Distant Immediacy: Badiou and Rancière on May ’68 and its Consequences

This article on the French May ’68 addresses the gap between the immediacy of the event and the series of consequences that are supposed to have followed from it. In the eyes of the critics of May ’68 from all sides of the political spectrum, the events in France have been considered as having no consequence at all, as having no political but merely cultural consequences, or as producing political consequences that were opposite to the intentions of their actors. To these interpretations, which all account for the distance between the event and its consequences by means of completely disjointing the latter from the former, the article opposes two reflections on May ’68 – those by Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière – that attempt to examine the consequences of the very immediacy of the politics practised by the actors of the events, a politics that operates at a distance from mediation, representation and postponement. Badiou and Rancière propose some similar conclusions, but also two very different ways of reading the immediacy of the event.