The Vincennes Event and the Afterlife of May 68 in the Pedagogical Thought of Deleuze and Rancière

Abstract

We propose an analysis of May 68 and of its afterlife in the pedagogical reflections of two thinkers who were able to transform the initial stimuli of revolutionary criticism into a creative power. Like the rebellious students, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière questioned the outdated and impoverished higher education of their time. We highlight their common crossing point, the Centre Universitaire Expérimental de Vincennes (Paris VIII), an institution created by the government in the aftermath of the insurrection which became known as an “anti-Sorbonne”, where research was cultivated in small groups and within an unprecedented multidisciplinary framework. It was there that Deleuze experienced his transformation as an educator, developing a musical conception of teaching. It was in Vincennes, finally, that Rancière began to tread his path of intellectual emancipation, culminating in the radical notion that thought is an exercise that presupposes equality to reach difference, dispensing any tutors or mediators.