Memory is a space of struggle: memory is not something that power can leave unruly, especially the memory of a moment that changed the course of lives and reality itself. May 2008 will mark the 40th anniversary of the famous May '68 movement, the largest general strike in French history and the only generalized insurrection experienced by the "developed" world in the second half of the 20th century. The "reactive memory" (political, media, cultural) reduces the event to a student riot, to a generational conflict, to a question of hormones, to a sudden acceleration towards modernity (explosion of hedonistic individualism, liberation of customs), etc. It seeks to neutralize the political: ruptures and dysfunctions, the manifestation of new subjectivities, politically or sociologically unrepresentable, the emergence of other ways of conceiving the social bond, the community, the future.
This book is precisely about the subsequent lives of May 68: about the way in which the event has been replaced by successive representations; but also about how its disruptive character has survived through different ways the annihilation attempts, the forms of amnesia and social instrumentalization that have tried to annul it, the sociologists who have explained it and the former student leaders who have appropriated the monopoly of his memory.
Kristin Ross teaches Literature at New York University. She is also the author of books such as ?The emergence of social space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune? (Minnesota, 1988) or ?Fast cars, clean bodies: decolonization and reordering of French culture? (MIT, 1995).
May 68 and their later lives? It is the first book in a collection dedicated to rescuing a living memory of that event.