‘The 1968 years’ draw into memory the thoughts and images of other dates, protests, and political formations worldwide. The Naxalite movement of India was as different from the French May as was the Prague Spring from the Hungarian Uprising. Yet each gathered currents of ideas, energies, tactics – in brief, memories – from others and then released them into the world again. These are ‘dates without places’ which became possible after the Second World War, giving us to think not the excess of ‘68 but that which was in excess of ‘68: intertwined insurrectionary components, only some of which were ‘local’ while others were more mobile and remote. They reveal memory as a contagion of the imagination which must cease to be defined only in relation to the past, or to a place, and must instead be recognized as the faculty relating to the future. Memories of imagination do not commemorate particular events, places, or even forms like ‘protest’ and ‘resistance.’ They gather through the homologies and analogies perceived by the imagination. Homology obtains the memories of the powers of constructability in an object by transporting it materially into a new reality, while analogy maintains the memories of the partial powers of the abstractability of an object in imagination. May ‘68 and other dates without places harbour the memory of this imagination which opens new spans for things, their range of actualizable trajectories. Some of these memories have carried forward to the great recent protests – Occupy, Syntagma Square, the Arab Spring – but we live less and less in a time when the semblance of Elias Canetti’s ‘open crowds’ can harbour imagination in politics. Our time would have to discover for itself the hidden spans of these twenty-first-century components, such that our memories of our own imagination remain actualizable.

“ 1968年”将世界各地其他约会，抗议活动和政治组织的思想和影像铭记在心。印度的纳萨尔派运动与法国五月运动不同，匈牙利起义带来的布拉格之春也与之不同。然而，每个人都从他人那里收集了思想，活力，策略的记忆-简而言之，就是记忆，然后又将它们释放到了世界中。这些是第二次世界大战后可能发生的“没有地方的约会”，使我们认为不是'68的多余部分，而是超过'68的部分：纠缠的起义分子，只有其中一部分是“本地的”，而其他则是“本地的”更加移动和远程。它们揭示的记忆是想象力的传染，必须不再仅仅根据过去或某个地方来定义它，而必须将其视为与未来有关的能力。想象力的记忆并不纪念特定的事件，地点，甚至不纪念“抗议”和“抵抗”之类的形式。他们通过想象中发现的同源性和类比来收集。同源性通过将对象实质性地转移到新的现实中来获得对象的可构造性力量的记忆，而类比法则在想象中保持了对象抽象性的部分力量的记忆。68年5月及其他没有地点的日期怀有这种想像力，这为事物及其可实现的轨迹范围打开了新的跨越。这些记忆中的一些已经延续到最近的抗议活动中-占领，宪法广场，阿拉伯之春，但在伊莱亚斯·卡内蒂（Elias Canetti）的“开放人群”的外表可以在政治中发挥想象力的时代，我们的生活越来越少。