We Shall Therefore Never Write about What Took Place or did not Take Place in May

Abstract

Without denying the importance of the emancipatory, radically democratic impulses of what is called ‘68, the present contribution aims at another – I would claim even more fundamental – dimension of the political as discussed around 1968. Under the sign of ‘67 (used as a cypher for this alternative configuration), more than the content of statements was questioned, and more than their form, namely the very mechanisms in which something can be asserted. Rather than just saying something new, ‘67 was developing languages in which something new could first be said at all – or at least examining why, in the existing languages, it was not possible to simply say anything new. This essay begins with an overview of the various forms of attempts at “sounding out the basic structure of language” undertaken in 1967, and detectable in texts as different as Jacques Derrida’s De la grammatologie and Peter Handke’s Kaspar. In a second step, it turns to the specific genre of the tract or pamphlet, as practiced in Berlin in 1967, and theoretically debated during the Parisian May by theorists such as Maurice Blanchot and Michel de Certeau. In sum, the essay takes these fundamental interrogations of linguistic structures and textual practices as a crucial momentum in the development of an alternative concept of the political.