Speech

Staffordshire University. We roll up our shirtsleeves and rub behind our ears with our wipes. It’s time to begin!

Speech: that’s what the Events of May 1968 were about, we tell our audience. The capacity to speak, to speak to anyone without formality. That’s how they spoke as the occupied the campuses of Nanterre and the Sorbonne, we tell them. That’s how they spoke during the teach-ins and sit-downs, during the refusals to disperse. And that’s how the walls spoke, the famous graffiti which were of all and for all, continuing the freedom to speak into another medium.

‘Under the paving stones, the beach’; ‘Dream is reality’; ‘Poetry is in the street’; ‘I have something to say but I don’t know what’; ‘I have nothing to say’ … To have nothing to say but saying itself; to speak the very act of speaking, to address the demonstrator alongside you in the crowd: this was the miracle.

We break for tea. – ‘It’s going well, isn’t it?’, W. says. It is going well.

When we return, we speak of the General Strike and the occupation of the main plants at Renault. We speak of de Gaulle fleeing France, and of parliamentary disarray. We speak of the Action Committees, of direct democracy. We speak of ‘wildfire, effervescence’ (Blanchot), and ‘fulguration’ (Levinas).

But we speak, too, of the vulnerability of the movement, of the gradual return to normality. We speak of the banning of far left groups, and of the retaking of the Sorbonne. We speak of the murder of militants and the infiltration of schools and universities by police. We speak of the factories reopening, and of workers returning to work. We speak of the triumph of de Gaulle’s party, returned to government with greatest majority they had ever received.

A pause for tea. He thinks we’re beginning to depress our audience, W. says.

Must there always be a betrayal of speech?, we wonder, when we return to the seminar room. Must the revolution always be betrayed? May ’68 failed, we tell their audience. Of course it did! But how could they have succeeded? Perhaps, we tell our audience, the Events were sufficient unto themselves. Perhaps they give us the idea of a revolution that need achieve no fixed goal, that has nothing to do with political results. And perhaps nothing to do with politics, either.

The room brightens as we invoke the title of one of the collectively written tracts of the Students and Writers Action Committee: Tomorrow it was May. And perhaps tomorrow – in another kind of tomorrow – it will be May again.

Tomorrow it was May. How moving! How beautiful! And we speak about the Hot Autumn in Italy in 1969, and about Italian workerism. We invoke the ghosts of Fourier, Blanqui, and Luxemburg; we celebrate Guevara, Ho Chi Minh and Cabral, and then we drink with our fellow attendees through the night.