By 1960 ‘existentialism’ (like ‘structuralism’ a few years later) had become a general-purpose catchword, roughly approximating to ‘bohemian’ in earlier decades: the unemployed art students who came to hear the Beatles on the Reeperbahn in Hamburg all called themselves ‘Exis’.
164
In which case it might seem odd that the fashionable psychoanalytical theorist Jacques Lacan should have been popularly assimilated to the category. But Lacan was a special case. Even by the lax standards of Sixties-era Paris he remained quite remarkably ignorant of contemporary developments in medicine, biology and neurology, with no discernible harm to his practice or reputation.
165
The SPGB continues to the time of writing. Impervious to change, and too small to be adversely affected by its own irrelevance, it will presumably survive indefinitely.
166
Like Gramsci’s near-contemporary the German Marxist Karl Korsch, or the Austro-Marxist writers Otto Bauer and Rudolf Hilferding.
167
Althusser’s claim rested on a bizarre structuralist account of Marx, whose contemporary appeal to youthful seekers after Theory was directly proportional to its Jesuitical opacity (older scholars were unimpressed). But the assertion of authority was clear enough: there is only one proper way to think about Marx, he insisted, and it is mine. In France, Althusser’s star waned with the fall of the Party whose cause he espoused; today his obscurantist appeal is confined to the outer fringes of Anglo-Saxon academia.
168
They had a point. Thus Raoul Vaneigem, a Belgian Situationist, writing in 1967: ‘With a world of ecstatic pleasures to gain, we have nothing to lose but our boredom.’ It is hard to be sure, in retrospect, whether such slogans were witty, innocent or merely cynical. In any event, they did little to imperil the status quo.
169
This was a longstanding source of friction. In January 1966, after months of dispute at a student dormitory complex in Antony, in southern Paris, a newly appointed director had introduced what was then a radical regime. Girls and boys over twenty one could henceforth entertain members of the opposite sex in their dormitory rooms. Those under twenty one could do so with
170
The Minister for Youth, one Francois Missoffe, had come to Nanterre to open a new sports facility. Cohn- Bendit, a local student
171
To visit the French Army in Germany, as it transpired, and assure himself of its loyalty and availability were it to be called upon. But this was not known at the time.
172
This was palpably untrue. The French Communist Party had no coherent strategy in 1968, beyond pouring scorn on the student radicals and trying to preserve its influence in the labor movement. Seizing political power was quite beyond its ability or imagination.
173
There were no women among the student leaders. In contemporary photographs and newsreels girls can be seen prominently perched on the shoulders of their boyfriends, but they were at best the auxiliary foot soldiers of the student army. The youth revolt of 1968 talked a lot about sex, but was quite unconcerned with inequalities of gender.
174
Quoted in Robert Lumley,
