Abstract
The chapter considers the effect of May ’68 on French critiques of “transparency,” and argues that a significant gap existed between (a) principally epistemological critiques published shortly before 1968, and (b) the rise of a new set of political critiques of transparency in the 1970s. The three years before May ’68 saw the publication of Leroi-Gourhan’s Gesture and Speech, Foucault’s Order of Things, and Derrida’s Of Grammatology, which all took for granted that no mind/world transparency was available to the human subject. All three works signaled that a certain transparency might be possible—even imminent—in the near future, provided a certain humanism was jettisoned, and with it the expectation that transparency would be achievable by humans themselves. May ’68 completely obviated this line of thinking.
This essay pursues further problems developed in my Transparency in Postwar France: A Critical History of the Present (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017); some discussion here reworks (considerably) passages from that book.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
My reading of Sartre’s treatment of transparency differs considerably from Manfred Schneider’s , which he pursues further in his contribution to this volume. I do not have the space to establish these differences or the reading itself in all its necessary complexity here, and ask the reader to please consult Geroulanos 2017: 48–63.
- 2.
- 3.
See also Foucault 1966: 210, where Foucault interprets the understanding of desire and the “table of representation” again by way of transparency.
- 4.
See Leroi-Gourhan’s sense that material and social evidence should be understood in terms of complementarity rather than transparency or co-dependence (Leroi-Gourhan 1964–1965: 147).
- 5.
See the fourth point of the founding declaration of the Union des Jeunesses communistes Marxistes-Léninistes which proposed to form revolutionary intellectuals linked to “the workers and the working people” and to institute “new forms of organization” that would realize this “task.” In Résolution (1967).
- 6.
See also Lyotard’s treatment of social transparency in Economie libidinale of Marx’s theorization of “the mystery of labor” and its “erasure” in Capital (Lyotard 1974: 134).
Works Cited
Althusser, Louis. 1990. For Marx. London: Verso.
Blanchot, Maurice. 1948 [1996]. The Most High. Trans. Allan Stoekl. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
Clastres, Pierre. 1974 [1987]. Society against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology. New York: Zone Books.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1972 [2004]. How Do We Recognize Structuralism? In Desert Islands and Other Texts, 170–192. New York: Semiotext(e).
———. 1995. Letter to a Harsh Critic. In Negotiations, 3–12. New York: Columbia University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1967 [1997]. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
———. 1972 [1980]. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 1992. The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Derrida, Jacques, and Maurizio Ferraris. 2001. A Taste for the Secret. Malden, MA: Polity Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1966 [1994]. The Order of Things. New York: Vintage.
——— 1975 [1995]. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage.
———. 1981. The Eye of Power. In Power/Knowledge, 146–165. New York: Pantheon.
———. 2008. Psychiatric Power. Trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Picador.
Furet, François. 1978 [1981]. Interpreting the French Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Geroulanos, Stefanos. 2017. Transparency in Postwar France: A Critical History of the Present. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Glissant, Édouard. 2006. Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Leroi-Gourhan, André. 1964–1965 [1993]. Gesture and Speech. Trans. Anna Bostock Berger. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1963 [1983]. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Founder of the Sciences of Man. In Structural Anthropology, vol. 2, trans. Monique Layton, 33–43. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lyotard, Jean-François. 1974 [1993]. Libidinal Economy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
———. 1979 [1984]. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
———. 1986 [1992]. The Postmodern Explained to Children. London: Turnaround.
Obama, Barack. 2009. Transparency and Open Government: Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies. January 21. www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/TransparencyandOpenGovernment. Last accessed 10 Jan 2017.
Résolution politique de la première session du premier Congrès de l’UJC (ml). 1967. In Les Cahiers marxistes-léninistes 15 (1967).
Rosanvallon, Pierre. 1979. Le Capitalisme utopique. Paris: Seuil.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1989. Dirty Hands. In No Exit and Three Other Plays. New York: Vintage Books.
Starobinski, Jean. 1957 [1988]. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Geroulanos, S. (2018). Transparency, Humanism, and the Politics of the Future Before and After May ’68. In: Alloa, E., Thomä, D. (eds) Transparency, Society and Subjectivity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77161-8_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77161-8_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-77160-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-77161-8
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)