil, universities. HISTORICAL MEMORY The moment when Vincennes began to take shape in collective memory as an incandescent monument in its own right can be dated with great precision. In 1980, President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s minister of universities, Alice Saunier-Seïté, ordered the university moved to Saint-Denis and its Vincennes campus razed to the ground. The Education Ministry had been weighing shutting its dissident university for many years. Indeed, facing as it did hostile governments and media, Vincennes had always felt like an embattled, even imperiled institution, to whose defense faculty and students repeatedly flew. For all his interest in Maoist political action at the time, Foucault worked tirelessly on behalf of the university, clashing with police during the very first campus occupation, taking up Judith Miller’s cause and joining student rallies on her behalf, and publishing a defense of his own department in Le Nouvel Observateur as its accreditation was being stripped.40 Political economist Michel Beaud, who resigned as university president after only four months, accused the Education Ministry of seeking to destroy the university in a book published in 1971 entitled, Vincennes Year III. The Ministry Against the University (the nod to the French Revolutionary calendar itself signaling that, in Beaud’s view, Vincennes represented a temporality-changing revolution in its own right).41 The notion that they might be expelled from their radical higher education Eden in the woods was always on Vincennes’ event horizon. When the move finally came, everyone concerned understood that this would represent a rupture point in Vincennes’ history—and not just because it was leaving its historic, state-of-the-art (if by now dilapidated) campus for an amalgam of repurposed buildings and prefabs only half the size, forcing a sharp reduction in student numbers. Even before the move took place, Vincennes faculty and fellow-travelers took up their pens to celebrate their university in nostalgia-saturated elegies. The experimental university had become an object of commemoration even before its first decade was out.42 The relocation to Saint-Denis only accelerated the process, triggering a new wave of recollection. Soon after he had resigned as university president to protest the move, Pierre Merlin published a vitriolic attack on SaunierSeïté and a chronicle of Vincennes’s successes, entitled The Assassinated University.43 One of the founders of its sociology department, Jean-Claude

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Passeron, penned a playful yet regretful parody, “The Last Days of Vincennes at Vincennes.”44 Paris-8’s university press published a photography album chronicling the murals that had been painted by art students at Vincennes.45 It is tempting to see in Paris-8’s departure from Vincennes a clamorous, meaningful sign that the “long May 68” was coming to an end, a convenient bookend closing a twelve-year period of political, social, cultural, and intellectual effervescence. This is one of the lessons Hervé Hamon and Patrick Rotman, who would go on to coauthor a series of important chronicles and documentary films about the May 1968 generation, drew from Vincenne’s relocation: “Paris-8 . . . knows that the reassertion of control over French universities . . . [isn’t] just a putsch by the authorities. The university left . . . has suffered a defeat, and has perhaps lost a war.”46 That its departure from Vincennes roughly coincided with the ascension of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan outside France and an increasingly vigorous liberal critique of Marxist revolutionary ideology within France seems in retrospect rich in significance. But making too much of the timing of Paris-8’s move to Saint-Denis risks flattening out the university’s complex history. That the relocation took place in 1980 was a product of political conjuncture as much as anything else: the university stood at the precipice of closure or removal almost from its inception, and it was only pressure by the then-mayor of Paris Jacques Chirac to reclaim the campus’s land for the city that finally precipitated the move. Indeed, Saunier-Seïté was in 1977 already being questioned in the Senate about the possibility that the experimental university might be relocated. Her response, too, illustrates Vincennes’ multidimensional identity—and the dangers of reducing it to its soixante-huitard reputation. Eschewing any reference to May 1968 or gauchiste experiments run amok, Saunier-Seïté preferred an entirely different trope upon which to blame the disorderly drug-infested campus, characterizing Vincennes as “the perfect example of the management and domination of the Communist Party in higher education.”47 Her remark amounted to a blatant rewriting of Vincennes’ history of political conflict, one that erased the soixante-huitard threads of its identity to construct another myth emphasizing the Communist menace. This myth was tailored to contemporary fears that the PCF, allied at that moment with François Mitterrand’s Socialist Party under the banner of the so-called Programme commun, were in a strong position to win the upcoming 1978 legislative elections. Vincennes alumni have, in a variety of media and genres, worked hard to make a place for the university in personal and collective memory ever since. The twentieth, then fortieth, and most recently fiftieth anniversaries of Vincennes’ foundation have inspired a series of formal recollections: newspaper features, radio shows revisiting the university’s history and significance

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produced by the French public broadcaster France Culture, lavishly illustrated multiauthor books, and documentary films.48 These tend to be celebrations that emphasize its (many real) accomplishments. Even those that acknowledge the conflict that marked its early years present the Vincennes experience as a coherent, unified whole, one that bore an unmistakable May 1968 stamp. In his memoir, subtitled “A Political Education around 68,” Lindenberg fondly recalls Vincennes as a kind of absurdist utopia, an “incredible mix of the Abbey of Thélème and the Ship of Fools.”49 In an essay published in May 1998 to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of les événements in, of all places, the historic newspaper of the PCF, L’Humanité, Cixous held up Vincennes as emblematic of the May 1968 experience. “Maysixtyeight isn’t finished,” proclaimed Cixous in her characteristically lyrical style. It had opened up a historical process, an open-ended, hope-filled dynamic of emancipation in which Vincennes had played an important part, and which was ongoing. Hers is a “big tent” version of May 1968, an ecumenical portrait in which Barthes, François Châtelet, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, “and so many others” can all peacefully coexist. Cixous, in short, presents May 1968 as “a bloc” at whose heart lies Vincennes.50 Cixous’s celebration of May 1968 and Vincennes is, in short, a myth. To be clear, by characterizing her essay as an exercise in mythmaking, I do not mean to criticize it. Rather, I argue that it represents a narrative choice, a way to frame Vincennes’ history and its relationship to May 1968 that emphasizes continuities and coherence and elides faultlines and fissures. Its purpose is twofold. First, it serves to parry those who criticize May 1968 and deplore its legacy in France—polemicists such as Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, whose 1985 book La Pensée 68 reads like a vitriol-drenched attack on Vincennes’ philosophy department.51 Second, Cixous’s big tent serves to refute those who argue that May 1968 in general, and Vincennes’ experience in particular, are no longer relevant—thus giving the lie to those who would argue “the long May 68” had already ended. Ultimately, her argument rests on an effort to weave back together the variegated strands of Vincennes’ history whose very fraying was, at least in part, a battle over the meaning of May 1968 itself. There are of course a whole multiplicity of ways to remember or celebrate Vincennes, including narratives that make little reference to May 1968. Saunier-Seïté proposed one narrative, emphasizing (with a healthy dose of bad faith) the PCF’s role. A generation of political refugees who fled Latin American military dictatorships in the 1970s fondly remember Vincennes’s warm welcome.52 Indeed, it would be possible to write a history of the university that situates it in the context not of France’s May 1968 moment, but of the political, intellectual, and cultural history of Latin America, or alternatively of a long global 1968 moment.

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Finally, retrospective celebrations of Vincennes also elide an important fact: many among those who were there in its early years did not enjoy their experience. The faculty who resigned their positions for example remembered their time there with little fondness. Serres quit to escape a climate that he described as nothing short of “intellectual terrorism.” Foucault had no regrets moving on to the Collège de France: “I had had enough of being surrounded by near lunatics.”53 Jacques Julliard, one of the founders of the history department, left Vincennes because “I was tired of the escalation and the waste.”54 Taken together, such statements amount to a counter-memory of sorts, one that figures Vincennes not as a utopia but a failed experiment, its good intentions paving a troubled path to a hell of internecine far-left conflict, misguided gauchisme, and intolerable dysfunction. This memorial narrative of course elides as much as more glowing narratives do—notably the fact that the period of intense political conflict on campus was relatively short-lived, and that for much of the 1970s Vincennes lived a more pacified existence. CONCLUSION Vincennes’ filiation with May 1968 is thus complex, even ambiguous. The project began at the initiative of the Gaullist regime as part of a strategy to defuse student discontent. The university took its definitive shape under the leadership of a group of academics who sought to build an institution after their own progressive ideals. This unlikely higher education utopia thus drew from many sources: May 1968 of course, but also the modernizing visions of Gaullist technocrats and the American liberal arts college that had so impressed Vincennes’ founders; gauchiste ideologies as well as the structuralist intellectual revolution that had reshaped the humanities and social sciences in postwar France. The students, teachers, and staff who studied, worked, socialized, organized, protested, and fought there brought a range of perspectives and objectives to campus, some tied directly to May 1968, others not: from Communist and Trotskyist to anarchist and Maoist; from philosophers trained in the country’s most selective schools and now working their way out from under the Althusserian shadow to working-class students who had never completed high school; from battle-hardened veterans of the Latin Quarter’s barricades to Chileans who had managed to keep one step ahead of Augusto Pinochet’s death squads; from deeply committed GP militants to apolitical students. Vincennes then was never simply a place where a unitary soixante-huitard dynamic was left free to unfold. Indeed, the very disagreements that so marked its early history must be seen in part as a contest to define what May 1968 in fact meant, and how its lessons (if any) should be put to work.

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Vincennes’s emergence as a site of memory in its own right since its move to Saint-Denis is a historical phenomenon in and of itself, and the recollections that emphasize its status as la fac soixante-huitard merit specific attention. This discourse draws of course on real, lived experience, but it also elides as much as it emphasizes, flattening out a complex, conflict-ridden history and a diverse set of social trajectories and viewpoints. Statements forcefully affirming Vincennes’ May 1968 identity must themselves be seen, at least in part, as efforts to define May 1968’s place in contemporary collective memory. NOTES 1. Jean Birnbaum, “Le jour où la fac de Vincennes s’est tue,” Le Monde, May 30, 2016. https​:/​/ww​​w​.lem​​onde.​​fr​/te​​levis​​ions-​​radio​​/arti​​cle​/2​​016​/0​​6​/01/​​le​-jo​​ur​-ou​​-la​-f​​ ac​-de​​-vinc​​ennes​​-s​-es​​t​​-tue​​_4930​​007​_1​​65502​​7​.htm​l (consulted April 28, 2020): “une université née de l’effervescence de Mai 68.” 2. Lilian Mathieu, “Virginie Linhart, Vincennes, l’université perdue,” Lectures (April 25, 2018). http:​/​/jou​​rnals​​.open​​editi​​on​.or​​g​/lec​​tur​es​​/2461​6 (consulted April 24, 2020): “un produit direct de la révolte estudiantine de mai et juin 1968 . . . Sa filiation soixante-huitarde.” 3. Charles Soulié, ed., Un Mythe à détruire? Origines et destin du Centre expérimental universitaire de Vincennes (Saint-Denis: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2012), back cover. 4. Paulin Hoegy, “Mai 68 et l’université de Vincennes: La faculté de penser autrement,” Unsighted, March 19, 2018. https​:/​/un​​sight​​ed​.co​​/doss​​iers/​​mai​-6​​8​-et-​​ luniv​​ersit​​e​-de-​​paris​​-vinc​​ennes​​-la​-f​​acult​​e​-d​e-​​pense​​r​-aut​​remen​​t/ (consulted April 28, 2020): “héritière du mouvement de Mai 68.” 5. Jean-Jacques Cadet, “Histoire de l’Université Paris-VIII,” L’Humanité, September 26, 2013, https​:/​/ww​​w​.hum​​anite​​.fr​/t​​ribun​​es​/hi​​stoir​​e​-de-​​l​-uni​​versi​​te​-pa​​​ris​ -v​​iii​-5​​49721​ (consulted April 28, 2020): “l’un des plus grands héritages de Mai 68.” 6. Clémenceau’s remarks pronounced January 29, 1891, in Journal Officiel. Débats parlementaires. Chambre des Députés (January 30, 1891): 156: “la Révolution française est un bloc . . . un bloc dont on ne peut rien distraire.” For an analysis of the context, see Marion Pouffary, “1891, l’affaire Thermidor,” Histoire, Économie et Société 28, no. 2 (2009): 87–108. 7. Pierre Nora, ed., Les Lieux de mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1984–1992). 8. Though no scholarly account of Vincennes’ history yet exists, there is a growing body of writing on the university. For a well-researched account of the university’s foundation, see Rémi Faucherre, “Atypie-utopie: Vincennes, naissance d’une université mai 1968-janvier 1969” (maîtrise thesis, Université Paris-7, 1992). Some Vincennes faculty have written histories of their own departments: Charles Soulié, “Le Destin d’une institution d’avant-garde: histoire du département de philosophe de Paris-VIII,” Histoire de l’Éducation, no. 77 (1998): 47–69; Jean-Pierre Martinon, “Histoire lacunaire du Département de Sociologie de l’Université de Paris VIII”

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(2006), http:​/​/www​​.univ​​-pari​​s8​.fr​​/soci​​ologi​​e​/fic​​hiers​​/ma​rt​​inon.​​pdf (consulted May 28, 2020). Other Vincennes faculty directed collective publications, typically aimed at defending the university against critics: Michel Debeauvais, ed., L’Université ouverte. Les dossiers de Vincennes (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1976); Jacqueline Brunet et al., eds., Vincennes ou le désir d’apprendre (Paris: Alain Moreau, 1979). Paris-8 maintains a web site of archives and documents on its own history: http://www​.ipt​.univ​-paris8​.fr​/hist/ (consulted 28 March 2020). For Vincennes’ place in broader historical context: François Dosse, Histoire du structuralisme (Paris: La Découverte, 1991–1992), vol. 2, ch. 15; Jean-Claude Passeron, “1950-1980: L’université mise à la question: changement de décor ou changement de cap?” in Histoire des universités en France, ed. Jacques Verger (Toulouse: Privat, 1986), pp. 367–419, esp. 386, 390, 393; André Tuillier, Histoire de l’Université de Paris et de la Sorbonne (Paris: Nouvelle Librairie de France, 1994), 2:561; and Yves Lequin and Pierre Lamard, “Universités nouvelles, technique et technologie (France: 1968-2010),” in Les Universités nouvelles. Enjeux et perspectives, eds. Lyse Roy and Yves Gringras (Québec: Presses de l’Université du Québec, 2012), pp. 111–138. Charles Soulié has conducted the most sustained work on Vincennes’ history: Soulié, “Vincennes,” in Le Siècle rebelle, 2nd ed., ed. Emmanuel de Waresquiel (Paris: Larousse, 2004), pp. 939–943; Soulié, Un Mythe à détruire? See also Jean-Michel Djian, ed., Vincennes. Une aventure de la pensée critique (Paris: Flammarion, 2009); Paul Cohen, “Happy Birthday Vincennes! The University of Paris-8 Turns Forty,” History Workshop Journal 61, no. 1 (2010): 206–224. I have also begun work on a book-length study of the university’s history. 9. See, for example: Terry Nichols Clark, Prophets and Patrons: The French University and the Emergence of the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973); Verger, ed., Histoire des universités en France (Toulouse: Privat, 1986); Christine Musselin, La Longue marche des universités françaises (Paris: PUF, 2001); and Christophe Charles and Jacques Verger, Histoire des Universités, 2nd ed. (Paris: PUF-Que sais-je?, 2007). 10. The literature is too vast to review here. Recent contributions include: Michelle Zancarini-Fournel et al., eds,, Les années 68. Le temps de la contestation (Brussels: Éditions Complexe, 2000); Andrew Feenberg and Jim Freedman, When Poetry Ruled The Streets: The French May Events of 1968 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001); Kristin Ross, May ‘68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Julian Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought (Montréal-Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007); and Richard Wolin, The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018). 11. De Gaulle articulated his wish for university reform to his cabinet on May 23, 1968, and again on January 9, 1969, to his then education minister, Alain Peyrefitte, in Peyrefitte C’était de Gaulle (Paris: Fayard, 2000), 3: 533–537, 606–608. See also de Gaulle’s influential adviser Jacques Foccart’s recollections, in Journal de l’Élysée, (Paris: Fayard-Jeune Afrique, 1997–2001), 2: 296. De Gaulle’s praised Faure’s reforms in his Mémoires (Paris: Pléiade, 2000), pp. 1193–1199.

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12. Faure’s project for the creation of Vincennes submitted to de Gaulle, Décret no. 68-1106 “Création à Vincennes d’un centre universitaire ayant statut de faculté” (December 7, 1968), Bulletin Officiel, no. 45 (December 19, 1968), reprinted in Brunet, Vincennes ou le désir d’apprendre, pp. 19–21; see also Claude-Marie Vadrot, “Edgar Faure ou l’art du contre-pied,” Politis, April 30–May 7, 2008, p. 26. On Faure, see Raymond Krakovitch, Edgar Faure. Le virtuose de la politique (Paris: Economica, 2006), ch. 13, esp. pp. 161–162. 13. Faure’s presentation to the National Assembly (July 24, 1968), published as Faure, L’Éducation nationale et la participation (Paris: Plon, 1968), p. 78: “Si ceux qui prétendaient détenir l’imagination n’ont pas pris le pouvoir, il reste au pouvoir à prendre l’imagination.” 14. Peyrefitte C’était de Gaulle, 3: 533–537, 606–608; Debré, Trois Républiques pour une France. Mémoires, vol. 4, Gouverner autrement 1962-1970 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1993), pp. 318–20; and Foccart, Journal, 5:379, 393, 413, 426, 438, 452, 470, 501, 544, and 623. 15. On Vincennes’ birth, see Faucherre, “Atypie-utopie.” See also the various accounts of the university’s founding figures: Cixous quoted in Claude-Marie Vadrot, “Nous avons pris la Bastille, pas la Sorbonne,” Politis, April 30–May 7, 2008, p. 23; Cixous, “Pré-histoire,” in Djian, Vincennes, pp. 18–25; Bernard Cassen, “Comment le PC sauva Vincennes,” in Djian, Vincennes, pp. 26–28; Dommergues and Raymond Las Vergnas in Brunet, Vincennes ou le désir d’apprendre, pp. 37–43; and Maurice Courtois, interview with Guy Berger (June 2002). http:​/​/www​​.ipt.​​univ-​​paris​​8​.fr/​​hist/​​ Inter​​view_​​​Berge​​r​.htm​ (consulted March 28, 2020). 16. Claude-Marie Vadrot, “Naissance d’une université,” Politis, April 30–May 7, 2008, pp. 24–25. 17. For an overview of Cixous’s life, career, and work, see Verena Andermatt Conley, “Hélène Cixous,” in French Women Writers, eds. Eva Martin Sartori and Dorothy Wynne Zimmerman (1991), 2nd ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), pp. 66–77. 18. Jacques Julliard, “Je vois un grand goéland battant les ailes et parlant sans trêve,” Pierre Encrevé, “Autour de Noam Chomsky,” and Pascal Bonafoux, “Le Sacre de Popper,” all in Djian, Vincennes, pp. 102–104, 110–112, 160–161; Dosse, Histoire du structuralisme, 2:191; and Cixous, White Ink: Interviews on Sex, Text and Politics, ed. Susan Sellers (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), pp. 58–59. 19. Courtois, interview with Guy Berger. 20. Orazio Irrera, “Michel Foucault – une généalogie de la subjectivité militante,” Chimères, no. 83 (2014): 35–45, esp. 38–40, quote on 40: “Voilà ce qu’a été la Tunisie pour moi: j’ai dû entrer dans le débat politique. Ce ne fut pas Mai 68 en France, mais Mars 68, dans un pays du tiers monde . . . Quand je suis rentré en France en novembre-décembre 1968, je fus plutôt surpris, étonné et même déçu [à l’egard de] ce que j’avais vu en Tunisie.” 21. Lacan speaking at Vincennes (December 3, 1969), quoted in Jacques Sédat, “Lacan et Mai 68,” Figures de la Psychanalyse, no. 18 (2009): 221–226, quote p. 223: “L’aspiration révolutionnaire, ça n’a qu’une chance, d’aboutir, toujours au discours du maître. . . . Ce à quoi vous aspirez comme révolutionnaires, c’est à un maître. Vous l’aurez.”

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22. “Vincennes-la-Folie: 21 conditions des étudiants,” Action, 5 November 1968, p. 4: “la poudre aux yeux . . . Michel Foucault, une des étoiles du ‘structuralisme’ . . . dans l’espoir de faire oublier le reste. Les étudiants ne se sont pas battu pour régler ces querelles professorales. . . . Ce n’est pas ce qui intéresse le mouvement étudiant. Que veulent les étudiants? . . . Ils veulent utiliser l’université pour approfondir la lutte commune des étudiants et des travailleurs inaugurée en mai. Ils veulent les ouvriers dans les université [sic] et l’université dans les usines. . . . les machinations . . . Nous avons gagné Vincennes en Mai. Pas grâce aux doléances professorales déplorant depuis des décades le manque de locaux, pas par le moyen d’une action corporatiste. Par les barricades et l’action de masse des étudiants et des travailleurs. . . . nomination des enseignants derrière le dos des étudiants. On veut mettre les étudiants devant le fait accompli et restaurer l’‘autorité’ universitaire dans tout son arbitraire . . . la critique permanente de l’université bourgeoise . . . base pour la préparation des actions extérieures à l’Université.” 23. See Debeauvais, L’Université ouverte, pp. 21–33; Hervé Hamon and Patrick Rotman, “Vincennes ou l’anomalie,” Le Débat (May 1981): 38–49; Hamon and Rotman, Génération, 2nd ed. (Paris: Seuil, 2008), 2: 39–65, tract quoted on 58: “La destruction de l’Université . . . un long processus. ce mouvement passe par la compréhension, par les masses étudiantes, de l’inanité de l’Université, de son système d’examens, de l’inutilité de son enseignement perverti.” See also interview with Judith Miller in Madeleine Chapsal and Michèle Manceaux, Les Professeurs pour quoi faire? (Paris: Seuil, 1970), pp. 96–99. 24. Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault (1926–1984), 2nd ed. (Paris: Flammarion, 1991), pp. 218–222. 25. David Macey, The Lives of Foucault (London: Hutchinson, 1993), p. 229. 26. Foccart Journal de l’Élysée, 2:567–568. 27. De Gaulle quoted by Jacques-Médéric Chevrot, Faure’s personal secretary, in Krakovitch, Edgar Faure, p. 269: “Vincennes, c’est pour les emmerdeurs.” 28. Faure quoted in Hamon and Rotman, Génération, 2:56–67: “Le président Mao, je le connais mieux que vous!” Faure always spoke about Vincennes in favorable terms after leaving the government: Faure, Ce que je crois (Paris: Grasset, 1971), pp. 77–81; and Brunet, Vincennes ou le désir d’apprendre, pp. 31–36. 29. See Faucherre, “Atypie-utopie.” 30. Chapsal and Manceaux, Les Professeurs pour quoi faire?, p. 100: “fonctionne de plus en plus mal. . . . un appareil d’Etat, un morceau de la société capitaliste.” 31. Debeauvais, L’Université ouverte, pp. 35–45. 32. “Rapport sur l’Université de Paris VIII (Vincennes) présenté par un groupe d’études” (1974), submitted to the Ministry of Education http:​/​/jul​​ienas​​.ipt.​​univ-​​paris​​ 8​.fr/​​hist/​​docum​​ents/​​Schwa​​rtz​/S​​​chwar​​tz1​.h​​tm (consulted 28 March 2020). 33. Soulié, “Le Destin d’une institution d’avant-garde,” pp. 66–67. 34. Brunet, Vincennes ou le désir d’apprendre, pp. 22–23. 35. Christine Delphy, “Les Origines du Mouvement de libération des femmes en France,” Nouvelles Questions Féministes, no. 16–18 (1991): 137–148. 36. Claude-Marie Vadrot, “‘Vincennes’ et les luttes de son temps,” Politis, April 30–May 7, 2008, pp. 30–31; and Djian, Vincennes, pp. 180–181.

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37. Julie Pagis, “Incidences biographiques du militantisme en Mai 68,” Sociétés Contemporaines, no. 84 (2011): 25–51, esp. 36–40; Pagis, Mai 68. Un pavé dans leur histoire (Presses de Sciences Po, 2014); and Nicolas Duvoux and Jules Naudet, “Une contre-histoire de Mai 68,” interview with Julie Pagis, La Vie des idées (May 21, 2018). http:​/​/www​​.lavi​​edesi​​dees.​​fr​/Un​​e​-con​​tre​-h​​istoi​​re​-de​​​-Mai-​​68​.ht​​ml (consulted 28 March 2020): “contre-histoire de Mai 68, celle des anonymes.” 38. Daniel Lindenberg, Choses vues. Une éducation politique autour de 68 (Paris: Bartillat, 2008), pp. 182–185. 39. Emmanuel Mousset, J’ai tant de choses à vous dire, blog entry 28 July 2011, https​:/​/ja​​itant​​decho​​sesav​​ousdi​​re​.bl​​ogspo​​t​.com​​/2011​​/07​/c​​haud-​​lete-​​​sra​-c​​haud.​​html (consulted May 28, 2020): “à la fac soixante-huitarde de Vincennes, Paris 8, dans le bois. J’avais, à cause de mon âge, une révolution de retard.” 40. On Foucault’s time at Vincennes: Eribon, Michel Foucault, p. 208 and pt. 3, ch. 1; Macey, The Lives of Foucault, ch. 9, esp. pp. 219–231; and James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), pp. 175–183. See Foucault’s published defense of his department, “Le Piège de Vincennes,” Le Nouvel Observateur, 9 February 1970, pp. 33–35. 41. Michel Beaud, Vincennes an III. Le Ministère contre l’Université (Paris: J. Martineau, 1971). 42. Jean-Pierre Vélis, “Vincennes: La rançon du succès,” L’Éducation, March 24, 1977, pp. 12–15; Marianne Debouzy,“Vincennes pour y faire quoi?” Esprit, no. 11–12 (1978): 87–97; the entire issue devoted “À Vincennes” of the Paris-8-based journal Littérature, no. 34 (1979); and Brunet, Vincennes ou le désir d’apprendre. 43. Pierre Merlin, L’Université assassinée. Vincennes: 1968–1980 (Paris: Ramsay, 1980). 44. Passeron, “Les derniers jours de Vincennes à Vincennes.” Semiotica 122, no. 3–4 (1998): 199–203. 45. Vincennes . . . vaine scène? (St-Denis: Université de Paris-VIII-Vincennes à Saint-Denis, 1981). 46. Hervé Hamon and Patrick Rotman, “Vincennes ou l’anomalie,” p. 14: “Paris VIII . . . sait que la reprise en main de l’Université française . . . ne sont pas seulement un putsch des pouvoirs publics. La gauche universitaire . . . a subi une défaite, et peut-être perdu une guerre.” 47. Passeron, “1950-1980,” pp. 394–395; and Saunier-Seïté quoted in Philippe Boggio, “Un Ghetto universitaire?” Le Monde, June 1, 1977, https​:/​/ww​​w​.lem​​onde.​​fr​ /ar​​chive​​s​/art​​icle/​​1977/​​06​/01​​/i​-un​​-ghet​​to​-un​​ivers​​itair​​e​_2​86​​6082_​​18192​​18​.ht​​ml (consulted March 28, 2020): “l’exemple parfait de gestion et de domination du parti communiste dans les enseignements supérieurs.” 48. On the occasion of Vincennes’ fortieth anniversary, the French public radio station France Culture put together a collection of audio and video files on the university’s history: http:​/​/www​​.radi​​ofran​​ce​.fr​​/chai​​nes​/f​​rance​​-cult​​ure2/​​dossi​​ers​ /2​​009​/u​​niver​​s​ite-​​saint​​-deni​​s/ (consulted November 11, 2009); the daily newspaper Libération, which can boast its own May 68 and especially Maoist filiations, published two extensive retrospectives, on January 13, 2009 and March 24, 2009; see also “Vincennes » ou l’histoire d’un utopie,” special issue, Politis, no. 1000, April 30–May

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7, 2008, pp. 22–33; Djian, Vincennes; my own Cohen, “Happy Birthday Vincennes!” could be counted in this category as well. Its fiftieth anniversary occasioned a new round of commemorations: Soulié, Un mythe à détruire; the documentary Vincennes. L’université perdue, directed by Virginie Linhart (2018). Several other documentary films have also been made on the subject, including: Le Ghetto expérimental, directed by Adam Schmedes and Jean-Michel Carré (1975); Les Murs et la parole, directed by Patrick Boriès, François Blusseau, and Philippe Hochard (1982); and Vincennes, roman noir pour université rouge, directed by Yolande Robveille and Jean Condé (2008). 49. Daniel Lindenberg, Choses vues, p. 183: “mélange incroyable d’abbaye de Thélème et de Nef des fous.” 50. Cixous, “Maisoixantehuit a commencé avant ’68 et,” L’Humanité, May 28, 1998, https://www​ .humanite​ .fr​ /node​ /183915 (consulted 28 May 2020): “et tant d’autres.” 51. Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, La Pensée 68. Essais sur l’anti-humanisme contemporain (Paris: Gallimard, 1985). 52. Hortensia Bussi de Allende, “L’Ouverture sur l’Amérique latine,” in Brunet, Vincennes ou le désir d’apprendre, pp. 154–157. 53. Serres and Foucault quoted in Eribon, Michel Foucault, pp. 218, 222: “terrorisme intellectuel”; and “J’en avais assez d’être entouré par des demi-fous.” 54. Julliard, “Je vois un grand goéland . . . ,” p. 161: “j’étais fatigué de la surenchère et du gâchis.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY “À Vincennes.” Special Issue, Littérature no. 34 (1979). Beaud, Michel. Vincennes an III. Le Ministère contre l’Université. Paris: J. Martineau, 1971. Birnbaum, Jean. “Le jour où la fac de Vincennes s’est tue.” Le Monde, May 30, 2016. https​:/​/ww​​w​.lem​​onde.​​fr​/te​​levis​​ions-​​radio​​/arti​​cle​/2​​016​/0​​6​/01/​​le​-jo​​ur​-ou​​-la​-f​​ ac​-de​​-vinc​​ennes​​-s​-es​​t​-​tue​​_4930​​007​_1​​65502​​7​.htm​​l. Boggio, Philippe. “Un Ghetto universitaire?” Le Monde, June 1, 1977. https​:/​/ww​​w​ .lem​​onde.​​fr​/ar​​chive​​s​/art​​icle/​​1977/​​06​/01​​/i​-un​​-ghet​​to​-un​​ivers​​itair​​e​_286​​​6082_​​18192​​ 18​.ht​​ml. Bonafoux, Pascal. “Le Sacre de Popper.” In Djian, Vincennes, pp. 160–161. Bourg, Julian. From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought. Montréal-Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007. Brunet, Jacqueline et al., eds Vincennes ou le désir d’apprendre. Paris: Alain Moreau, 1979. Bussi de Allende, Hortensia, “L’Ouverture sur l’Amérique latine.” In Brunet, Vincennes ou le désir d’apprendre, pp. 154–157. Cadet, Jean-Jacques Cadet. “Histoire de l’Université Paris-VIII.” L’Humanité, 26 September 2013. https​:/​/ww​​w​.hum​​anite​​.fr​/t​​ribun​​es​/hi​​stoir​​e​-de-​​l​-uni​​versi​​te​-pa​​r​is​-v​​ iii​-5​​49721​.

