A good half-century after the events, May ’68 is still viewed as a generational countercultural revolt. Granted, this Cold War notion was rejected after 1989 from positions as diverse as those of Braudelian world-systems analysis and Rancièrian theory of political subjectivation. Moreover, both of these approaches demythologized the Cold War May by expanding the spatiotemporal perspective. Yet such a contextualization of the events enables us not only to replace the counterculture with economy or politics, but also to conceptualize it. With the counterculture no longer isolated in space from culture in general, no longer separated in time from the overall conjuncture condensed by May, we can look at the long sixties beyond 1968, and at 1968 beyond France; we can read the world movement with world literature; and we can resist the period’s obsession with the New (from the New Left to the New Philosophers) to see that the real aesthetic and conceptual innovations could only have come from anti- and postcolonial discourses. These are the main goals of this cluster of essays on May ’68.

事件发生半个世纪以来，68年5月仍然被视为一代代反文化起义。诚然，这种冷战概念在1989年以后就被各种观点所拒绝，这些观点包括布劳德世界体系的分析和兰契安的政治主观理论。此外，这两种方法都通过扩大时空视角来揭开冷战五月的神秘面纱。然而，事件的这种背景化使我们不仅可以用经济或政治代替反文化，而且可以将其概念化。由于反文化不再在空间上与一般文化隔离，在时间上不再与五月所凝聚的总体融合分离，我们可以看看1968年以后的六十年代，以及法国之外的1968年。我们可以用世界文学来阅读世界运动；我们可以抵制该时期对新事物（从新左派到新哲学家）的痴迷，以了解真正的美学和概念创新只能来自反殖民和后殖民的话语。这些是68年5月撰写的论文集的主要目标。