From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought, Second Edition

by Julian Bourg

Winner: CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book Award, CHOICE Magazine (2008) Winner: Morris D. Forkosch Prize for the best book in intellectual history, Journal of the History of Ideas (2008) The French revolts of May 1968, the largest general strike in twentieth-century Europe, were among the most famous and colourful episodes of the twentieth century. Julian Bourg argues that during the subsequent decade the revolts led to a remarkable paradigm shift in French thought - the concern for revolution in the 1960s was transformed into a fascination with ethics. Challenging the prevalent view that the 1960s did not have any lasting effect, From Revolution to Ethics shows how intellectuals and activists turned to ethics as the touchstone for understanding interpersonal, institutional, and political dilemmas. In absorbing and scrupulously researched detail Bourg explores the developing ethical fascination as it emerged among student Maoists courting terrorism, anti-psychiatric celebrations of madness, feminists mobilizing against rape, and pundits and philosophers championing humanitarianism. From Revolution to Ethics provides a compelling picture of how May 1968 helped make ethics a compass for navigating contemporary global concerns. In a new preface for the second edition published to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the events, Bourg assessses the worldwide influence of the ethical turn, from human rights to the return of religion and the new populism.

Genres: History, Philosophy, Politics, Nonfiction, European History

504 pages, Paperback

First published May 4, 2007

Reviews

[Alejandro Teruel · Rating 3 out of 5]

A hard book to read and I almost gave up on it several times, but finally managed to slog through. At the beginning I was struck by the number of curious parallels between May 68 and some of the more recent protests in Latinamerica, particularly the ongoing revolt in Chile. For example, both revolts occured at a time of unprecedented economic prosperity for the country and university student enrollments, both came a complete surprise to the establishment and under a right of center government, and in a generation that "had it (relatively" or superficially) easy") following a generation that had lived through traumatic history -WWII in the case of France with a society split beween those in the Resistence and the Vichy collaborators and the Pinochet dictatorship in the case of Chile.

The key insight in the book is that the French May 1968 did not succeed qua revolution but did manage to encourage French intellectuals to delve more deeply into ethical issues about incarceration, authority, sexual freedom, gender and psychiatry among other topics for almost twenty years. The first chapter, Cobblestone beaches: Normative contradictions of the May revolt is a fascinating introduction to the history of the revolt and its main figures. After this chapter the book is divided into four parts and a conclusion.

The first part, The sabre and the keyhole: French maoism, violence and prisoner dignity is, in my opinion the best and is very readable.

It is in the second part, Spinoza on Prozac: From institutional psychotherapy to the philosophy of desire that the book stumbles and looses its thread. It is true that the book’s subtitle is “May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought”, and it is also true that Bourg does a good job of providing context for contemporary French intellectuals like Sartre, Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari – a context I lack since I have read only some of these thinkers and haphazardly at best. However in this part, Bourg places the extremely thorny Anti-Oedipus squarely in the middle of developments which makes for an unconvincing keystone to events to say the least. To me, the thread leading from revolution to ethics snapped several times, bogging me down in too many hard-to-understand details and concepts.

The third part, “Your sexual revolution is not ours”: French feminist “moralism” and the limits of desire picks up the thread by turning to the impact of the 68 revolt on feminism, homosexuality and pedophilia. Each issue is discussed in separate chapters, the most interesting and fascinating ones being Gender and ‘68: Tensions from the start which provides an overview to the evolution of positions and concepts on gender, and Feminism, law, rape and leftist male reaction, which I would highly recommend. I was also surprised and, to be honest, shocked by the polemics on the age of sexual consent and the pedophiliac discourses, of which I was unaware.

The fourth part, When all bets are off: Ethical Jansenism and the New Philosophers not only loses the thread again, but reads like an unwelcome chore. Sometimes the book reads like a Ph. D. thesis whose strands have been decided and fixed in advance in a pique of optimism, only to find those strands not only bloating the thesis but mostly beside the point. Bourg is not sympathetic to the New Philosophy, even as he struggles to retrieve some useful insights or theses from them and it shows -he analyses in detail books which he warns are dull and confusing;

Obscure, slightly pretentious, and in the end somewhat banal, the analysis of Lardreau and Jambet in “L’Ange” and “Le Monde” were nevertheless significant for the cultural sensibility they represent.

Bourg’s idea of linking these philosophers to Jansenism is one of those issues which have very little to do with the rest of the book, but which is typically the sort of thing included into a Ph.D. thesis in order to either strive hard at showing an unexpected linkage or showing that a topic has been dutifully read about in detail.

The conclusion is very readable and recaps the first chapter in somewhat more detail.:

The story of how the ethical turn came about has dealt with the social fact of violence and metal illness, with institutions like prisons and psychiatric asylums; with laws, civil society, and citizenship; with gender, sex, and desire; and with theoretical models of self, associations and political action.