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Chapsal, Madeleine, and Michèle Manceaux. Les Professeurs pour quoi faire? Paris: Seuil, 1970. Charles, Christophe, and Jacques Verger. Histoire des Universités, 2nd ed. Paris: PUF-Que sais-je?, 2007. Cixous, Hélène. “Maisoixantehuit a commencé avant mai ‘68 et n’est pas fini.” L’Humanité, May 28, 1998. https://www​.humanite​.fr​/node​/183915. Cixous, Hélène. “Pré-histoire.” In Djian, Vincennes, pp. 18–25. Cixous, Hélène. White Ink: Interviews on Sex, Text and Politics, edited by Susan Sellers. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Clark, Terry Nichols. Prophets and Patrons: The French University and the Emergence of the Social Sciences. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973. Cohen, Paul. “Happy Birthday Vincennes! The University of Paris-8 Turns Forty.” History Workshop Journal 61, no. 1 (2010): 206–224. Conley, Verena Andermatt. “Hélène Cixous.” In French Women Writers, edited by Eva Martin Sartori and Dorothy Wynne Zimmerman, 2nd ed., pp. 66–77. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Courtois, Maurice. Interview with Guy Berger (June 2002). http:​/​/www​​.ipt.​​univ-​​paris​​ 8​.fr/​​hist/​​Inter​​view_​​Ber​ge​​r​.htm​. Debeauvais, Michel, ed. L’Université ouverte: Les dossiers de Vincennes. Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1976. Debouzy, Marianne. “Vincennes pour y faire quoi?” Esprit no. 11–12 (1978): 87–97. Debré, Michel. Gouverner autrement 1962-1970. Vol. 4 of Trois Républiques pour une France. Mémoires. Paris: Albin Michel, 1993. De Gaulle, Charles. Mémoires. Paris: Pléiade, 2000. Delphy, Christine. “Les Origines du Mouvement de libération des femmes en France.” Nouvelles Questions Féministes no. 16-18 (1991): 137–148. Djian, Jean-Michel, ed. Vincennes. Une aventure de la pensée critique. Paris: Flammarion, 2009. Dosse, François. Histoire du structuralisme. 2 vols. Paris: La Découverte, 1991–1992. Duvoux, Nicolas, and Jules Naudet. “Une contre-histoire de Mai 68,” interview with Julie Pagis. La Vie des Idées (May 21, 2018). http:​/​/www​​.lavi​​edesi​​dees.​​fr​/Un​​e​-con​​ tre​-h​​istoi​​re​-de​​-​Mai-​​68​.ht​​ml. Encrevé, Pierre. “Autour de Noam Chomsky” In Djian, Vincennes, pp. 110–12. Eribon, Didier. Michel Foucault (1926-1984). 2nd ed. Paris: Flammarion, 1991. Faucherre, Rémi. “Atypie-utopie: Vincennes, naissance d’une université mai 1968-janvier 1969.” Maîtrise thesis, Université Paris-7, 1992. Faure, Edgar. Ce que je crois. Paris: Grasset, 1971. Faure, Edgar. L’Éducation nationale et la participation. Paris: Plon, 1968. Feenberg, Andrew and Jim Freedman. When Poetry Ruled The Streets: The French May Events of 1968. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. Ferry, Luc, and Alain Renaut. La Pensée 68. Essais sur l’anti-humanisme contemporain. Paris: Gallimard, 1985. Foccart, Jacques. Journal de l’Élysée. 5 vols. Paris: Fayard-Jeune Afrique, 1997–2001. Le Ghetto expérimental, directed by Adam Schmedes and Jean-Michel Carré. Paris: Les Films du grain de sable, 1975. 110 min.

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Hamon, Hervé, and Patrick Rotman. Génération. 2 vols. 2nd ed. Paris: Seuil, 2008. Hamon, Hervé, and Patrick Rotman. “Vincennes ou l’anomalie.” Le Débat, May 1981, pp. 38–49. Hoegy, Paulin Hoegy. “Mai 68 et l’université de Vincennes: La faculté de penser autrement.” Unsighted, March 19, 2018. https​:/​/un​​sight​​ed​.co​​/doss​​iers/​​mai​-6​​8​-et-​​ luniv​​ersit​​e​-de-​​paris​​-vinc​​ennes​​-la​-f​​acult​​e​-de-​​​pense​​r​-aut​​remen​​t/. Irrera, Orazio. “Michel Foucault—une généalogie de la subjectivité militante.” Chimères no. 83 (2014): 35–45. Journal Officiel. Débats parlementaires. Chambre des Députés, January 30, 1891. Julliard, Jacques Julliard. “Je vois un grand goéland battant les ailes et parlant sans trêve.” In Djian, Vincennes, pp. 160–161. Krakovitch, Raymond. Edgar Faure. Le virtuose de la politique. Paris: Economica, 2006. Lequin, Yves, and Pierre Lamard. “Universités nouvelles, technique et technologie (France: 1968–2010).” In Roy and Gringras, Les Universités nouvelles, pp. 111–138. Lindenberg, Daniel. Choses vues. Une éducation politique autour de 68. Paris: Bartillat, 2008. Macey, David. The Lives of Foucault. London: Hutchinson, 1993. Martinon, Jean-Pierre. “Histoire lacunaire du Département de Sociologie de l’Université de Paris VIII.” 2006. http:​/​/www​​.univ​​-pari​​s8​.fr​​/soci​​ologi​​e​/fic​​hiers​​/ ma​rt​​inon.​​pdf Mathieu, Lilian. “Virginie Linhart, Vincennes, l’université perdue.” Lectures (April 25, 2018). http:​/​/jou​​rnals​​.open​​editi​​on​.or​​g​/lec​​tures​​​/2461​​6. Merlin, Pierre. L’Université assassinée. Vincennes: 1968-1980. Paris: Ramsay, 1980. Miller, James. The Passion of Michel Foucault. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993. Mousset, Emmanuel. J’ai tant de choses à vous dire. Blog entry 28 July 2011. https​:/​ /ja​​itant​​decho​​sesav​​ousdi​​re​.bl​​ogspo​​t​.com​​/2011​​/07​/c​​haud-​​lete-​​s​ra​-c​​haud.​​html. Les Murs et la parole, directed by Patrick Boriès, François Blusseau, and Philippe Hochard. Ivry-sur-Seine: Iskra, 1982. 94 min. Musselin, Christine. La Longue marche des universités françaises. Paris: PUF, 2001. Nora, Pierre, ed. Les Lieux de mémoire. 3 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1984–1992. Pagis, Julie. “Incidences biographiques du militantisme en Mai 68.” Sociétés Contemporaines no. 84 (2011): 25–51. Pagis, Julie. Mai 68. Un pavé dans leur histoire. Paris: Presses de Scienes Po. 2014. Passeron, Jean-Claude. “1950-1980: L’université mise à la question: changement de décor ou changement de cap?” In Verger, Histoire des universités en France, pp. 367–419. Passeron, Jean-Claude. “Les Derniers jours de Vincennes à Vincennes.” Semiotica 122, no. 3-4 (1998): 199–203. Peyrefitte Alain. C’était de Gaulle. 3 vols. Paris: Fayard, 1994–2000. Pouffary, Marion. “1891, l’affaire Thermidor.” Histoire, Économie et Société 28, no. 2 (2009): 87–108.

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“Rapport sur l’Université de Paris VIII (Vincennes) présenté par un groupe d’études” (1974). http:​/​/jul​​ienas​​.ipt.​​univ-​​paris​​8​.fr/​​hist/​​docum​​ents/​​Schwa​​rtz​/S​​c​hwar​​tz1​.h​​tm. Ross, Kristin. May ’68 and Its Afterlives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Roy, Lyse, and Yves Gringras, eds. Les Universités nouvelles. Enjeux et perspectives. Québec: Presses de l’Université du Québec, 2012. Sédat, Jacques. “Lacan et Mai 68.” Figures de la Psychanalyse no. 18 (2009): 221–226. Soulié, Charles. “Le Destin d’une institution d’avant-garde: histoire du département de philosophe de Paris-VIII.” Histoire de l’Éducation no. 77 (1998): 47–69. Soulié, Charles, ed. Un Mythe à détruire? Origines et destin du Centre expérimental universitaire de Vincennes. Saint-Denis: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2012. Soulié, Charles. “Vincennes.” In Le Siècle rebelle, edited by Emmanuel de Waresquiel, 2nd ed., pp. 939–943. Paris: Larousse, 2004. Tuillier, André. Histoire de l’Université de Paris et de la Sorbonne. 2 vols. Paris: Nouvelle Librairie de France, 1994. Vadrot, Claude-Marie Vadrot. “Edgar Faure ou l’art du contre-pied.” Politis, April 30–May 7, 2008, p. 26. Vadrot, Claude-Marie. “Naissance d’une université.” Politis, April 30–May 7, 2008, pp. 24–25. Vadrot, Claude-Marie. “Nous avons pris la Bastille, pas la Sorbonne” Politis, April 30–May 7, 2008, p. 23. Vadrot, Claude-Marie. “‘Vincennes’ et les luttes de son temps.” Politis, April 30– May 7, 2008, pp. 30–31. Vélis, Jean-Pierre. “Vincennes: La rançon du succès.” L’Éducation, March 24, 1977, pp. 12–15. Verger, Jacques, ed. Histoire des universités en France. Toulouse: Privat, 1986. “Vincennes-la-Folie: 21 conditions des étudiants.” Action, November 5, 1968, p. 4. “Vincennes » ou l’histoire d’un utopie.” Special issue, Politis, April 30–May 7, 2008, pp. 22–33. Vincennes, roman noir pour université rouge, directed by Yolande Robveille and Jean Condé. Paris: Zara Films, 2008. 90 min. Vincennes. L’université perdue. Directed by Virginie Linhart. Paris: Blaq Out, 2018. 95 min. Vincennes . . . vaine scène? St-Denis: Université de Paris-VIII-Vincennes à SaintDenis, 1981. Wolin, Richard. The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s. 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. Zancarini-Fournel, Michelle et al., eds. Les années 68. Le temps de la contestation. Brussels: Éditions Complexe, 2000.

Chapter 5

Class Struggle Ascanio Celestini, Nanni Balestrini, and the Living Legacy of the Italian 1968 Giuseppina Mecchia

The novel Lotta Di Classe (Class Struggle) by Ascanio Celestini came out in 2009, exactly forty years after the so-called Autunno Caldo of 1969 (The Hot Autumn of 1969), a season of workers’ struggles that in Italy prolonged the international upheavals of 1968 into the 1970s. While it would be hard to prove that either Celestini or his publisher meant to mark that anniversary, the coincidence is striking and is the perfect symbolic start for the discussion that follows. When I saw the book in one of the Feltrinelli bookstores in Rome, I was extremely intrigued by its title, which at first seemed a throwback to an earlier era of labor relations. The social politics of post-Fordist societies are shrouded in an ideological fog that has increasingly obscured our perception of class dynamics and conflicts. Since at least the 1990s, economists, sociologists and cultural critics have commented on the death of the Fordist industrial model of economic and social production. No longer bound by the common, massive inhabitance of factory floors, often invested in pension plans directly tied to capitalist markets, increasingly employed in temporary positions, how could workers experience the direct feeling of belonging to a specific “class,” with whom they would share economic and political grievances and desires? As Zygmunt Bauman has repeated for more than two decades, in contemporary Western societies workers “find themselves abandoned to their own—pitifully meagre and evidently inadequate—resources.”1 In the so-called gig-economy, where each one of us is supposed to be both worker and manager, we are conditioned to ignore the commonality of our situation, and only recognize the incessant imperative to fend for ourselves. The reader of the twenty-first century, then, is left to wonder how, in a novel entitled “class struggle,” one can expect to encounter compelling characters 103

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and a credible intrigue under the aegis of such an apparently outdated notion. But in reality, the system of exploitation enacted by capital on its workers— now more explicitly thought in their double identity as consumers—is still quite close to the one that many decided to confront in the fall of 1969. This is why, in the pages that follow, I will argue that Celestini’s novel is a precious contribution to a renewed critique of contemporary capitalist societies, one that recognizes the persistence of capitalist alienation and infuses the concept of “class” with new meaning while underscoring the continued necessity of its use. In order to better understand the continuity and the semantic shifts characterizing current portrayals of class struggle, I am reading Celestini’s novel in direct relation to what I consider its unavoidable narrative antecedent, Nanni Balestrini’s 1971 We Want Everything. The establishment of a genealogy going back to the times of “The Long Italian 68” for the work of Celestini is essential to my argument, because it predicates an essential continuity within the Italian post-1968 political legacy, and the continued adoption of a narrative style that blends humor, formal innovation and social critique. This kind of writing has a long tradition in Italian literary history: both Balestrini and Celestini, as authors and public personae, participate in an artistic and social project that has been called “resistance writing” (scritture di resistenza), a project that uses the literary medium to counter the hegemonic discourses reigning over the Italian political and cultural environment. As Claudia Boscolo and Stefano Jossa have said, we are dealing with nothing less than “another way of making history and representing facts.”2 In a time when capitalist organization, political parties, and representative institutions seem increasingly impervious to meaningful penetration by grassroots movements and social protest, narrative interventions seem to be one of the most valuable tools at our disposal. This way of understanding the literary function is, I believe, one of the places where the Italian 1968 still lives, because “the political challenge of writing does not reside in the testimonial account of what is obvious or at least communicable, but in the opening of another space which repositions the gaze and complicates issues.”3 In 1971, Balestrini’s We Want Everything was received as a revolutionary work both in form and content: not only did its plot chronicle the progressive awakening of the political consciousness of his young protagonist, but it also used an original, very innovative narrative technique. Neither aspect of the novel was surprising, since Balestrini, at the time, was already famous as an experimental poet and a political activist, roles that he played within larger creative collectives since the early 1960s. Just to recall his most recognized initiatives, already in 1963 Balestrini had cofounded the poetic collective Gruppo 63, while in 1968 he had been among the original founders of Potere Operaio (Workers Power), an extra-parliamentary group that redefined the

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identity and the political goals of industrial workers. After the 1973 dissolution of Potere Operaio, some of its founders went back to the Italian Communist Party, but Balestrini cofounded another collective, Autonomia Operaia (Workers Autonomy) that continued to redefine the cultural and social subject of anticapitalist struggle. In the years since, throughout his exile in France after the repression of Italian leftist movements that started in the late 1970s, Balestrini has been one of the artists and intellectuals who ensured the continuation of the legacy of the Italian 1968, making it possible for someone like Ascanio Celestini, himself born in 1972, to conceive his own artistic path in the wake of a much earlier generation. Significantly, it is also in the 2000s that Balestrini’s book has been translated into English, together with the work of some of Balestrini’s political allies of the 1970s, such as Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, and Franco Berardi “Bifo,” just to name a few. In fact, I am arguing that the writing, publication and favorable reception of Celestini’s Lotta di Classe is part of the continued, if sometimes a bit delayed, interest in the Potere Operaio and Autonomia Operaia legacy both in Italy and abroad. The early 1990s elaboration of the theoretical concept of “post-workerism” (post-operaismo), the diffusion of categories such as “cognitive” or “immaterial” labor and the increasing visibility of new forms of capitalist exploitation of human time and energy have made a new editorial interest in We Want Everything possible and even necessary. As the Swiss-Italian economist Christian Marazzi—himself an activist during the long 1968—said already in the early 1990s, people whose skills mostly reside in their communication abilities participate in a mode of production “accompanied by a sort of spatialization of the sociocultural resources that combine in the composition of ‘cognitive laborers’, the class constituted by post-Fordist immaterial producers.”4 This is precisely the class involved in the struggle featured in Celestini’s novel who share the degraded spaces of call centers and squalid lower working-class apartment buildings. As a much earlier work, Balestrini’s novel was situated in the industrial environment of Fordist production, but the two novels share a key critical function, that is, the artistic rendition of the incessant struggle waged by the subjects of labor against capitalist social organization. This portrayal implies the redefinition of the subject of that struggle, and this redefinition needs to include the authors themselves. This is why the first aspect of the related functions pertaining to Balestrini and Celestini’s artistic project needs to be found in the construction of the public image legible in the writers’ signature and image. The writer as public persona is an aspect of authorship that remains somewhat understudied in the literary field, but in any speech-act—be it the formulation of a political tract or the authoring of a novel—the position of the subject of that speech is paramount, and it is always marked.5 In many ways,

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such a marking is fundamental to the way a literary work will be received. While apparently marginal to the content and form of the two narrations, it is therefore important to examine the related if different public images not only of our two writers, but also of the publishers who lend them their authorial credibility. AUTHORS AND THEIR PUBLISHERS Celestini shares with Balestrini a protean ability to act in a variety of expressive media: a native of Rome’s hinterland, he gained regional attention in the early 2000s mostly as a playwright and theater performer, but soon he also started to appear on national television and ended up writing, directing and acting for the cinema. As I have already mentioned, Balestrini started his career as a poet, became a very visible political activist in the 1968 movements, and later on he worked as a playwright and theater director first in Italy and then during his exile in France, while continuing to write novels from the 1970s until the early 2000s. By the time our authors published their first novels, the public already knew their names and their artistic background, which allowed them to eschew the difficulties that many writers encounter when trying to publish their first book. They both had a solid archive confirming their authorial relevance and the sociopolitical connotations it carried. Although, as we will see, the contexts of publication were different, Balestrini and Celestini were both able to land contracts with very prestigious and socially engaged publishing houses: We Want Everything was published by Feltrinelli, and Class Struggle by Einaudi. The cultural and political connotations of these commercial venues and cultural institutions are related but do not overlap, and a brief discussion of their publishing contexts will serve as a good introduction to the historical circumstances and the forms of editorial support surrounding these works. The publication of We Want Everything by Feltrinelli was completely predictable: as one of the cofounders of Potere Operaio, Nanni Balestrini had been put in charge by its founder, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, of a collection devoted to narratives portraying the political and cultural struggles of “The Long 68.” The scion of an immensely rich family of industrialists and financiers, the controversial publisher was by then the trusted political ally and financial backer for all sort of revolutionary enterprises. A former member of the Italian Communist Party and now extremely close to the founders of Potere Operaio, Feltrinelli was a friend of Balestrini, who was also employed by the publishing house since the early 1960s.6 Feltrinelli had built an impressive catalog, especially of texts dealing with the history of labor, workers struggle and classic Marxism. For Balestrini, publishing a novel

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with Feltrinelli about young migrants coming from the Italian south to work in Torino’s factories, was a clear designation of his signatory as belonging to the extra-parliamentary, revolutionary movements that dominated the political struggles of the time. That characterization was essential to the social reception of Balestrini’s authorial persona, which has never changed and is still legible even after his death. For Ascanio Celestini, the contract for Class Struggle was brought about by a different set of circumstances: Einaudi had already published the scripts for two of his plays, Storie di Uno Scemo di Guerra (Stories of a War Idiot, 2005), and La pecora nera (The Black Sheep, 2006), first as simple texts, and then with DVDs of the actual performances. Born in 1933 under the name Giulio Einaudi Editore, the Einaudi publishing venture maintained its extremely prestigious status for the better part of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. As an institution, it has been associated with the liberal left since its inception, as it was founded under the auspices of the Partito d’Azione, the first true antifascist Italian Party, founded as a clandestine enterprise in 1942. The founder of the publishing house, Giulio Einaudi, was the son of Luigi Einaudi, who in 1948 became the second president of the Italian Republic. Giulio’s most trusted collaborator and artistic director was Leone Ginzburg, an antifascist activist in the 1930s and a protagonist of the Resistance (Resistenza) against the German occupation of Italy in the 1940s who ultimately was tortured and killed by the Nazis in 1944. This rich and completely unassailable antifascist legacy established lasting credentials for the Einaudi publishing house. Even after 1994, when it was bought by the Mondadori holding, which by then was owned by Silvio Berlusconi, an Einaudi listing remained indicative of quality and progressive views. For Celestini, then, becoming one of their authors was an important achievement, certainly derived from the previous success of his plays and movies. Because of its own history, Einaudi was the perfect backing for a twenty-first-century example of “Resistance writing.” Giangiacomo Feltrinelli and Giulio Einaudi were the perfect example of what the cultural critic Giancarlo Ferretti has called the publisher-protagonist (the editore-protagonista), a figure that remains important in the Italian cultural industry. These cultural agents established lasting, historically layered publishing brands whose identity is very important to the characterization of the authors they represent, as their founders were able to ensure “a strong specificity for [the] House, a constant renewal of their catalogs, and the development of a pool of habitual readers.”7 This is why when buying We Want Everything and Lotta di classe, the readers already had an idea of what they were getting, just because of the editorial connotations accompanying the books. In the case of Balestrini, they knew they were going to read a politically and formally radical work; in the case of Celestini, they knew that the first novel of a successful, original and

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politically progressive multimedia artist had been given the seal of approval of a progressive publishing powerhouse. SUBJECTS OF STRUGGLE Always in the domain of subjective enunciation, but this time from a diegetic perspective, the two novels share an essential narrative technique, once again focused on the clear identification of narrative subjectivity: they are both told from the point of view of first-person narrators. At the same time, however, a plurality of enunciation is also achieved, since in different ways we go from a first-person singular to a first-person plural kind of collective narration, accentuating the importance of creating a voice able to incarnate a community of struggling subjects. We Want Everything features a shift between singular and plural subjectivity rather abruptly in the last chapters of the novels. This change derives from the progressive identification on the part of the protagonist with the struggling collective organizing a strike at the FIAT Mirafiori plant in Turin. The anonymous hero comes from a small village near Salerno, about 40 kilometers south of Naples. This region was—and in many ways still is—an impoverished, backward industrial environment, where at the beginning of the 1970s many industries were still related to the agricultural sector. The professional profile of the protagonist reflects this situation: although he had attended a trade school in Salerno to become an auto-electrician, his first job is in the tomato canneries, where he works long hours for very low wages, a job performed by nonspecialized workers. This is when he decides to move to the industrial North, like many other young Southern men in his same situation. But after several years moving from a factory job to another between Brescia, Milan, and finally Turin, our hero realizes that his condition has not changed that much: I’d had all kinds of work in my life. Construction worker, porter, dishwasher in a restaurant, I’d been a labourer and a student, which is also a job. I’d worked at Alemagna, at Magneti Marelli, at Ideal Standard. And now I’d been at Fiat, at this Fiat that was a myth, because of all the money that they said you made there. And I had really understood something. That with work you can only live, and live poorly, as a worker, as someone who is exploited. The free time in your day is taken away, and all of your energy. You eat poorly. You are forced to get up at impossible hours . . . I understood that work is exploitation and nothing more.8

This is why the young man decides to join not only the worker’s struggle, but also the more generalized anticapitalist protests surrounding him. Besides the Maoist students, the antiimperialist opponents to the Vietnam War, and

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other assorted 1968 activists, he also recognizes an intergenerational connection with a constituency of “comrades who were in their forties, who had families, who’d worked in Germany . . . who already said that by sixty they’d be dead from work.”9 As Nanni Balestrini said in an afterword to the 2014 English translation, the protagonist “is the Southern proletarian, adept at a thousand trades because he has no trade, without a single professional quality even when he possesses a diploma,” the kind of worker who ends up “in Turin, in Milan, in Switzerland, in Germany, anywhere in Europe.”10 The peripatetic qualities of this subject make him a perfect “hero,” because although nothing very extraordinary seems to differentiate him from countless others, there is in fact an epic quality in his vicissitudes, down to the “war” that he wages in in the second part of the book in the company of a motley crew of comrades. The epic character of Balestrini’s novels is also stressed by Franco Berardi Bifo’s in his introduction to the 2004 Italian edition, where he says that “Balestrini might be considered the only epic poet of the last part of the Italian 1900s,” although it is a “bizarre and choppy epic, like the world that it wants to immortalize.”11 In Class Struggle, there is no switch between the “I” of the individual worker and the “we” of the collective that he belongs to, but a polyphony of narrative subjects of labor and struggle is still present, although achieved in a different way: the novel is told by four narrative voices, who reprise and modify the account of the main events in the plot. Three of them are young workers, and one is a twelve- or thirteen-year-old child, who follows the misadventures of the other narrators, his older brother and two of his girlfriends. These three young adults, all in their mid-to-late 1920s, share two main spaces: one is the floor of a calling center, where they all end up working at different times in the narrative, and the other one is an apartment building in the outskirts of Rome, where they also all live for a while. They are not factory workers, and their employment at the call center and in a myriad of service positions do belong to the category of “cognitive labor” theorized in the 1990s. Marinella, one of the two female narrators, also shares with the protagonist of We Want Everything the necessity of holding a wide variety of jobs. Except that, in the so-called “gig economy,” she needs to do them all at the same time. The scattered nature of her daily schedule, when compared to the protagonist of We Want Everything, increases her stress, which politically risks isolating her from her potential class comrades: I work three jobs a day, and they are all temporary, and a hundred times I forget to zip my pants, and they stay like that until I can run to the john to pee. I pee running, like the bikers at the Giro d’Italia . . . And I get back to my apartment at all different hours. And the people I meet are never the same. And if someone in my building comes knocking at my door, I don’t recognize him.12

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This difficulty in meeting one’s peers is a critical one, although it will be overcome by the protagonists of the novel, who eventually do come to recognize each other and to articulate a true understanding of the “class struggle” in which they are all aware of participating. It is during a political mobilization that Marinella meets Nicola at the call center, where “he used to only work nights, and we didn’t meet, but now he was also coming during the daytime. And he wrote on the paper, he organized strikes.”13 Nicola is one of the organizers of a successful strike that takes the management by surprise and forces them to increase workers’ wages and improve, however minimally, working conditions. When the narration shifts to Nicola’s voice, he is immediately ready to articulate the absurdity of his job, and the ways in which the workers try to resist by maximizing their schedules: If you call the call center where I work, and I answer, you’ll hear my voice saying “hallo, how can I help you,” because I can help you. If you talk for less than twenty seconds, I earn nothing, I do you a service and I help the shitty company that employs me. But if we stay on the phone for one minute I am given 30 cents of gross compensation, which after taxes by law makes about 21 cents. If I can drag the call on up to two minutes I bank about 60 cents, which after taxes is a bit over 40 cents.14

One of the biggest ironies of Nicola’s work is that he is considered an “independent contractor,” whose position needs to be renewed every three months. But clearly, there is no freedom in his relationship with his employer, and the pretense of autonomy granted to the operators only functions as a resistance tool, granting them one more legal ground to initiate a strike: And with our broken pencils we got up from our seats. We stopped and we assembled. The supervisors ordered us to go back to our phones . . . But we stopped anyway . . . “We are independent contractors”—I said—we can end our services when we want. We are autonomous workers, like the plumber. “We are taking a smoke.”15

The child who opens the narration and who introduces the other narrators through his own whimsical, sometimes naïve but also very insightful perspective is strongly connected not only to the other narrators, but also with other important worker figures and narrative heroes; first and foremost an aging prostitute who becomes an important player in his sexual awakening. In the Italian literary tradition, the so-called “choral novel” (romanzo corale) is a long-established genre, that goes back to that venerable and sometimes underestimated prototype of socially engaged literature, Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed. An historical novel originally published in 1827,

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this was also an early example of Italian “Resistance writing,” as its themes and intrigue clearly resonated with the struggle for independence known as the Risorgimento. While narrated by one single, omniscient and somewhat paternalistic narrator, this story of two working-class heroes struggling to maintain their love and dignity in the face of feudal oppression in sixteenthcentury Lombardy often adopts an early version of the so-called “free indirect style,” which adopts the point of view of one of the protagonists without always marking it in quotation. Often adopting the voice of his lower-class characters, Manzoni attempts to give legitimacy to the voice of the “small people.” It is significant that both Balestrini and Celestini adopted updated versions of it. Another legacy from the novelistic tradition of the nineteenth century is that the four narrators of Class Struggle as well as the young massworker of We Want Everything all become the protagonists of a modern Bildungsroman, as their adventures make them aware of the conditions of their existence. But like in The Betrothed, we are dealing with an eminently sociopolitical bildung, even though important personal discoveries are also achieved. In Manzoni’s novel, the rebellious protagonist comes to understand more deeply the potential but also the limits of his own autonomous agency in a feudal political system. This is one of the characteristics of the educational component of our two narrative works. The personal aspect of this education does remain significant: in the case of Lotta di Classe, the two brothers come to terms with their personal history and the reality of their orphaned condition, discovering that their uncle was ultimately responsible for it. The protagonist of We Want Everything works through his personal resentment for his impoverished condition and is able to overcome his hostility toward the more privileged student youth of Milan, with whom he develops a relation of trust and friendship grounded in their common political struggles. While this friendship can appear somewhat utopian, the alliance between factory workers and the student movement was a fundamental aspect in the novel’s context, and in Italy this collaboration carried on well into the 1970s. TESTIMONIALS, REALISM, AND FORMAL INNOVATION An important compositional aspect shared by the two novels is that they both originate in the interviews that Balestrini and Celestini conducted with the workers of FIAT in Turin and the operators in a call center at the outskirts of Rome, respectively. For a long time, Balestrini was reluctant to admit the “reality” that his indomitable hero, who was supposed to represent a plural, collective subjectivity, was also in fact inspired by a single individual. The identity of Alfonso Natella, the activist whose voice resonates in the narration

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of We Want Everything, was made public only on the occasion of the writer’s death, in 2019. During the memorial, the aged but still undaunted Natella appeared in person and admitted to his role in Nanni’s project for the very first time. This was a true revelation even for some of Balestrini’s friends and collaborators, as Rachel Kushner explains in her account of the spectacular coup-de-theatre that took place in the Argentina theater in Rome: This fictional narrator, who came to represent the voice incarnate of strike and riot—of sheer refusal as something like a spontaneous “strategy”—was based, Nanni had admitted, on a real person. But none of Nanni’s very broad circle of friends and collaborators, the whole layer of Italy involved in far-left politics of the 1970s, had ever met Alfonso. Some people even suspected there was no Alfonso—that he was an amalgamation of the many people Nanni would have met and organized alongside during the Hot Autumn of factory strikes in Milan and Turin, in 1969 and 1970.16

Critics have noticed how Balestrini is able to establish a profoundly original narrative strategy in his novel, precisely because he blends the orality typical of the testimonial with an elaborate artistic presentation, based on compositional techniques that he imports from his poetic background. He maintains his allegiance to the estrangement techniques typical of avantgarde poetics, to the point that Carlo Baghetti has said that paradoxically We Want Everything is a book that could not be read by the class it wanted to portray, since “Balestrini talks about the people in a non-popular way. This is due to the difficult style adopted in his works.”17 It is true that in Italy, as Baghetti reminds us, there are many writers who have adopted a more classic realistic novelistic style in talking about the working class, from Vasco Pratolini to Elio Vittorini and Ottiero Ottieri. Balestrini innovates on this tradition in various ways. First of all, he adopts a poetic organization for his narration, inventing a very peculiar form, a narrative “lassa.” This is a prose stanza that mimics epic prosody and does not follow a precise chronological order in narrating thoughts and events. Additionally, he eschews punctuation and inserts fragments of speech deriving from political tracts, revolutionary journals and other heterogeneous materials. For Balestrini, there is a political value to the adoption of this “difficult” style, as it allows him to avoid the paternalistic, condescending implications of socialist realism, leaving the imagined reader “in the uncomfortable position of autonomously managing the time of the narration.”18 For Balestrini, the creativity of the reader should always be assumed, and nobody should be deemed incapable of autonomous sense-making. This is a tenet of his involvement in the founding of Autonomia Operaia, and he believes it

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should be maintained both with regard to the achievement of political selfconsciousness and artistic reception. Remarkably, Celestini also refuses to adhere to a socialist realist esthetics. While there are no “lassas” in Lotta di Classe, the narration is also organized with little regard to chronological order, in narrative blocks that go from a few paragraphs to a few pages. The readers need to make their own way in the deciphering of the events narrated in the book, a process that does require an imaginative, even creative effort. Celestini’s background in theater and the cinema seems to result in narrative blocks that function like takes in a movie, or scenes in a play. The lack of realistic description, however, forces the reader to autonomously create the images that a visual medium would more readily present. Like Balestrini with Alfonso Natella, Celestini also had reallife subjects who inspired his characters: in 2007 he had released a documentary, called Parole Sante (Holy Words), based on the interviews he himself had conducted with the workers of Atesia, a call center in the outskirts of Rome. In presenting this project while he was shooting it, he said that he was collecting “notes for a movie on class struggle.”19 The novel Lotta di Classe is clearly a literary version of that project, one that once again involves the reader in making sense of apparently disjointed narrative fragments. The different voice registers adopted by the four narrators, the introduction of dialect and other idiosyncratic forms of speech also remind us of Balestrini’s composite diction. This is why I think that the switch from a testimonial-based, documentary or realist approach to a participatory, reader-centered esthetics is another element shared by the two writers, who succeed in “combining the tragic-epic spirit of the revolutionary movement with the ironic-combinatory spirit of literary experimentation.”20 GENDERED STRUGGLES Now that the relation between the two novels is fully established, it is essential to recognize that one of the main themes of Lotta di Classe clearly reflects the thirty-eight years hiatus separating it from We Want Everything. In Celestini’s narration, we hear the voices of women workers; both Patrizia and Marinella, the two female narrators, struggle in their daily lives with another kind of oppression, the one perpetrated by the possessors of the penis, here more familiarly indicated as the cazzo (dick). Like their male friend Nicola, the two young women often repeat that their work at the call center is awful and that they are only there for the money, but they also have to deal with the constant, unwanted attentions and straight-out harassment of their male supervisors, coworkers, and neighbors, which greatly aggravates the stress of

