Barricades of May ’68 Still Divide the French

This article in the Times makes an interesting point about the legacy of May 1968 forty years later:

Forty years ago, French students in neckties and bobby socks threw cobblestones at the police and demanded that the sclerotic postwar system must change. Today, French students, worried about finding jobs and losing state benefits, are marching through the streets demanding that nothing change at all.

I also thought this remark on Sarkozy was particularly insightful:

“Sarkozy is the first post-’68 president,” Mr. Glucksmann said. “To liquidate ’68 is to liquidate himself.”

It seems to me that, following Kojin Karatani’s advice in Transcritique, the goal of any emancipatory political struggle (starting with the currently benign status of student activism) should not be to admit defeat by relegating one’s activities solely to the pragmatic doldrums of disparate factionalism (environmental, sexual, humanitarian, etc.), nor to consolidate these groups under some “master signifier” group. Instead, the student Left must (re-)formulate the very foundation upon which a larger political goal is to be conceived. I find Karatani’s espousal of New Associationism to be quite compelling, especially in regards to his remark that consumer advocacy and the labor movement are fundamentally one in the same.

May ‘68’s legacy is both inspiring and tragic: it demonstrates the potential for society to mobilize around some regulative idea, yet at the same time it was ultimately a failure to the extent that what was lacking was “fidelity to the Event,” to use Badiou’s terms. However, the movement should not function as a source of nostalgia for the lost radical past, but perhaps as a “regulative idea” in and for itself that could guide us towards some authentic Act. Now the goal should be to provide an economic safety net in the temporal gap between such an Act and what precedes it. New Associationism serves this function and therefore seems worth pursuing.