“[…] Becoming isn’t part of history; history amounts only the set of preconditions, however recent, that one leaves behind in order to ‘become,’ that is, to create something new. This is precisely what Nietzsche calls the Untimely. May 68 was a demonstration, an irruption, of a becoming in its pure state.” (Gilles Deleuze)1 [1]

The concept of the event has never been – with the possible exception of the Stoics – a particularly central category of classic philosophy. Nevertheless, it permeates the entire history of occidental thinking. Yet if the event is taking on a new significance in political thinking today, this is not a return of the same, but rather a repetition of difference. What does the question of the event involve? What is meant by this? An initial brief answer could be: the event is the irruption of a historical singularity. But we also wonder: Where does the question of the event come from specifically in contemporary philosophy?

For many years historians have attempted to reconstruct continuities below the fissured development of history. Ruptures, gaps, discontinuities, those were more disruptive elements that were supposed to be mended, filled or simply erased by historical interpretation. Since the 1950s, however, a new dimension of temporality has emerged in historical research: the problem of discontinuity, ruptures, gaps shifted to the center of historical reflection. Discontinuity was thus no longer something that history studies were supposed to gloss over or eliminate, but instead became an important moment of historical research.2 [2] Alongside and below the molarity of universalist historiography, events take place that call for a different dimension of temporality.

Of course, this epistemological change did not first take place in the twentieth century. It can be traced back to Marx, who opened up molar history with a molecular analysis of production conditions and the class struggle. But a new epistemology also begins with Nietzsche and his conception of genealogy. Counter to Marx, however, a new universal history was sketched out, which was again to do away with all differences; a new universal history, in which the subject was to be able to play its foundational function, historical consciousness to find its unity, and the revolution to be interpreted as a consciousness-raising process. Counter to Nietzsche, attempts were made to restore transcendental philosophy and to reduce genealogy to the search for an origin.

What does this have to do with the event? The concept of the event questions the correlation between continuous history, logos, sense, project, origin and return, and allows the question to emerge about the difference and the singularity of the present. Its two components arise here: the first component relates to the genealogical question, which investigates the event as something that constitutes and crosses through us. In a sense, this is the explanation of the event, under the star of which we stand: the event as a con-stellation. The second component refers to the search for an eventful break, which introduces a difference into the present: the event as a flash of lightning.

So the event is not simply the break between two phases or periods, which are separated by the event into different times. This would still mean that we are content with a continuous conception of time. A time or an era, however, is not a unit. And the event is not an innovation, because innovation remains on the surface of things. Innovations can vanish with the moment that engendered them. The event has more to do with the idea of the beginning, the inizio, as Machiavelli uses the term. Machiavelli considers the concept of the beginning as something that is anchored in things. The beginning determines everything and does not vanish with the moment. The beginning lasts with the thing itself.

Let us take May 1968 as an exemplary event. It is an event that comprises both: the constellation and the break. But what does that actually mean: an event? Does this one event happen individually or singularly, as a unit or as a multiplicity? We say, at first it is unique, a singularity. Yet to this singularity the plural inheres, and there is also a tendency that inheres to it, which does not allow the event to be grasped either as unified or as isolated. In May 1968, of course there were the days of the “sand under the pavement” in Paris, the time when “power to imagination” was called for most intensively. Just looking at this brief period of time, however, already makes it clear that a multiplicity of events were involved, also a concatenation with other events happening far away from Paris.

It seems that there are two temporalities of the event in general, but also two temporalities of ‘1968’: one of the present becoming and one of duration. There is the plural singularity of that May itself, and it seems as though that May also expanded into the time thereafter as well as into the time before. A veritable mole, or rather – to invoke the animal of control societies – a valiant snake, whose coils are “much more complicated than the tunnels of a mole’s burrow”. Two temporalities: event and history, contingency and continuum, in a sense these are only two different modes of the snake. Naturally the snake winds its way throughout the entire 1960s and appears frequently, not only in the ‘West’, but also in very different places: one time in Cuba, another in Berlin, another in Strasbourg, another in Shanghai, another in San Francisco, another in Korčula – or in many other places that have vanished from our collective memory and our geopolitical perspective.

The event ‘1968’ has also appeared after 1968 recurrently in the stream of history that is not at all uniform and smooth. First, in the 1970s, as the common experience of one (or several) generations that let a thousand micropolitics bloom, but which quickly became entangled in the striations of the cadre, of small identitary groups, of armed conflicts. Then, not much later, it became an object of desire in the struggles of classifying the event in diverse ideological, mostly nationally shaped memories and in the struggles to control the interpretation of the manifold narratives of May. And gradually molar historiography becomes newly hegemonic as it seeks to isolate the event from history as a rupture, either in an affirmative movement as an emotional celebration of the revolutionary break, or as an obliteration of the event in its reduction to a travesty.

