The Melancholy Left by Bruno Bosteels

In 68, Paco Ignacio Taibo II notes: "Today the movement of '68 is one more Mexican specter, one of the many unredeemed and sleepless specters that haunt our land. "1 Of course, the image repeats that of the specter or ghost whose haunting force runs through the first pages of The Communist Manifesto, an image that was taken up in turn in the 1960s by some of the most outspoken actors in the student-popular movements in the world, from the brothers Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit in France, whose Leftism as a Remedy Against the Senile Disease of Communism (a clever inversion of Lenin's Leftism as a Childhood Disease of Communism) begins with the lines "A specter haunts the world today, the specter of the students,"2 all the way to the fragment "Un fantasma recorre México" ("A Phantasm or Specter Haunts Mexico"), which is José Revueltas's first published text on the student movement, written shortly after the massacre that took place on the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, in the Tlatelolco neighborhood of Mexico City.3 In other words, 1968 becomes a ghost not only for its inheritors today; at the time of the events themselves, the force of the movement already appeared as a formidable specter. It would be a mistake, however, to subsume all these uses of the spectral or phantasmatic image into a vast ontology, or hauntology of the specter, similar to that presented by Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Even under one and the same translucent cloak, no ghost ever presents itself twice with the same appearance. In France, for instance, immediately after the events of May-June 1968, to invoke the specter of leftism still entailed launching a double threat, certainly against the government of Charles de Gaulle but also-this time ironically, if we recall the famous first political use of the specter-against the orthodoxy of the Communist Party. In Mexico, by contrast, the gesture of conjuring up the ghost, even if it retains the charge of intimate rebellion against the regime of President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, is not without a strong undercurrent of obstinate melancholy as a result of the repression that took place on October 2, 1968, when more than 200 students, activists and bystanders were shot by government forces. It is this violent act of military repression that, to this day, is remembered in Mexico with the words "2 de octubre no se olvida" ("October 2, we won't forget").

An event, then, appears as a ghost both for what it no longer is and for what it has yet to be. In one case, it ciphers the memory of an annihilated possibility; in the other, the glimpse of a promise that is perhaps on the verge of becoming real. Ghosts or phantasms can mark the death of the ideas from the old world, as well as announcing a new principle of life. "It is true that the old world belongs to the philistine. But one should not treat the latter as a ghost from which to recoil in fear. On the contrary, we ought to stare the ghost in the eye," Marx warned in one of his letters to Arnold Ruge, five years before the upheavals of 1848. And he ended his letter: "For our part, we must expose the old world to the full light of day and shape the new one in a positive way. The longer the time that events allow to thinking humanity for taking stock of its position, and to suffering humanity for mobilising its forces, the more perfect on entering the world will be the product that the present time bears in its womb. "4 The anchoring point for the figure of the ghost is always a break on the extreme edge where the old bears the new, either to give in to what is gestating there or else to tie it down with the threads of the past. Today, these two postures are perhaps only two sides of the same coin, one that from passing from hand to hand ends up losing its inscription forever.