The Politics of Radical Immanence

A certain fragility has been discovered in the very bedrock of existence even, and perhaps above all, in those aspects of it that are most familiar, most solid and most intimately related to our bodies and to our everyday behaviour. But together with this sense of instability ... one in fact discovers something that perhaps was not initially foreseen, something one might describe as precisely the inhibiting effect of global, totalitarian theories. Michel Foucault (1) Run, comrade, the old world is behind you. Paris May '68 Graffiti (2) This is no time for pretence at objectivity. I shall not even attempt to deny that I am writing this paper as a philosopher trained in Paris in the late seventies by Deleuze, Lyotard, Foucault and Irigaray. I belong therefore to what is often described as 'la generdation des rendez-vous manques', or the generation of missed chances, that experienced in real-time the momentous impact of the '68 events. As a consequence, I consider '1968' as the fundamental political myth of my generation, namely as the event that defined the political ontology of the times and regulated social interaction in a variety of realms, ranging from sexuality and kinship systems to religious and discursive practices. These myths are transmitted through narratives-mythologies or fictions, which I have renamed as 'figurations', (3) or cartographies of the present. A cartography is a politically informed map of one's historical and social location, the purpose of which is to enable the analysis of situated formations of power and hence adequate forms of resistance. Michel Foucault worked extensively on the notion of genealogy or counter-memories as a tool to draw the 'diagrams of the present' in his analysis of the micro-physics of power in postindustrial societies. (4) Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari also stressed the importance of immanent analyses of the singular actualisations of concrete power-formations. (5) Feminism also adopted the practice of the politics of locations as a method for grounding its activism. (6) It also perfected the strategy of positive renaming and re-signification of the subject. A location is an embedded and embodied memory: it is a set of counter-memories, which are activated by the resisting thinkers against the grain of the dominant social representations of subjectivity. A location is a materialist temporal and spatial site of co-production of the subjects in their diversity. Accounting for this complexity is therefore anything but an instance of relativism. Locations provide the ground for political and ethical accountability. Remembrance, cartographies of locations, political (dis-) identifications and strategic re-configurations are the tools for consciousness-raising which were devised by transformative epistemologies such as feminism and race theory. (7) The structure of this article therefore consists in a reflection on May '68 as a philosophical location and also on the continuing role of the imaginary representations of that event. I will also discuss the extent to which the memories of the event became contested elements in the political struggle for definition of radical politics and theory. The main thesis I want to defend is that the most significant theoretical innovation introduced by the enduring event that is May '68 is what later became known as 'radical immanence'. (8) Back then, it included the notions of political passions, affirmative ethics and the rigorous vision of affectivity which they entail. In the conclusion, I will stress the need to focus the debate more seriously on the radical politics of dis-identification and the political construction of hope in the future as some of the conceptual elements that make May 1968 into the longest month in history, i.e. into an event that endures in time and transposes across generations. ON MEMORY AND THE SOCIAL IMAGINARY May 1968 as a cluster of interrelated cultural events, artistic practices and theoretical happenings has become part of the collective imaginary

Aesthetics · Epistemology · Immanence · Physics · Political science · Politics · Quantum mechanics · Sociology · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Law · Philosophy

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