The older they become, the more harshly renegades take stock of the event. Since the 1970s3 [3] there has been a specific German renegade genealogy of 1968, which culminated only recently in Götz Aly’s book Unser Kampf: this German genealogy reduces the complex issue of the Anti- Semitism of the left to the formula that the people of the 1968 generation are nothing other than ‘Hitler’s children’. In France the renegade function was taken over by several of the Nouveaux Philosophes, whose entire program, according to Gilles Deleuze, was no more than a “hatred of 68”. As early as 1977 Deleuze said: “It was a competition to see who could piss on May ’68 the most. And they have constructed their expressing subject in terms of this hatred: ‘We were there in ’68 (they were?), and we can tell you it was stupid, there is no point doing it again.’”4 [4]

That is the number, that is the card trick that still works extremely well today: those who were more or less a part of things, instrumentalize their witnessing to tie down, distort or revile the event in their sense, in order to come to terms with it. The admission of having made a mistake then makes them appear even more credibly right: the renegades insist on this as ‘authentic’, albeit meanwhile negative guardians of the event – also a form of “loyalty to the event”.5 [5]

To return to the two temporalities, first of all to the aspects that focus attention more on duration: duration as molecular revolution, as a lasting transformation of life styles, as aesthetics of existence. In his last lecture, Le Courage de la Verité, in 1984, Michel Foucault spoke of a second face of revolution, with which the revolution is no longer interpreted as a political project, but rather as a rearrangement of modes of existence: “Activism attested by life in the form of a lifestyle […] necessarily represents a break with the conventions, habits and values of society. Through its visible form, through its persistent practice and its immediate existence, it must directly show the concrete possibility and the obvious value of a different manner of living, which is true life.”6 [6] For Foucault, it is by no means a figure of the authentic that is evident in this ‘different’, ‘true’ life, which is also supposed to be a good life and a beautiful life. The aesthetics of existence is specifically not given by nature, but rather develops first through intensive techniques of self-formation. It is something that must be practiced for a long time as care for the self and for others. Foucault’s discussion of deviant forms of living, for instance of the Cynics – and here we can mentally add the transformations of modes of existence after 1968, especially the feminist transformations of the second women’s movement – attributes a special quality specifically to these deviant existences. In their deviation and in their insistence on an “inner world activism that turns against the world”7, [7] they change the world, indeed they create new worlds.

Shortly after the end of Foucault’s lectures and a month before his early death, a short essay was published again in May 1984 of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s reflections on 1968 with the title Mai 68 n’a pas eu lieu (May 68 Did Not Take Place,). The essay begins with the thesis that something is attested to the event, through which it eludes causal chains: in historical phenomena like the major revolutions or the Paris Commune “there is always one part of the event that is irreducible to any social determinism, or to causal chains. Historians are not very fond of this point: they restore causality after the fact. Yet the event itself is a splitting off from, a breaking with causality; it is a bifurcation, a lawless deviation, an unstable condition that opens up a new field of the possible.”8 [8]

A new field of the possible, new possible worlds, engendered by the deviation of lifestyles, that is what links Foucault’s “aesthetics of existence” and Guattari’s “molecular revolution”. Deleuze and Guattari emphasize: “An event can be turned around, repressed, co-opted, betrayed, but still something survives that cannot be outdated. Only traitors could say it’s outdated. Even ancient, an event can never be outdated. It is an opening onto the possible. It enters as much into the interior of individuals as into the depths of a society.”9

The event as singularity writes a difference into the present. The question of the present as difference is what Immanuel Kant made it possible to think, when he raised the question of the French Revolution as a major event. His answer is also very important for us, because it enables us to more precisely clarify what can be understood as a molecular revolution. In the Conflict of the Faculties, Kant says that we should seek the hint of change not in major events, but rather in events that are not so spectacular. What is important about revolution for him is not the molar view of the major event, but rather how revolution is lived, also and especially by the people who do not take part in it. What happens in the minds of the people who do not do the revolution (as a major event)?

Kant’s reflection opens up a way of understanding revolutionary becoming: revolutionary becoming that as present becoming counters the idea of a future of revolution. Revolutionary becoming is not merely a hedonistic carpe diem, it is a political experiment. The event is not inscribed in a straight line from the past to the future. It is always thought that the event has a goal; but the event is a mutation in collective perception, a rearrangement of labor, of knowledge, of childhood, of time, of sexuality.

