When a social mutation appears, it is not enough to draw the consequences or effects according to lines of economic or political causality. Society must be capable of forming collective agencies of enunciation that match the new subjectivity, in such a way that it desires its own mutation. It's a veritable redeployment. The American New Deal and the Japanese boom correspond to two very different examples of subjective redeployment, into all sorts of ambiguities and even reactionary structures. But they produced enough initiative and creativity to conceive new social states capable of responding to the demands of the event. Following 68 in France, on the contrary, the authorities never stopped living with the idea that "things will settle down". And indeed, things did settle down, but under catastrophic conditions. May 68 was neither the result of, nor a reaction to a crisis. It is rather the opposite. It is the current crisis in France, the impasse that stems directly from the inability of the French society to assimilate May 68. French society has shown a radical incapacity to create a subjective redeployment on the collective level, which is what 68 demands. In this light, how could it now trigger an economic redeployment that would ever satisfy the expectations of the "left"? French society never came up with anything for the people: nothing at school, nothing at work. Everything that was new was marginalized or reduces into caricature. Today we see the population of Longwy cling to their steel, the dairy farmers to their cows, etc. What else can they do? Every collective enunciation by a new existence, by a new collective subjectivity, was crushed in advance by the reaction against 68, on the left almost as much as on the right. Even by the "free radio stations". Each time it appeared, the possible was closed off.

The children of May 68, you can run into them all over the place, even if they are not aware of who they are. Each country produces them in its own way. Their situation isn't so great. These are not young executives. These are strangely indifferent, and for this very reason are in the right frame of mind. They have stopped being demanding and narcissistic, but they know perfectly well that nothing today corresponds to their subjectivity, to their potential of energy. They even know that all current reforms are rather directed against them. They are determined to mind their own business as much as they can. They hold it open, hang on to something possible. It is Coppola who created their poetized portrait in Rusty James. The actor Mickey Rourke explained: "The character is at the end of his rope, on the edge. He's not the Hell's Angel type. He's got brains and he's got good sense. But he hasn't got any university degree. And it is this combination that makes him go crazy. He knows that there's no job for him because he is smarter than any guy willing to hire him" (Libération, February 15, 1984).

This is true of the entire world. What we institutionalize for the unemployed, the retired, or in school, are controlled "situations of abandonment". For these, the handicapped are the model. The only subjective redeployments actually occurring collectively are those of an unbridled American-style capitalism, of a Muslim fundamentalism like in Iran, or of Afro-American religion like in Brazil: the reversed figures of a new orthodoxy (one should add European neo-Papism to the list). Europe has nothing to suggest, and France seems no longer to have any other ambition than to assume the leadership of an Americanized and over-armed Europe that would impose the necessary economic redeployment from above. But the field of the possible lives elsewhere. Along the East-West axis, in pacifism, insofar as it intends to break up not only relations of conflict and over-armament, but also of complicity and distribution between the United States and the Soviet Union. Along the North-South axis, in a new internationalism that no longer relies solely of an alliance with the third-world, but on the phenomena of third-worldification in the rich countries themselves (the evolution of metropolises, the decline of the inner-cities, the rise of a European third-world, as Paul Virilio has theorized them). There can only be creative solutions. These are the creative redeployments that can contribute to a resolution of the current crisis and that can take over where a generalized May 68, amplified bifurcation or fluctuation, left off.

...Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but...life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.

Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. there is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.

History progresses not by negation and the negation of negation, but by deciding problems and affirming differences. It is no less bloody and cruel as a result. Only the shadows of history live by negation...

[Spinoza] denounces all the falsifications of life, all the values in the name of which we disparage life. We do not live, we only lead a semblance of life; we can only think of how to keep from dying, and our whole life is a death worship.

We have pushed a process into a goal. The aim of any process is not the perpetuation of that process, but the completion thereof....

Laughter has the remarkable power of making an object come up close, of drawing it into a zone of crude contact with the reality where one can finger it familiarly on all sides, turn it upside down, inside out, peer at it from above and bellow, break open its external shell, look into its center, doubt it, take it apart, dismember it, lay it bare and expose it, examine it freely and experiment with it. Laughter demolishes fear and piety, before an object, before a world, making of it an object of familiar contact and thus clearing the ground for an absolutely free investigation of it. . . . Familiarization of the world through laughter and popular speech is an extremely important and indispensable step in making free, scientifically knowable and artistically realistic creativity in European civilization.

To be pressured by meaning signifies that one must appear as if carried away by what one is meant to carry.