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their daily lives. In an important passage, Marinella articulates this injustice that has felt since her childhood, when she wanted to become a Catholic priest and eventually, maybe, the Pope. That she could not do so was made perfectly clear by her Sunday school teacher: “This is Church doctrine,” he said, but in fact it was only the dick he had between his legs. Just a matter of chromosomes. Just like the poor, who are the children of the poor. Black people who are born of black people. Gypsies who are the children of gypsies. When you are young, the priest only talks about the body of Christ, and he never talks about his own body as a priest, nor of the piece of meat he has between his legs.21

In this quote, the reader recognizes the analogy of the women’s condition with other social and racial minorities. It justifies the characterization of “class struggle” for Marinella’s daily fight not only for women’s dignity, but for their very survival. After the accidental death of an apparently inoffensive neighbor, who has slowly gained her trust by talking to her informally in their building, Marinella discovers that the man had been stalking her for months and was planning to kill her during their first date. Celestini’s account is remarkable as it directly ties sexual oppression to class domination, as Marinella discovers that the apparently idle stalker was watching her while she was constantly working, simply trying to make ends meet: I am glad that he died. It is only fair. He followed me while I was running around in my thousand jobs, he looked at me without doing nothing. He was wasting all that time, while I never had enough time, not even to drink a glass of milk . . . Who said that time is money? A philosopher, a banker or a clockmaker? He had a checking account full of time, an unlimited amount of credit. Instead, I had to count the minutes and the half minutes in my pockets . . . One of us had to die. Better him . . . Do you think this is a mean thought? It might be cynical, but it is not mean. This is class struggle.22

Male privilege also translates into economic privilege, as the stalker seems to have a reserve of time and money, while Marinella has neither. The appropriation of the political and discursive legacy of class struggle in the fight for gender equality is an important twist in Celestini’s novel, one that Balestrini had not foreseen. In fact, it is quite striking how Balestrini did not portray a single female subject of workers’ struggle. On the contrary, the protagonist of We Want Everything has a quasi–antagonistic relationship to the women of the Italian North, who appear in the novel only as potential sexual partners and are

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always considered with a detachment that oscillates between social resentment and straight-out misogyny. For instance, after having complained about the girls he sees in bars or the art students whom he tries to pick up in the streets, the young man seems unable to feel any sympathy even for women who actually are his fellow workers: So I meet a girl who works in a factory, but she said she was a secretary. I didn’t care. I didn’t even like her. If I’d been down south I wouldn’t even have given a shit about her. It’s just that in Milano these bitches were used to getting someone to pay for everything. They sold themselves just like prostitutes these girls, these workers, these wage-earners. But I went with this one because she paid her way and I paid mine.23

It is just after the publication of We Want Everything, in the early 1970s, that in Italy the profound redefinition of female subjectivity brought about by the feminist movements started to expand and decisively redefine political concepts such as oppression, autonomy, and class struggle itself. The feminist movements appropriated the language and the tactics and the language of the workers’ struggle, guaranteeing a radical revision of its aims and meaning, but also the continuity of its relevance and discursive legacy within a different context of injustice. The centrality of the women’s characters in Lotta di classe is confirmed by the novel’s ending. Nicola, Patrizia and Marinella all end up rejecting their current working conditions and social determinations: after trying to become a manager, Marinella quits the call center disgusted by the unfairness and continued sexism of the company, and Nicola finally abandons his dehumanizing post and starts selling kebabs with an Egyptian immigrant. Patrizia, however, is granted the opportunity to move a step forward: she is the one who truly introduces a radically other narrative “space-time” into the novel in a bittersweet ending. After her botched suicide attempt causes a gas explosion, impacting all the characters in the novel and putting her into a coma, Patrizia recovers and goes back to work. The intolerable nature of her environment has remained the same, and finally she summons the immense strength to leave the call center in a superhero-like manner: I come back to my post, and without sitting down I turn off my computer. I do it without hitting pause, without logging out . . . We just need to unplug and stop to waste energy. It is the euthanasia of a comatose system. And I pass through the walls . . . A guard tries to stop me . . . and says to his superiors “Captain, what should we do? This is witchcraft!” And I will answer “No, this is class struggle.”24

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While apparently uplifting, this is not an unambiguously positive outcome for Patrizia. The recourse to the fantastic register in the evocation of her newly acquired superpowers might imply that, in realistic terms, there is no positive solution to the multiple challenges that she faces as a woman and a worker. On the other hand, Patrizia as Wonder Woman might just be a different, updated and more playful version of the epic hero incarnated by the protagonist of We Want Everything, who also had an unusual ability of surmounting all sort of obstacles and let his voice be heard. What is clear, however, is that the recent #MeToo movement has alerted us all to the impervious nature of patriarchal domination and that when gender inequality is concerned, it is absolutely imperative to carry on the struggles of 1968 and the 1970s into the present. The same is true for capitalist exploitation, and often the two go hand in hand. The life of the oppressed will indeed will always contain the potential for embracing of social and political struggle. A final resolution can only be an inspiring, but largely fantastic, narrative outcome. It would be a grave mistake, however, to deduce the futility of political struggles from the necessity of their constant reiteration in different contexts. As the French philosopher Jacques Rancière, himself an important survivor of the 1968 movements, has kept explaining during the past four decades, the necessity for political struggle can never be extinguished. Those who are betrayed by democratic promises of equality and capitalist assurances of fair financial compensation will always be at the center of political confrontation. The wrongs caused by capitalist organization are systemic, and therefore cannot be eradicated once for all. Struggling subjects are in fact the only real subjects of politics, because their condition is “simply the constitutive wrong or torsion of politics as such. The party of the poor embodies nothing other than politics itself as the setting-up of a part of those who have no part.”25 This is the lesson that the readers of Balestrini and Celestini take away from their books. It is not for nothing that one of the groups born out of “The Long Italian 68” adopted a very meaningful name, Lotta Continua (Permanent Struggle). Neither the protagonist of We Want Everything, nor the four young narrators of Lotta Di Classe are granted a permanent resolution to their problems. What they have gained, however, is an understanding of the systemic nature of their condition that we, as readers, also achieve thanks to their example and our own imagination. The living legacy of the Italian 1968, as witnessed in the continuity between the work of Nanni Balestrini and Ascanio Celestini, is a powerful reminder that yes, for all intents and purposes, the struggle does indeed go on.

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NOTES 1. Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty. London: Polity 2007, p. 68. 2. Claudia Boscolo, and Stefano Jossa. Scritture di Resistenza. Roma: Carocci Editore 2014, p. 15. [my translation] 3. Boscolo and Jossa, Scritture di resistenza, p. 13. 4. Christian Marazzi, Capital and Affects, trans. Giuseppina Mecchia, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011, p. 94. This book originally appeared in 1994. Its English translation in the early 2000s is by itself a sign of the renewed vitality of the activist and theoretical legacy of the Italian 1968. 5. My use of the term “speech-act” is based on two main theoretical foundations: one is linguistic, and rests on Émile Benveniste’s pragmatic insight into how subjectivity in language is established through the use of personal pronouns such as “I” and “we,” which are completely dependent from and refer to the speaker’s position; the other one is more focused on the attribution of discourse and refers to the indexical, archive-based construction of authorship elaborated by Michel Foucault in his seminal 1969 lecture What is an Author. The signature of an author and the imprimatur of a culturally influential publishing house pertain, I believe, to both these dimensions of speech. 6. For a fascinating history of Giangiacomo Feltrinelli and his publishing house, see the well-documented, gripping, and enlightening book by his son Carlo: Feltrinelli: A Story of Riches, Revolution, and Violent Death (Orlando: Harcourt Brace, 2001). Balestrini is mentioned several times in the book. 7. Ferretti, Gian Carlo, Storia dell’editoria letteraria in Italia 1945–2003, Einaudi: Torino, 2004, p. 3. 8. Nanni Balestrini, We Want Everything, translated by Matt Holden (London: Verso, 2016), p. 115. 9. Balestrini, We Want Everything, p. 129. 10. Balestrini, We Want Everything, p. 195. 11. Berardi, Franco, Introduzione, Vogliamo Tutto (Milano: DeriveApprodi, 2003), p. 60 [my translation] 12. Ascanio Celestini, Lotta di Classe, Torino: Einaudi 2009, p. 60. [all translations are mine] 13. Celestini, Lotta di Classe, p. 95. 14. Celestini, Lotta di Classe, p. 118. 15. Celestini, Lotta di Classe, p. 133. 16. Rachel Kushner, “Nanni Balestrini 1935–2019,” Commune, 4: May 2019, https​:/​/co​​mmune​​mag​.c​​om​/na​​nni​-b​​alest​​rini-​​19​35-​​2019/​. 17. Carlo Baghetti, “Formes et fonctions d’un roman impopulaire : Vogliamo tutto de Nanni Balestrini,” Cahiers d’études romanes , n. 35,2017, http:​/​/jou​​rnals​​.open​​editi​​ on​.or​​g​/etu​​desro​​man​es​​/6460​. [all translations are mine] 18. Ibidem.

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19. Ascanio Celestini, video available at https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=iep​​​ ZqbQJ​​lJQ. 20. Berardi, Franco, Introduction, Vogliamo Tutto, p. 5. 21. Celestini, Lotta di Classe, p. 57. 22. Celestini, Lotta di Classe, pp. 111–112. 23. Balestrini, We Want Everything, p. 48. 24. Celestini, Lotta di Classe, pp. 228–229. 25. Rancière, Jacques. Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 14.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Baghetti, Carlo. “Formes et fonctions d’un roman impopulaire : Vogliamo tutto de Nanni Balestrini,” Cahiers d’études romanes , n. 35, 2017, http:​/​/jou​​rnals​​.open​​editi​​ on​.or​​g​/etu​​desro​​man​es​​/6460​. Balestrini, Nanni. We Want Everything. Translated by Matt Holden, London: Verso 2017. Celestini, Ascanio. Lotta di Classe. Milano: Einaudi 2009. Celestini, Ascanio. Appunti per un film sulla lotta di classe. 2006. https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​ tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=iep​​​ZqbQJ​​lJQ. Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty. London: Polity 2007 Benveniste, Emile. “Subjectivity in Language.” Problems in General Linguistics. Miami: University of Miami Press, 1966, pp. 223–230. Berardi, Franco. Introduzione. Vogliamo Tutto. Milano: DeriveApprodi, 2003. Boscolo, Claudia and Jossa, Stefano. Scritture di Resistenza. Roma: Carocci Editore, 2014 Feltrinelli, Carlo. Feltrinelli: A Story of Riches, Revolution, and Violent Death. Orlando: Harcourt Brace 2001. Ferretti, Gian Carlo. Storia dell’editoria letteraria in Italia 1945–2003. Einaudi: Torino, 2004 Foucault, Michel. What is an Author. Lecture at the College de France on February 22, 1969, https​:/​/ww​​w​.ope​​n​.edu​​/open​​learn​​/ocw/​​plugi​​nfile​​.php/​​62484​​9​/mod​​_reso​​ urce/​​conte​​nt​/1/​​a840_​​1​_​mic​​hel​_f​​oucau​​lt​.pd​f Kushner, Rachel “Nanni Balestrini 1935–2019,” Commune, 4: May 2019, https​:/​/co​​ mmune​​mag​.c​​om​/na​​nni​-b​​alest​​rini-​​​1935-​​2019/​ Marazzi, Christian. Capital and Affects. Translated by Giuseppina Mecchia, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011 Rancière, Jacques. Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, p. 14.

Chapter 6

Recalibrating Memories The Divergent Afterlife of Northern Ireland’s 1968 Chris Reynolds

INTRODUCTION This chapter makes a case in favor of the continued interrogation of our understandings of the past—even in those areas where one may be tempted to assume that little remains to be uncovered. Through an examination and explanation of the absence of Northern Ireland from the dominant narrative of the global 1968, it adds a further layer to how this specific period is to be understood. In addition, it is argued that stitching the Northern Irish events into the story facilitates a necessary problematization of the global afterlives of 1968 as part of the explanation for the Troubled Province’s erroneous marginalization from the conventional narrative of this era. The advantages of doing so, as will be discussed, go well beyond challenging our perceptions around any national or transnational perspectives of 1968 and its afterlives. Indeed, through an assessment of a collaborative project with National Museums Northern Ireland (NMNI), the opportunities offered by the conclusion of the conflict known as the “Troubles” to recalibrate how Northern Ireland’s 1968 is treated and remembered enable a discussion on the fluidity of memory and the crucial role of managing the legacy of the past as part of efforts to maintain peace in post-conflict societies.

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NORTHERN IRELAND AND THE GLOBAL NARRATIVE OF “1968” As this very edited volume and the conference from which it has emerged both testify, the topic of “1968” continues to attract considerable, global academic attention and has now been doing so for over fifty years. Such is the extent and diversity of material produced that an entire field of “68 studies” has been established that has seen this period become the focus of quite an incredible multidisciplinary surge in academic (and public) interest. The commemorative fervor that has periodically underpinned the emergence of this trend has witnessed the establishment of a number of common characteristics that have come to dominate how this story is recounted, remembered, and understood. One such trend has been the now widely accepted temporal framework that goes well beyond the calendar year that is 1968 to encompass a period whose parameters are somewhat malleable but could loosely be termed as covering the period from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s.1 Setting out such a broader temporal paradigm is unquestionably a positive move, particularly as among its consequences has been a concomitant diversification of the cast of 1968. Traditionally almost exclusively centered on young people, many of whom were university students, the narrative has increasingly sought to capture a much more representative picture of the diverse protagonists that defined the exceptional nurture of this period of revolt that clearly went well beyond the higher education milieu (e.g., Häberlen, Keck-Szajbel and Mahoney 2019; Chen et​.a​l. 2018). A third and particularly pertinent and relatively recent departure in 1968 studies has been what could be described as the transnational turn. Global interconnectedness was unquestionably an identifiable feature of the 1968 zeitgeist and something that those involved at the time were certainly aware of and influenced by. It is also true that in the great outpouring of material that emerged in the aftermath of this period, one can identify a number of key, relatively early studies that sought to make sense of the quite remarkable transnational nature of what had been experienced (e.g., Katsiaficas 1987; Caute 1988; Fraser 1988; Jameson 1984). However, it was only more recently, and in particular in and around the 40th anniversary of the 1968 events in 2008, that the period’s transnationalism became one of the standout strands in 1968 studies. One only has to consider the surge in publications, conferences, and media coverage in 2008 and since to take stock that making sense of how and why so many countries all over the globe appeared to experience rebellions that shared so many characteristics during this relatively short window of time has developed into a growth area in the burgeoning industry that 1968 has become (see, e.g., Vinen 2018; Gildea, Mark, and Warring 2013; Crane and Muellner 2008; de Groot 2008; Farik

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2008; Klimke and Scharloth 2008). There is no doubt that the broadening of the temporal framework has facilitated such increased awareness of the global nature of 1968. However, it has also become evident that making sense of any “1968” (at national, local, or regional level) is very much predicated on an understanding of the quite exceptional global context and its influence. Within this increasingly prominent, and arguably consensual, narrative of the “global sixties” one can inevitably identify a certain hierarchy with some “68s” featuring more heavily than others. So, for example, the fact that 1968 is the temporal epicenter of les années 68 is much to do with the prominence of the French events of mai 68. In fact, one can almost go as far as suggesting that what happened in the streets of Paris during the spring of this iconic year has acquired the status of the paradigmatic 1968, the ’68 par excellence (Reynolds 2015, 145–6). One can forward many arguments against the French events meriting its place on the 1968 pedestal, but the reality remains that it has, over the course of the last fifty years, acquired a certain prominence in how this period is remembered. Much recent work has sought to challenge such a restrictive narrative and has seen the emergence of a widened geographical optic that has facilitated a much broader understanding of the sheer extent and diversity of experiences that are part and parcel of this era of revolt. The most recent and interesting trends in this area of 1968 studies have seen explorations of what could be described as peripheral 1968s that have helped shine a light beyond the stereotypical hotspots (e.g., Blum 2018; Draper 2018; Gueye 2018; Burleigh 2017; Zancarini-Fournel 2016, 778–865; Dramé and Lamarre 2009; Førland 2008). However, while this parallel process of anchoring and challenging the geographical focus of 1968 studies has incontestably been a positive step forward, some areas more than others, despite having experienced a 1968-style revolt, have struggled to carve out a place on the roster of the global sixties. One such place is Northern Ireland. NORTHERN IRELAND’S “1968” On October 5, 1968, a civil rights march was brutally attacked by local police officers on the streets of Derry, Northern Ireland.2 The television images of this violence provided the necessary shot in the arm for a movement built around the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) that had been campaigning for change for some time and signaled the beginning of Northern Ireland’s 1968. By the following week an influential student body called the People’s Democracy (PD) had been formed at Queen’s University, Belfast and, together with NICRA, would be at the heart of an increasingly intense movement that would last until February 1969. During the course of these four months, tensions mounted as the ranks of protestors swelled and

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calls grew for the government to address the discrimination that had become part and parcel of how the Province functioned. These demands for change on issues such as equal rights to employment, to housing and electoral reform, provided the backdrop for a series of actions that included increasingly large marches and eventually forced the hand of the Unionist Prime Minister Terence O’Neill who attempted to offer some concessions. However, his efforts met with criticism from both sides of the divide in Northern Ireland; hard-line Unionists saw such proposed reforms as a step too far, while elements of the civil rights movement wanted more. Tensions eventually came to a head with a brutal attack on another civil rights march, this time on the outskirts of Derry, by a group of Unionist counter-protestors. The infamous attack on Burntollet Bridge marked a crucial turning point. Its exposure of sectarian tensions would prove impossible to contain, eventually forcing O’Neill out and signaling the descent toward the devastating conflict that has become known as the “Troubles.”3 When trying to make sense of the virtual absence of Northern Ireland from the transnational narrative of 1968, it is of course possible to identify a number of contextual factors that arguably set the Province apart and may well provide some explanation (Reynolds 2015, 149–60). It is true that the relationship between Ireland and Britain that led to the formation of Northern Ireland and all the associated difficulties and challenges were such that a case could indeed be made for it to be considered a case apart. This very particular history, with such a fractious relationship at its core, provided a singular backdrop that gave rise to the issues that underpinned the agitation brought to the surface in 1968–1969. Furthermore, and again given the particularities of the relationship with Britain, there was a certain threat of violence that had become part and parcel of Irish history that undoubtedly hung in the air during the events of 1968 and inevitably inflected how the events unfolded as they did. Such a particular threat of dangerous violence, grounded in historical experience, undoubtedly fueled some of the intergenerational tensions even within the movement itself, particularly in terms of where the line could be drawn between violence and nonviolence and just how far provocative forms of action should actually be allowed to go. Finally, the very specific issue of civil rights and the fact that Northern Irish activists were focused on bringing about change on this single issue arguably set the Province apart from other 1968s where a much broader and arguably elusive set of demands motivated activists to rebel. Nevertheless, and despite these easily identifiable and indisputably significant contextual differences, it is also just as easy to delineate strong similarities and overlap between what happened in Northern Ireland and elsewhere at this time (Reynolds 2015, 83–118). Just had been the case in many of those countries that would experience their own 1968, Northern Ireland was

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exposed to the influential and significant postwar socioeconomic changes that were crucial to shaping the emergence of new ideas. The relative comfort and stability brought about by such developments were essential elements in paving the way for the emergence of the protest in les années 68 and the context of Northern Ireland, despite its problems, can certainly be described as relatively stable. While economic difficulties may well have been on the horizon, Northern Ireland was as exposed to advent of the consumer society and the radical cultural changes that accompanied it as anywhere else. This manifested itself most notably through attitudinal changes in terms of music, art, and fashion. The baby-boom generation came of age during this period and was not afraid to demand change. This explains why young people in general, although not the only actors, were such a significant element in triggering and defining what happened in 1968. When one considers the cast of Northern Irelands’ 1968, it very much in keeping with how events played out elsewhere, particularly with a prominent and influential role played by young people as exemplified in particular in terms of the role played by the student body PD. Furthermore, a consideration of the forms of action deployed by Northern Irish activists reveals strong overlap with how other movements carried themselves during this period. Street protests, the significance of challenging ideas of space, the sheer verbosity of activists, and even the alternative forms of expressions such as the use of posters, all help connect the Northern Irish events to what was happening more broadly. A DIVERGENT AFTERLIFE Despite such strong similarities and an evident connectedness, the Northern Irish events are largely absent from the conventional narrative (see, for example, Chaplin and Pieper Mooney 2018; Chen et. al. 2018; Cornilis and Waters 2010; Dreyfus-Armand 2008; Fink, Gassert and Junker 1998; Caute 1988). As outlined above, there are a number of important contextual differences that one is able to draw out that may offer some explanation for this absence. However, to identify such differences as sufficient evidence for the marginalization of the Northern Irish events is less than convincing. It is perfectly possible, and indeed quite straightforward, to delve into the contextual specificities of any area considered to have experienced a 1968-style upheaval and identify particularities that arguably set it apart (Reynolds 2015, 158–160). And yet they remain on the roster. In fact, to predicate the inclusion of any area in the narrative of this period on contextual similarities alone is to miss the point about what actually binds the very diverse movements that made up the transnational experience of 1968. This period should not be understood as a convergence of similar contextual circumstances that saw the coming

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together of demands at a global level. Instead, 1968 should be considered as a moment, or a gateway that was opened, permitting people from all around the world to demand change, regardless of their particular context or demands. In such an interpretation, what happened in Northern Ireland very much fits and further strengthens the argument that the Province should be part of this transnational story. The explanation for Northern Ireland’s absence does not then lie with what happened or the context from which it emerged. Instead, one must look to what happened afterward and the onset of the “Troubles.” While one must be careful to not oversimplify how the global events of 1968 are generally understood, it is the case that among the plethora of material produced, a certain dominant narrative has come to prevail. One such example of this which is of particular relevance to the discussion in hand relates to how the impact of 1968 should be understood. One of the standout consensual points on this period is that which considers it as a watershed moment, a time of great change (e.g., Häberlen, Keck-Szajbel and Mahoney 2019; Klimke and Scharloth 2008). 1968 has come to represent a genuine break between one era and the next. In all those areas that are part of the 1968 story, this period has a “before” and an “after” and, in the majority of cases, it is a change that is considered in positive terms. Therefore, in the conventional understanding of this period, 1968 is broadly viewed as resulting in a positive step forward. The pace of this positive change of course varies from one area to the next, with some cases needing a much longer timeframe than others before digesting what happened and taking stock of the positive nature of this impact. The fact that 1968 has become synonymous with positive change, or the harbinger of a progressive step forward, may well be one element in helping make sense of the continued and durable interest in this period; an interest that is often inflected with a substantial dose of nostalgia. However, more pertinent to the present discussion is the fact that it is precisely this common interpretation of 1968 as a positive moment that provides the most relevant explanation for the absence of Northern Ireland from the transnational narrative of 1968. In the context of Northern Ireland, the year 1968 and the events of that period have become intrinsically linked to the beginning of the “Troubles.”4 The bloody conflict that started in the immediate aftermath of Northern Ireland’s 1968 would rage until 1998. During that period, the Province became the scene of a brutal and deadly sectarian conflict that would define the lives of most citizens with over 3,600 deaths and even more injuries (both physical and mental) (Thornton et al. 2004). It is this very different and difficult afterlife, specific to Northern Ireland, that set it apart and explains why it became marginalized from the dominant, and generally positive, narrative of the global 1968 (Reynolds 2105, 149–185). From without, it is

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hardly surprising that Northern Ireland did not fit the dominant narrative; as 1968 was increasingly framed as a positive progressive moment, the marginalization of Northern Ireland as the “Troubles” took hold is not difficult to understand. Critically important also is the role of those involved. Northern Irelands 1968ers, unlike their global counterparts were in no position to partake in the foundational work of including their experiences alongside their comrades elsewhere in the world. The onset of the “Troubles” made any association with that period a difficult and dangerous one. Furthermore, as the “Troubles” bedded in and death toll rose, the year 1968 became evermore distanced from the increasingly positive and even celebratory nature of how this era was remembered elsewhere. Indeed, it could be argued that the memory of Northern Ireland’s 1968 became buried under the horror of the “Troubles”—hence its absence (Reynolds 2017, 638–640). POST-“TROUBLES” NORTHERN IRELAND After thirty long years of conflict, the signing of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) in 1998 marked the end of the “Troubles” and the beginning of a new era for Northern Ireland.5 This peace accord which has, in the main, remained in place since then, forms the backdrop of the current context in Northern Ireland and was the fruit of many years of negotiating. The intervening period has not been without its difficulties and there remain many critics of the agreement and the institutions that it put in place (Fenton 2018). However, despite these criticisms, no-one can be in any doubt as to how it has transformed the lives of people in Northern Ireland (Armstrong, Herbert and Mustad 2019; Byrne 2014; Tonge 2013, 92–93). In particular, the single greatest achievement of the GFA was to bring the violence to a close and, while some elements in society remain wedded to violence, and there have been some instances that risked pushing the Province back toward such a destructive approach, there can be no real comparison between the Northern Ireland of today and that of pre-1998. The onset of peace has brought genuine change and a certain degree of normalization, evident in a very broad range of areas. Daily life for the population of Northern Ireland has quite simply been transformed by the onset of peace where the shadow of violence has been replaced by the emergence of some semblance of normality that has been a vector of progress and opportunities. Instead of conversations being monopolized by the horror of the “Troubles,” more recently, a sense of positivity hangs on the air. One could point to successes such as that of the national football team or the unquestionable upturn in the economic outlook as examples of how

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normal life has been slowly emerging from the conflict (Bairner 2008). The Northern Irish tourist industry has boomed as it has surfed the wave of the post-“Troubles” context that has seen more external visitors willing to enjoy the sights the Province has to offer. Such an influx of international visitors has been helped enormously by successes in the world of golf and also that of the entertainment industry with the Province’s coastline providing the backdrop for a number of hugely successful television franchises, including Game of Thrones (Boyd 2019). In the present discussion, such factors may appear trivial. However, the reality is that changes such as these would have been simply unthinkable during the conflict and are therefore indicative of just how far Northern Ireland has come since the onset of peace on its journey toward normalization. Just as this new context has provided opportunities in those areas outlined above, one has also been able to identify similar openings in terms of how the past is remembered—an issue of critical importance for the maintenance of peace. As the Province has moved away from the conflict and peace has bedded in, one of the logical and more interesting developments has been a shift in attitudes toward how the past should be remembered. It is obvious that, as the context has changed so radically—and in particular, as we move away from the constant threat of violence that so defined the “Troubles”— it has become possible for people to speak more openly and differently about how they interpret and understand their experiences of this difficult period (Dawson 2014; Lundy and McGovern 2008, 29–48; Bell 2003). That such an opportunity to recalibrate memories of the past has emerged is not something that has just happened organically. In fact, despite the unquestionable progress of the peace process since 1998, there have been a number of issues that have provided serious challenges for the maintenance of peace (Cochrane 2013; Power 2011). It is important to bear in mind that the GFA may well have ended the violence, but the divisions that defined the Province during the conflict remained—and remain—in place. Such divisions define how the conflict is remembered and there is general agreement across the political parties in Northern Ireland that, without a mechanism to effectively manage it, the legacy of the past could become one of the most important threats to the continuation of peace.6 As well as a number of government-led initiatives to meet this challenge, much work goes on in cultural institutions and community relations activities (at state and grassroots levels) aimed at addressing the challenge that the past represents.7 More broadly, discussions about this issue figure prominently across society with widespread recognition that something needs to be done, but little consensus has been achieved on a concrete plan. It is precisely this context that has provided the backdrop for the emergence of the Voices of 68 collaboration with NMNI.

