French May '68, "China," and the dialectics of refusals in film and intellectual cultures since 1960s

The aim of this paper is to examine and define the transpolitical individualism as expression of the postcommunist transition to democracy, based on the analysis that Gilles Lipovetsky devoted to the French revolution of May’68. This historical moment has been regarded not only as a powerful instrument to achieve the so-called privatization of postwar lifestyle, enhancing a new perspective on the public and civil perception of authority, in the manner suggested by Alain Touraine, but also as the beginning of a new democratic age. At the core of my paper lies the correspondent analysis between the three elements of the process of power transition – disciplinary, revolutionary and conventional practices, and the types of individualism identified by Lipovetsky. My hypothesis is that to each element of the political order disciplinerevolution-convention, corresponds a certain form of individualism from the three recognised by the French philosopher responsible, hedonist and narcissistic individualism. Such forms of individualism are conceived as paradigms that shape and personalise the democratic culture, at the end of which the ideology of the transpolitical individualism rises. Transpolitical individualism suggests, in fact, a product of the historical transition from one regime of power to another and the source of our contemporary consumerist society. The last part of my research will be focused on analysing two possible consequences of accepting transpolitical individualism as expression of the transition’s process. I will argue that May’68 experiences democracy as a continuity of a certain perception of autonomy from modernism to postmodernism. Inspired by this assumption, I will criticize Luc Ferry’s argument that the French manifestations can be tracked as a rebellion of individuals against norms, that lead, through the hyperbolic affirmation of individuality, the destruction of the classical notion of the Subject.

http://annals.filosofie.unibuc.ro/index.php/annals/article/download/302/296

The Rise of Transpolitical Individualism as Expression of the Postcommunist Transition to Democracy. May ’68 as Pattern for Personalising Democracy

Contrary to widespread celebrations of the Western sixties as the antiauthoritarian heyday of “shining youthfulness” and “revolutionary lyricism” in contemporary cultures, Milan Kundera’s novel Život je jinde ( Life Is Elsewhere ), written shortly after the Soviet invasions of Czechoslovakia in 1968, exposes the narcissistic underside of this subversive epoch through a highly subjective juxtaposition of the two major historical events that happened in the same year in Eastern and Western Europe — Prague Spring and French May ’68. While Kudera’s idiosyncratic historical perspective, which perceived the Prague 1968 as more important than the May uprisings in Paris, may infuriate many Western readers, I argue that the book Život je jinde does not entertain a totally dismissive, unsympathetic attitude towards the revolutionary traditions of modern Europe at large. Relatively ignored by the critical world ever since its publication, Life Is Elsewhere not only outlines some radically alternative visions of the European sixties but also provides innovative ways to problematize the epistemological and ideological confines implicitly attached to the currently reigning liberal-democratic capitalism.

Gilles Lipovetsky

Papers

CHAPTER 16. May ’68, or the Rise of Transpolitical Individualism