El movimiento italiano del 77: continuación del 68 francés

El mayo del 68 francés y el ‘movimiento italiano del 77’ no constituyen un apéndice de las luchas proletarias del siglo XX, sino la anticipación de las dinámicas productivas, políticas y comunicativas que se han desarrollado en las décadas siguientes. Había una dinámica de fondo en las diferentes luchas: el enfrentamiento con las instituciones disciplinarias. Si el mayo del 68 francés fue un acontecimiento que comportó un cambio de sentido, el movimiento italiano del 77 fue continuador y replicador de aquel acontecimiento. 1977 es el año de inflexión de una creciente insubordinación política y sindical, de sabotaje y lucha contra los ritmos de trabajo. May 68 in France and the 'Italian movement of 77' were not an appendix to the proletarian struggles of the 20th century but the forerunner to the productive, political and communicati¬ve dynamics that unfolded in the following decades. Behind all of these different struggles was a very specific dynamic: confrontation with the disciplinary institutions. The events of May 68 in France introduced a change of direction and the Italian movement of 77 continued and replicated those events. The year 1977 marked a turning point in a growing insubordination on both a political and labour level. It was a year of sabotage and of a refusal of the rhythms of work.

Enacting Political Friendship in Gezi

This chapter deploys the alternative conceptual lens developed in the book, according to which democratic action is a theatrical experience created and sustained through the intermediating practices of political friendship, to analyze the Gezi protests of 2013. What emerges from this analysis is a richer account of events that moves beyond the limiting frameworks of success/failure and spontaneity/organization by bringing to light both the on-the-ground practices of political actors and the messiness and impurity of democratic politics even in the moment of its staging. Focusing on such intermediating practices as deliberation, judging, negotiation, artistic production, common use, and the organization of the mundane aspects of everyday life, the chapter demonstrates that those who took part in Gezi borrowed from past struggles, including May ’68, re-activated political habits, and, acting in unexpected ways, created new, if imperfect and fragile, forms of commonality among diverse figures, showing that another way of doing things is possible.

Prologue

Through an interpretive analysis of the surprising refiguration of the iconic May ’68 poster “Beauty is in the Street” in Istanbul during the Gezi Protests of 2013, the Prologue sets the stage for the book by making three closely related points. First, it draws attention to the emancipatory potential of such refigurations of past struggles in the present and highlights the importance of keeping a record of democratic events. Second, it establishes the centrality of 1968 in democratic theory by demonstrating how Negri, Habermas, and Rancière formulated their own unique conceptualizations of democratic action in response to the questions that first emerged in the aftermath of the experience of 1968 and continue to shape current debates. Third, it argues that to rescue contemporary democratic events from their ongoing trivialization, it is necessary to develop an alternative conceptual lens that reveals what other accounts erase, namely the on-the-ground efforts of political actors.

La mística como síntoma de la modernidad. Una lectura del proyecto epistemológico de Michel de Certeau

This article presents an enquiry into one aspect of Michel de Certeau’s intellectual project: to make Christianity intelligible in our epistemological situation. I seek to demonstrate how this epistemological and theological question shapes many of his historical and anthropological works, which seek to elucidate the re-composition of the human sciences and Christianity from a particular reading of modernity. The matrix of his thought is configured by the irruption of mystical experience in otherness and strangeness and the questions this poses to the claimed uniqueness modern reason, heir to the Aufklärung. We will inquire about the fundamental theoretical tools that support the political discernment made by Michel de Certeau in the cultural crisis of May 68. Then we analyse the place of the nominalist rupture in the process of desontologization of language and the passage from the religious system to the ethics of Enlightenment as a way through the notion of “the formality of practices”. Both are preludes to his particular reading of secularization.

« Connais-toi toi-même et tu connaîtras l'univers et les dieux », l’initiation dans Archaos ou le jardin étincelant de C. Rochefort

Archaos ou le jardin étincelant by Cristiane Rochefort, is a post-May 68 utopia. The learning process prescribed in this novel parodies/mocks traditional coming-of-age novels: rules are not enacted by an exogenous mentor. Classical intellectual guides are ridiculed. The process of initiation is turned inward, toward the self, and is accomplished by way of sex education, the ultimate condition for access to power. Resolutely feminist, this novel reconsiders the world led by women. Archaos is the story of a Dionysian journey under the guise of a political utopia which calls for symbolic death and for an esoteric renaissance under the auspices of the goddess Isthar.