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VOICES OF 68 The 2015 study Sous les paves . . . the Troubles. Northern Ireland, France and the European Collective memory of 1968, explained, and argued against, the erroneous absence of the Province from the dominant transnational narrative of this seminal period (Reynolds 2015). Following its publication, the author was contacted by the team at NMNI to discuss how the book’s findings could inform the representation of 1968 in its premier site at Belfast’s Ulster Museum. There then unfolded a four-stage collaboration that offers an insight to the possibilities available in terms of meeting the challenge of managing the past (Reynolds and Blair 2019). The initial stage saw minor alterations to the existing gallery with a view to adding greater emphasis to the international context and its influence in how events unfolded in Northern Ireland. The second stage saw a substantial overhaul with a series of Oral History interviews used as the underpinning for a new treatment of the period where much emphasis was placed on the global circumstances and their impact. This phase also included the beginning of links with local school and curriculum bodies and the development of educational resources and study days to accompany the gallery material. These resources, and others, were made available online for teachers, pupils, and the general public to delve deeper into the project content.8 The third stage sought to benefit from and contribute to the commemorative fervor that accompanied 1968’s 50th anniversary in 2018 through the curation of a new, extended, temporary exhibition entitled Voices of 68 which was hosted at the Ulster Museum for a two-month period to mark the anniversary of the N. Irish events and culminated in a three-day conference.9 In addition, multiple mobile versions of Voices of 68 were created and travelled to destinations all over the UK and Ireland as well as being hosted in a number of venues in Europe and the United States.10 A digital version of the exhibition was also created to enable access to those unable to physically visit or those wishing to explore the content further.11 The fourth and final stage of the project saw an adapted version of Voices of 68 incorporated into the permanent gallery of the Ulster Museum where it sits today in a prominent position adjacent to the critically acclaimed Troubles and Beyond gallery. The success and effectiveness of this project is evident in its expansion and growth. However, even a cursory glance at some of the feedback garnered reveals a number of important lessons. First of all, as exemplified by the following extracts from visitor testimonies, the exhibition content has encouraged visitors to see beyond the insular perspective and take on board the impact of the broader international context: We are often told it was just a Northern Ireland thing, but it was clearly part of a bigger social movement; It is very important to understand the wider context of

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these events. The world was changing and they were part of a global movement; It was very important to understand that the civil rights movement in America had a profound effect on the Irish working class who felt an affinity with the black people; History without context can lead to dangerous and false conclusions. It is always good to see the big picture. The civil rights movement in NI clearly followed other events in USA and Europe. The student protests in Paris and other European cities provided an example to young people in NI; The people within NI were inspired by protests in France to continue these marches.12

Such examples go some way toward highlighting how effective this collaborative project, via its multifaceted outputs, has been in helping challenge and overcome the absence of Northern Ireland from the transnational narrative. However, perhaps even more importantly, telling this story via the broader international optic has enabled the project to frame this era differently and gather a much more diverse set of perspectives than have hitherto been the case.13 By examining Northern Ireland’s 1968 within the broader global context, a degree of ‘narrative hospitality’ has been forged that has enabled previously marginalized voices to be part of the discussion and debate (Black and Reynolds 2020, 29). As the extract examples from testimonies below highlight, this has had an important impact on how visitors have reflected on this pivotal moment in Northern Ireland’s recent past: I’m only really starting to appreciate the context at the time and the historical significance of these events; It is rare to hear a more balanced view. It challenges things I’ve been told; It is important to hear two sides and conflicting views within sides. It has made me want to read a bit more; No war is over until you know the stories of the other sides; It is of utmost importance to record multiple and conflicting perspectives so that an objective view of history may be retained; It is always important to hear multiple perspectives to get a true sense of what happened; Increases understanding of different perspectives. I feel I have greater understanding; I think it is important to give everyone a voice, to hear all their stories. I know that in Northern Ireland this is very difficult as the divisions are so deep. It is a living experience over many years with hatred and bitterness. [. . .] there will never be a consensus. But we need to dialogue and listen to each other to prevent the bitterness and divisions being passed to another generation and try to come to some sense as to why things happened.14

These reflections are indicative of not just how this project has enabled visitors to challenge their understandings. They also reveal a clear willingness on behalf of the public to confront the challenge that the past presents in Northern Ireland. Such readiness is in keeping with the emerging consensus around the need to face up to the difficulties this issue presents and is equally

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identifiable in how the approach of NMNI has evolved over the course of the period since the onset of peace. Prior to 1998, and like most of the Northern Irish museum sector, NMNI avoided any real treatment of the “Troubles” in its galleries (Black and Reynolds 2020, 23–25). However, since then, there has been an unquestionable shift that, despite some setbacks, reveals unquestionable progress. The first real step came with the 2003 Conflict; The Irish at War exhibition at the Ulster Museum that was met with a very positive reception and exemplified just how the new context provided potentially fertile ground for a new, more challenging perspective. However, the Ulster Museum was closed in 2006 for a major refurbishment and reopened in 2009 with the inclusion of a new gallery dedicated to the “Troubles.” The general consensus on this new gallery was that it was insipid and a step backward in terms of what could be achieved (Meredith 2009). Since then, great progress has been made to overcome this misstep. Projects such as the 2014 Art of the Troubles or the 2015 Silent Testimony exhibition were indicative of such progress and the 2018 launch of new “Troubles” gallery entitled Troubles and Beyond marked its culmination with this new treatment praised for its courageous and innovative approach to examining the conflict (Gannon 2018). Such developments in the NMNI context and approach are important to bear in mind as they have provided the backdrop to the emergence of the Voices of 68 project and highlight how the latter has very much fitted in with the broader trend that has seen NMNI assume and settle into its role as a vital protagonist in the challenge of managing the legacy of Northern Ireland’s past. NMNI is not alone in such a trajectory; much valuable work on the issue of the past has been undertaken across Northern Irish society and continues today.15 Such groundwork ought to be important in informing promised government policy on this vital question. Within this plethora of initiatives, the innovative approach of the Voices of 68 collaboration and the lessons gleaned from its expansion and growth can contribute to such policy debates and discussions and are indeed doing so.16 However, there is also some relevance to broader debates and discussions in relation to post-conflict societies struggling to come to terms with their pasts. MEMORY IN POST-CONFLICT CONTEXTS The last three decades have witnessed a huge surge in memory studies (Bell 2008, 148; Winter 2000, 69–92). This “boom” has facilitated the emergence of an extensive, international field of research that straddles a range of academic disciplines (Dutceac-Segesten and Wüstenberg 2017). Particularly pertinent for this discussion is the deployment of memory studies and its

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application to peace-building efforts in post-conflict societies (McGrattan and Hopkins 2017; Viggiani 2014; Ahonen 2012; Hamber and Wilson 2010). There is a general recognition that dealing with the past can and should form an integral part of how post-conflict societies future-proof peace. Management of the past is necessary so as to avoid any possibility of the tensions and divisions associated with what happened to pave the way for a return to violence. Despite the difficulties associated with such a challenge, it is clear that the cessation of conflict provides a fertile new context for alternatives takes on the past to emerge. This is to be understood by the notion of the fluidity of memory; how we remember the past can and does change. Maurice Halbwachs formulated the understanding that how we remember the past is very much determined by the needs of the present (Halbwachs 1925; 1950). It stands to reason that as the present shifts from one context to the next so too is there a possibility—even a necessity—for our memories to shift also (Knauer and Walkowitz 2004; Olick 1999; Schwartz 1982). This is precisely how one is to understand the context in Northern Ireland since the conclusion of the “Troubles” in 1998. The onset of peace has forged an opportunity for a recalibration of how the past is remembered and what it does to social cohesion in the Province. Perhaps even more than an opportunity, this new context has obliged those that can to step up and confront the challenge that the past presents. Making sense of, and gleaning the lessons from, the success of the Voices of 68 project is predicated on understanding these well-established ideas around the fluidity of memory and the importance of the present-day context of Northern Ireland. However, the project’s success and effectiveness are to be understood by more than how it has been able to tap into the opportunities provided by the current context. One must also take into consideration its innovative approach that combines the methodology of Oral History with the latest addition to the ever-growing list of memory modes, agonistic memory. The general effectiveness and benefits of the Oral History approach are wellestablished and form the basis of a very rich area of debate and discussion (Della Porta 2014; Thompson 1998; Portelli 1991; Frisch 1990). While Oral History is not without its critics and those that caution its use, there is no denying that in post-conflict societies it has become an increasingly prevalent tool in helping manage the difficulties of the past (Hamber 2009; Bickford 2007; Schaffer and Smith 2004; Humphrey 2002). This is also true in the specific context of Northern Ireland where there is a plethora of initiatives that draw on Oral History and where the government has identified this methodological approach as a central feature of its plans for managing the legacy of the conflict (Hamber and Kelly 2016).17 The deployment of Oral History has therefore been an important and pertinent element of the Voices of 68 project. In particular, it was essential in ensuring the effectiveness of

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the theoretical underpinning of agonistic memory. Drawing on the foundational work of Cento-Bull and Hansen, agonistic memory encourages the bringing together of contested narratives on the past with a view to making the clash of such perspectives part and parcel of the memory process (Cento Bull and Hansen 2016). Moving away from the objective of arriving at some sort of consensus, the multiperspectivist mode (facilitated by the deployment of Oral History) enables the inclusion of previously marginalized voices with the objective of heightening empathy and understanding (Reynolds 2019). By bringing together such a diverse and wide range of perspectives on the pivotal events of Northern Ireland’s 1968, this project has underscored the possibilities of the current peacetime context. Furthermore, it has demonstrated that it is indeed possible to provide a platform for new, constructive, and inclusive discussions about the past, even on potentially divisive moments such as 1968. Having done so, the next logical step is an extension of this approach to the broader challenge of managing the legacy of the past in Northern Ireland. And to take things a step further, if this project can produce such positive outcomes in the deeply divided and difficult circumstances of Northern Ireland, surely there are grounds for an exploration of its effectiveness in other post-conflict societies grappling with the challenges presented by their own difficult pasts.18 CONCLUSION This project started out with the objective of stitching Northern Ireland into the increasingly prominent transnational narrative of 1968. The aim was to ensure—from both within and without—that the new peace-time context would mean that the horror of the “Troubles” would no longer prevent the Province from being considered as part of this global revolt. The expansion and success of the project was such that its initial objectives have been largely met. However, the benefits of doing so have also enabled the formulation of an innovative, combined methodological and theoretical approach whose potential benefits stretch well beyond the issue of 1968. Such a process is evidence of the importance our continued challenging of how the past is understood and remembered, even in those areas (such as 1968) considered to be thoroughly well-trodden. The reanalysis of Northern Ireland’s 1968 from the global perspective helped reframe this period in such a way so as to create the narrative hospitality that provided the platform for a much more inclusive and constructive conversation on this vital period. As a result, memories have been recalibrated and potentially rich lines of enquiry have been opened up for those grappling with the challenge of the past, not only in Northern

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Ireland but in other post-conflict societies where this question requires close and careful management.

NOTES 1. The French term les années 68 has become an effective means through which to capture this broader temporal framework (C.f., for example, Gobille 2008; Damamme, Gobille, Matonti, Pudal 2008; Zancarini-Fournel 2008; Porhel 2008; Vigna 2007). Once could also point to term such as the “Sixties” or the “Long 60s” that similarly broaden the temporal framework (c.f., for example, Vinen 2018; Strain 2016; Sherman 2013; Marwick 1998). 2. See Reynolds 2015; Prince 2007; Purdie 1990 for a complete overview of the events of Northern Ireland’s 1968. 3. The history of Northern Ireland, and in particular that of the Troubles has spawned a plethora of academic research. Some useful starting points for an overview include; Wharton 2019; Patterson 2007; McKittrick and McVea 2001; Hennessey 1997. 4. See, for example, the 2008 BBC documentary looking at the events of 5 October 1968 and its title The Day the Troubles began. 5. The published version of this landmark peace deal can be read here: https​:/​/as​​ sets.​​publi​​shing​​.serv​​ice​.g​​ov​.uk​​/gove​​rnmen​​t​/upl​​oads/​​syste​​m​/upl​​oads/​​attac​​hment​​_data​​/ file​​/​1366​​52​/ag​​reeme​​nt​.pd​f 6. See, for example, http:​/​/www​​.asse​​mblyr​​esear​​chmat​​ters.​​org​/2​​016​/0​​9​/22/​​deali​​ ng​-wi​​th​-th​​e​-pas​​t​-in​-​​north​​ern​-i​​relan​​d/ 7. The following, state-led initiatives are evidence of the recognition of the need to pro-actively manage the legacy of the past:​http:​/​/www​​.asse​​mblyr​​esear​​chmat​​ters.​​ org​/2​​016​/0​​9​/22/​​deali​​ng​-wi​​th​-th​​e​-pas​​t​-in-​​​north​​ern​-i​​relan​​d/; http:​/​/www​​.comm​​unity​​-rela​​tions​​.org.​​uk​/pr​​ogram​​mes​/m​​arkin​​g​-an​n​​ivers​​aries​/ ; https​:/​/ww​​w​.gov​​.uk​/g​​overn​​ment/​​news/​​first​​-worl​​d​-war​​-comm​​emora​​tions​​-and-​​ the​-d​​ecade​​​-of​-c​​enten​​aries​; https​:/​/ww​​w​.gov​​.uk​/g​​overn​​ment/​​publi​​catio​​ns​/th​​e​-sto​​rmont​​-hous​​​e​-agr​​eemen​​t;; http:​/​/iri​​shhis​​toria​​nsinb​​ritai​​n​.org​/​​?p​=3​​21; https://www​.fictcommission​.org​/en 8. One example of the of study days can be found here: https​:/​/ww​​w​.nmn​​i​.com​​ /what​​s​-on/​​1968-​​an​-op​​portu​​nity-​​misse​​d.​;ht​​tps:/​​/www.​​nmni.​​com​/w​​hats-​​on​/19​​68​-​an ​​ -oppo​​rtuni​​ty​-mi​​ssed; The online educational resource can be found here:‘ https​:/​/ww​​ w​.nmn​​i​.com​​/lear​​n​/196​​8​-his​​tory-​​resou​​r​ce​/H​​ome​.a​​spx ; the NMNI YouTube channel dedicated to this project is to be found here: https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/p​​layli​​st​?li​​st​ =PL​​_UgxD​​N1Li8​​_14DI​​IIWF​X​​KKaQS​​EX2SV​​NM 9. Details on exhibition launch: https​:/​/ww​​w​.nmn​​i​.com​​/news​​/voic​​es​-of​​-68​-e​​​ xhibi​​tion;​ Details on conference: https​:/​/ww​​w​.nmn​​i​.com​​/what​​s​-on/​​1968-​​and​​-b​​eyond​. 10. The exhibition has been hosted in the following destinations: Boston College; Ballymena Library; Derry Central Library; Newry Library; Dungannon Library; Derry, Guildhall; Belfast City Hall; Ulster University (Magee Campus); Nottingham Trent University; Irish Cultural Centre, London Hammersmith; Luton Irish Centre;

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Victoria Gallery & Museum, Liverpool; University of Bath: November; World Heritage Centre, Manchester; Cardiff University; Cork County Library; Cork City Library; Dublin City Library; Galway, NUIG; Kerry Library; Mayo County Library; Arklow Library; Tipperary County Library. 11. The digital version is available to download here: https​:/​/bo​​oks​.a​​pple.​​com​/u​​s​/ boo​​k​/voi​​ces​-o​​f​-68/​​​id140​​19847​​83. It has been on display at Harvard University, Florida State University, and the British School at Rome. 12. Visitor feedback on “Voices of 68” exhibition. 13. The following people were interviewed as part of the project: Paul Arthur; Paul Bew; Gregory Campbell; Ivan Cooper; Anthony Coughlan; Austin Currie; Anne Devlin; Michael Farrel; Mervyn Gibson; Denis Haughey; Erskine Holmes; Anne Hope; Judith Jennings; Bernadette McAliskey; Nelson McAusland; Eddie McCamley; Eamonn McCann; Chris McGimpsey; Dympna McGlade; Aidan McKinney; Maurice Mills; Geordie Morrow ; Mike Nesbitt; Hubert Nichol; Henry Patterson; Brid Rodgers; Bríd Ruddy; Carol Tweedale; Eileen Weir; Fergus Woods. 14. Visitor feedback on “Voices of 68” exhibition. 15. One could point to the work of organizations such as Healing Through Remembering (https://hea​ling​thro​ughr​emem​bering​.org), Community Relations Council (https://www​.community​-relations​.org​.uk), The Nerve Centre (https://www​ .nervecentre​.org), and The Bloody Sunday Trust (https​:/​/ww​​w​.mus​​eumof​​freed​​erry.​​ org​/c​​onten​​t​/abo​​ut​-bl​​oody-​​​sunda​​y​-tru​​st) as just a few examples of bodies involved in this important work. 16. For example, members of the Flags, Identity, Culture and Tradition (FICT) commission, set up to produce recommendations for a number of challenges facing the peace process, have pointed to the influence of the Voices of 68 project on their reflections in dealing with the legacy of the past. 17. The 2014 Stormont House Agreement (https​:/​/ww​​w​.gov​​.uk​/g​​overn​​ment/​​publi​​ catio​​ns​/th​​e​-sto​​rmont​​-ho​us​​e​-agr​​eemen​t) outlined the centrality of the Oral History approach for the government. 18. For examples of the deployment of agonism in other post-conflict societies, see Strömbom 2019; Maddison 2015; Peterson 2013.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Ahonen, S. 2012. Coming to Terms with a Dark Past: How Post-conflict Societies Deal with History. Frankfurt am Main: Lang. Bairner, Alan. 2008. “Still taking sides: sport, leisure and identity.” In Northern Ireland after the Troubles?: A Society in Transition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bell, C. 2003. “Dealing with the Past in Northern Ireland.” Fordham International Law Journal. 26(4): 1095–2003. Bell, Duncan. 2008. “Agonistic Democracy and the Politics of Memory.” Constellations 15(1): 148–166.

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Bickford, Louis. 2007. “Unofficial Truth Projects.” Human Rights Quarterly 29(4): 994–1035. Black, G. and Reynolds, C. 2020. “Engaging audiences with difficult pasts: The voices of ’68 Project at the Ulster Museum, Belfast.” Curator. The Museum Journal. 63(1): 21–38. Blum, F. 2018. “Années 68 postcoloniales?: “Mai” de France et d’Afrique.” French Historical Studies 41(2): 193–218. Boyd, S.W. (2019). “Post-conflict tourism development in Northern Ireland: moving beyond murals and dark sites associated with its past.” In Isaac, R. K., Çakmak, E., Butler, R. (eds), Tourism and Hospitality in Conflict-Ridden Destinations. Abingdon: Routledge. 226–239. Burleigh H. 2017. “Finding Tunisia in the Global 1960s.” Monde(s) 11(1): 61–78. Byrne, J. 2014. “Flags and Protests: Exploring the Views, Perceptions and Experiences of People Directly and Indirectly Affected by the Flag Protests.” Available at; http:​/​ /uir​​.ulst​​er​.ac​​.uk​/2​​8386/​​1​/Rep​​​ort​.p​​df. Caute, David. 1988. Sixty-Eight: The Year of the Barricades. London: Hamish Hamilton. Cento Bull, Anna and Hansen, Hans Lauge. 2016. “On agonistic memory.” Memory Studies 9(4): 390–404. Chaplin, T. and Pieper Mooney J. E. 2018. The Global 1960s: Convention, Contest, and Counterculture. London: Routledge. Chen, J., Klimke, M., Kirasirova, M., Nolan, M., Young, M. and Waley-Cohen, J. 2018. The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties: Between Protest and Nationbuilding. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge. Cochrane, F. 2013. Northern Ireland: The Reluctant Peace. New Haven: Yale University Press. Cornils, I. and Waters, S. (eds). 2010. Memories of 1968: International Perspectives. Bern: Peter Lang. Crane, C. and Muellner, N. 2008. (1968) Episodes of Culture in Contest. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholar Publishing. Damamme, Dominique, Gobille, Boris, Matonti, Frédérique, Pudal, Bernard. 2008. Mai- Juin 68. Paris. Editions de l’Atelier/Editions Ouvrières. Dawson, G. 2014. “The desire for justice, psychic reparation and the politics of memory in ‘post-conflict’ Northern Ireland.” Rethinking History 18(2): 265–288. De Groot, G.J. 2008. The Sixties Unplugged. London: Pan Books. Della Porta, Donatella. 2014. Methodological Practices in Social Movement Research. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dramé, P. and Lamarre, J. (eds). 2009. 1968, Des sociétés en crise: une perspective globale: 1968, Societies in Crisis: A Global Perspective. Laval: Les Presses de l’Université de Laval. Draper, S. 2018. 1968 Mexico: Constellations of Freedom and Democracy. Durham: Duke University Press. Dreyfus-Armand, G. 2008. Les années 68, un monde en mouvement: Nouveaux regards sur une histoire plurielle (1968–1981). Paris: Syllepse.

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Dutceac-Segesten, A. and Wüstenberg, J. 2017. “Memory Studies–the State of the Field.” Memory Studies 10(4): 474–489. Farik, N. 2008. 1968 Revisited - 40 Years of Protest Movements. Brussels: Heinrich Böll Stiftung. Fenton, S. 2018. The Good Friday Agreement. London: Biteback Publishing. Fink, C., Gassert, P. and Junker, D. (eds). 1998. 1968: The World Transformed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Førland, E. 2008. “Special issue on 1968.” Scandinavian Journal of History 33(4). Fraser, Ronald. 1988. 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt. New York: Pantheon. Frisch, Michael. 1990. Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History. Albany: State University of New York Press. Gannon, D. 2018. “The troubles and beyond, ulster Museum. Belfast.” Museum Journal. https://www.museumsassociation.org/museums-journal/ reviews/2018/11/01112018-troubles-and-berond-ulster-museum/# Gildea, R., Mark, J. and Warring, A. 2013. Europe’s 1968: Voices of Revolt. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gobille, Boris. 2008. Mai 68. Paris. La Découverte Gueye, O. 2018. “Mai 1968 au Sénégal: Dakar dans le mouvement social mondial.” Socio 10: 121–136. Häberlen J.C., Keck-Szajbel, M. and Mahoney, K. 2019. The Politics of Authenticity. Countercultures and Radical Movements across the Iron Curtain, 1968–1989. New York: Berghahn. Halbwachs, Maurice. 1925. Les Cadres Sociaux de la Mémoire. Paris: Alcan. Halbwachs, Maurice. 1950. La Mémoire Collective. Paris: Presses universitaire de France. Hamber, Brandon. 2009. Transforming Societies After Political Violence: Truth, Reconciliation and Mental Health. New York: Springer. Hamber, Brandon and Kelly, Gráinne. 2016. “Practice, power and inertia: Personal narrative, archives and dealing with the past in Northern Ireland.” Journal of Human Rights Practice 8(1): 25–44. Hamber, B. and Wilson, R.A. 2002. “Symbolic closure through memory, reparation and revenge in post-conflict societies.” Journal of Human Rights 1(1): 35–53. Hennessey, T. 1997. A History of Northern Ireland: 1920–1996. Basingstoke: MacMillan. Humphrey, M. 2002. The Politics of Atrocity and Reconciliation: From Terror to Trauma. London and New York: Routledge. Jameson, Frederic. 1984. “Periodizing the 60s.” Social Text, No. 9/10, Spring Summer. 178–209. Katsiaficas, George. 1987. The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968. Boston: South End Press. Klimke, M. and Scharloth, J. 2008. 1968 in Europe: A History of Protest and Activism, 1956-1977. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Knauer, Lisa M. and Walkowitz, Daniel. 2004. Memory and the Impact of Political Transformation in Public Space. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

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Lundy, P. and McGovern, M. 2001. “The politics of memory in post-conflict Northern Ireland.” Peace Review, A Journal of Social Justice 13(1): 27–33. Maddison, S. 2015. “Relational transformation and agonistic dialogue in divided societies.” Political Studies 63(5), 1014–1030. Marwick, A. 1998. The Sixties: Cultural revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c.1958–1974. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McGrattan, Cillian and Hopkins, Stephen. 2017. “Memory and post-conflict societies: From contestation to integration?” Ethnopolitics 16(5): 488–499. McKittrick, D. and McVea, D. 2001. Making Sense of the Troubles. London: Penguin. Meredith, F. 2009. “Minimal Troubles at Ulster Museum.” Irish Times. Accessed September 18, 2019. https​:/​/ww​​w​.iri​​shtim​​es​.co​​m​/new​​s​/min​​imal-​​troub​​les​-a​​t​-uls​​ter​ -m​​​useum​​-1​.76​​1670. Olick, Jeffrey K. 1999. “Genre memories and memory genres: A dialogical analysis of May 8, 1945 commemorations in the Federal Republic of Germany.” American Sociological Review 64(3): 381–402. Patterson, H. 2007. Ireland since 1939: The Persistence of Conflict. Dublin: Penguin. Peterson, J.H. 2013. “Creating space for emancipatory human security: Liberal obstructions and the potential of agonism.” International Studies Quarterly 57(2): 318–328. Porhel, Vincent. 2008. Ouvriers Bretons. Conflits d’usines, conflits identitaires en Bretagne dans les années 68. Rennes. Presses Universitaire de Rennes. Portelli, A. 1991. The Death of Luigi Trastulli, and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History. Albany: State University of New York Press. Power, M. 2011. Building Peace in Northern Ireland. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Prince, S. 2007. Northern Ireland’s 68. Civil Rights, Global Revolt and the Origins of the Troubles. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. Purdie, B. 1990. Politics in the Streets: Origins of the Civil Rights Movement in Northern Ireland. Belfast: Blackstaff Press. Reynolds C. 2019. “Sobre el disputado pasado de Irlanda del Norte: 1968 y la memoria agonística.” In Bautista, N. and Duée, C., Mayo del 68, 50 años después. Madrid: Dykinson. Reynolds, C. & Blair, W. 2018. “Museums and ‘difficult pasts’: Northern Ireland’s 1968.” Museum International 70(3-4): 12–25. Reynolds, C. 2017. “Northern Ireland’s 1968 in a post-troubles context.” Interventions 19(5), 631–645. Reynolds, C. 2015. Sous les paves . . . the Troubles: Northern Ireland, France and the European Collective Memory of 1968. Bern: Peter Lang. Schaffer, Kay, and Smith, Sidonie. 2004. “Conjunctions: Life narratives in the field of human rights.” Biography 27(1): 1–24. Schwartz, Barry. 1982. “The social context of commemoration: A study in collective memory.” Social Forces 61 (2): 374–402. Sherman, J.D. 2013. 21St Century Studies: Long 1968: Revisions and New Perspectives. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

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Strain, C.B. 2016. The Long Sixties—America, 1955–1973: America, 1954–1974. Newark, NJ: John Wiley & Sons Strömbom, L. 2019. “Exploring prospects for agonistic encounters in conflict zones: investigating dual narrative tourism in Israel/Palestine.” Alternatives 44(2–4): 75–93. Thompson, Paul. 1988. The Voice of the Past: Oral History. New York. Oxford University Press. Thornton, C, Kelters, S., Feeney, B. and McKittrick, D. 2004. Lost Lives: The Stories of the Men, Women and Children Who Died as a Result of the Northern Ireland Troubles. Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing. Tonge, J. 2013. Northern Ireland: Conflict and Change. Abingdon: Routledge. Viggiani, Elisabetta. 2014. Talking Stones: The Politics of Memorialization in PostConflict in Northern Ireland. New York: Berghahn Books. Vigna, Xavier. 2007. L’Insubordination ouvrière dans les années 68. Essai d’histoire politique des usines. Rennes. PUR. Vinen, R. 2018. The Long ‘68: Radical protest and its enemies. London: Allen Lane. Vinen, R. 2018. 1968: Radical Protest and Its Enemies. New York: Harper. Wharton, K.M. 2019. Torn apart: Fifty years of the Troubles, 1969-2019. Stroud: The History Press. Winter, Jay. 2000. “The generation of memory: Reflections on the ‘Memory Boom’.” Contemporary Historical Studies, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 27: 69–92. Zancarini-Fournel, M. 2016. Les luttes et les rêves: Une histoire populaire de la France de 1685 à nos jours. Paris: Zones / La Découverte. Zancarini-Fournel, Michelle. 2008. Le Moment 68. Paris. Seuil.

Chapter 7

Conflicts of Class, Race, and Sexuality Reading Leïla Slimani’s Chanson douce (2016) and Dans le jardin de l’ogre (2014) through Julia Kristeva’s Post-‘68 Feminism Valérie K. Orlando

Women are the victims of class, capitalism, patriarchy, and their gender in Leïla Slimani’s two novels, Chanson douce (2016)1 and the earlier, Dans le jardin de l’ogre (2014).2 As a millennial author and winner of the 2016 Prix Goncourt, Moroccan-born Slimani, who lives in France, is a prime example of a globally connected, bicultural writer of the twenty-first century. Comfortable in her cosmopolitanism, as well as her rejection of stereotypes and expectations with respect to the subjects of her novels (e.g., she does not draw on the well-traveled themes chosen by many Beur/Maghrebi authors),3 Slimani explores the abject, dark, but often shared aspects of women’s socioeconomic realities in France and, in general, the West. I posit here that her contemporary writing engages French feminist ideology of the past, thus evoking the idea of the continuing “luttes” of feminist movements since May 1968. The recent debates in France4 over “fémicide” and sexual harassment generated in the climate of the #Me2 movement, also provide an interesting contemporary framework in which to read Slimani’s novels. Chanson douce and Dans le jardin de l’ogre reflect not only salient examples of current feminist debates, they also make us think about the failures of past movements, particularly the Mouvement de libération des femmes (MLF) emerging out of May 1968 and continuing in the early 1970s, to change the status quo. Slimani literarily depicts the fact that women’s movements have been incapable of convincing society that women’s rights are human rights; an aspect that is also revealed in current feminist debates in France.5 In general, in the years since 1968, both in France and the United States as well as elsewhere, women have been sorely reminded that universal 139

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access to equality remains elusive. As feminist philosopher Julia Kristeva has reminded us over the years, feminism cannot be encapsulated in a movement, but rather should be thought of as “a humanism” to challenge the sociocultural patriarchal paradigms that women face every day which unfairly affect their daily lives.6 These paradigms have only become more significant, or at least seem so, since recently they have been so mediatized. In the era of hyper-capitalist systems that mandate women perform in a man’s world while still functioning in their biological role, or what Kristeva names in her celebrated article “Le Temps des femmes” (“Women’s Time,”1979), as the “dénominateur symbolique” (symbolic denominator) of the maternal, they are doomed to failure.7 Kristeva’s Law of the Symbolic Order means, as feminist scholar Kelly Oliver suggests, that “sexual identity,” “motherhood,” and the female body “can only ever be signified”; that is represented, by those in power: men.8 The symbolic denominator is characterized by “reproduction, the survival of the species, life and death, the body, sex, the symbolic.”9 Women viewed as responsible for reproduction are biologically determined as “an ensemble of sociocultural” idées réçues, which unfavorably influence their identity.10 Women are thus determined by “patriarchal time,” the linear “space-time” (espace-temps) that “revêt le terme de ‘femme’” (clothes the term “woman”) in a patriarchal ideology that is always in “infinite expansion.”11 Although a feminist, Julia Kristeva acknowledges in “Women’s Time” that feminist movements post-1968 often made the difference between “the sexes a painful one . . . in a civilization that has nothing to do besides playing the stock market and waging war.”12 More broadly for Kristeva, for feminist movements to achieve equality in society for women they need to reconcile and eventually overcome their reticence in embracing motherhood. Kelly Oliver suggests that Kristeva was wary in the 1970s of feminists’ tendency to reduce “the identity of woman to the identity of man by inserting her into his linear time.”13 Particularly, Kristeva was apprehensive about collective feminism and its elision of the “individual woman,” which discounted the uniqueness of the multiple positionalities one woman can have, including motherhood.14 The post-1968 philosopher in her oeuvre of the early 1970s, posits that “individual women have become the victims of feminism’s totalizing ‘we’,” “universally emblematic” in the “sociopolitical life of nations.”15 Leïla Slimani’s contemporary feminist novels echo Kristeva’s positions, revealing the fifty-year-old failure of feminist movements to change socioeconomic and political inequality as hoped. This essay considers Slimani’s novels through a Kristevean framework, drawing most notably on the article “Le Temps des femmes” and the longer essay Pouvoirs de la horreur, which are foundational theoretical works that still today help explain the

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contemporary conflicted spaces women occupy in late-capitalist16 patriarchal society. Themes of Slimani’s novels echo Kristeva’s main criticism of the women’s movements of the 1970s. Kristeva emphasizes three key societal factors influencing women’s circumstances. They are first, women’s subordinate positionality in relation to language/the semiotic; second, women’s lack of agency in regard to their representations in society; and, third, the constraints of motherhood construed by patriarchal norms. Slimani’s writing also exposes how the trap of dominant, patriarchal, linear time entraps women, impeding them from becoming individual subjects. For Kristeva, and by extension Slimani, woman is un sujet en procès (a subject in process) forever molding herself in a disconnect between the expectations that society places on her and her own ambitions with respect to identity and subjecthood.17 Kristeva warns that women’s movements should not “sink” their debates “into an essentialist cult of Woman.” She continues, noting that “if the feminine exists, it only exists in order of significance or signifying process.”18 SLIMANI’S EXPLORATION OF THE “LAW OF THE SYMBOLIC” Slimani places her female protagonists in conflicted spaces as she entreats readers to think about the sociocultural and political contemporary structures in which women must constantly negotiate for power over their own destinies in order to establish their individual identities. The author focuses on (1) the patriarchal, capitalist systems that facilitate men’s efforts to mold women to their expectations; (2) the biological and emotional realms of the maternal that force women to make certain choices that counter positive outcomes for them as individuals; and (3) women’s self-destructive behavior as the result of what Kristeva names “the abject.” Clarifying what the abject means to subjecthood, Kristeva notes that “l’abject sollicite et pulvérise tout à la fois” (the abject solicits and pulverizes everything at the same time) and is where lies “the fundamental lack of all being, sense, language, desire.”19 The abject is also where “le sujet trouve l’impossible en lui-même” (the subject finds the impossible in him/herself). Slimani’s characters stand as examples of Kristeva’s affirmations. They are doubly impeded by their gender and their fragile positions when confronted with the abject in their lives. These abject forces push them to the margins of language, desire, and power over their bodies. Leïla Slimani’s narratives depict the materialist, capitalist pressures on women that today, perhaps more than ever before, compel them to confront what is lacking in their being, or the very core of their selves. They continue

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to be forced to make arduous choices pertaining to motherhood, careers, and their own sexuality. Reading Slimani’s works against decades of feminist post-1968 discourse reminds us to what extent women’s sociopolitical oppression continues to persist in all classes. The author’s messages echo those of MLF feminist Christine Delphy who, although almost at the opposite end of the spectrum to Kristeva, maintains that there are universal direct links between “l’économie domestique et l’oppression des femmes” (the domestic economy and the oppression of women).20 Caught in the socioeconomic constraints of a contemporary patriarchal capitalist system, Slimani’s female protagonists pay dearly for their transgressions of the symbolic order. In Dans le jardin de l’ogre, Adèle described as a “modern-day Madame Bovary,”21 is imprisoned in her husband’s objectification and punished severely by him for her extramarital sexual relations. Psychologically disturbed nanny Louise in Chanson douce is pushed to commit murder by her insanity which is the result of years of marginalization and socioeconomic inequality. Referring to contemporary French society, Kristeva points out that women learn that resisting the structures of the patriarchal order of Law is futile. Adèle and Louise, both from the working class, are never free of male dominance and economic disadvantage, even when they are ensconced in the bourgeois echelons of contemporary, Parisian capitalist-modernity. Both protagonists are white (although Adèle’s father is Algerian) and products of the hard realities they have lived in the economically challenged banlieues of France. They become entangled in the aspirations and manipulations of the millennial bourgeois circles of Paris; Adèle by her doctor-husband and Louise by Myriam and Paul, her employers, both thinking that “everything is possible” (48) as they socially climb in Paris. All Slimani’s female characters—Louise, Myriam, and Adèle—at some point and in some manner, become victims of what Kristeva emphasizes is the patriarchal Law of Order that hinders their individualism and, eventually, pushes them to “negation.”22 The stories of socially marginalized Adèle and Louise are cruel testaments to the continued compromised positions of women in society as their agency is circumvented by the constraints of motherhood and their lack of power in the patriarchal systems that hem them in. In their loss of self, they are literally driven to psychosis, becoming what Kristeva calls “égarés” (the lost ones), left without compasses in search for a place in the world. Their abjection pushes them to ask themselves “Où suis-je” (Where am I?).23 In both novels, the female protagonists are fragmented by irreconcilable differences between what is expected of them, which is Kristeva’s definition of “the various functions of woman” ordained in the Symbolic, and what they desire to be. Most specifically, women are unable to, as Kristeva notes, “mark out new places that serve as gratifying and healing substitutes for

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long-standing deficiencies of maternal space” because they cannot answer Kristeva’s question, “what lies behind the desire to be a mother?”24 Reading Slimani’s works through this question, we see how impossible the answer is to find as her protagonists seek to claim the right to their individual beingin-the-world25; or, to be un sujet en procès on their own terms, not defined by others’ expectations or by motherhood. Both Louise and Adèle attempt to trouble the symbolic order or show, as Kristeva states, that “revolutions are possible,”26 that perhaps there is some space between motherhood and the Other, but in the end, the Order will not be disrupted. Myriam, who employs Louise in Chanson douce to take care of her children, is also a victim in the end of her own ideas about having it all; a career and children even though she resigns herself not to play “ni à la martyre ni à la Mère courage” (neither the martyr nor the courageous Mother) (48). In Slimani’s world, women assert a possible alternative power to the patriarchal but, in the end, their actions condemn them. Their choices lead to Louise’s infanticide in Chanson douce and Adèle’s self-harming, sexual obsessions in Dans le jardin de l’ogre. Both women are literally destroyed in the abject space of annihilation. This destruction of selfhood “is death infecting life”, as Kristeva defines it: “il nous appelle et finit par nous engloutir” (it calls us and finishes by swallowing us).27 THE PATRIARCHAL, CAPITALIST SYSTEMS THAT DESTROY WOMEN In “Le Temps des femmes,” Kristeva critiques what she views as the failure of French feminist movements of the late 1960s to propose alternatives to the linear dominant “institutions sociales” (social institutions) which are those of “les hommes” (men) and the capitalist systems they have contrived.28 For Slimani as well, women as subjects-in-process must constantly define themselves against the societal symbolic representations made for them that include the “long-standing deficiencies of maternal space” as they are construed in the “sociopolitical life” of capitalist nations.29 In post-1968 France, the political claims of women and “les luttes pour l’égalité des salaires et des fonctions, pour la prise du pouvoir dans les institutions sociales au même titre que les hommes” (the struggles for equal salary and jobs, for taking over power in social institutions in the same way as men) were doomed to failure because they offered women no other alternative but the mold of “l’ordre symbolique” (the symbolic order).30 This order dictates a woman’s expected behavior as Slimani’s protagonists demonstrate. Adèle and Louise are significantly hampered also in terms of class and whether or not they have access to economic power.

