Was “1968” Sublime?

As a response to the question of how “la pensée 1968” guides the project of cultural critique today, my title appears to present a false problem. To resuscitate a question that Jean-François Lyotard not only posed but also answered is “false” if it implies a finite referent that hails an audience for whom an historical event could be sublime, or not, depending on how one defines it. Yet this referent is not finite, and its unfulfilled possibilities continue to spur faith in the value of contemporary cultural criticism. Questions pertaining to whose “1968” as well as its when and where cannot be sidestepped. Born in Los Angeles in 1965, I was too young to discern the impact, aesthetic or otherwise, of “May 1968” as it transpired, and I therefore respond to this invitation to contemplate its influence in the Kantian spirit of an Idea of freedom that lies beyond cognition.

Recollecting Christopher Norris’s 1992 “cult of the sublime” critique, one might ponder why Lyotard so prolifically endeavored to deploy aesthetics against positivism, that age-old enemy of Theodor W. Adorno and his inheritors. In Immanuel Kant’s canonical emplotment, the “fault” that distinguishes the sublime lies with the subject and, specifically, with the faculty of imagination. I point this out because a sincere attempt to determine whether “May 1968” was sublime might begin with historical Verstehen in a hermeneutic sense—that is, with the work of empathetically imagining the “structure of feeling” that propelled French students and workers into the streets. Demoralized intellectuals who take part in such a venture will quickly confront its limits. At a moment when American plutocracy no longer bothers to hide its hostility toward university “elites” who threaten to incite an increasingly indebted youth against their creditors, this consideration of “May 1968”’s aesthetic impact is almost frivolous—there seems to be so little at stake in it. My titular question is, nevertheless, worth raising because it facilitates reflection about the horizon of this “now” that renders a return to Lyotard’s sublime appear dated at best.

The student protests in France were addressed to an institution, a government, a people, and a present-becoming-future. Lyotard begins his “Preamble to a Charter” from 1968 by invoking “our struggle at Nanterre” as the student protesters’ refused “the Fouchet reforms (November 1967)”¹ and practically affirmed “the right to political expression in the faculty (March 22, 1968, onward). Henceforth,” Lyotard proclaims, “social reality and the university’s function in relation to it will be subjected to permanent criticism and contestation. Our task,” he proclaims, “will have to be that of displacing [détourner] the entire institution of the university as fully as possible from the functions to which it is restricted by both the ruling class and its own deeply internalized repressions, in order to turn it into a place for working out the means of the critical understanding and expression of reality” (1993, 41). For the seemingly idealistic Lyotard of the “Preamble,” the “crisis that began in May 1968 is not a ‘crisis,’” since, as he declares, “it ushers us into a new period of history” in which “critique and struggle target and disrupt not only the political regime but also the social system, and not only capitalist private property but also the organization of life as a whole, all of the ‘values’ that modern societies, be they from the West or the East, utilize or fabricate, impose or insinuate, to defuse desire” (41).

What left-leaning intellectual does not feel wistful recalling Lyotard’s earnestly hopeful attestation to “an embryonic alliance [that] was forming between workers’ and the students’ struggles.” As he so stirringly articulates it in the “Preamble,” this alliance was “weak with respect to the adversary that has to be fought; it [was] formidable if one compares it to the isolation and the hopelessness that reigned in the class struggle before May 1968” (1993, 42).

One might speculate about the survival of the enthusiasm that infused the forty-four-year-old Lyotard’s remarks in 1968 in light of his future as the herald of the death of...