Waking Up from May '68 and the Repressive Hangover : Stages of Critique Past Althusser and Foucault

Abstract

Following the May '68 student and worker uprisings in Paris, Foucault and Althusser reworked their analyses of power in order to take account of the social and political forces that had effectively squelched the revolutionary moment. At first, they organized their analyses around the notion of repression; but quickly thereafter, they reoriented their analyses toward the more productive dimensions of repressive power, with the ambition to unearth the sources of reproduction of social processes, practices, and institutions. Despite explicit rejections of the repressive model, however, a "repressive hangover" continued to have a significant effect on the style of critique that emerged in the 1970s. Foucault would eventually overcome it beginning in about 1980, after studying neoliberal governmentality in his 1979 lectures, The Birth of Biopolitics, and returning to theme of subjectivity: his exploration of the arts of living, of techniques of the self, of the care of the self can be interpreted as an effort to incorporate elements that would previously have fallen under the rubric of repression into the deeper subjective processes of the formation of the self. However, it is not critical theory or its evolution that would finally extricate us from the repressive hangover, so much as new digital technologies and the Internet of Things: the emergence of new conceptions of power in the digital age, tied to desire and jouissance, should finally allow us to get beyond the limitations of the post '68 repressive hangover.