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Louise in Chanson douce embodies France’s current conflicts surrounding class and social mobility. She is of la classe péréphique (as defined by sociologist Christophe Guilluy), the poor working class, invisible on the peripheries of the power structures of contemporary millennial, urban environments.31 Adèle, raised in a blue-collar neighborhood in Slimani’s first novel, Dans le jardin de l’ogre, although privileged by her marriage into the bourgeoisie of Paris, is rendered mute by it, coopted by masculine notions of how she must behave, prescribed most notably by her husband Richard, a doctor. Her only freedom, or at least what she perceives as freedom, are the fleeting moments with the many sexual partners she encounters due to her addiction to sex. Both Slimani’s female protagonists push against what Kristeva describes as “un certain ‘moi’ qui est fondu avec son maître” (a certain “self” that is melded with its master) but they are unable to ultimately break the Laws of the Symbolic.32 In Chanson douce, Louise’s unfulfilled maternal obsessions, domestic abuse, and unstable economic situation cause her mental instability and eventually push her to murder Myriam’s children. Louise and her employer, Myriam, are generalized composites of complicated, multifaceted collective “representations” of millions of frustrated women who exist in contemporary society, molded by its expectations, extremes and excesses.33 Slimani’s novels resonate with Kristeva’s affirmation that explains women’s position in society as always “situated [by] social forces engaged in the production of [their] representations.”34 Myriam, trained as a lawyer, employs Louise to take care of her children when she returns to work. She laments to Louise the difference in how her and her husband’s roles have been designed by the contemporary society in which they find themselves, noting that Paul has much more power as far as making choices than she. Myriam compares her situation constantly to what she perceives as the perfection of her friends’ “familles idéales” (ideal families) and wonders how it will ever be possible to be “free of others” and their expectations. For the young, aspiring, lawyer who is subjected to the molds others place her in, this would be the “ultimate freedom” (49). Interestingly in Chanson douce, Myriam Charfa, although of Maghrebi origin, escapes the usual French stereotypes and is cast as a social climber and an ambitious young lawyer who employs white Louise to take care of her children when she realizes “elle se sentait mourir de n’avoir rien d’autre à raconter que les pitreries des enfants et les conversations entre des inconnus qu’elle épiait au supermarché” (she felt like dying due to the fact that she had nothing to talk about but the whining of children and the conversations between strangers that she spied on in the supermarket) (21). Myriam’s white husband Paul, also driven by his career, reluctantly supports his wife in her ambitions; however, not before contributing to her guilt over leaving her children by stating that her going back to work will mean that the couple

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will be “dans la tranche de salaire la plus vicieuse: trop riches pour accéder en urgence à une aide et trop pauvres pour que l’embauche d’une nounou ne représente pas un sacrifice” (in the most vicious pay bracket: too rich to have emergency access to aid and too poor for the hiring of a nanny not to be a burden) (25). Slimani exposes the contemporary lament of the Western middle-class, which is losing its financial footing, leaving women especially burdened. Paul sets the weight of guilt over hiring the nanny squarely on the shoulders of his wife, stating that her absence from home to pursue her career will mean that “la nounou et toi . . . gagnerez à peu près la même chose” (the nanny and you will earn about the same thing) (25). Through her heroines, Slimani makes the point that the capitalist machine, in which MaghrebiFrench Myriam in Chanson and biracial (Algerian-French) Adèle in Dans le jardin de l’ogre find themselves entrapped, trumps any racial stereotypes that could be applied to them. The overarching message is that women in whatever class they are bound, who seek to survive financially in contemporary society, are not only compromised by economics but also the ancillary burdens of motherhood. In a 2019 interview with Vogue, Slimani commented that in Dans le jardin de l’ogre (recently translated into English with the title Adele), she sought to reveal the most conflicted aspects of motherhood: The thing that is most difficult when you are a mother is that it is condemnation for a lifetime. It’s never possible to press pause and take a break and say, ‘I just want to forget for a day or two that I am a mother and be the woman I was before.’ When you give life, there is also something that dies in you. You are in grief for something in your past. You feel a certain nostalgia for the woman you were before.35

THE BIOLOGICAL AND EMOTIONAL REALMS OF THE MATERNAL THAT PREDETERMINE WOMEN Adèle in Dans le jardin de l’ogre is unable to resolve how to reconcile woman, the feminine, and the maternal, in her contemporary era. Describing her protagonist, Slimani quips, “What is most subversive and violent with Adèle is that she’s a woman who wants to be an object; she’s very passive.”36 Adèle struggles against representations construed for her by men and patriarchal denominators that determine how she should be; what Kristeva calls the Law. Myriam in Chanson douce also is molded by societal and her husband’s expectations for what she should do and be as a mother. After a year or so of staying at home, she feels unfulfilled as she constantly thinks about how well “she succeeded at the bar exam” and, thus, was recognized by her peers (mostly male) as worthy of having a place in society (21). Yet, she retreated,

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preferring to try to live in a mythical maternal dream world. The desire to be productive economically and the expectations of societal pressures to perform her role as super-mom eventually lead her to be “eaten away” by “bitterness and regret” (20). It is Louise who “suscite et comble les fantasmes de famille idéale que Myriam a honte de nourrir” (incites and fulfills the fantasies of the ideal family that Myriam is embarrassed to nourish) (38). Although Slimani could be faulted for punishing women who desire to juggle it all as they try to navigate the hard realities of consumption-driven capitalism, I suggest that she is really commenting on how contemporary society has failed women because, as Kristeva notes, it fails to consider their “différence sexuelle, biologique, physiologique” (sexual, biological, and physiological difference).37 This failure leads to an another problem according to Kristeva, which is society’s inability to understand “the difference in the relationship of subjects to the symbolic contract that is the social contract.” As Kristeva further explains, this “difference” affects “the relationship to power, language and sense.”38 Slimani’s novels, therefore, echo Kristeva’s plea for women as expressed in Les Nouvelles maladies de l’âme: Since we no longer wish to be excluded from this order, and we are no longer satisfied with our perpetually assigned role of maintaining, developing, and preserving this sociosymbolic contract as mothers [and] wives . . . how might we appropriate our own space, a space that is passed down through tradition and that we would like to modify?39

The tension between feminine, biological limitations, and the search for the self is embodied most predominately in thirty-five-year-old Adèle in Dans le jardin de l’ogre. From the working class, Adèle has navigated a childhood fraught with the negative aspects associated with poverty, alcoholism, and sexual abuse (committed by a neighbor). Raised by her manipulative mother, Simone, and an introverted, mentally frail, unemployed Algerian-born father Kader, Adèle shapes her worldview and her self-awareness in the cold hard reality of her family’s tiny “appartement glauque” (murky apartment) in Boulogne-sur-mer, a small village outside Paris (182). Her mother describes Adèle as “toujours empotée et prude . . . jamais un mot, jamais un sourire” (always stuffy and prudish . . . never a word, never a smile) (92). She admits that “on pensait qu’elle finirait vieille fille” (we thought she would end up an old maid) (92). Slimani’s protagonist could be designated as a biracial Beur, but the author does not dwell on this ethnic detail, nor does she mark Adèle in terms of any physical difference packaged in stereotypes. On the contrary, her beauty—her “pale” fragility (62) —are what draw Richard, an ambitious doctor, to marry her. She quickly moves from a working-class neighborhood to Paris’s 18th arrondisement, where appearances are everything. To keep

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up these appearances, after landing a job through one of Richard’s many connections, Adèle works half-heartedly as a journalist for an international newsmagazine. However, she has no interest in being a reporter. In fact, “Adèle n’aime pas son métier. Elle hait l’idée de devoir travailler pour vivre” (Adèle doesn’t like her job. She hates the idea of having to work to live) (19). Moreover, “elle n’a jamais eu d’autre ambition que d’être regardée” (she never has had any ambition other than to be looked at) (19). Her apathy about her job is so acute that she fabricates the details of her news assignments to forego the exhausting groundwork necessary to pursue them. Using her reporting as an excuse, she is absent weeks at a time as she gives into her increasing sexual obsessions, hooking up with random men. Commenting on her character, Slimani remarks: “What is most subversive and violent with Adèle is her passivity . . . She is the very antithesis of what we mean when we talk about empowered, emancipated women in 2019. Adèle’s not that kind of woman. She wants to be taken, she wants to be fucked.”40 All Adèle’s actions and plans are developed around her sexual encounters with men of all social echelons; some are friends and colleagues, others remain completely anonymous. Slimani studies Adèle as the victim of what she describes as “the mechanism of addiction . . . the fact that you lose the freedom of saying no.” Sex for Adèle, the author notes, is “about loneliness, about boredom, about frustration . . . and is something that allows [Adèle] to be more than a wife and mother—the two things that give her a halo of respectability.”41 Adèle’s identity and self-worth are increasingly compromised as she lives her double life: “Elle voudrait n’être qu’un objet au milieu d’une horde, être dévorée, sucée, avalée tout entière. Qu’on lui pince les seins, qu’on lui morde le ventre. Elle veut être une poupée dans le jardin d’un ogre” (She only wanted to be an object in the middle of a horde, to be devoured, sucked, totally gulped down. Let her breasts be pinched, let her stomach be bitten. She wants to be a doll in an ogre’s garden) (14). Hiding her hyper-sexed, parallel life in the “Ogre’s garden” allows her short moments (or so she thinks) during which to flee her husband’s class conscious objectification, as he constantly seeks to mold her to fit his ideal of what his bourgeois life and wife should look like. When he discovers her betrayals, Richard exercises his “pouvoir sur elle pour la rabaisser” (power over her to put her down) (189). He takes his place in a long line of men who have abused her: “Les hommes l’ont tirée de l’enfance. Ils l’ont extirpée de cet âge boueux et elle a troqué la passivité enfantine contre la lascivité des geishas” (Men who pulled her from childhood. They pulled her out of that muddy age and she swapped childish passivity for the lascivity of geishas) (138). Although Adèle produces one child, Lucien, she cannot accept her role as mother. She admits that she thought “un enfant la guérirait” (a child would cure her) (40) and that motherhood was accomplished for the same reasons as

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getting married, “pour appartenir au monde et se protéger de toute différence avec les autres” (for being part of the world and to protect herself from all difference with others) (39). She convinces herself that “la maternité était la seule issue à son mal-être, la seule solution pour briser net cette fuite en avant” (that motherhood was the only way out of her unwellness, the only solution to break clean from running away) (40). However, maternity and then motherhood prove to be “insufferable” for her (41). She regards her son as “une contrainte dont elle a dû mal à s’accommoder” (a burden that she is unable to get used to) (39), and she views the whole experience as having broken her body and soul: “elle a l’impression d’en être sortie laide, molle, vieillie. Elle a coupé ses cheveux court et il lui semble que les rides, désormais, lui rongent le visage” (She has the impression that she came out of it ugly, soft, aged. She cut her hair short and it seems to her that wrinkles, now, gnaw at her face) (42). Motherhood alters the protagonist’s body forever, externally changing it by a “paleness that has become intense” (44). Her thin, pale face reveals the veins in her cheeks as they “méandrent” across her skin (44) and “elle est d’une maigeur” (she is so thin) (148). In the end, it is the “dissatisfaction” with motherhood and her career that are mirrored in her failing body as her marriage crumbles; a marriage for which she has already “fait le deuil” (mourned) (43). In Chanson douce, Myriam is consumed by self-doubt concerning her ability to be an adequate mother, even as she desires to be one. Louise, the nanny, continues to critique subtly her employer’s inadequacies as well as her qualities. The nanny’s mixed messages sent to Myriam shift constantly throughout the narrative. On the one hand, Louise points out the harm on her children Myriam’s daily absences inflict. And, on the other, the nanny lauds her for her accomplishments, emphatically noting the power Myriam has that she could never enjoy due to her compromised socioeconomic circumstances and lack of education. Nevertheless, the social worlds in which the two women have had to navigate—one which has led to privilege, the other to sacrifice—have led to only one, defining difference with respect to motherhood: “Louise sucite et comble les fantasmes de famille idéale que Myriam a honte de nourrir” (Louise encourages and fulfills the fantasies of the ideal family that Myriam is embarrassed to nourish) (38). Myriam’s perceived failure at being maternal reveals how the symbolic representations of motherhood in the heteronormative realms of capitalist society negatively impact women. As Kristeva tells us, these representations reduce women to mere “means of reproduction.”42 Nanny Louise has also failed in her own pursuit of motherhood. In the novel’s backstory, Stéphanie, Louise’s daughter, is left to her own devices, practically abandoned, when her mother takes up her role as a nanny for other children. Louise chooses financial stability over her own motherhood. Estranged from her mother, Stéphanie leaves at eighteen, never to be heard from again.

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The social tensions and conflicts in which Slimani’s protagonists find themselves in the era of the #Me2 movement seem burdensomely anachronist; predicaments that should be of a bygone era. Despite the evolution and predominance of feminist movements post-1968, the socioeconomic and cultural realities in which many women are bound still negatively impact them. As Kelly Oliver notes, “Woman, Nature, and femininity” are still bound in the patriarchal repression of Western culture.43 WOMEN’S SELF-DESTRUCTIVE BEHAVIOR Adèle’s sex addiction in Dans le jardin de l’ogre leads her to renounce motherhood in favor of self-harm—anorexia, cutting, self-mutilation, and other self-induced traumas—which eventually lead to her mental breakdown. Slimani’s female protagonists who resort to self-harming practices in contemporary settings reveal a long-standing feminist affirmation concerning the psychological ramifications of women’s lack of power in patriarchal society. post-May 1968 feminists (Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Shoshana Felman, and the later, Kelly Oliver, Toril Moi, and Susan Bordo) underscore that self-harm is the direct result of modern capitalist culture’s fabrication of a certain “physiological reality” for women. This reality constantly prescribes corporeal specifications for them, negatively impacting their psychology and well-being.44 Slimani’s novels focus on how women’s mental instability is connected to sociopolitical forces that impede their free agency in society, incur economic disenfranchisement, and facilitate male objectification of their bodies. Adèle’s anorexia and Louise’s insanity embody feminist scholar Shoshana Felman’s claims made in her well-known article, “Women and Madness: The Critical Phallacy” (1975). For Felman, like Kristeva and Irigaray, a generation of post-1968 feminists suggests that madness, or at the very least, psychological stress, often afflicts women because they have been precluded from their own “means of protest or self-affirmation.”45 Felman emphasizes that “from her initial family upbringing throughout her subsequent development, the social role assigned to the woman is that of serving an image, authoritative and central, of man: a woman is first and foremost a daughter/a mother/a wife.”46 In Dans le jardin de l’ogre, Adèle’s husband Richard’s obsession with her reduces the protagonist to the basic “functions of a woman.”47 By the end of the novel, Adèle has succumbed to metaphorical “annihilation” through her self-destructive behavior.48 She is consumed psychologically and physically by her sexual desires which ultimately cause her harm. Her encounters are increasingly sexually violent (rapes and sadomasochist practices), leading to her mental instability and the slow disintegration of her body through anorexia and self-mutilation (74). Her behavior underscores Kristeva’s

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thesis that “le dégoût alimentaire est peut-être la forme la plus élémentaire et la plus archaïque de l’abjection”49 (food disgust is perhaps the most elementary and archaic form of abjection). Adèle’s anorexia is also her only recourse to power over herself in a consumer culture that, as Susan Bordo underscores, drives “the ideology and imagery that mediate the construction of gender.”50 Adèle’s dissatisfaction with her domestic situation mirrors her corporeal decline, as she pushes herself even harder to seek out intensified sexual encounters where she is mutilated and often raped. Ironically, in these encounters of the purest form of debasement, she remarks that the corporeal and psychological risks are negligible because they “excite” her very “soul” (135). The physical excitement is most intense when she is able to “fake an epileptic orgasm, lascivious enjoyment, animal pleasure.” The eroticism that “clothes” her sexual experiences abolishes “all rules and all codes” (135). However, Adèle’s sexual obsessions leave her feeling even more alone and isolated from any sense of belonging to a community and to others: “elle rendait impossible les amitiés, les ambitions, les emplois du temps [avec les autres]” (she made friendships, ambitions and agendas impossible with others) (135). Adèle’s psychological disintegration is literal by the end of the novel, as she is erased from her own story, her whereabouts left unknown after she fails to return to Richard from her father’s funeral. Her husband is left standing in front of the house in the countryside to which he forced Adèle to move to “heal” her sexual obsessions and mold her once again into his expectations of what she should be: “une femme au foyer dans [un] manoir de province” (a housewife in a provincial manor) (210). In Chanson douce, nanny Louise is slowly consumed by psychological instability, feeling suffocated “enfermée dans l’appartement” (closed in the apartment) where “elle a parfois l’impression de devenir folle” (where sometimes she has the impression she is going crazy). She is often “en proie à la panique” (prey to panic) (122). Years of her husband’s verbal abuse and the compromised economic circumstances in which he leaves her when he dies, both contributed to her mental decline: “De Jacques, elle n’a hérité que . . . de factures à acquitter. La banque lui a donné un mois pour quitter la petite maison de Bobigny, qui allait être saisie” (from Jacques she inherited nothing . . . [but] bills to pay. The bank gave her a month to move from the little house in Bobigny which was to be repossessed) (110). In denial of her slow psychological demise, Louise relies on the maternal fantasy world she builds, making herself indispensable to Myriam and Paul Massé. “Mélancolie délirante” (melancholic delirium) is the term Louise finds appropriate for describing her mental state (171). This mental fragility leads to

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Une haine [qui] monte en elle. Une haine qui vient contrarier ses élans serviles et son optimisme enfantin. Une haine qui brouille tout. Elle est absorbée dans un rêve triste et confus. Hantée par l’impression d’avoir trop vu, trop entendu de l’intimité des autres, d’une intimité à laquelle elle n’a jamais eu droit. Elle n’a jamais eu de chambre à elle. (171) (Hatred welling up inside her. A hatred that pushes back on her servility and infantile optimism. A hate that blurs everything. Haunted by the impression of having seen too much, heard too much of the intimacy of others, and of an intimacy to which she will never have a right to. She has never had a room of her own).

Louise, like Myriam her employer, suffers from what she perceives others expect of her. Yet for Louise, the stakes of these expectations are higher due to her economic precarity. The difference between the two women lies in their access to the possibilities necessary to transform their status and gain agency, as well as the tools (education, economic means, and community support) to effectuate, or to bring to fruition, their subjecthood. In Kristevean terms, Louise cannot benefit from the possibilities that occur as a subjectin-process.51 She is stuck in her own abjection as it manifests from poverty and isolation in the banlieue. The nanny’s hatred of herself fuels her erratic behavior, cumulating in revenge on her employers for what she perceives as their airs and haughty ways that put her down: “Les jours d’abattement succèdent à l’euphorie. Le monde paraît se rétrécir, se rétracter, peser sur son corps d’un poids écrasant. Paul et Myriam ferment sur elle des portes qu’elle voudrait défoncer” (204) (Days of decline follow euphoria. The world seems to shrink, retract, weigh on her body with an overwhelming weight. Paul and Myriam close doors on her that she would like to break down). Felman remarks that “women’s oppression exists not only in the material, practical organization of economic, social, medical, and political structures, but also in the very foundations of logos, reasoning, and articulation.”52 Their marginalization outside the logos of sociopolitical power leaves women unable to articulate or affirm their place in the world. Fear of losing her place, her identity as nanny, which has happened to her in the past when children grow up and families no longer need her, Louise focuses on finding ways to encourage Myriam to have another child. “L’obsession de l’enfant tourne à vide dans sa tête . . . Il protégera la place de Louise en son royaume . . . Ce bébé, elle le désire avec une violence de fanatique, un aveuglement de possédée” (219) (The baby obsession swirls emptily in her head . . . It protects Louise’s place in her realm . . . She desires this baby with a fanatic’s violence, the blindness of one possessed). Her obsession to live motherhood vicariously through a possible new baby made by Myriam and Paul makes her increasingly unstable, pushing her to have dark thoughts, which lead to fantasies of death where “il

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faut que quelqu’un meure pour que nous soyons heureux” (230) (someone must die so that we can be happy). These dark thoughts become reality when Louise finally “picks up a knife” and kills both children (245). CONCLUSION Slimani’s heroines’ erasure, whether actual or metaphorical, in the final scenes of her novels, reminds us that Kristeva’s post-May 1968 feminine sujet en procès struggles with “a difficult balancing act” between subjectivity and objectification in the constructs of the Symbolic, the Law of patriarchal society.53 The author’s characters are destined to exist continuously as feminine subjects in suspension in the abject between the possibility of active agency as an individual and the reality of their powerless motherhood. These constraints bind Adèle, Louise, and Myriam “within the symbolic order” of the patriarchal status quo, thus keeping them from living “in the world.”54 Unfortunately, Leïla Slimani’s contemporary novels reveal that in the last fifty years women are still, as Julia Kristeva noted in her writing of the 1970s, subjected to their “functions as a woman” first before everything else.55 NOTES 1. Leïla Slimani. Chanson douce (Paris: Gallimard, 2016). At the time of the writing of this essay, the film version of Chanson Douce had just been released in France (November 26, 2019, directed by Lucie Borleteau, with Karin Viard in the role of nanny Louise, Leïla Bekhti as Myriam, and Antoine Reinartz as Paul). The story is based on the actual case of nanny Yoselyn Ortega (a Dominican immigrant) who stabbed to death the two children, Leo Krim, 2, and his sister Lucia, 6, in her charge in her employers’ upscale apartment in Manhattan on October 25, 2012. In 2018, Ortega was sentenced to life in prison. https​:/​/ww​​w​.nyt​​imes.​​com​/2​​018​/0​​5​/14/​​nyreg​​ ion​/m​​anhat​​tan​-n​​anny-​​sen​te​​nced-​​life.​​html (Last accessed 2/18/19). 2. Leïla Slimani. Dans le jardin de l’ogre (Paris: Gallimard, 2014). 3. Themes include the social, racial, ethnic, and religious tensions in the banlieues of Paris; women’s oppression in Maghrebi communities, poverty, and so on. See the works of first-, second-, and now third-generation Beur authors (such as first-generation Azzouz Begag, Mehdi Charef, and Leila Sebbar to the more recent Faïza Guène, among others). Slimani was appointed in 2017 by President Emmanuel Macron to be Francophone Affairs Minister. She was chosen, as one reporter suggests, primarily “because she ‘represents the open face of Francophonie [being French-speaking] to a multicultural world’, and because she was ‘part of a new generation that the president wants to highlight’.” https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​guard​​ian​.c​​om​/wo​​rld​ /2​​017​/n​​ov​/06​​/emma​​nuel-​​macro​​n​-app​​oints​​-auth​​or​-le​​ila​-s​​liman​​i​-to-​​champ​​ion​-f​​​rench​​ -lang​​uage-​​and​-c​​ultur​e (Last accessed 4/29/20).

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4. In fall 2019, in particular, these debates fueled massive protests across France by women calling for more government oversight and enforcement of laws protecting women from domestic violence and rape. Women activists have repeatedly pointed out that victims of domestic violence have had very little aide from police or recourse in court and are more often than not blamed for their victimization. 5. See: Taru Spiegel, “Feminism and “Égalité”: France Makes Gender Equality a Global Cause,”July 14, 2019) https​:/​/bl​​ogs​.l​​oc​.go​​v​/int​​ernat​​ional​​-coll​​ectio​​ns​/20​​19​/07​​ /fran​​ce​-ma​​kes​-g​​ender​​-equa​​lity-​​a​-glo​​bal​-c​​ause-​​femi​n​​ism​-a​​nd​-ga​​lit​-i​​n​-fra​​nce/ (Last accessed: 2/12/20) And: Laure Bereni, “Women’s Movements and Feminism: French Political Sociology Meets a Comparative Feminist Approach” (Chapter 21), in Robert Elgie, Emiliano Grossman, and Amy G. Mazur (eds), The Oxford Handbook of French Politics (Oxford University Press, 2016), 461–482. 6. See: https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=2HI​​NJ​-Bl​​​FGI​&t​​=271s​ (Last accessed 2/12/20). 7. Julia Kristeva, “Le Temps des femmes,” 34/44: Cahiers de recherche de sciences des textes et documents, no. 5 (winter 1979): 5–9, 5 8. See: Kelly Oliver, “Julia Kristeva’s Feminist Revolutions,” Hypatia, 8(3), 1993: 94–114.The group identity fostered by feminist movements of the 1970s denied the fact that their ideologies “can lead to dogmatism, violence, and the annihilation of personal differences . . . Kristeva argues that absorbing individuals into groups is the danger of ‘herd’ feminism . . . [thus] for Kristeva, women’s movements should demand attention to individual differences, particularly sexual differences. All individuals, says Kristeva, have their own unique sexuality” (98–99). 9. Kristeva, “Le Temps des femmes,” 5. 10. Kristeva, “Le Temps des femmes,” 5–6. 11. Kristeva, “Le Temps des femmes,” 8. 12. Kristeva, “Le Temps des femmes,” 8. Author’s italics. 13. Kelly Oliver, Ed. French Feminism Reader, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Press, 2000, 157. 14. Kelly Oliver notes: “Like many intellectuals after May 1968, Kristeva became disillusioned with practical politics. She maintains that [the political] like religion, is a search for one transcendent Meaning. Insofar as they fix an idea, even political interpretations with emancipatory goals can become totalitarian. This is Kristeva’s complaint against contemporary feminist movements” (French Feminism Reader, 157). 15. Kristeva, “Le Temps des femmes,” 8. 16. I am here referring to “late-capitalism” as contextualized by Fredric Jameson in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (New York: Verso, 1991).  17. As defined in Kristeva’s “Le Temps des femmes.” 18. Julia Kristeva. Nouvelle Revue de Psychoanalyse (Paris: Gallimard, 1979): 134–135. Cited in Toril Moi, Ed. The Kristeva Reader (New York: Blackwell, 1986), 11. 19. Julia Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l’horreur (Paris: Editions Seuil, 1980), 12–13.

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20. Michèle Barrett and Mary McIntosh. “Delphy: vers un féminisme matérialiste,” Nouvelles Questions Féministes, No. 4, Mon Dieu! C’est la révolution et je suis encore en peignoir ! (fall, 1982): 34–49, p. 35. 21. Lara Feigel “Adèle by Leïla Slimani review—sex-addiction thriller,” The Guardian (Feb 14, 2019) https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​guard​​ian​.c​​om​/bo​​oks​/2​​019​/f​​eb​/14​​/adel​​e​-lei​​l​ a​-sl​​imani​​-revi​​ew (Last accessed 4/28/20). 22. Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l’horreur, 14. 23. Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l’horreur, 14. 24. Kristeva, “Le Temps des femmes,” 16. 25. Here, I am referring to Martin Heidegger’s notion of “being-in-the-world” as outlined in his seminal, Being and Time first published in 1927 in German as Sein und Zeit and then translated into English in 1962 (New York: Harper-Collins, 1962). “Being-in-the-world” is described as “being with and Being-One’s-Self” (41). 26. Cite in Kelly Oliver, “Julia Kristeva’s Feminist Revolutions,” 102. 27. Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l’horreur, 12. 28. Kristeva, “Le Temps des femmes,” 8. 29. Kristeva, “Le Temps des femmes,” 8. 30. Kristeva, “Le Temps des femmes,” 8–10. 31. Christophe Guilluy, La France périphérique: Comment on a sacrifié les classes populaires (Paris: Flammarion, 2015). 32. Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l’horreur, 9. 33. Oliver, “Julia Kristeva’s Feminist Revolutions,” 103. 34. Oliver, “Julia Kristeva’s Feminist Revolutions,” 106. 35. Olivia Marks, “Author Leïla Slimani Invites Vogue Into Her Literary World,” Vogue, January 20, 2019 https​:/​/ww​​w​.vog​​ue​.co​​.uk​/a​​rticl​​e​/lei​​la​-sl​​ima​ni​​-inte​​rview​ (Last accessed, 4/28/20). 36. Marks, “Author Leïla Slimani Invites Vogue Into Her Literary World.” Slimani acknowledges in this article that her novel emerged in 2012 as she watched the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal unfold on television. She had just “left her job as a journalist for Jeune Afrique, and after an earlier stint as a ‘very, very, very bad’ actor.” At this moment, she was trying to conceptualize her first novel. She notes, “[I was] tired of female characters who were always lovers and good mothers.” So thought that a woman who was “an anti-hero, a liar . . . someone a little bit dirty” would be more interesting. https​:/​/ww​​w​.vog​​ue​.co​​.uk​/a​​rticl​​e​/lei​​la​-sl​​imani​​​-inte​​rview​. 37. Kristeva, “Le Temps des femmes,”10. 38. Kristeva, “Le Temps des femmes,”10. 39. Kristeva, Les nouvelles maladies de l’âme (Paris : Fayard, 2014), 212. 40. Marks, “Author Leïla Slimani Invites Vogue Into Her Literary World.” 41. Marks, “Author Leïla Slimani Invites Vogue Into Her Literary World.” 42. Kristeva, “Le Temps des femmes,” 8. 43. Kelly Oliver, Ed. French Feminism Reader (Lanham: Roman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000), 203. 44. Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight : Feminism, Western Culture and Body (Berkeley: UC Berkeley Press, 1993), 103. 45. Felman, “Women and Madness,” 2.

