a Twitter thread from @GabrielRockhill
@TwitterVid_bot1.
The idea that French theory is revolutionary “68 thought” is a myth whose purpose is to promote anticommunist theory as radical while invisibilizing the actual theorists and actors of revolutionary politics.🧵1/9
#Marxism
My latest in @monthly_review: https://monthlyreview.org/2023/06/01/the-myth-of-1968-thought-and-the-french-intelligentsia-historical-commodity-fetishism-and-ideological-rollback/
2.
#Foucault didn't publicly support the 68 movement & for good reason: he had participated in the Gaullist academic counter-reform that triggered the student uprising. He was thus clearly on the opposite side of the barricades in #May68. 2/9
3.
#Bourdieu was absent from the streets in #1968. Following the tradition of his mentor, the anticommunist CIA asset Raymond Aron, he preferred so-called “empirical evidence” to what he dismissed as the “revolutionary posturing” of leftism. 3/9
4.
#Derrida was not, as he himself clearly explained, a ’68er, and his “heart was not ‘on the barricades.’” In fact, he didn’t even think the category of “social class” made sense 🤔4/9
5.
#Lacan occupied the position of the stern father in #May68 who invoked “the inability of any revolution to free the subject from his servitude.” He described himself as an “antiprogressive” “liberal” in his critiques of the movement. 5/9
6.
The marketing of #FrenchTheory by Ford Found. et al changed 68 into a symbol for a product of US-driven cultural imperialism. The real social relations at work in 68 disappeared behind the enchantment with the commodity of French Theory (historical commodity fetishism). 6/9
#Marx
7.
The social function of the historical commodity fetishism around #68 is to excise the work of the more radical side of French theory, if it be the marginalized anarchists, Maoists, Trots, or Marxian thinkers, or the largely excluded MLs. 7/9
#Marxism
8.
This article foregrounds the thinkers who were engaged in #68 & who continue today the revolutionary tradition overshadowed by #FrenchTheory: Michel Simon, Michel Clouscard, Georges Gastaud, Annie Lacroix-Riz, Aymeric Monville, etc. 8/9
@PRCF_
9.
Join us on June 22 for an online discussion on "The Myth of 68 Thought & the French Intelligentsia," co-sponsored by @CTW_ATC & @MarxMidwest 9/9
Details forthcoming here: https://criticaltheoryworkshop.com/myth-68-thought/
10.
My article on the myth of #May68 & #FrenchTheory is now available online via @monthly_review! While the anticommunist radical recuperators (Foucault, Derrida, Lacan et al) were promoted after #68, the real 68 thinkers were invisibilized.
#Marx #Marxism
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