If there is a double temporality of the event, then in the end it must also be said of the moment, present becoming, the event in its singularity, that it returns. It returns, and in its return the event repeats itself in a different way. It is, for instance, the way the occupation of the Paris theater Odéon in May 1968 relates to the occupations of theaters in Paris by the Intermittents some thirty-five years later.10 [10] On 15 May 1968, students and artists stormed the Odéon after the performance. Instead of the conventional performances and the actions of representational theater, for a brief period the theater became a space of political agency, a center of the student revolts. Oliver Marchart has pointed out that the theater became not only a site of political agency in May 68, but was also brought back to the streets again.11 [11] The theater props of the Odéon were used as media of transgression alongside the barricades, just as the Pink Silver Blocks joined the Black Blocks in the last decade. Protestors were suddenly costumed as Roman legionaries, pirates and princesses. In fact, the theater became not only a site of political agency, but also spread into the streets of Paris.

And something similar happened about thirty-five years later in the movement of the Intermittents. After the founding of the Coordination des Intermittents et Précaires d’Île de France in the theater La Colline in Paris, the movement shifted to the Théâtre Olympe de Gouges. From there, the Intermittents’ discourses and forms of organization spread out into the entire city; the precarization of cultural workers became a central building block in a newly constituent power. According to Maurizio Lazzarato, specifically as the event fell back into history, the actors invented and constructed “forms of speaking and doing, modalities of ‘being together’ (desire to govern themselves) and modalities of ‘being against something’ (the will not to be governed), specifically at the start of the discontinuity initiated by the event”.12 [12]

68 is one name for this kind of discontinuity, for a constellation, a star, under which many of us stand, whether they consciously experienced the year 1968 or not; one name for the confusion of continuities and discontinuities, in which “May” happened as a singular plurality. Or better yet: as a chain of events that are still and newly introducing a difference into the present.

Translation from German to English by Aileen Derieg.

[1] Gilles Deleuze, “Control and Becoming”, in: ibid., Negotiations, Columbia University Press, 1995, p. 171

[2] Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, Pantheon Books, New York, 1972, Introduction.

[3] Cf. Jillian Becker, Hitler’s Children. The Story of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, New York, 1977.

[4] Gilles Deleuze, On the New Philosophers (plus a More General Problem), in ibid., Two Regimes of Madnesse. Texts and Interviews 1975-1995, Semiotext(e), 2007, p. 144.

[5] On the turn to “loyalty to the event”, see the relevant writing by Alain Badiou, but also Georg Simmel, who described renegades in 1908 as a manifestation, in which “a typical loyalty against one’s new political, religious or other party” could be observed.

[6] Michel Foucault, Le Courage de la vérité. Le Gouvernement de Soi et des autres, II. Cours au Collège de France 1984, Gallimard/Seuil, Paris, 2009, p. 170.

[7] Ibid. p. 262.

[8] Gilles Deleuze / Félix Guattari, May 68 Didn’t Happen, in ibid., Two Regimes of Madness, p. 233.

[9] Ibid.

[10] On the Intermitents, see the work by Antonella Corsani and Maurizio Lazzarato.

[11] Cf. Oliver Marchart, “Staging the Political. (Counter-)Publics and the Theatricality of Acting”, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0605/marchart/en.

[12] Maurizio Lazzarato in an unpublished lecture held at the Shedhalle in Zurich in October 2010.

1. Gilles Deleuze, “Control and Becoming”, in: ibid., Negotiations, Columbia University Press, 1995, p. 171↩
2. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, Pantheon Books, New York, 1972, Introduction.↩
3. Cf. Jillian Becker, Hitler’s Children. The Story of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, New York, 1977.↩
4. Gilles Deleuze, On the New Philosophers (plus a More General Problem), in ibid., Two Regimes of Madnesse. Texts and Interviews 1975-1995, Semiotext(e), 2007, p. 144.↩
5. On the turn to “loyalty to the event”, see the relevant writing by Alain Badiou, but also Georg Simmel, who described renegades in 1908 as a manifestation, in which “a typical loyalty against one’s new political, religious or other party” could be observed.↩
6. Michel Foucault, Le Courage de la vérité. Le Gouvernement de Soi et des autres, II. Cours au Collège de France 1984, Gallimard/Seuil, Paris, 2009, p. 170.↩
7. Ibid. p. 262.↩
8. Gilles Deleuze / Félix Guattari, May 68 Didn’t Happen, in ibid., Two Regimes of Madness, p. 233.↩
9. Ibid.↩
10. On the Intermittents, see the work by Antonella Corsani and Maurizio Lazzarato.↩
11. Cf. Oliver Marchart, “Staging the Political. (Counter-)Publics and the Theatricality of Acting”, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0605/marchart/en.↩
12. Maurizio Lazzarato in an unpublished lecture held at the Shedhalle in Zurich in October 2010.↩