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46. Shoshana Felman, “Women and Madness: The Critical Phallacy,” Diacritics 5 No. 4 Winter 1975: 2–10, p. 2. The article analyzes the groundbreaking work of feminist-psychologist Phyllis Chesler and French feminist Luce Irigaray, both writing foundational feminists works in the early 1970s: Women and Madness (Phyllis Chesler, 1973) and Speculum de l’autre femme (Luce Irigaray, 1974). 47. Kristeva, “Le Temps des femmes,” 6–7. 48. Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l’horreur, 10. 49. Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l’horreur, 10. 50. Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 49. 51. As discussed by Kristeva in “Le Temps des femmes.” 52. Felman, “Women and Madness,” 4. 53. Toril Moi Ed., The Kristeva Reader (NY: Blackwell, 1986), 13–14. 54. Moi, The Kristeva Reader, 13–14. 55. Kristeva, “Le Temps des femmes.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY Barrett, Michèle and Mary McIntosh. “Delphy: vers un féminisme matérialiste,” Nouvelles Questions Féministes, No. 4, Mon Dieu! C’est la révolution et je suis encore en peignoir ! (fall, 1982): 34–49. Bereni, Laure. “Women’s Movements and Feminism: French Political Sociology Meets a Comparative Feminist Approach,” in Robert Elgie, Emiliano Grossman, and Amy G. Mazur (eds), The Oxford Handbook of French Politics, Oxford University Press, 2016, 461–482. Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight : Feminism, Western Culture and Body. Berkeley: UC Berkeley Press, 1993. Chesler, Phyllis. Women and Madness. New York: Avon Books, 1973 Feigel, Lara. “Adèle by Leïla Slimani review—sex-addiction thriller,” The Guardian (Feb 14, 2019) https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​guard​​ian​.c​​om​/bo​​oks​/2​​019​/f​​eb​/14​​/adel​​e​-lei​​l​a​-sl​​ imani​​-revi​​ew (Last accessed 4/29/20) Felman, Shoshana.“Women and Madness: The Critical Phallacy,” Diacritics 5 No. 4 Winter 1975: 2–10. Guilluy, Christophe. La France périphérique: Comment on a sacrifié les classes populaires. Paris: Flammarion, 2015. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. New York: Harper-Collins, 1962. Irigaray, Luce. Speculum de l’autre femme. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1974. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. New York: Verso, 1991. Kristeva, Julia. Les nouvelles maladies de l’âme. Paris: Fayard, 2014. Pouvoirs de l’horreur. Paris: Editions Seuil, 1980. Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse. Paris: Gallimard, 1979. “Le Temps des femmes,” 34/44: Cahiers de recherche de sciences des textes et documents, no. 5 (winter 1979): 5–19.

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Marks, Olivia. “Author Leïla Slimani Invites Vogue Into Her Literary World”, Vogue, January 20, 2019 https​:/​/ww​​w​.vog​​ue​.co​​.uk​/a​​rticl​​e​/lei​​la​-sl​​ima​ni​​-inte​​rview​ (Last accessed 4/29/20) Moi, Toril ed. The Kristeva Reader. NY: Blackwell, 1986. Oliver, Kelly Ed. French Feminism Reader, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Press, 2000. “Julia Kristeva’s Feminist Revolutions,” Hypatia, 8 (3), Summer 1993: 94–114. Slimani, Leïla. 2016. Chanson douce. Paris: Gallimard. 2014. Dans le jardin de l’ogre. Paris: Gallimard. Spiegel, Taru. “Feminism and “Égalité”: France Makes Gender Equality a Global Cause” July 14, 2019. https​:/​/bl​​ogs​.l​​oc​.go​​v​/int​​ernat​​ional​​-coll​​ectio​​ns​/20​​19​/07​​/ fran​​ce​-ma​​kes​-g​​ender​​-equa​​lity-​​a​-glo​​bal​-c​​ause-​​femi​n​​ism​-a​​nd​-ga​​lit​-i​​n​-fra​​nce/ (Last accessed: 2/12/20) Willsher, Kim. “Macron appoints author Leïla Slimani to champion French language.” The Guardian (Nov. 6, 2017) https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​guard​​ian​.c​​om​/wo​​rld​/2​​017​/ n​​ov​/06​​/emma​​nuel-​​macro​​n​-app​​oints​​-auth​​or​-le​​ila​-s​​liman​​i​-to-​​champ​​ion​-f​​​rench​​-lang​​ uage-​​and​-c​​ultur​e (Last accessed: 4/29/20).

Chapter 8

Aftereffects of May 1968 on Men and Women According to Michel Houellebecq Alexis L. Chauchois1 and Gilles Glacet2

The consequences of the May 1968 revolution on French society are at the heart of Michel Houellebecq’s literary endeavor. Bruno Viard, in his essay aptly titled Houellebecq au laser. La faute à Mai 68, showed that the novelist is a worthy disciple of Balzac, “convaincu que le roman est investi de la passionnante responsabilité aristotélicienne de refléter mimétiquement les problèmes de la société” (92). These problems, Houellebecq links them directly to this pivotal date which marks a profound change in customs and a turning point in human relations, in particular the erotic-sentimental dynamic maintained by men and women, as well as the relation of power which binds each other. Houellebecq’s work bears a resemblance to a meticulous study of his time, and takes up the famous Balzacian precept: “Indiquer les désastres produits par les changements de mœurs est la seule mission des livres” (Balzac 512). Houellebecq takes an uncompromising view of society and delivers a diagnosis that is sometimes difficult to hear or accept. This work is structured in two parts which correspond to two different texts, Les Particules élémentaires and Soumission. The choice of these two novels published seventeen years apart, 1998 for one and 2015 for the other, is justified by a study which, to show the reaction of the individual to the major societal changes that have occurred starting in 1968, must be long term. The main drive of change in this case is the apparent liberation of women and the acquisition of their independence. Apparent because, as this reading will reveal, men may have from the start distorted the spirit of 1968 and diverted a sexual liberation which has no other motive than to make women more available to their desires. On the second part, it will be men’s sole purpose to try and reverse a situation that eludes them and recuperate the power lost over women. 157

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Les Particules élémentaires alone presents the consequences of the changes in customs over four generations around the period of May 1968. This look that the author has on society will allow us to show that despite appearances, men have obtained what that they have coveted. They returned the women’s liberation for their own profit and put women’s sexual freedom at men’s service. Then out of Houellebecq’s imagination comes Soumission, as a response or at least a reaction to Les Particules élémentaires. This anticipatory novel sets out to describe a postmodern society in which men are no longer satisfied in their relationship with women. Even if men literally enjoy the sexual liberation, passing from one partner to another, men seem to have lost control over women. Men become nostalgic of a type of reassuring but lost happiness that the patriarchal society before 1968 conceded to them. Houellebecq will show, from the collapse of the Judeo-Christian religion and the values that accompanied it from 1968, how men manage to put women under their thumb through religion, without shedding the benefits of sexual liberation. It is then a hegemony that is set up, and it is all the stake of this work to show the opportunism of men who adapt to the changes of their time to reaffirm their superiority in the battle of the sexes. WOMEN VICTIMS OF THE SEXUAL LIBERATION If it is customary to underline a suffering masculinity in the work of Michel Houellebecq (Viennot), in Les particules élémentaires, the author also paints a disillusioned and sad portrait of women after 1968. Annabelle and Christiane, the two main female characters in the novel live a tragic fate. The sexual freedom newly acquired by the generation which precedes them seems to particularly deprive them of the possibility of a true romantic relationship, nonetheless desired. On the other hand, the feminine being idealized by the narrator, the loving and devoted grandmother, represents the archetype of the maternal conditioning of patriarchal society that the women of 1968 have rightly fought against. The next generation of women appears victim of a new form of conditioning which keeps them at the service of men. Houellebecq thus chooses to stage women forever victims of what is also presented as their greatest strength, their feelings. First exploited for a nourishing purpose for and by a masculine labor society which needs the attentive care of a mother, their love is again diverted and physically exploited for the enjoyment of the body in a society which has become consumer and which has now the time to live its pleasures. Houellebecq wants to expose an established reality. His main characters are thus all split and, rather than an individual situation, seem to offer a demonstration of universal value. There are therefore two grandmothers, two

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male characters, Michel and Bruno, and two women after 1968, Christiane and Annabelle, who revolve around Jeanine, the absent and unique mother. The comparison between the two grandmothers and the two young women, Christiane and Annabelle, articulated by the point of view of the two male characters, Bruno and Michel, reveals the feminine condition. Michel Houellebecq, could he have used this comparison to highlight women’s liberation who would have ultimately only aimed to redirect the enslavement of women to men? Until the First World War, France responded to a patriarchal model officially established by the Napoleonic Civil Code of 1804. Women remain minors all their lives, and only leave the authority of the father to submit to that of the husband. Female emancipation then evolves slowly. Before 1914, women traditionally stayed at home, or worked in the fields for the poorest. But the world conflict will upset the establishment of this society by the call to support the war effort which sends women to work in the factories for the manufacturing of weapons and ammunitions while men are at the front. So even if the postwar period represents for many of these women a return to normalcy and traditional values, some nonetheless reach an unprecedented level of responsibility: 700,000 war widows become head of the family at the end of the conflict. The narrator describes the life of Michel’s grandmother whose adolescence corresponds to the First World War and who finds herself widowed in 1944 when her husband Lucien dies during an Allied bombing: “Cette femme avait eu une enfance atroce, avec les travaux de la ferme dès l’âge de sept ans, au milieu de semi-brutes alcooliques. Son adolescence avait été trop brève pour qu’elle en garde un réel souvenir” (Particules 90). As agreed with what society expected of women at the time, she did not shirk her responsibilities and performed family tasks with devotion and dignity without worrying about her own fate: “Après la mort de son mari elle avait travaillé en usine tout en élevant ses quatre enfants; en plein hiver, elle avait été chercher de l’eau dans la cour pour la toilette de la famille” (Particules 90). Essentially, and in accordance with the family model in force, women at that time will pass on their way of life to the next generation. From the Second World War to the end of the sixties, a so-called golden age of marriage prevailed. As France Prioux points out: “Le célibat [est] rare et même si les divorces [sont] déjà fréquents . . . ils [sont] très souvent suivis d’un remariage. Les couples se [marient] pour avoir des enfants ou lorsqu’un enfant a été conçu, plus ou moins volontairement comme en témoignent la proportion croissante de conceptions prénuptiales observées alors” (Prioux 38). Jeanine, mother of Bruno and Michel, is thus completely in the spirit of the times, and she complies with it without asking any questions: “Les deux époux formaient alors ce qu’on devait appeler par la suite un ‘couple

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moderne’, et c’est plutôt par inadvertance que Janine tomba enceinte de son mari. Elle décida cependant de garder l’enfant; la maternité, pensait-elle, était une de ces expériences qu’une femme doit vivre” (Particules 27–28). She then perpetuates without realizing the traditional family model: “voici le monde qu’ils souhaitaient léguer à leurs enfants. La femme reste à la maison et tient son ménage” (Particules 49). In this institutional family model, which structures the domination of men, women are dedicated to a life turned toward the interior of their home and at the service of their family and children. They are conditioned on an existence for others and in the abandonment of their person. Yet with the sexual revolution, it was ultimately the mother, Janine, who abandoned her two children, Bruno and Michel, to live her life. But it is then quite naturally Bruno’s maternal grandmother on one hand, and Michel’s paternal grandmother (Bruno’s half-brother) on the other hand, who take care of the education of the two children then aged two, in 1958 for Bruno and in 1960 for Michel. Thus, Michel’s grandmother, “à plus de soixante ans, depuis peu en retraite . . . avait accepté de s’occuper à nouveau d’un enfant jeune—le fils de son fils” (Particules 91). This is the one the narrator praises: a woman completely devoted to the family, and to men in particular since it is a question of the son and the grandson. Yet, this nostalgic description of a past subjugated state of the female condition exposes a simply reactionary discourse: Des êtres humains qui travaillaient toute leur vie . . . uniquement par dévouement et par amour ; qui donnaient littéralement leur vie aux autres dans un esprit de dévouement et d’amour; qui n’avaient cependant nullement l’impression de se sacrifier; qui n’envisageaient en réalité d’autre manière de vivre que de donner leur vie aux autres dans un esprit de dévouement et d’amour. En pratique, ces êtres humains étaient généralement des femmes. (Particules 91)3

But the author also defends himself from being reactionary since he says he is “conservateur de ce qui fonctionne tant bien que mal plutôt que réactionnaire” (Houellebecq et Lévy 118–119). In Les Particules élémentaires, the perversity of this discourse comes from the fact that, according to the narrator, women derive their superiority and their greatness from this gift of self which men seem less capable of. This tremendous declaration of love for women, in everything they have of maternal—the grandmother is the woman whose maternal propensity prevails over sexual propensity—in fact conceals adherence to a form of enslavement that has endured for centuries in our society. This enslavement is marked and underlined in this passage by the repetition on three occasions of the associated terms “dévouement” and “amour,” which articulates what is expected of women. The proximity of these words then presents love as the sacrifice of self for the other, and

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here of women—the grandmother—for men. Contrary to what he says about women, the feeling that the narrator has for her is not free. He loves women for what they can bring to him, when they are at his service, and that they sacrifice themselves to him without being aware of it, as women have been conditioned for centuries. And Bruno Viard’s definition of love according to Houellebecq as exalted, “c’est-à-dire revendiqué avec tellement de force qu’il ne laisse de place à aucune revendication de l’ego” (Viard 330) applies again to this particular case. This self-giving praised by the narrator, in reality conceals a societal and cultural indoctrination. The trace of this dynamic within our societies, inherited from the past, is found explicitly in literature. Victor Hugo thus pays tribute to the role of the doll, for example, a privileged instrument for the construction of the feminine. After having discussed at length Cosette’s passion for the doll of her dreams, Hugo indeed embarks a reflection on motherhood in this scene where Jean Valjean comes to pick up the little girl from les Thénardier. La poupée est un des plus impérieux besoins et en même temps un des plus charmants instincts de l’enfance féminine. Soigner, vêtir, parer, habiller, déshabiller, rhabiller, enseigner, un peu gronder, bercer, dorloter, endormir, se figurer que quelque chose est quelqu’un, tout l’avenir de la femme est là. Tout en rêvant et tout en jasant, tout en faisant de petits trousseaux et de petites layettes [. . .] l’enfant devient jeune fille, la jeune fille devient grande fille, la grande fille devient femme. Le premier enfant continue la dernière poupée. (Hugo 8712)

Victor Hugo presents here as a “besoin” and an “instinct” which is in fact an intentional conditioning. The doll is put in the hands of the little girl and this gesture is perpetuated to such an extent that it passes for natural. Laurence Mall in Jouer à la poupée chez Rousseau, Michelet et Beauvoir similarly shows the thought of Rousseau (Mall). Because there is indeed in Emile this same discourse of a necessary subjugation of women by men: “justifiez toujours les soins que vous imposez aux jeunes filles, mais imposez-leur-en toujours [. . .] Il faut les exercer d’abord à la contrainte, afin qu’elle ne leur coûte jamais rien ; à dompter toutes leurs fantaisies, pour les soumettre aux volontés d’autrui” (Rousseau 7815). Rousseau also shows that the little girl is immediately directed toward a restrictive goal, domesticity: “les filles [. . .] doivent être gênées de bonne heure. Ce malheur, si c’en est un pour elles, est inséparable de leur sexe [. . .] Elles seront toute leur vie asservies à la gêne la plus continuelle et la plus sévère, qui est celle des bienséances” (Rousseau 7814). While the boy, Emile, is raised to become an accomplished and fulfilled man, the little girl is trained in a functional education in the service of men because “la dépendance étant un état naturel aux femmes, les filles se

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sentent faites pour obéir” (Rousseau 7829). The betrayal of this discourse is that Rousseau presents this fact as if it were a feminine choice. In this context, women would find their fulfillment only in the service of men. Their task is therefore domestic, to please their husband and to become a mother. It is a simple state of alienation without saying so openly, but which men and literature, from Rousseau to Houellebecq via Hugo, find normal and justify by an inability of women to be independent: “elle ne peut rien faire pour ellemême,” “elle n’est rien encore” (Rousseau 7773). So, what about Houellebecq’s characters because the sexual revolution officially took place in the meantime? France has seen a liberation of morals and the emancipation of women. Christiane and Annabelle are both children of this period. Annabelle was ten in 1968 while Christiane was eight. Annabelle, who loves Michel, and Christiane, who loves Bruno, want to be free and independent women. After all, two generations separate them from the two grandmothers. Born in 1958, Annabelle comes from a stable family, before the revolution of customs: “Née dans une famille heureuse (en vingt-cinq ans de mariage ses parents n’avaient eu aucune dispute sérieuse), Annabelle savait que son destin serait le même” (Particules 49). The values she received on the life as a couple are similar to those of Michel’s who “avait des idées modérées sur le bonheur”: “Les idées qu’il pouvait avoir, il les tenait de sa grand-mère, qui les avait directement transmises à ses enfants” (Particules 48). It is a simple, straightforward model, which leaves little room for questioning: “ [Michel] n’y avait jamais réellement songé” (Particules 48). Annabelle, having her heart set on Michel, therefore foresees her future existence in a response to the hope instilled in her of a sentimental, stable and egalitarian love: “quelque part dans le monde, il y avait un garçon qu’elle ne connaissait pas, qui ne la connaissait pas davantage, mais avec qui elle ferait sa vie. Elle essaierait de le rendre heureux, et il essaierait, lui aussi, de la rendre heureuse” (Particules 49–50). This idealized love is imbued with the stability of the previous generation but is part of a profound change in the mores of society and in fact will come up against another reading of sexual liberation by men. As a teenager, Annabelle was heavily influenced by her readings: “elle venait de lire dans Stéphanie un dossier sur l’amitié garçon-fille” (Particules 75). These articles circumvent behavior and define a kind of conduct, a standard to be followed. After reading this magazine, Annabelle will let herself be “embrasser par un garçon dans une discothèque” (Particules 75). Subsequently, she still lives to the rhythm of external influences: “elle avait vécu ; elle avait pris de la coke, participé à des partouzes, dormi dans des hôtels de luxe” (Particules 237). She is both victim of her desires and of her time: “tout le monde vivait comme ça autour de moi, j’évoluais dans un

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milieu libéré” (Particules 233). Annabelle falls victim of a new conditioning specific to her time, but in a similar way to previous generations. She therefore gives herself, although she “n’éprouvai(t) aucun plaisir à provoquer ni à séduire” (Particules 233). The sexual liberation made women even more vulnerable in a masculine universe and faced with men initially motivated by their desire: “je me donnais trop facilement, les hommes me laissaient tomber dès qu’ils étaient arrivés à leurs fins, et j’en souffrais” (Particules 233). If men and women are found in the desire that they have for each other, they are on the other hand in discrepancy as to what motivates this desire: “les hommes ne font pas l’amour parce qu’ils sont amoureux, mais parce qu’ils sont excités” (Particules 233). Here is all the difference between women who remain sentimental and attached to a value system put in place to subordinate them, and men guided by their urges in a society which they have made evolve in order to legitimize these same urges, and which, according to Annabelle, considers women “comme du bétail interchangeable” (Particules 233). Christiane understood this sexual need in men and the need to maintain their desire. She is like the grandmothers, devoted, but her generosity is expressed sexually: “J’étais très amoureuse de mon mari. Je caressais, je léchais son sexe avec vénération; j’aimais le sentir en moi” (Particules 142). To the point that the sex of her husband, whom she literally worships, has even taken on a symbolic and religious dimension: “J’étais fière de provoquer ses érections, j’avais une photo de son sexe dressé, que je conservais tout le temps dans mon portefeuille; pour moi c’était comme une image pieuse, lui donner du plaisir était ma plus grande joie” (Particules 142). And the affirmation is certainly possible following the sexual liberation which gave an official place to sexuality outside procreation and against the precepts of the Church. Symbolically, this new sexuality somehow replaces religion, and Christiane, by her name but also by her sacrifice to men, takes on a Christian figure. But this man in particular leaves her, however, because the gift of the body and the dedication to his pleasure are not enough when the body is not eternal: “Finalement, il m’a quittée pour une plus jeune” (Particules 142). The aging body deprives women of their sexual dimension in the eyes of men. Christiane no longer represents an object of male desire, and she quickly realizes that Bruno, despite his friendly and harmless appearance, is ultimately like her previous husband: “J’ai bien vu tout à l’heure que tu n’étais pas vraiment attiré par ma chatte; c’est déjà un peu la chatte d’une vieille femme . . . À vingt ans, j’avais une très belle vulve” (Particules 142). In Bruno’s mind, the couple only exists in its sexual dimension. And his previous marriage was already only the expression of his sexual desire: “J’ai rencontré Anne en 1981 . . . Elle n’était pas tellement belle, mais j’en avais

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marre de me branler. Ce qui était bien, quand même, c’est qu’elle avait de gros seins. J’ai toujours aimé les gros seins . . .” (Particules 170). Bruno’s desire is totally provoked and maintained by the figure of his wife since at the end of the desire coincides the end of the relationship: “Plus tard ses seins sont tombés, et notre mariage s’est cassé la gueule lui aussi” (Particules 170). Men thus interpret sexual liberation in order to use women, who has become a sexual object, as a consumer product. Once the expiration date has passed, they are discarded. Since the sexual liberation, the couple is no longer based mainly on a household economy but perceived in its sexual and dimension of the flesh. Sexuality takes a more important role and is established as a privileged moment having a playful function, allowing to bring together the two partners, but also to separate them. However, women ultimately seem to fall victims of this liberation. Men indeed perceived the sexual liberation like a free buffet of women to their male desire: “La promesse mon corps m’appartient s’est transformée en mon corps est disponible” (Hargot), available to satisfy a male desire that is no longer hampered by societal norms. In fact, advances in female sexual freedom go in this direction, and rather liberate men. Contraception, abortion, and reproductive control in general are women’s responsibilities. This is the case with Annabelle who will experience abortion on several occasions. Houellebecq’s demonstration illustrates a relentless masculine logic to the detriment of women, despite the sexual revolution. As long as women serve and are useful to men, they are esteemed, otherwise they are not useful and are rejected. The grandmother is loved because she is devoted, and as in her case the sexual question does not arise, she does not become obsolete in her service. After the sexual revolution, the service of young women is part of not only devotion but also sexuality. And when women become expired, they are eliminated. Men are waiting for a dedication which, if it is no longer present or even no longer possible—because women are aging or because they are sick— makes the woman obsolete. It is an untenable position for women after 1968. Houellebecq, in a way, caricatures the sexual revolution, as if before it, there was no sexuality. It is the grandmother’s period that symbolizes a woman without sexuality, the one before the revolution. Whereas women after 1968 take on this almost exclusively sexual dimension. The author paints a tender yet dramatic portrait of these devoted women, in the service of men, and victims of society. The transition between these two generations is ensured by Jeanine, Michel, and Bruno’s mother, who has no devotion, neither maternal nor sexual, and whose behavior ultimately comes close to that of men. And it is this woman on whom Houellebecq casts a stigma and who by the same becomes responsible for this situation and this chaos.

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ISLAM: AN OPPORTUNISTIC RESPONSE TO HOUELLEBECQ’S INSOLUBLE EQUATION OF WOMEN In Les particules élémentaires, Houellebecq highlighted that sexual freedom has turned against women. A misunderstanding, perhaps intentional, has indeed entered the very meaning of the word freedom. Men interpreted it by women placed at their disposal, freely. When women naturally saw in it the freedom to enjoy their sexuality as they wished. But this freedom of women causes upheaval for a male who was built on the idea of a woman at his service. In 2015, Soumission presents a male hero à la Houellebecq in line with those of Les Particules élémentaires. This traditional hero for the author is a depressed, frustrated man, somehow marginalized by society. He is unhappy because women of postmodern society keep slipping away from him. His angst comes into being at the heart of a paradox: he wants liberated women, that is to say sexually liberated to better be able to consume them, but at the same time, he does not support the freedom of these women; their social independence. This Houellebecq type of hero wants liberated women, but in the service of a single man, for his only pleasure. He must regain control over women who escape from his grasp and put them back under his dependence. His reactionary vision made him regret the society before the May 1968 revolution, a patriarchal society which, helped by the dogmas of religion, kept women under the thumb of men. Since the overwhelmed Catholic religion can do nothing more, Islam, in the Western vision that the narrator has of it, will respond to this need. In his mind, the Muslim women are liberated in their sensuality within the domestic sphere. Paradoxically, they are also always enclosed and hidden in public by the veil or the burqa that religion imposes on them. In the French society in times of crisis presented by this novel which stages the seizure of political power by a Muslim party, it is a question of showing that François, reactionary hero, converts to Islam out of pure opportunism and with the sole intention to restore a hierarchy lost to women since 1968. Soumission is an anticipatory novel in which François, a character-narrator, is a professor of literature at the Sorbonne-Paris III and, not by chance, a specialist in Huysmans. When the novel begins in 2022, François is fortyfour years old and finds himself at a turning point in his life. His life is then divided between literature and women. In the new society in effect, François is looking for his place, but he is also looking for what represents to him the ideal woman. In the course of his reflections, a walk in a shopping mall (Soumission 97–99), symbolic place of the consumer society, exposes in his eyes the essential and revealing difference between Western women and Islamic women:

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Vêtues pendant la journée d’impénétrables burqas noires, les riches Saoudiennes se transformaient le soir en oiseaux de paradis, se paraient de guêpières, de soutiens-gorge ajourés, de strings ornés de dentelles multicolores et de pierreries; exactement l’inverse des Occidentales, classe et sexy pendant la journée parce que leur statut social était en jeu, qui s’affaissaient le soir en rentrant chez elles, abdiquant avec épuisement toute perspective de séduction, revêtant des tenues décontractées et informes. (Soumission 98)

From this simple observation of dress code, François builds his reasoning and draws conclusions. Since the revolution in the West, women have become more active and now devote themselves to their careers, while in the past they were often stay-at-home mothers and took care of their families. Western women have become seductress outside the home to better establish or enforce their social status. However, they take pleasure, still according to François, in comfort and a form of carelessness at home. Conversely, Islamic women, who hide in society, preventing any exposure of their person and by the same any attempt of seduction, are revealed once inside the home, and play their charms for their only husband. To better substantiate his demonstration, the narrator takes the example of Annelise who, according to him, was engaged “dans une vie familiale normale” (Soumission 99). He describes her tidied and well-regulated life: “Le matin probablement elle se faisait un brushing puis elle s’habillait avec soin, conformément à son statut professionnel [. . .] puis elle rentrait vers vingt et une heures, épuisée [. . .] elle s’effondrait, passait un sweat-shirt et un bas de jogging, c’est ainsi qu’elle se présentait devant son seigneur et maître” (Soumission 100). The simple expression seigneur et maître shows with irony the relational abyss between men and women who are never on an equal footing. But the main thing here is that François makes Annelise the stereotype of the modern woman and generalizes the demonstration to all Western women. The advent of the Islamic party in France led to a reaction directly opposite to that of May 1968 and re-enslaved women. They are no longer a source of attraction for men because they evade their gaze and their imagination. As a result, women are no longer available sensually or sexually in society. From this idea is born the explicit questioning of sexual liberation as the supreme temptress of a desire which tortures men when they do not have free access to them. They therefore remain subject to frustration, a traditional characteristic of the male character of Houellebecq. For François, everything comes down to his apprehension of the female gender. He violently condemns women after May 1968, the very ones he had first wanted because of their emancipation. The narrator seems to express the regret of women he would like to be seductresses, liberated but only in their domestic roles, inside the home. He does not want these

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women who put their energy at the service of their social roles and for their own development. François also nostalgically evokes the end of the nineteenth century and the patriarchal society which saw, whichever the reason, couples last over time. He compares these couples to that specific to his generation, suitable for the consumer society that surrounds him, where the partners replace each other in a perpetual exchange. This melancholy thought leads the narrator in the rereading of Huysmans’ En ménage, a work to which he then refers to better describe the paragon of the ideal woman: “La femme qu’avait recherchée Huysmans toute sa vie, il l’avait déjà décrite [. . .] dans Marthe, son premier roman [. . .] en 1876. Femme pot-au-feu la plupart du temps, elle devait rester capable de se transformer en fille, à heures fixes” (Soumission 104). This definition despises women and reduces them to two primary functions, to please men sexually and at home. These two simple lines paint a portrait of an ideal partner for the narrator but reduce women to the ancient formula which combines the mother and the whore. To find this companion again of idealized days of yore, that is to say before the revolution of 1968, François thinks of religion which then facilitated this state of submission of women. Could Western Christianity, mangled by 1968, resuscitate and allow the return of these values before the revolution? The article written by Rediger, president of the new Islamized Sorbonne, quickly cuts short any speculation in this direction: À force de minauderies, de chatteries et de pelotage honteux des progressistes, l’Église catholique était devenue incapable de s’opposer à la décadence des mœurs. De rejeter nettement, vigoureusement, le mariage homosexuel, le droit à l’avortement et le travail des femmes. Il fallait se rendre à l’évidence : parvenue à un degré de décomposition répugnant, l’Europe occidentale n’était plus en état de se sauver elle-même. (Soumission 291)

The revolution of 1968 brought about a defection of the individual with religion and sounded the death knell for Catholicism in France. A return to Christianity has become impossible: “Et ce combat nécessaire pour l’instauration d’une nouvelle phase organique de civilisation ne pouvait plus, aujourd’hui, être mené au nom du christianisme” (Soumission 291). But this statement also shows that the societal values that emerged from May 1968 are condemned in the short term facing the craze for worship traditions and the reviving religious fervor. So, what Christianity or even the more traditional values of society could not achieve, another religion, Islam, will do it for them. In the novel, the reforms are underway and clearly go in the direction of a return to a patriarchal society with all the consequences it entails for the

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status of women: “Toutes ces réformes visaient à “redonner toute sa place, toute sa dignité à la famille, cellule de base de notre société,” avaient déclaré le nouveau président de la république” (Soumission 209). These decisions are in line with François’ reactionary thoughts. Because if the family is returned to the center, it is only to better bring the woman back under the yoke of the man, with in particular for François, the intention to satisfy his fantasies, and his sexual needs for domination and control. The most conservative circles in society can easily be found in the ideas advocated by the Muslim Brotherhood party: “l’ensemble de l’article était un énorme appel du pied à ses anciens camarades traditionalistes et identitaires . . . ils étaient, sur l’essentiel, en parfait accord avec les musulmans. Sur le rejet de l’athéisme et de l’humanisme, sur la nécessaire soumission de la femme, sur le retour au patriarcat : leur combat, à tous points de vue, était exactement le même” (Soumission 290). The return to traditional values advocated by the Muslim Brotherhood seems to be timely and comfort François in his ideas on patriarchy and the place of women in society. Two singular scenes feed François’ reflections. Symbolically, one of these scenes takes place in the public sphere and the other in the private sphere. They thus provide a global overview of societal changes. The first takes place on a train. A fifty-year-old Arab businessman travels with two teenage girls whom François immediately chooses to identify as his wives, when it would have been reasonable, and even more logical, to regard them as his daughters. These two teenage girls seem quite carefree and happy, not at all concerned with their status or their appearance vis-à-vis society. They offer the image of happiness. But their clothes hide their bodies and faces from foreign eyes and therefore from male eyes. As teenagers, they naturally present themselves as infantile and docile women. The sight of these two young girls leaves François pensive and he analyzes the situation according to the judgment he preestablished: En régime islamique, les femmes [. . .] avaient au fond la possibilité de rester des enfants pratiquement toute leur vie. Peu après être sorties de l’enfance elles devenaient elles-mêmes mères, et replongeaient dans l’univers enfantin. [. . .] [Elles troquaient] les jeux enfantins pour des jeux sexuels—ce qui revenait au fond à peu près à la même chose. Évidemment elles perdaient l’autonomie, mais fuck autonomy. (Soumission 239)