It is hard to pin down for whom Bourg wrote this book. You have to have at least a nodding acquaintance with key French thinkers and be interested in very minor figures and details. I also agree with another Goodreads reviewer in that the book would have done well to break out of its parochial look at French thinkers, relating the history of ideas covered a little more broadly. While Bourg definitely helped me make better sense of the relationship between thinkers such as Foucault and Sartre -who tower above the rest in terms of pages devoted to them, I also get the impression that Bourg’s selection of works and authors is highly idiosyncratic -there is very little on Beauvoir (no mention of The Second Sex for example), or Camus -in spite of Bourg’s mention of several of the writers’ debt to the idea of the outsider/rebel or Lipovetsky or Aron or Revel. One also gets an idea of the arbitrariness of the chosen fields of impact: why not economy, social work, urban development or public planning, medicine, fiction, linguistics, marketing or sociology as well or instead of psychiatry for example?

Are the parallels between France 1968 and Chile 2019 more than mere coincidence? How similar is the bigger picture, that is to say the economic, social and political context for both revolts? Is Chile 2019 at all due to a long-scale ripple effect, are the reasons for the revolt in Chile simply part of "unfinished business" still radiating world-wide fifty one years ago or are they both an example of cyclic events that come about when a country's prosperity hides gross social inequalities? Food for thought....

Afterword
Until I read Simon Schama's Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution on the 1789 revolution, I had not grasped the degree to which the post 1968 concerns with prisoner dignity and incarceration is probably indebted to to the symbolic and mythic importance of the 1789 fall of the Bastille.

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting contribution to the field by Bourg, who notes that one result of 1968 in French intellectual thought was the gradual turn away from political revolution and an embracing of ethical concerns by leading thinkers. This culminated in the primacy of ethics in the works of the 'new philosophers' of the late 1970s. Al-tough I enjoyed Bourg's argument, I would have liked to have seen more references to intellectuals and events outside of France, particularly references to neighbouring Germany.

Quotes:

1. “In the years after 1968, France did experience a revolution. In 1968 that word – revolution – was on everyone’s lips. By the early 1980s and especially by the 1990s, everywhere one turned, there was talk of ethics. What had been revolutionized was the very notion of revolution itself.” (4)

2. "After 1968 ethics gradually became a preferred term, lens, and framework for grappling with many aspects of life: from interpersonal relationships (especially matters of desire, sex, and gender) to institutions (universities, prisons, and psychiatric hospitals) to politics (violence, law, the state, and human rights).” (5)

3. “The end of the politics of the living revolution, which was concretely embodied in French Marxism, coincided with the return of the theme of political ethics. The ethically problematic aspects of revolutionary politics led to a re-evaluation of political ethics, the political, and ethics tout court. One of the by-products of this transformation on the intellectual-political Left was thus a return –first implicit, then explicit – of ethical approaches to thought and action.” (9)

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Es difícil comprometerse con todos los diálogos que abren tanto el libro —largo y temáticamente muy abarcador— como sus distintas ramificaciones: el prólogo de Bourg a esta segunda edición —es un libro publicado originalmente en 2004—, la obra que coordinó sobre nuevas perspectivas en la historia intelectual francesa —'After the Deluge' (2004)—, las múltiples reseñas a lo largo de estos años —muchas de las cuales han sido respondidas por el autor—. Van cuatro comentarios con cosas que me llamaron la atención y que considero útiles para quienes se interesen en este campo y/o en estas discusiones.

1) Aunque el concepto de lo 'ético' es demasiado amplio y puede conllevar problemas metodológicos, creo que permite encontrar nuevos matices en el pensamiento francés posterior a 1968. Más allá de las diferentes instancias de contradicción entre una premisa tan general y un mosaico tan diverso, Bourg se toma el tiempo de reflexionar muy puntualmente sobre cada uno de los temas que presenta, regados a lo largo de 25 capítulos. De modo que el llamado 'giro ético' en el que descansa la tesis del libro se muestra, a veces con mayor o menor éxito, como un aparato heurístico más que como una narrativa teleológica: si en los capítulos más debatibles se pierde de vista la diversidad de autores y corrientes con las que el autor trata, en aquellos mejor logrados hay un claro enriquecimiento de nuestra visión de la historia intelectual francesa de estos años. Por ejemplo, los teóricos asociados de forma reduccionista a la French Theory o a un supuesto antihumanismo posmoderno aparecen bajo una nueva luz: las obras y el activismo en los setenta de figuras como Foucault, Deleuze y Guattari se interpretan como tendencias de largo plazo más que como la culminación del 'iliberalismo' cultural francés. Se trata de una respuesta contundente a la visión del liberalismo de la guerra fría tardía —pienso en las series 'New French Thought' editadas en los noventa por Mark Lilla y Thomas Pavel— y también funciona en un nivel más profundo, pues reivindica muchos aspectos del cuestionado legado del 68 —con cuánto acierto ya sería otra conversación—. En pocas palabras: puede que sea exagerado definir todo este periodo a partir de una sola etiqueta, pero sí hay una dimensión ética en el campo intelectual francés muy propia de la época, incluso en rincones inesperados.

