“They Don't Represent Us!”: From the Crisis of the Organic Intellectuals of 1978 to the Exhumation of Buried Imaginaries

Abstract

Based on the notion of événement (event), elaborated by the French philosopher Alain Badiou, this essay aims to offer a definition of the 15M movement as an event. According to Badiou, the event has the capacity to perforate established knowledge and to transform the codes of communication. The event destabilizes the regime of truth to the extent that what was assumed to be obvious now appears as unstable, and, consequently, the need arises to explore and construct other discourses capable of naming the new situation. In this essay, I locate two moments of the event: the political moment and the theoretical moment; the first is the time of the revolution, while the second is devoted to the study and theorization of this revolution. I argue that the radical effects of the event can be registered in the second moment. In the theoretical moment, there is a crisis of the organic intellectuals of the Regime of ’78, and the empty space they leave behind may begin to be occupied by other voices that were previously barely heard. In the same way, during the theoretical moment, the revolution without a genealogical tree that was the 15M, which was not inscribed in a revolutionary continuity, begins to seek its roots in discourses of the past that were silenced or forgotten, or that simply did not have a framework that would give them back their conditions of legibility.