Here is the reflection of Victor Hugo on the role of the doll and play in female conditioning. And this reasoning on the life of the Muslim woman, makes her, for the duration of her life, a being dependent on the man, the father first, then the husband. She is kept in a woman-child state. Completely under the tutelage of man, she is detached from all responsibilities other than those

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inherent in the maintenance of the home. External concerns are the responsibility of the man, while the role of the woman is to take care of his wellbeing: “Au moins aurait-il eu la compensation de deux épouses gracieuses et charmantes, pour le distraire de ses soucis d’homme d’affaires épuisé” (Soumission 239). The portrait of these women made by François is more in line with that of women before 1968 in France. The second scene, which takes place in the private domain, occurs when François visits Rediger. François discovers his way of life, and the changes that Islamized society has brought internally. Rediger, due to his conversion to Islam, now owns two wives. The first, Malika, is about forty years old, but the second, Aïcha, much younger, is only fifteen years old. Each woman is assigned a specific function that leaves François dreamy: “une épouse de quarante ans pour la cuisine, une de quinze ans pour d’autres choses . . . sans doute avait-il une ou deux épouses d’âge intermédiaire, mais je me voyais mal lui poser la question” (Soumission 275). While François was desperately looking for a perfect Huysmans-style woman, that is to say, both sexual and “pot-au-feu,” the solution came through the Muslim tradition. Since this woman, who represents his ideal, does not exist or no longer from his point of view since the sexual revolution, polygamy will allow that this perfect wife be realized for him. A woman multiplied into several, where each plays a specific, erotic, or nurturing role. At the end of his proselytizing speech, Rediger explains to François that the house he lives in had illustrious occupants, including the famous writer and editor Jean Paulhan, but especially Dominique Aury4 (Réage), the author of Histoire d’O (Soumission 273). In connection with this novel, Rediger announces for the first time in the story: “C’est la soumission” (Soumission 274). This remark is not trivial because the story is that of a free and independent young woman, taken by her lover René to a castle where women are “tamed.” She becomes a slave there voluntarily. However, she suffers and basically knows little pleasure except to belong to someone. Rediger then develops this “idée renversante et simple, jamais exprimée auparavant avec cette force, que le sommet du bonheur humain réside dans la soumission la plus absolue” (Soumission 274). It should now be clarified that, contrary to popular belief, submission in Houellebecq’s novel only applies to the relationship between woman and man. The eponymous novel has often been perceived as an allusion to religion. This misunderstanding may have arisen, and in any case been fueled by the translation of the word Islam, which can mean submission. But here it is not strictly speaking about religion. Religion is only a pretext for François to achieve his ends. If Rediger tries to link the two: “il y a pour moi un rapport entre l’absolue soumission de la femme à l’homme, telle que la décrit Histoire d’O, et la soumission de l’homme à Dieu, telle que l’envisage l’islam” (Soumission 274),

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this is a shortcut that François will not take. Because François, as his questions to Rediger prove, is only interested in the benefits that he can draw from religion, that is to say, for him, access to women. Moreover, after the meeting, to a François who still hesitates to convert, Rediger confides the book he has written, Dix questions sur l’islam. But the book does not convince him, he does not budge from his own convictions. He shows no interest in the religious or political question and is only interested in the particular point of polygamy. He pursues his reflections, totally focused on the place that women hold in his perception of the Islamic religion. Completely instrumentalized, religion only serves his sole purpose, the reconquest of women. In this context, women also find themselves instrumentalized and reconditioned to satisfy men: je n’avais nullement cherché alors à dissimuler l’impression que me causaient les avantages physiques d’Aïcha, ni les petits pâtés chauds de Malika. Les femmes musulmanes étaient dévouées et soumises, je pouvais compter là-dessus, elles étaient élevées dans ce sens, et pour donner du plaisir au fond cela suffit; quant à la cuisine je m’en foutais un peu, j’étais moins délicat que Huysmans sur ce chapitre, mais de toute façon elles recevaient une éducation appropriée, il devait être bien rare qu’on ne parvienne pas à en faire des ménagères au moins potables. (Soumission 312)

All that matters to François is his own pleasure. Finally, it is the exotic idea and the Western vision of the harem that comes to his mind, a true paradise for him, populated by “étudiantes—jolies, voilées, timides” (Soumission 315). This conception reflects the thought of Edward Said on the subject, to whom orientalism takes the form of a “praxis of the same sort, albeit in different territories, as male gender dominance, or patriarchy, in metropolitan societies: the Orient was routinely described as feminine, its riches as fertile, its main symbols the sensual woman, the harem, and the despotic—but curiously attractive—ruler” (103). From this perspective, the harem is perceived according to the unique angle of pleasure it gives to men and not as the prison it represents for women. François then gives free rein to his self-centered fantasy: “chacune de ces filles, aussi jolie soit-elle, se sentirait heureuse et fière d’être choisie par moi, et honorée de partager ma couche. Elles seraient dignes d’être aimées; et je parviendrais, de mon côté, à les aimer” (Soumission 315). This conception of religion gives back all confidence to his primary masculinity in a society and by a new government which offer him precisely an institutionalized role of dominant male. These singular arguments finally convince François to convert. It is not a submission to religion or any spiritual awareness, but an opportunistic conversion, for personal gain. If François is similar to the heroes of Huysmans, from Des Esseintes to Durtal, he stands out in what governs their engagement.

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The similarity of the novels, however, resides primarily in the apparent conversion they present. The second chapter of En route begins with the question: “Comment était-il redevenu catholique, comment en était-il arrivé là ?” (Huysmans 85). The fact is undisputed, it is not a conclusion and the readers are therefore warned. In Houellebecq’s work, the readers feel this conversion happen, little by little. But it is also already acquired. As it is the ideal excuse, it seeks only its justifications. The subject of the novel, in either case, raises the question of how to live after conversion. This question is not mystical in François, it is practical. The realization that he has of it, is the whole purpose of François’s stay in Rocamadour. The passage shows the inability of religion to relieve his angst: “mais peu à peu je sentais que je perdais le contact, qu’elle s’éloignait dans l’espace et dans les siècles [. . .] Au bout d’une demiheure je me relevai, définitivement déserté par l’Esprit, réduit à mon corps endommagé, périssable” (Soumission 178). There is a philosophical failure of religion in François. His existential anxiety is limited to his more pragmatic fear of growing old with no one by his side to take care of him. This is what the function of women comes down to. A function that the character wishes to legitimize in a society where the interests of women are institutionally turned toward men, going against all the post-68 achievements which sought to establish greater equality between the genders. The idealized woman, that of the prerevolution, woman of all work, no longer exists. The arrival of a Muslim political party, through its supporting religion, allows these values to be called into question and a return to a patriarchal society. The ideal woman then is no longer contained in one being, but she multiplies in several. Two novels published almost twenty years apart, Les Particules élémentaires and Soumission, enabled Michel Houellebecq to explain the consequences of the upheaval of 1968 on our society and in particular the deterioration of the relationship between men and women. In the author’s perception, a misunderstanding arose in the couple from the moment that sexual release was claimed. Where women have simply taken possession of their body and the freedom to offer it as they choose, men have seen a possibility of free consumption of women. There are also, as the author shows in Les Particules élémentaires, men left behind who endure their frustration without really establishing a connection with the feminine, while for others, women are only considered as goods, perishable and disposable consumer products. The fact remains that sexual liberation has turned against these women. But 1968 also coincided with the collapse of religious values and in particular Judeo-Christian values in Europe. Women should have benefited from the weakening of moral constraints intended to keep them traditionally in a condition subject to patriarchy. Finally, instead of gaining freedom, they find themselves once again victims of a change announced in their favor. Starting from an observation of the resurgence of the spiritual observed throughout

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the world (Dortier et Testot), Houellebecq predicts in Soumission a use of religion to subjugate again women and place them institutionally under the dependence of men. In this sense, the repercussions of the revolution of 1968 are again asserted as a disaster for women. All in all, these two Houellebecq novels may also present themselves as a warning in regard to women. Even if it only remains with Soumission at the stage of conjecture, it warns that the patriarchy will continue to fight to keep an exclusive power and impose its desires and its domination, in any form or travesty whatsoever. Contrary to current trends which in Western societies see a progressive disappearance of the borders between the genders, Houellebecq is the cantor of a war between the sexes always present and implacable. Now, fifty years have passed since the events of 1968, and it is easier to really step back from this period and try to better understand its ins and outs. Houellebecq follows on from his analysis of the evolution of mores since then. What the writer points to above all and consistently in his work, as he still does in his latest novel Sérotonine, published in 2019, is a misunderstanding between men and women which finds its origin according to him in the difference they have in apprehending the romantic relationship: L’amour, plutôt destinés aux femmes, car les femmes comprennent mal ce qu’est l’amour chez les hommes, elles sont constamment déconcertées par leur attitude et leurs comportements, et en arrivent quelquefois à cette conclusion erronée que les hommes sont incapables d’aimer, elles perçoivent rarement que ce même mot d’amour recouvre, chez l’homme et chez la femme, deux réalités radicalement différentes. (Sérotonine 70)

Houellebecq presents women in prey to their feeling of love: “l’amour quand il se manifeste chez la femme est un des phénomènes naturels les plus imposants dont la nature puisse nous offrir le spectacle . . . la femme crée les conditions d’existence d’un couple . . . cette nouvelle entité . . . n’est que la manifestation pure d’un instinct vital, elle sacrifierait sans hésiter sa vie” (Sérotonine 70–71), while he makes man, a being centered on his phallus, which acts or reacts according to his urges (Sérotonine 71). Extending from his previous novels, the author reveals that, if women saw their status change significantly in the 1960s and 1970s, they are still dependent on their feelings. 1968 presents itself as a societal turn, but also as an illusion, because the status newly acquired by women since then actually masks a more devious enslavement. Houellebecq presents women as victims of societal changes of the time, which men knew how to take advantage of.

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NOTES 1. Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA. 2. Department of French, Francophone and Italian Studies, College of Charleston, Charleston, SC, USA. 3. Italic by the author of the article. 4. Pseudonym, her real name Pauline Réage.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Balzac, Honoré de. Œuvres complètes, Volume 22. Calmann Lévy, 1879. Dortier, Jean-François, et Laurent Testot. “Le retour du religieux, un phénomène mondial.” Sciences Humaines, vol. 160, mai 2005, https​:/​/ww​​w​.sci​​ences​​humai​​nes​ .c​​om​/le​​-reto​​ur​-du​​-reli​​gieux​​-un​-p​​henom​​ene​-m​​ond​ia​​l​_fr_​​4912.​​html. Hargot, Thérèse. Thérèse Hargot : « La libération sexuelle a asservi les femmes ». Entretien réalisé par Eugénie Bastié, 5 février 2016, https​:/​/ww​​w​.lef​​i garo​​.fr​/v​​ox​/so​​ ciete​​/2016​​/02​/0​​5​/310​​03​-20​​16020​​5ARTF​​IG003​​90​-th​​erese​​-harg​​ot​-la​​-libe​​ratio​​n​-sex​​ uelle​​-​a​-as​​servi​​t​-les​​-femm​​es​.ph​​p. Houellebecq, Michel. Les particules élémentaires. J’ai lu, Flammarion, 2007. Sérotonine. Flammarion, 2019. Soumission. J’ai lu, Flammarion, 2017. Houellebecq, Michel, et Bernard-Henry Lévy. Ennemis publics. Flammarion, 2008. Hugo, Victor. Les misérables. Kindle Ed. Huysmans, Joris-Karl. En Route. Éd. Dominique Millet, Gallimard, 1996. Mall, Laurence. “Jouer à la poupée chez Rousseau, Michelet et Beauvoir.” Tessera, vol. 35, automne 2003, pp. 63–78. Prioux, France. “Mariage, vie en couple et rupture d’union. Sous l’angle de la démographie.” Informations sociales, vol. 122, no. 2, 2005, pp. 38–50, doi:10.3917/ inso.122.0038. Cairn​.inf​o. Réage, Pauline. Histoire d’O, suivi de Retour à Roissy. Le Livre de Poche, 1999. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Emile ou de l’éducation. Kindle Ed., 2011. Said, Edward W. « Orientalism Reconsidered ». Cultural Critique, no 1, Autumn 1985, pp. 89–107. Viard, Bruno. Houellebecq au laser : La faute à Mai 68. Les Editions Ovadia, 2008. Les tiroirs de Michel Houellebecq. Presses Universitaires de France, 2013. Viennot, Gilles. La crise de la postmodernité et de la masculinité dans les romans de Michel Houellebecq. University of Kansas, 30 mai 2014, https​:/​/ku​​schol​​arwor​​ ks​.ku​​.edu/​​bitst​​ream/​​handl​​e​/180​​8​/239​​70​/Vi​​ennot​​_ku​_0​​099D_​​13511​​_DATA​​​_1​.pd​​ f​?seq​​uence​​=1.

Chapter 9

A Timeless Spirit Revolutionary Aesthetics in Roberto Bolaño’s Amulet Augustus O’Neill

The student movement in Mexico during 1968 is most recognized for its terminus: the Tlatelolco Massacre. On October 2, a joint force of Mexican military and police killed student and civilian protestors gathered in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas—located in the Tlatelolco neighborhood of Mexico City. Deaths ranged from 30 to over 300; adding further uncertainty is the Mexican government’s refusal to acknowledge the massacre until the early 1990s (Flaherty 3). Both scholarly research and artistic renderings have identified the events in Tlatelolco as a culminative moment in the student movement; Samuel Steinberg comments that “the narrative of 1968 takes as its center the Tlatelolco massacre because the moment of sacrifice serves as an economical mode of representing the whole of the movement. 2 October becomes a metonymic narrative for the entirety of the movement itself” (8). The seductively neat packaging of this narrative has faded over time, as contemporary Mexico 1968 historiography has shifted from representing the massacre as the student movement’s inevitable finale, especially in light of the 50th anniversary of the global 1968 movements that has renewed interest across disciplines. In her book 1968 Mexico: Constellations of Freedom and Democracy, Susana Draper focuses on historical actors forgotten in Mexico 1968 ­historiography—Marxist philosophers, amateur filmmakers, female prisoners, and strike leaders—to construct a history that while “attending to the dominant history and conceptualization of the movement, also introduces other points that flicker on the margins, pointing to the possibility of reading a different constellation” (33). In the considerable literary production on Mexico 1968, Roberto Bolaño’s 1998 novella Amulet presents a narrative on the

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margins of the student movement, chronicling the Mexican army’s occupation of university campuses and the resistance of one poet, Auxilio Lacouture, against these forces. In this paper, I will argue that Amulet transforms the history of Mexico 1968 through an analysis of revolutionary temporality in the text and Auxilio’s life in Mexico City. I propose that Bolaño’s synthesis of aesthetics and politics in the text decenters the Tlatelolco Massacre as the telos of the student movement in Mexico 1968. This interpretation is strengthened by the novella’s historical basis, namely Auxilio’s real-life counterpart, Alcira Sanst-Scaffo, who indeed resisted the army’s occupation over fifteen days by remaining on campus. Furthermore, such a reading underscores the movement’s resistance to oppressive state power as well as the recurring nature of the revolutionary struggle, particularly in Mexico where violence toward students has continued beyond 1968 to the present day. The origins of the student movement can be traced to late July 1968, when students occupied campuses throughout Mexico City on the 27th in response to repeated acts of violent police repression in the previous weeks: one during a march commemorating the Cuban Revolution; another, ironically enough, during a march against police brutality; and once after riot police (granaderos) targeted vocational students during a soccer match (Draper 23–24). These occupations were met with military raids, eventually convincing Javier Barrios Sierra—then-rector of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM)—to cancel classes and lead a march. Continued organization led to the formation of the National Strike Council (CNH), an assembly of university students throughout Mexico. The CNH published a list of demands in early August, calling for the freeing of political prisoners, the resignation of certain military officials, and the disbanding of the granaderos, among other things (Flaherty 9). The demands were not met with consideration, but rather an escalation of aggression by both the military and police, as Mexican president Gustavo Díaz Ordaz intended to subdue the student movement before the start of the Summer Olympic Games in October. The military occupied the campuses of UNAM and the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN) in September and arrested hundreds of students (102). Participants in the movement met in the Plaza de Las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco to plan their response to the occupations, and on October 2, the military and police executed a coordinated strike on these students. After the violence, the bodies were cleared and the plaza was cleaned overnight. The Mexican government denied responsibility for decades. Amulet centers on Auxilio Lacouture, a middle-aged Uruguayan poetess who lives in Mexico City during the late 1960s, working odd jobs throughout the city and spending her leisure time with other poets and artists. Frequently referring to herself as “the mother of Mexican poetry” (Bolaño 1), Auxilio leads an unassuming, bohemian life until the Mexican army occupies the

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UNAM campus in September 1968 as they attempted to squash the bourgeoning student movement. At the moment the occupation begins, Auxilio is reading poetry in the bathroom of the Philosophy and Letters Department at UNAM. She leaves after hearing the commotion outside and witnesses the army rounding up students, faculty, and staff from a fourth-floor window. Auxilio describes the events, “like something from a movie about the Second World War crossed with one about the Mexican Revolution” (25). She tells herself, “You stay here, Auxilio. Don’t let them take you prisoner, my girl. Stay here, Auxilio, you don’t have to be in that movie; if they want to make you play a role, they can damn well come and find you” (26). She returns to the bathroom and hides in a stall, but a soldier enters the room. This is the precise moment when her linear conception of time unravels: While I, a poor Uruguayan poet, but with a love of Mexico as deep as anyone’s, waited for the soldier to search the cubicles one by one and prepared myself mentally and physically not to open the door, if it came to that, to defend the autonomy of the National Autonomous University of Mexico even in this last redoubt, a special kind of silence prevailed, a silence that figures neither in musical nor in philosophical dictionaries, as if time were coming apart and flying off in different directions simultaneously, a pure time, neither verbal nor composed of gestures and actions. (Bolaño 29–30)

Her decision to stay in the bathroom and resist the army’s occupation marks the beginning of her temporal rupture. She realizes that her presence is the last remaining safeguard of the university’s autonomy, mentioning her own love for Mexico as she stands opposite its army. Because Auxilio is countering the state’s apparatus of control, I believe the revolutionary action generates a revolutionary temporality, a newly constructed chronology of her life wherein the center is this act of remaining on campus and preserving the autonomy of the university, which serves as a point of return throughout the text. Once the soldier leaves, she relates her emotional state: “I felt ticklish and sleepy at the same time. But in fact I was more awake than ever. The situation was, admittedly, unfamiliar, but I knew what to do. I knew where my duty lay” (31). This “pure time” (30) is the essence of the revolutionary moment in which Auxilio feels true freedom, committed to the struggle against state oppression, and the feeling is captured in the novelty of her sensations. A promising theoretical approach to interpreting this novella comes by way of Herbert Marcuse and other thinkers of the Frankfurt School. In Eros and Civilization, Marcuse analyzes Greek mythology and Friedrich Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters as the blueprints for liberation from repressive civilization; time, according to Schiller and Marcuse, is one of the supreme instruments of

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power in a repressive society: “If the ‘aesthetic state’ is really to be the state of freedom, then it must ultimately defeat the destructive course of time. Only this is the token of a non-repressive civilization. Thus, Schiller attributes to the liberating play impulse the function of ‘abolishing time in time,’ of reconciling being and becoming, change and identity” (Marcuse 191–192). In Amulet, Bolaño portrays Auxilio as capable of rupturing time through revolutionary action on the path toward the aesthetic state, a poet being the perfect candidate to symbolize this change. Moreover, she recognizes the destructive abilities of her act of resistance and its exceptionality; the righteous decision is quickly confirmed by her feelings moments after the encounter. In the struggle against repression, Auxilio counterposes herself against the military forces—stating that she is all that stands in the way between the army and UNAM’s autonomy—and quickly assumes a new responsibility to resist. It is worth mentioning that Auxilio’s account previously appeared as a fragment in Bolaño’s novel The Savage Detectives, published a year before Amulet in 1998. Celina Manzoni analyzes the relationship between writing and rewriting in Amulet, the expansion of Auxilio’s ten-page excerpt from The Savage Detectives into a full-fledged narrative. Identifying the UNAM bathroom as an example of an aleph—a space containing all other points, from the eponymous short story by Jorge Luis Borges—Manzoni discusses these parallels in the construction of space in the narrative and the expansion of the larger text: The challenge for Bolaño consists more so in the gestation of a textuality that flows through Latin American time and space, unfolding new and original modalities of the classic themes: the double, the mirror, and the dream-withina-dream, a challenge that is carried out in conditions of immobility, seclusion, and the fight for memory. (29)

This expanded narrative permits Bolaño to delve more into Auxilio’s biography and contextualize her relationship with the student movement and the artists of Mexico City, unrestricted by spatial boundaries. Her newfound revolutionary temporality propels the narrative from one moment in her life to the next, always returning to the bathroom. It is precisely these conditions described by Manzoni that help define the body of text: immobility, seclusion, and memory are motifs employed by Bolaño to elaborate Auxilio’s story, a narrative for 1968 that resists a facile chronology and clarifies the need for ongoing revolutionary struggle. Though the opportunity arises for Auxilio to flee the bathroom safely, she decides to remain there and defend the university’s autonomy: And I knew what I had to do. I knew. I knew that I had to resist. So I sat down on the tiles of the women’s bathroom and, before the last rays of sunlight faded,

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read three more of Pedro Garfias’s poems, then shut the book and shut my eyes and said: Auxilio Lacouture, citizen of Uruguay, Latin American, poet and traveler, resist. (Bolaño 32)

It is no coincidence that Auxilio is reading poetry at this time, nor in the moments immediately preceding the occupation: Chris Andrews writes in Roberto Bolaño’s Fiction: An Expanding Universe that poetry “is crucial to this feat of resistance” (147), and it can be taken to represent what Marcuse refers to as “the liberating play impulse” (192) from Schiller. There is a marriage of the aesthetic and the political throughout Amulet that makes the revolutionary act possible. As consequence, a new temporality takes shape for Auxilio in the bathroom stall: The year 1968 became the year 1964 and the year 1960 became the year 1956. But it also became the years 1970 and 1973 and the years 1975 and 1976. As if I had died and was viewing the years from an unaccustomed vantage point. I mean: I started thinking about my past as if I was thinking about my present, future, and past, all mixed together and dormant in the one tepid egg, the enormous egg of some inner bird (an archaeopteryx?) nestled on a bed of smoking rubble. (Bolaño 32)

All conceptions of time become unstable for Auxilio after committing this fundamental act of resistance in 1968; her life becomes one timeless vision rooted in the revolutionary moment. This blurring of temporal boundaries as a result of participation in significant episodes of history is not an uncommon phenomenon, especially in the context of the 1960s. David Harris, a famed anti-war activist during the Vietnam era, describes this sentiment as he reflects on his activism: “I took the whole decade of the ‘60s very personally. It is, now standing here as a 73-year-old man, it’s hard to distinguish anything in my life from that period of time, so if I seem to be emotionally wrapped up in it, it’s because I am” (Harris 2019). The revolutionary spirit of the 60s destabilizes typical conceptions of chronology and lends primacy to these vital moments of action. Susana Draper offers further insight on the temporalities of 1968: Participants in the movement emphasize the difficulty of putting into language the effect those few months had on their personal and political lives. The temporality of the feeling of freedom they experienced over the course of a few months becomes incommensurable with the metric usually used to count time, particular when considering widespread changes. There is something ungraspable about that experience, and therein lies a portion of its potential. (84)

It is my contention that Bolaño conceives the same temporality for Auxilio through similar circumstances. Crucially, Bolaño transmits this ineffable

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feeling through aesthetic means: a novella about a poet resisting state repression. In a certain regard, the foregrounding of Auxilio’s temporality in Amulet mirrors the primacy of the Tlatelolco Massacre in Mexico 1968 historiography, and through aesthetic representation, Bolaño subverts the movement’s perceived telos and carries the revolutionary spirit beyond the massacre. Scholarly work has found that Roberto Bolaño based the character of Auxilio on Alcira Sanst-Scaffo, a Uruguayan poet and student who took refuge in a UNAM bathroom and hid there for two weeks as soldiers occupied the campus. Bolaño met Alcira in 1970, though they lost touch later in the 1970s (Gutiérrez Mouat 67). Alcira’s account is given in Elena Poniatowska’s Massacre in Mexico, a seminal text of Mexico 1968 historiography recounting the student movement. Massacre in Mexico comprises testimonials from students and professors who participated in marches and protests throughout 1968 and witnessed the Tlatelolco Massacre. Alcira, however, does not tell her own story: instead it is told by Carolina Pérez Cicero, a student in the Philosophy and Letters Department at UNAM: During the fifteen-day occupation of campus by the army, a young woman locked herself in a university bathroom: Alcira. She was terrified. She couldn’t escape, or she didn’t want to . . . Someone from the cleaning staff found her half-dead on the bathroom floor. Fifteen days later! . . . She was so afraid that she never left the bathroom! (Poniatowska 71)

For Alcira—and eventually, Auxilio—the horror is real. The autonomy of the university has been violated, and the army poses a looming existential threat, eliminating any form of resistance. As Walter Benjamin comments in Critique of Violence, “militarism is the compulsory, universal use of violence as a means to the ends of the state” (298). Nevertheless, Bolaño’s recreation of the event offers an important distinction: Auxilio’s impetus for staying in the bathroom is not fear but the will to resistance, an imperative to defend the university’s autonomy and overcome state repression. Ricardo Gutiérrez Mouat describes Auxilio’s new conception of time as an “eternal present”, noting that “the ‘free-falling reading’ that the novel forces on its readers implies that time is not linear but fractured or condensed” (68). This reading shares threads with Marcuse’s critique of Friedrich Nietzsche’s theories in Eros and Civilization. Marcuse identifies Nietzsche’s “eternal return” as a crucial step in the destruction of the reality principle and the formation of a non-repressive society: As long as there is the uncomprehended and unconquered flux of time—senseless loss, the painful “it was” that will never be again—being contains the seed of destruction which perverts good to evil and vice-versa. Man comes to himself

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only when the transcendence has been conquered—when eternity has become present in the here and now. (Marcuse 122)

In Amulet, Auxilio has achieved this eternal present/return by the very act of resistance to the state’s repression. Her coming-to-herself and her eternity-becoming-present can be understood when she says she feels more awake than ever (Bolaño 31). This is the essence of revolutionary temporality, achieved by Bolaño by transfiguring Alcira’s story through aesthetic representation. That said, it is important to note that Auxilio’s account is only a microcosm of Marcuse’s utopic vision, a personal revolution in her own mind. There is also a tension in deciding whether the temporal rupture should be understood in its revolutionary moment as an act of resistance, or if Auxilio’s new temporality is anchored in the trauma that she undergoes, living for two weeks locked in the bathroom without food. As Auxilio warns in the first line of the novella: “This is going to be a horror story” (1). The horror is both singular and universal, an apt description for Auxilio’s suffering alone in the bathroom and for the violence inflicted upon the students at Tlatelolco. However, a distinction must be made: Auxilio suffers no trauma directly resulting from state repression, that is, she does not receive its violence. Rather, her trauma comes in the act of resisting the occupation and the lack of fulfillment of her physiological needs. Moreover, the first mention of temporal rupture occurs long before her material state has worsened. Auxilio stays in the bathroom and resists the army’s occupation of the university to mark the rupture in chronology. Throughout the narrative, she continues to return to the bathroom because it was the inauguration of the resistance to repression. This reading does not negate the existence of her trauma, but it does amplify the complexity of her actions by contextualizing them in the sphere of revolutionary action. At this point, a discussion of the material conditions of Auxilio’s life in Mexico City is in order. Before and after her time in the bathroom at UNAM, Auxilio leads a humble and itinerant existence throughout Latin America. When she arrives in Mexico City in 1965, she goes to the homes of León Felipe and Pedro Garfias, two Spanish poets in exile during the Franco dictatorship, and works as a cleaning lady for the sole purpose of being in their company without the expectation of payment: “León Felipe used to call me Bonita, he’d say, You’re priceless, Auxilio, and try to help me out with a few pesos, but usually when he offered me money I’d kick up an almighty fuss. I’m doing this because I want to, León Felipe, I would say, out of sheer, irresistible admiration” (Bolaño 11). From the outset, Auxilio is characterized in the text as resistant to traditional economic practices with respect to her aesthetic values. Though she enjoys her time cleaning for Felipe and Garfias, Auxilio admits she has material needs to satisfy: “living is easy in Mexico City, as

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everyone knows or presumes or imagines, but only if you have some money or a scholarship or a family or at least some measly casual job, and I had nothing” (15–16). The spatial dynamics of Mexico City are critical to understanding Auxilio’s material conditions. In her reading of the novella, Andreea Marinescu proposes that Amulet attempts to synthesize two Latin American critical traditions—the testimonio genre and Ángel Rama’s “lettered city”— to reclaim the bygone social commentary of Latin American literature in the urban realm (135). For one, testimonios present a first-person account of historical events, a genre typically associated with revolutionary conflicts in Central America during the 1980s (Gugelberger 8): for example, Rigoberta Menchú’s depiction of genocidal violence against ethnic Mayans by the Guatemalan army in her book I, Rigoberta Menchú is a seminal work in the testimonio genre. On the other hand, Rama’s celebrated book The Lettered City traces the origins of Spanish and Portuguese colonies that developed into centers of power by privileging systems of writing and promoting a cultural elite linked closely to the state: Within each visible city stood another, figurative one, that controlled and directed it, and this less tangible “lettered city” was not less girded by defensive walls nor less aggressively bent on a certain kind of redemption. The lettered city acted upon the order of signs, and the high priority of its function lent it a sacred aspect . . . The order of signs appeared as the realm of the Spirit, and thanks to them, human spirits could speak to one another. This was the cultural dimension of the colonial power structure. (Rama 17)

Rama outlines the transformation of the lettered urban elite from the colonial era to the twentieth century, capable of becoming independent of state power through institutions like the press and public education. Thus, “Rama anticipates that the advent of independent and oppositional lettered intellectuals will have the capacity to shape and ultimately revolutionize the lettered city from within” (Marinescu 135). However, the concept does not enjoy seamless application onto Bolaño’s Mexico City: Marinescu argues that the intellectual tradition has been fragmented into institutions such as UNAM, social circles, for example, the Mexican poets occupying the bars and cafés, and the Spanish poets in exile (140). Consequently, the political potential of Mexico 1968 is attenuated, but Auxilio is still able to witness firsthand—in keeping with the testimonio tradition—the occupation of UNAM’s campus and resist, hence she keeps the revolutionary potential alive as a member of Mexico City’s lettered citizenry: “her act is a political act that makes possible a different kind of narrative about Mexico ‘68” (142). It is precisely this different narrative for which I am arguing: a revolutionary reading of Amulet, emphasizing the vital political act, made possible by aesthetics.

