Abstract

This dissertation shows how the theme of ethics became fascinating to the French intellectual-political Left in the decade following the student/worker revolts of May 1968. Those revolts had dramatically upset France, leading to the largest general strike in twentieth-century Europe and symbolizing a sea change in social mores and collective values. Explicit reference to ethics had been largely absent from the May events, but behind the Marxism and anarchism of many protagonists a powerful "ethics of liberation" could be discerned, an ethics best captured by the student slogan, "It is forbidden to forbid." During the 1970s, as it became clear to the far-Left minority that France was not going to experience an anticipated revolution, the contradictions of the "forbidden to forbid" sensibility worked themselves out, developed, and were transformed. By the time the post-1968 period drew to a close, with the election of Francois Mitterrand as President in 1981, the ethics of liberation had become one of the sources for widespread ethical fascination. Many who had spoken of "revolution" in 1968 gradually re-articulated their emancipatory hopes in the languages of ethics. ;May 1968 had opened a period of sweeping challenges to French social and political structures and of attempts to re-order relationships in daily life. Fundamental questions were asked about the individual's relationship to him or herself, others, institutions, the state, and humanity in general. I demonstrate the ethical dimensions of post-1968 French political and cultural history by weaving a braided narrative among four principal case studies: French Maoism and mobilization around prisons, "anti-Oedipal" glorification of schizophrenia which neglected practical psychiatric concerns, debate between feminists and male Leftists on the limits of desire, and the renunciation of political participation for metaphysical speculation and supra-statist humanitarianism by the so-called New Philosophers. ;Ethical discourses of the period were not without their ambiguities. Worthwhile developments, such as debate on the "intolerable" conditions of prisons or on new legislation to protect women from sexual violence, rested side-by-side with less compelling extremes, such as the call for "madness" to model social life or for "intergenerational" sexual relationships to be unconstrained. Some quarters of the intellectual-political French Left found in ethics a substitute for a defunct Marxism rapidly exiting the cultural scene. One of the legacies of 1960s and 1970s cultural-political agitation was a concern for and enchantment with ethics palpable for the remaining years of the twentieth century