1968 Now, Then, and Again: An Opening

Before it was a queer art, “failure” was a concept/event mobilized by parties to the subaltern historiography debate. In that context “failure” was roughed up for presupposing a certain temporal logic of “transition” (for example, from colonialism to nationalism), but in the hands of Gayatri Spivak it also took on a certain deconstructive cast, evoking less a methodological maneuver that belonged to the fraught predicament of postcolonial India and more a thought experiment dedicated to grasping the unsettled restlessness of “spacing” (l’espacement) itself. Aware of such precedents, we nevertheless open with “failure” for other reasons.

A revolution that failed is always at the very least a revolution that was attempted, that is, a powerful expression of desire (for radical transformation, for a different world). This is why the term “failed revolution” not only should never be used as a derogatory and dismissive term (namely as a way, in effect, not to come to terms with the political force of desire) but also constitutes something of an oxymoron in the end. Put differently, there is no such a thing as a “failed revolution” strictly speaking: there is no such a thing as a revolution that failed to make a mark, to leave a trace, to produce new forms of subjectivities. Such marks, traces, and subjectivities do not simply evaporate into thin air once the revolutionary dust settles down and the work of reaction and restoration begins. On the contrary, such marks and traces are always likely to be read anew and reiterated differently; such subjectivities are always likely to resist, persist, insist in the seemingly eternal present of reaction and to return emboldened and transmogrified unexpectedly in the future.

There is no such a thing as a failed revolution because a revolution that failed never failed at the very least to produce the conditions for the possibility of its return in another form, in another time, in another space. In effect, revolution is nothing if it doesn’t turn and return. The turn is inscribed indelibly in its image, its concept, and its history. Indeed, the point can be phrased using a perhaps unexpected literary example. The Pakistani Urdu poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz wrote the following after his visit to Dhaka in 1974: “We who remain strangers after so many embraces / how often must we meet to come close again.” The lines and the poem they launch have been much debated, largely because Faiz’s immense popularity in East Pakistan prior to 1971 declined precipitously after his silence on the war and its horrors. When he visited Dhaka in 1974 as part of an official Pakistani delegation, he was given the proverbial cold shoulder. The lines, hence, have most often been read as expressing either his true despair or his disingenuous remorse. But what if we read them in an entirely different way, an admittedly counterintuitive way: as addressed not to the people of Dhaka so much as to revolution itself, that winged bird whose flight is insistently tracked by the bloody lips, hands, and feet of Faiz’s poetry?

Thus, our re-memory (as Toni Morrison would spell it) of 1968 in this special issue is neither a monumental memorialization nor a nostalgic yearning: it is neither exactly an act of mourning nor exactly an acting out of melancholia. Our stubbornness regarding 1968 stems from our belief that nothing is ever lost in and for history, that the past must be kept open, as it were, to new developments: it is neither mourning nor melancholia to remember as well as to assert and to foreground the presence of 1968 in our present so as to search in this presence for that future of the past that might have been radically different from our present: re-memory of 1968 means to try to seize on the unspent energies and unrealized potentials of that impossible history that makes anything at all possible once again.

Invocations of 1968 only too often bring to mind the streets of Paris, Berkeley, Prague aflame with students and workers protests, thereby reducing 1968 to a Euro-American affair...