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In search of employment, Auxilio volunteers at the Philosophy and Letters Department at UNAM; she transcribes and translates, eventually getting work helping professors and secretaries. It pays little, but Auxilio earns enough to enjoy her social life with the poets of Mexico City: “Sometimes I’d go for a whole week without spending a peso. I was happy. The Mexican poets were generous and I was happy” (Bolaño 17). I believe that Auxilio has created for herself an existence outside of what Herbert Marcuse refers to as scarcity, a lynchpin of advanced industrial society: Behind the reality principle lies the fundamental fact of Ananke or scarcity (Lebensnot), which means that the struggle for existence takes place in a world too poor for the satisfaction of human needs without constant restraint, renunciation, delay . . . The distribution of scarcity as well as the effort of overcoming it, the mode of work, have been imposed upon individuals. (Marcuse 35–36)

Auxilio has all of her needs met without strain, nor is the work imposed onto her. Rather, at times in the novella she twists this notion and imposes on the Spanish poets, moving around their papers and kicking up dust (Bolaño 4). Furthermore, she finds joy—not alienation—in her work. After telling León Felipe that she would not accept payment from him, in her own words: “I put the money he had given me on his desk and went on with my work. I used to sing. While I was working I used to sing and it didn’t matter to me whether I was paid for my work or not” (11–12). Auxilio has made for herself a life where there are no divisions between labor and art: aesthetic practices have become her guiding principles. This attitude toward work is crucial to a life free from repression in the Marxist tradition, and as Marcuse notes later: “This quality would reflect the prevalent satisfaction of the basic human needs . . . This satisfaction would be (and this is the most important point) without toil—that is, without the rule of alienated labor over the human existence” (152). All of Auxilio’s labor represented in Amulet conforms to this description, whether it is the work she completes at UNAM or cleaning for the Spanish poets. Even before Auxilio’s resistance and enclosure in the university bathroom, she represents the possibility of a non-repressive lifestyle through her approaches to work and the material conditions of her life. The character development of Auxilio outside of her role in the student movement helps solidify her revolutionary potentiality. So says Marcuse: “The real of freedom is envisioned as existing beyond the realm of necessity: freedom is not within but outside the ‘struggle for existence.’” (195). Bolaño portrays Auxilio as a poet liberated from this struggle in her life in Mexico City, an aesthetic representation of what life could be in a truly free society. Following in the tradition of Immanuel Kant and Sigmund Freud, Marcuse emphasizes the faculty of imagination as the necessary means to achieve

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freedom: “Phantasy has a truth value of its own, which corresponds to the experience of its own—namely, the surmounting of the antagonistic human reality” (143). In reading Amulet, one observes a strong correspondence between Marcuse’s analysis and the role of imagination in Auxilio’s life. While locked in the bathroom, she begins to fantasize about encounters she never had, the most noteworthy being with Remedios Varo, a Spanish surrealist painter living in Mexico. I never met Remedios Varo. Not because I was too timid to pay her a visit at her house, not because I didn’t admire her work (which I admire wholeheartedly), but because Remedios Varo died in 1963, and in 1963 I was still living in my beloved, faraway Montevideo. Although some nights, when the moon shines into the women’s bathroom and I am still awake, I think, No, in 1963, I was already in Mexico City. (Bolaño 106)

The imagined meeting with Varo is described vividly, though in an unstable stream of consciousness style fluctuating in time and space: between Varo’s home in 1963 and the UNAM bathroom in 1968. As Marcuse says, the truth of the fantasy exists in its challenge to a repressive reality. According to Myrna Solotorevsky, Bolaño uses historical figures like Varo in the text to heighten its verisimilitude while simultaneously in keeping with the testimonio tradition (255). The facticity of the account carries less weight than the urgency of the text to address political and social issues (Marinescu 139). This analysis works in harmony with Marcuse’s theories on imagination to provide the narrative underpinnings in which Bolaño can transfigure Alcira Sanst-Scaffo’s experience into a revolutionary text. During Auxilio’s visit, she notices an enormous painting, covered with an old skirt so large that it must have belonged to a giant (Bolaño 108). When Varo uncovers the painting, Auxilio sees “an enormous valley, viewed from the highest mountain, a green and brown valley, and the mere sight of that landscape makes me anxious . . . I know that the landscape, the enormous valley, vaguely reminiscent of a Renaissance background is waiting” (110–111). This valley appears in two other passages of the novella, later discussed in greater detail. Continuing his analysis, Marcuse notes that “imagination envisions the reconciliation of the individual with the whole, of desire with realization, of happiness with reason. While this harmony has been removed into utopia by the established reality principle, phantasy insists that it must and can become real” (143). Resistance to the army’s occupation manifests through Auxilio’s embodiment of the university, that is, the individual and the whole, a union achieved through imagination as she processes the revolutionary moment in the bathroom. I believe that Auxilio’s presence, her being-there, aligns with what Nietzsche calls “being-as-end-in-itself” (from Marcuse 121), a presence

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inimical to the attempted occupation and violation of UNAM’s autonomy by the army, in other words, the intended reality principle of the state. Bolaño situates Auxilio—a Uruguayan poet, the surrogate of university—at the confluence of the aesthetic and the political in a similar vein to Surrealism, when “art allied itself with the revolution” (149). Hence, Auxilio occupies a liminal space mediated by the imagination in which revolutionary action is possible. Throughout Amulet, Auxilio returns to the bathroom at random, with no seemingly discernable pattern characterizing her temporal jumps. However, one noteworthy shift occurs while she and others are protesting in Mexico City in 1972 against Pinochet’s coup-d’état in Chile, in solidarity with Arturo Belano (Bolaño’s literary alter ego), a Chilean poet and friend who had returned to his homeland to support the Allende government. After seeing familiar faces from 1968 at the demonstration, Auxilio notes: I also saw something else: I saw a mirror and, peering into it, I could see an enormous, uninhabited valley, and the vision of that valley brought tears to my eyes, partly because, at the time, the most trifling matters were enough to make me burst into tears. The valley I had seen, however, was no trifling matter. I don’t know if it was the vale of joy or the vale of tears. But I saw it and then I saw myself shut up in the women’s bathroom, and I remembered that there I had dreamed of the very same valley, and waking from that dream or nightmare I had begun to cry or maybe it was the other way around, maybe the tears had woken me. (Bolaño 74–75)

The valley in this dark vision is the same from Remedios Varo’s painting; the feeling of dread continues in this second instance and Auxilio has (false) premonitions of Arturo’s death. In comparison to other temporal shifts in Amulet, the timing of this flashback most clearly resembles the origin of Auxilio’s temporal rupture: in the midst of political action. This notion of recurrence brings to mind Hannah Arendt’s writings on revolution, namely, the paradoxical nature of the very word revolution, whose contemporary usage connotes novelty and freedom, yet by its original definition, “the word clearly indicates a recurring, cyclical movement” (35). Recurrence is certainly an adequate description of Auxilio’s perception of time, centered in the initial moment of revolutionary action. Taking political action is not novel for Auxilio, yet this moment transports her back to the original. Both meanings of revolution find usage in Amulet, cohering with thematic complexity that Bolaño develops by creating an alternative narrative of Mexico 1968 and refusing to package history in a static and linear fashion. As the novella progresses, the trauma that Auxilio has suffered while locked in the bathroom becomes more apparent. Previous scholarship of Amulet has highlighted the importance of trauma as the impetus for Auxilio’s

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fractured temporality. Ryan Long refers to the bathroom as a “traumatic chronotope” (130), which results in the new temporal center: “Trauma in Lacouture’s case produces an understanding of an entire life through the lens of one two-week period, an anachronistic comprehension of history that rejects immediate understanding in favor of an insistent recognition of mediation because of, and through, the traumatic experience” (136). Although Long cogently describes the phenomenon, I believe he has misidentified its cause: Auxilio’s rupture in time commences in the near-confrontation between the soldier, a tangible representation of state repression, not during or after her two-week enclosure in the bathroom. To clarify, this assertion is not denying the trauma resulting from the experience, but rather it addresses the origin of the temporal shift. By reconceptualizing Auxilio’s temporality as formed in the revolutionary act of resistance, Bolaño joins the aesthetic and the political to construct a new narrative for Mexico 1968 that overcomes a reductive rendition of the event. The valley returns for the final passage of the novella. In an apocalyptic vision, Auxilio finds herself in the valley and witnesses a great number of children heading to their doom, an abyss on the other side: “They were walking toward the abyss. I think I realized that as soon as I saw them. A shadow or a mass of children, walking unstoppably toward the abyss” (Bolaño 182). The author’s reimagined children’s crusade, according to Gutiérrez Mouat, represents “a whole generation of Latin Americans who fought for their own kind of liberation in a different time or place” (71), for one, the students killed in Tlatelolco. Thinking back to the first appearance of the valley, it is important to remember what covered the painting at Remedios Varo’s house: a large skirt. A distinctly feminine piece of clothing, this skirt can be interpreted as belonging to Auxilio, the “mother of Mexican poetry” (1), covering the painting and protecting the children until its final revelation. According to Andreea Marinescu, the maternal quality sets the ending of Amulet apart in its representation of revolutionary discourse: “Auxilio contemplates the catastrophe, but integrates the maternal aspect into a reformulation of the future. The forward-looking appeal, not its claim to Truth, is where the political potential of the written text rests” (145). In this way, Bolaño subverts the male, sacrificial narratives most typical of Mexico 1968, instead choosing to incorporate the female perspective that had been absent in popular representations of the student movements. Auxilio hears the children sing a battle cry on the march to their demise: “Although the song that I heard was about war, about the heroic deeds of a whole generation of young Latin Americans led to sacrifice, I knew that above and beyond all, it was about courage and mirrors, desire and pleasure. And that song is our amulet” (Bolaño 184–185). The title of the novella appears as its final word, a small item or piece of jewelry protecting one from evil. Desire and pleasure, we may remember,

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are two guiding principles of Marcuse’s non-repressive society in Eros and Civilization. Mirrors, a classic metaphor in the Latin American fiction of Borges and Gabriel García Márquez, here symbolize Auxilio’s revolutionary act in the UNAM bathroom, a potent representation of how we question our reality both in time and space. On the surface, Auxilio notes the militaristic tone of the song, yet she knows that in truth the children are singing for freedom from centuries of repression and cycles of violence. Gutiérrez Mouat argues that this song represents poetry, an insightful interpretation considering Bolaño’s own reverence of poetry and its power (71). Bolaño arms these children—a bona fide return of the repressed—with the one weapon at their disposal that may bring down their oppressors: art. Once asked in an interview what he thought to be the clearest display of misfortune, Bolaño responded, “Children that die of hunger, children that die of easily-treated illnesses, children that suffer sexual abuse, children that have to work, children that are mistreated by their parents” (Bolaño por sí mismo 47). Clearly, the suffering of children and youth is a pressing theme in the author’s thinking and his oeuvre; they take center stage in the final scene of Amulet and signify an act of Marcuse’s “Great Refusal”: “the protest against unnecessary repression, the struggle for the ultimate form of freedom—‘to live without anxiety.’ But this idea could be formulated without punishment only in the language of art” (149–150). Marcuse and Bolaño converge one last time to demonstrate how art created through the faculty of imagination is essential for freedom. Crucially, Auxilio’s vision originates in the UNAM bathroom, unmarked by time and its tyrannical flow. It is from this space wherein the revolutionary act commenced that the fight against terror remains vital, not submitting to a long history of repressive forces, and Auxilio holding on to her faith in the power of poetry. There is a teleology in the canonical history of Mexico 1968 that tempts us to see the Tlatelolco Massacre as the violent finale of the student movement. In Amulet, Roberto Bolaño upends this history by situating Auxilio Lacouture in another critical space during the movement—the occupation of the UNAM campus—allowing for her to resist and for the revolutionary moment to continue into her future. The philosopher José Revueltas, present in UNAM and deeply engaged with the student movement, wrote in the wake of Mexico 1968 that, “the revolutionary movement of the generation of ‘68 is ongoing; it has not ended, nor will it ever end” (Draper 46). Octavio Paz, famed Mexican poet and Nobel Laureate, wrote in a 1972 letter to Adolfo Gilly on the latter’s newest book: “it is a remarkable contribution to the history of the Mexican Revolution, and an equally remarkable contribution to living history, that is to say, the history that we are all living and making (and, at times, unmaking) in Mexico these days” (Paz 116). These notions of ongoing revolution and living in history resonate in

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Auxilio’s story and many others around the world: the spirit of resistance traveled far beyond 1968. Unfortunately, the repressive state delivering violence against this spirit did not disappear either. On September 26, 2014, about 120 students from the Ayotzinipa Rural Teachers’ College in Mexico tried to steal buses in the town of Iguala to travel to Mexico City and organize a march commemorating the Tlatelolco Massacre. After commandeering two buses, forty-three of the students were fired upon and kidnapped by a group of police and cartel hitmen, who would later murder them and incinerate their bodies (Grillo 33). The search for the remains revealed thirty-eight other corpses, victims of narcoviolence. The local police and mayor collaborated with a cartel (32). The connections between the Tlatelolco Massacre and the killings in Iguala are disquieting, and one cannot help but see recurrence. In closing, when reflecting on Amulet, I notice an intriguing structural change when comparing the novella to historical representations of Mexico 1968, starting with optimism of organized students and ending with tragic violence. The structure of the text reverses this trajectory in tone: Bolaño starts by telling the readers that it will be a “horror story” (1) and ends with the children marching in song, protected by art. By ending with these impressions of hope, I believe that Roberto Bolaño is writing to reclaim the history of Mexico 1968 by challenging our conventional notion of linear time and creating a narrative—steeped in Latin American tradition—that continues beyond the Tlatelolco Massacre. In the text, Auxilio Lacouture embodies aesthetic life and follows her virtues in the face of certain danger. It is a revolutionary struggle very much alive today, impervious to the whims of time. Whether history repeats itself or it rhymes, we shall sing our poetry in the face of repression, for its power is eternal. BIBLIOGRAPHY Andrews, Chris. Roberto Bolaño’s Fiction: An Expanding Universe. New York, Columbia: University Press, 2014. Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. New York: The Viking Press, 1963. Benjamin, Walter. “Critique of Violence.” Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, edited by Peter Demetz, translated by Edmund Jephcott, Mariner Books, 2019, pp. 291–316. By Roberto Bolano, Chris Andrews, from AMULET, copyright ©1999 by the Heirs of Roberto Bolaño. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Bolaño, Roberto. “La Felicidad perfecta engendra inmovilidad o campos de concentración.” Interview with Anonymous. Bolaño por sí mismo: Entrevistas escogidas. Edited by Andrés Braithwaite, Havana, Casa de Las Américas, 2016. Originally published in La Tercera, Santiago, March 19, 2000.

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Draper, Susana. 1968 Mexico: Constellations of Freedom and Democracy. Durham, Duke UP, 2018. Flaherty, George F. Hotel Mexico: Dwelling on the ‘68 Movement. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2016. Grillo, Ioan. “Mexico’s Nightmare.” Time, vol. 184, no. 20, November 24, 2014, pp. 30–33. MasterFILE Premier, doi: 0040781X. Accessed 15 February 2020. Gugelberger, Georg. M., Ed. The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America. Durham, Duke UP, 1996. Gutiérrez Mouat, Ricardo. Understanding Roberto Bolaño. Columbia, University of South Carolina Press. 2016. Harris, David. “Playing it Forward: What happened in the Sixties and what can it teach us today.” Does “la lute continue”? The Global Afterlives of May 1968, March 29, 2019, The Winthrop-King Institute for Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL. Keynote Address. https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=dWm​​​D8qf5​​bPs Long, Ryan. “Traumatic Time in Roberto Bolaño’s Amuleto and the Archive of 1968.” Bulletin of Latin American Research, vol. 29, no. 1, 2010, pp. 128–143. Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. Boston, Beacon Press, 1955. Marinescu, Andreea. “Testimonio’ in the Lettered City: Literature and Witnessing in Roberto Bolaño’s Amuleto.” Chasqui: Journal of Latin American Literature, vol. 42, no. 2, 2013, pp. 134–146. Manzoni, Celina. “Reescritura como desplazamiento y anagonórisis en El amuleto de Roberto Bolaño.” Hispamérica, vol. 32, no. 94, 2003, pp. 25–32. Paz, Octavio. “Postscript.” The Other Mexico: Critique of the Pyramid. Translated by Helen R. Lane, Grove Press, 1972, pp. 113–148. Poniatowska, Elena. La noche de Tlatelolco: Testimonios de historia oral. Mexico City, Ediciones Era, 1971. Rama, Ángel. The Lettered City. Translated by John Charles Chasteen, Durham, Duke University Press, 1996. Solotorevsky, Myrna. “Pseudo-Real Referents and their Function in Santa María de las flores negras by Hernán Rivera Letelier and Amuleto by Roberto Bolaño.” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 249–256. Steinberg, Samuel. Unfinished Events: Writing, Visual Culture, and the Durations of Mexico, 1968. 2009. University of Pennsylvania, PhD dissertation. University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommon, https​:/​/re​​posit​​ory​.u​​penn.​​edu​/d​​isser​​tatio​​ns​/A​A​​ I3363​​670/

Index

Page references for figures are italicized abject, 139, 141, 143, 152 Adorno, 11 Africa, xiii, 49; East, 49, 51; North, 25 Algerian War, 30–31, 38 Alliance of Liberals and Democrats, xii Arab Spring, 25–26 Arendt, Hannah, xi, 185 Arte Povera, 8, 10–11, 14, 57 A/traverso, 58 Autonomia, 45–46, 56–58, 61, 64–65 Autonomia Operaia, 56, 105, 112 Autunno Caldo, 14, 56, 103 Badiou, Alain, 82 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 19 Balestrini, Nanni, xvii, 103–7, 109, 111–16 Balibar, Étienne, 82, 85–86 banlieues, 142, 151 Barthes, Roland, viii, 26–27, 36, 63, 82, 91 Battle of Adwa, 45, 49–50 Battle of Valle Giulia, 11, 12 the Beatles, xiv Beauchamp, Line, 25 Bene, Carmelo, 57 Benjamin, Walter, xi, 14, 180

Bill 1978, 25 Black Panther Party, xiii Black Power, xiv, xvi Bolaño, Roberto, xviii, 175–88 bourgeois, 84, 87, 96, 142, 147 Burntollet Bridge, 122 Canguilhem, Georges, 82 Caribbean, x, xv–xvi Carnevale, 53 Cassen, Bernard, 82 Cattabriga, Giovanni. See Wu Ming 2 Celestini, Ascanio, xvii, 103–7, 111, 113–14, 116 Césaire, Aimé, xv Charest, Jean, 25, 37 Chauvet, Marie, xv Cinquemani, Luca. See Fare Ala Cixous, Hélène, 82–83, 91 Cohn-Bendit, Daniel, viii, xi–xii, 38 Columbia, xi communist, xi, 85, 87, 90, 92, 105–6 Congress of Black Writers, xv countercultural, xvii, 45, 56–58, 68–69 counterculture, xiii–xiv, 68 de Beauvoir, Simone, xv 191

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Index

de Certeau, Michel, 27, 32, 36 de Gaulle, Charles, vii–viii, 29–30, 81–83, 85–87 Deleuze, Gilles, 57, 82 Democratic National Convention, xiii Derrida, Jacques, 82, 91 Di Gangi, Andrea. See Fare Ala Dommergues, Pierre, 82 Durham Report, 34, 38 Duvalier, François “Papa Doc,” xv

Houellebecq, Michel, xviii, 157–62, 164–66, 169, 171–72

Einaudi, Guilio, 107 Eurocentric, xvii, 57 European Union, xii

Kant, Immanuel, xi, 183 Kounellis, Jannis, xvi, 1–20 Kristeva, Julia, 139–46, 148–49, 152 Kristevean, 140, 151

Fanon, Frantz, 28, 30 Fare Ala, xvii, 45–46, 48, 50–68 Faure, Edgar, 81–87 Fémicide, 139 feminism, xiii, xviii, 139–40 feminist, xvi, xviii, 56, 82, 87–88, 115, 139–40, 142–43, 149 Fischer, Joschka, xii Foucault, Michel, 82–85, 89, 91–92 Frankfurt “Sponti” radicals, xii French Right, vii Galleria L’Attico, 3, 6 Galleria Lucio Amelio, 1 Gaullism, viii Gaullist, viii, 30, 37, 81–82, 84–85, 87, 92 global sixties, 121 Good Friday Agreement, 125 granaderos, 176 Green Party, xii, 38 Gruppo 63, 104 Guattari, Félix, 57 Halbwachs, Maurice, 130 Hegel, xi Holocaust, 69 horns. See lingue di Menelik The Hot Autumn of 1969. See Autunno Caldo of 1969

Islam, 165, 167, 169–70 Italian 1968, 103–5, 116 Italian avant-garde, 57, 68 Italian Communist Party, 105–6 Ivory Tower, viii, 42 Jameson, Fredric, xiii, 120

Lacan, Jacques, 1, 82–83, 85, 91 Left: American New, xiii; Italian, 57; New, xi, xiii LGBTI, xvi lingue di Menelik. See tongues of Menelik Long Live Menelik, 45, 46, 50 Lo Zoo, 57 Luigi Ontani, 57 Lyotard, Jean-François, 82 Macron, Emmanuel, xii Mao, ix, xi, 57–58, 86 Maoist, xiii, 85–89, 92, 108 Maple Spring, 26 Marat, 1–2, 8, 9 Marx, Karl, xi Marxist, xiii, 90, 175, 183 Matraque, 30–31 Memory, vii, 36, 58–59, 66, 68, 80–81, 89, 119, 125, 129–31, 178; agonistic, 130–31; collective memory, 80, 89–90, 93, 127; site of, 80–81, 92 memory studies, 129 Menelik II, 45, 53, 61 Mouvement de libération des femmes (MLF), xviii, 88, 139, 142 movement: civil rights, ix, xiii, 28, 122, 128; feminist, 115, 139–40,

Index

143, 149; Italian leftist, 105; #Me2, 139, 149; #MeToo, 116; national liberation, xiii; separatist, 27–29; student, xviii, 31, 83–84, 86, 111, 175–78, 180, 183, 186–87; women’s, xiii, xiv, 139, 141 Muslim, xviii, 165, 168–69, 171 Mussolini, 49, 69 Nadeau-Dubois, Gabriel, 31, 33, 35, 38 National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), 176–78, 180–85, 187 National Museums Northern Ireland (NMNI), xvii, 119, 126–27, 129 National Organization Group of Guadeloupe, xv National Polytechnic Institute (IPN), 176 National Strike Council (CNH), 176 Nazis, xii, 107 Negus, 63 Neo-Fascist Right, 12 New German Cinema, xi Newton, Huey P., xiii Nora, Pierre, 36, 80 Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), 121 Olmi, Ermanno Il Posto, 15 Opération McGill, 30 Orientalist, 46, 56 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 12–13, 16–17, 57 People’s Democracy (PD), 121, 123 Plaza de las Tres Culturas, 175–76 Porta, Antonio, 57 postcolonial, 27–28, 30–31, 38, 56–58, 66, 68–69; Italian, 46 postcoloniality, xvii, 45–46, 57 post-operaismo. See post-workerism poststructuralist, 82 post-wokerism, xvii, 105 Potere Operaio, 56, 104–6

193

Quebec Liberal Party, 25 Quebec Spring, xvi, 25–26, 33, 36–38 Rancière, Jacques, 82, 85–86, 116 resistance writing, 104, 107, 111 Revolution, ix, xi–xiii, xvi, xviii, 8, 33–37, 42, 80, 88–89, 92, 157, 160, 162, 164–67, 169, 172, 181, 185, 187; Cuban, 176; French, xi, 8, 80; Grenada, xvi; Mexican, 177, 187; The Quiet, 29, 41 Robespierre, 1–2 Rodney, Walter, xv Romano, Roberto. See Fare Ala Sartre, Jean-Paul, xii, xv scritture di resistenza. See resistance writing Seale, Bobby, xiii Serres, Michel, 82, 92 Sierra, Javier Barrios, 176 Silent Testimony, 129 Situationist, xii, 64–65, 88; neo-, 64–65 Slimani, Leïla, xviii, 139–47, 149, 152 Spender, Stephen, x–xi structuralism, viii–ix, 84 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), xiii Superstudio, 57 testimonio, 182, 184 Tet Offensive, xiii Third Republic, 80 Third World, xiii, 56, 83 Tlatelolco Massacre, 175–76, 180 tongues of Menelik. See lingue di Menelik Troubles, xvii, 119, 122, 124–27, 129– 31; Art of the, 129 truncheon, 26, 29–31, 38 Ulster Musuem, 127, 129 Université Paris-8, 79 Verhofstadt, Guy, xii

194

Vincennes: bois de, 79, 81–82; Centre Universitaire Expérimental de, xvii, 79 Viva Menilicchi. See Long Live Menelik Voices of 68, 126–27, 129–30 War: First World, 159; guerrilla, 42, 66, 68; post-Cold, 57; Second ItaloEthiopian, 49; Second World War, 159, 177; Vietnam, vii–x, xiii, xv, 108 Williams, Eric, xvi

Index

women’s rights, xviii, 37, 139 Workerist, 56, 58 Workers Power. See Potere Operaio working class, xi, 79, 88, 92, 105, 111– 12, 128, 142, 144, 146 Wu Ming, xvii, 45, 57–58, 60, 64–65, 68 Wu Ming 2, xvii, 45–46, 48, 50–53, 55, 57–61, 63–65, 67–68 Wu Ming Foundation, 46, 48, 50, 52, 55, 59, 61, 63, 64, 67 Zeitgeist, xiv, 120

About the Authors

Chris Bennett, assistant professor of Art History/Contemporary Art at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, is an art historian who specializes in European, American, and global art since 1945. His current research includes a book project focused on Italy in the 1960s and a number of the artists associated with the Arte Povera group. Around 2008, he was part of a wave of scholarship on Arte Povera that aimed to draw attention, vis-à-vis past approaches, to this art’s more self-consciously ambiguous, contradictory, and/or paradoxical dimensions, and, more recently, he has contributed to new theorizations of painting in Rome in the 1960s or the Piazza del Popolo School, including the production of Mario Schifano, Renato Mambor, Giosetta Fioroni, and Franco Angeli. He has held prestigious research fellowships including a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome in 2005–2006 and a year-long residential fellowship at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles in 2006–2007. In addition to pursuing art historical scholarship, he has curated a number of exhibitions including a full-scale show of the work of Alighiero Boetti at the UCLA Fowler Museum in Los Angeles in 2012 and, at the Hilliard Art Museum at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, tandem exhibitions of the art of Yun-Fei Ji and Sandra Eula Lee (2017–2018). Tenley Bick is assistant professor of Global Contemporary Art in the Department of Art History at Florida State University. Her scholarship has appeared in Third Text and African Arts, as well as in the edited volume Theorizing Visual Studies: Writing Through the Discipline (eds Elkins and McGuire, et al). Her translation work has also been published, in the catalog for the internationally traveling exhibition Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 (eds Kwon and Kaiser). She is currently writing a book in preparation, 195

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About the Authors

entitled Where There’s Everything: Michelangelo Pistoletto and WorldBuilding in Arte Povera, as well as a second book-length project on contemporary art and the history of Italian colonialism. She is the founder and curator of COSTELLAZIONE, a series of live conversations on contemporary Italian art and activism. Alexis L. Chauchois is a PhD student in French Literature and Francophone literature at Florida State University. His research interests extend to novels from the nineteenth- to the twenty-first-century novels, and particularly writers such as Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Michel Houellebecq, Makenzy Orcel, and Jean-Claude Charles. William Cloonan is the Richard Chapple Professor of Modern Languages (Emeritus) at Florida State University. He researches and writes on the contemporary French novel, and the visual arts. His most recent book is Frères Ennemis: the French in American Literature and Americans in French Literature (2018). Paul Cohen is an associate professor at the University of Toronto, where he teaches early modern French history. His work explores the social history of language, the invention of linguistic nationalism, and the history of linguistic intermediaries in the global French colonial empire. He has also published widely on issues of contemporary concern, and has begun work on a booklength history of the Université Paris-8 (Vincennes-Saint Denis), where he was maître de conférences before joining the University of Toronto. Barry J. Faulk is a professor of English at Florida State University. His books include British Rock Modernism and Punk Rock Warlord: the Life and Work of Joe Strummer, coedited with Brady Harrison. Gilles Glacet is an independent scholar. He received his PhD from Emory University with a specialization in twentieth-century French literature. His areas of interest include nineteenth- and twentieth-century French literature, contemporary French literature and culture, as well as Francophone literature. Giuseppina Mecchia is an associate professor of French and Italian at the University of Pittsburgh. She has coedited, translated, and introduced several volumes of French and Italian political philosophy and cultural studies, from post-workerism to the political philosophy of language. She has published on the politics of esthetics in Jacques Rancière, Marcel Proust, Stendhal, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Michel Houellebecq, the

About the Authors

197

cinema of Michael Haneke, Paolo Sorrentino and Raoul Ruiz, Elsa Morante, Paolo Virno and Natalia Ginzburg. She keeps exploring the relation between political philosophy, linguistic and cultural theories, and esthetics. Martin Munro is Winthrop-King professor of French and Francophone Studies at Florida State University. He previously worked in Scotland, Ireland, and Trinidad. His publications include Writing on the Fault Line: Haitian Literature and the Earthquake of 2010 (Liverpool, 2014); Tropical Apocalypse: Haiti and the Caribbean End Times (Virginia, 2015), and an edited volume of Caribbean ghost stories. In 2019, he published a translation of Michaël Ferrier’s Mémoires d’outre mer, and he is currently translating other novels by Ferrier. In 2020–2021, he will be a fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. He is director of the Winthrop-King Institute for Contemporary French and Francophone Studies at Florida State. Timo Obergöker is professor for French and Francophone Studies at the University of Cheste in the United Kingdom. His research focusses on contemporary literature from France, Belgium, and Quebec. Timo is also interested in French chanson and in the French Empire. Amongst his recent publications: Prise de possession. Storytelling, culture populaire et colonialisme (Königshausen und Neumann, 2016), La place de la République dans la littérature française contemporaine (Peter Lang, 2020). Augustus O’Neill is a doctoral student of Spanish Literature in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics at Florida State University. He received a B.A. in Spanish from The Ohio State University and an M.A. in Spanish at Florida State University, with a concentration on Hispanic Linguistics. His research interests include contemporary Latin American fiction, critical theory, colonial studies, and aesthetics. Valérie K. Orlando is professor of French & Francophone Literatures at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the Fulbright-Tocqueville Distinguished Chair Award recipient (Université de Lyon-Lumière II, Lyon, France, fall 2019) and Research Fellow at Le Collegium de Lyon (L’institut d’études avancées de l’université de Lyon, spring 2020). She is the author of six books, the most recent of which include: The Algerian New Novel: The Poetics of a Modern Nation, 1950-1979 (2017), New African Cinema (2017), and Screening Morocco: Contemporary Film in a Changing Society (2011). She has published with Pamela Pears, Paris and the Marginalized Author: Treachery, Alienation, Queerness, and Exile (2018) and with Sandra M. Cypess, Reimaging the Caribbean: Conversations among the Creole, English, French and Spanish Caribbean (2014). She is also Series Editor for

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About the Authors

After the Empire: The Francophone World and Postcolonial France with Lexington Books. Chris Reynolds is an associate professor of Contemporary French and European Studies at Nottingham Trent University. His main research interests are in relation to the events of 1968 from a French, Northern Irish and European perspective. In addition to a wide range of articles and chapters on these topics, he is the author of Memories of May ’68: France’s Convenient Consensus (2011) and Sous les pavés . . . The Troubles: Northern Ireland, France and the European Collective Memory of 1968 (2015). Christian P. Weber is an associate professor and program coordinator of German at Florida State University. His research interests include Goethe, romanticism, aesthetic theory, and biopolitical metaphors of nationalism. He is the author of Die Logik der Lyrik: Goethes Phänomenologie des Geistes in Gedichten (2013) and recent articles and book chapters on Kleist’s editorship of the “Berliner Abendblätter,” Goethe’s “Faust” as a critique of posthumanism, Goethe versus ETA Hoffmann on the uncanny, Anacreontic poetry as a forerunner of Kantian aesthetics, and a rereading of Adorno’s reading of Eichendorff.