From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought. By J. B <scp>ourg</scp> . Montreal &amp; Kingston, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007. xx + 468. Hb £17.99.

In the run up to May 1968, the British antipsychiatrist David Cooper was invited by Félix Guattari to speak at the latter's La Borde clinic. ‘The gist of his talk was that patients should stop taking their medication and have sex instead’ (p. 174). The death of a patient the following day would highlight La Borde founder Jean Oury's concern that his clinic had been reduced to a tourist attraction for leftist intellectuals indifferent to suffering. Similarly, antihumanist indifference would be echoed over the next decade by (Deleuzian) gay rights activists' dismissals of rape as a bourgeois legal fiction, not to mention the apparent willingness of Foucault et al. to consider paedophilia another interdiction it might henceforth be ‘défendu d'interdire’. From Revolution to Ethics draws drolly and repeatedly on such synechdoches to demonstrate the misadventures of intellectual hubris, the sense that May, for all its effervescence, gave rise to an ultimately ambiguous renewal of ethical discourse. Bourg rejects the oversimplification that, in the absence of long-term changes to the existing institutions of politics, the events of May amounted to little more than a surge of nihilistic individualism legitimated by the philosophical fantasy of a rupture either with or within metaphysics. Rather than a failed revolution, he argues, 1968 changed the terms of revolution, shifting to the register of ethics—questions of how to live, how to change one's stance in relation to institutions—in response to the apparent impossibility of the politics of institutional overthrow. ‘The transvaluation of revolution-to-ethics explains the era's continuity-in-change … it is indisputable that that 1968 led France on a road toward ethical fascination’ (p. 336). By way of illustration, the book traces a line through the fragmentation of the unified left into more specialized agencements in the fields of mental health (the institutional psychoanalysis that evolved around Guattari and La Borde); prisoner welfare, in the loosely Foucauldian Groupe d'information sur les prisons; and sexual politics, via the tensions between feminists' demands for legal equality and the more avowedly anarchistic ambitions of the male gay movement. The final chapter deals with the problematic culmination of this ethological turn in the ‘ethical Jansenism’ of the Nouveaux philosophes, whose retreat from politics was stigmatized as amateurish and insubstantial by the weightier maîtres à penser and whose combination of celebrity and political defeatism is often seen as a factor in the late 1970s' breakdown of the left. Readings of the forgotten figures of Maurice Clavel, Guy Lardreau and Lucien Goldmann insightfully draw out the impasse of abandoning politics for ethics suggested to be already implicit in those, including Deleuze, who had so vehemently criticized the upstarts. The claim has been made before, albeit less entertainingly, by Alain Badiou (Abrégé de métapolitique, Paris, Seuil, 1998). Bourg's very significant achievement is to have recast 1968 and its aftermath as a paradigm in which the bit-part players symptomatize the risks immanent to the work of the more illustrious, conferring more unity on the events' legacy than others have been willing to concede.

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