2) El punto anterior me lleva a otra cuestión interesante en términos de metodología. Quizás los mejores estudios contemporáneos en historia intelectual francesa son los que han recogido las lecciones de los académicos franceses, menos enfocados en la exégesis textual y más en el rol de ciertas instituciones y dinámicas sociales en la vida intelectual del país. Bourg no es la excepción: en paralelo a la lectura atenta de textos densos —los capítulos sobre 'El anti-edipo' y Deleuze/Guattari son extraordinarios— hay una meticulosa historia política y social: las secciones sobre el radicalismo de la sociedad civil, desde el acompañamiento de Foucault y Deleuze a los movimientos en favor de los presos, hasta las campañas feministas que culminaron en cambios legislativos contra la violencia sexual, podrían ser capítulos autónomos en una obra sobre movimientos sociales post-68. Ahora bien, con todo y lo complicado que es hablar de omisiones en un libro tan completo, no habría estado de más considerar el activismo migrante y sus cambios entre los sesenta y setenta: si el argumento es que hubo un cambio desde la revolución a la ética, pocos ejemplos tan valiosos como el de las organizaciones y redes intelectuales norte-africanas, muchas de ellas de raigambre maoísta.

3) De nuevo, no pretendo hablar de lo que no se incluyó en el libro desde la mera enumeración: a la luz de las hipótesis de Bourg, me sorprende que no hayan tenido un mayor protagonismo algunos personajes y corrientes, en la medida en que el legado del 68 fue crucial para su conformación y rodeó muchas de las controversias en las que se involucraron. Me vienen a la mente Lefort, Castoriadis y la deuxième gauche francesa: sus debates sobre la democracia y el totalitarismo son una buena muestra de que las batallas culturales de la guerra fría no son suficientes para entender los cambios en la cultura francesa del último cuarto del siglo pasado, y hay pocos grupos cuyos temas centrales —la autogestión, notablemente— sean imposibles de entender sin hablar del significado del mayo francés. Algo parecido ocurre con los intelectuales del otro lado del campo: por encima del antitotalitarismo, sería importante analizar las tesis de 'la república del centro' de Furet y sus alumnos —Rosanvallon, Julliard—, o las de otros intelectuales en la órbita de Aron —Gauchet, Manent—, desde las discusiones sobre la ética y la 'irresponsabilidad' de los intelectuales franceses. Un buen complemento a la lectura de Bourg, en este sentido, son los estudios de Emile Chabal sobre la Francia contemporánea —de los setenta a la fecha— o los de Iain Stewart sobre Raymond Aron y el liberalismo francés.

4) Otro punto ciego del libro, relevante en tanto problematiza el consenso en torno a la ética en la vida intelectual francesa, es el camino que siguieron algunos intelectuales de izquierda, en particular ex-maoístas o pensadores del círculo de Althusser. El análisis sobre los Nouveaux Philosophes es inteligente y necesario en el marco de un cambio en las fuentes de legitimidad intelectual, resultadode la nueva cultura de masas; la atención a Jankélévitch, Ricoeur y Lévinas, en el último capítulo, es un buen cierre para la historia de este giro. Sin embargo, en medio de las reapariciones de Sartre o de polémicas como el 'affaire Heidegger' en estas páginas finales, echo de menos un breve acercamiento a quienes se convertirían en críticos contemporáneos del giro ético, o al menos en promotores de una visión alternativa en torno a cuestiones éticas. Veo al menos dos ejes: por un lado está la relación de los ex-althusserianos con el antihumanismo de su maestro, en especial tras su muerte y con la incursión de varios de ellos en debates estéticos —Badiou, Rancière y otros participantes en el seminario 'La politique des poètes' en los noventa—; por otro lado, pienso en la cantidad de textos sobre el amor o la amistad —Barthes, Derrida, Blanchot, Nancy, Badiou, Serres, Irigaray, Cixous, o recientemente, François Jullien— en la obra tardía de muchos de estos autores. A primera vista parece que es pedir mucho, pero sería esencial para evaluar con mayor precisión la transición de la revolución a la ética que describe Bourg.

[Nick · Rating 2 out of 5]

For work

[Patrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not the easiest book to get through. It’s long and dense at times, but the argument and methodology are sophisticated and important for anyone doing intellectual history.