Missing the 68´ mistimes. Past Futures for Absent-Minded Presents

Abstract

Between ironic distance and weeping gesture, the memory of the so-called “most historical year of contemporary history” is threatened of being petrified after returning to a past seen as strange and alien to the coordinated of the present. Unlike that generation that thought its future as the expectation of a progress, that left behind consumption and bureaucracy, ours, disaffected with the emancipatory future of modernity and the distopic present in which we are progressively sunk, directs its gaze towards a past. In this past the possible and desirable have been devastated by the practice of the known as impassable, leaning toward retrotopic views that make the past a place we should have never abandoned. This paper proposes an interpretative reading of the memories of 1968 departing from the theoretical assumptions of oral history and cultural studies of memory. Considering the way by which subjects represent historical time to give meaning to their lives, the text rethinks the 68 from the actuality of their future pasts, inviting to recover part of its utopian surplus for the futures awaiting to come.