Articles

Despite the tendency of decennial commemorations to cement the “official version” of May ’68, important questions remain unanswered. What exactly was the role of the police in the escalation of the violence (including the much overlooked fatalities in June)? Why did the Renault factory workers reject the concessions obtained in the Grenelle agreements? And was de Gaulle on the point of stepping down when he went to Baden-Baden? Chris Reynolds points out some blind spots in the increasingly stereotyped interpretation of the events in France forty years ago.

“If my philosophy has been of any use to me, it’s been to situate my monstrous condition within an order of general discourse.” Catalan philosopher and former Social Democratic MEP Xavier Rubert de Ventós talks in interview about his allergy to the law, why he finds the reactionary Céline more interesting than the liberal Rawls, and what he means by the “non-Fichtean ego”.

Large-scale social movements often behave provocatively but with the aim to make more space for democracy. The latest of these is the global justice movement born in Seattle in 1999. Magnus Wennerhag’s new book is the first major Swedish study on the impact of this movement. In the extract Arena publishes here, he shows how it differs from the movements of 1968, being more political and more directed towards international institutions and globalized democracy.

With the EU accession of Bulgaria and Romania, the Roma became the largest autochthonous ethnic minority within the Union, without this translating into political influence. While there is general agreement at the political level that socio-economic integration of Roma is desirable, neither the EU commission nor the national governments appear to be prepared to implement the necessary strategies to bring this about, writes Nikoleta Popkostadinova.

The alarmist reaction from parts of the German media to a recent spate of violent assaults by migrant youths on “native” Germans – talk has been of a cultural clash – bore striking similarities to last year’s controversy over the release from prison of two former members of the Red Army Faction. In both cases, media sympathy for the “victims” of violence fed directly into political campaigns targeting the majority’s sense of embattlement.

The fact that a Guggenheim museum is being planned in Vilnius is indicative of the conviction that cultural “de-provincialization” can only be achieved by taking part in global projects. Skaidra Trilupaityte describes how Frank Gehry’s “architectural miracle” in the former backwater of Bilbao marked the start of the Guggenheim Foundation’s policy of expansion that today has cities around the world queuing up to pay the Guggenheim license fee. Meanwhile, writes Trilupaityte, city planners ignore that the cultural needs of the local population are quite different from those of business and the tourist industry. Vilnius is not Bilbao!

Christopher Ricks, professor of humanities at Boston University and professor of poetry at Oxford University, is famous for his close readings of Milton, Keats, and Eliot, and also for his passion for the music of Bob Dylan. This culminated in his book Dylan’s “Visions of Sin” (2003), an analysis of Dylan’s lyrics that had some critics grumble that Ricks could talk one into believing that even a phone book is poetry. Ieva Lesinska, editor of Rigas Laiks, decided to find out for herself.

Hungary’s entry into the Schengen Zone in December 2007, along with eight other countries, brought a further relaxation of historical borders. While many communities have benefited, the process has not been without its absurdities, writes Gábor Miklósi.

While Nietzsche was an enemy of populism and egalitarianism, he was also an enthusiastic supporter of the struggle for liberty; his perfunctory endorsement of existing institutions sits alongside a proto-politics of drives and intensities. A Nietzschean politics is less a critique of political events so much as a diagnosis of the forces and tendencies driving them – and therein lies its liberalism, writes Béla Egyed.

The concept of psycho-trauma has gained widespread currency in poststructuralist literary theory. Yet what might be sign of hope for a more interdisciplinary approach to psycho-trauma on closer inspection turns out to be ambiguous, according Harald Weilnböck. Literary theory, he writes, often distorts what psycho-trauma means in clinical terms and, while gaining interdisciplinary cachet, repeats patterns of self-protection and transference. In the third and final instalment of this long essay, the author draws some troubling conclusions from Dr Goodheart’s excusrsus into poststructuralist trauma theory. Could it be that the poststructuralist interest in ensuring that “the trauma remains inaccessible to memory” is affiliated to institutional structures of power, control, and exclusion?

Europe is the exception to the global de-secularization of politics; at the same time, theoretical interest in theological issues has been rising in Europe over the past fifteen years. Placing Habermas’s “soft naturalism” against the “militant atheism” of Michel Onfray and Richard Dawkins, and borrowing Diderot’s concept of matérialisme enchanté, Sven-Eric Liedman warns against trivializing life’s wonders, be they of a technical nature or beyond our present conception.