Conceived 51 years after the global workers’ and student revolt of May 1968, this Focus will break down the theoretical and literary legacy of May into three intervals of 17 years. In 1985, 17 years after 1968, Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut published a book, La pensée 68, in which they canonized the view that the theoretical underpinning of May ’68 was provided by French structuralist thinkers, notably Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Lacan (see Ferry and Renaut 1985; for the English translation, see Ferry and Renaut 1990). Seventeen years later, in 2002, Kristin Ross’s book May ’68 and its Afterlives effectively replaced this canonical image with the notion that French structuralists were all either completely absent or showed at least great reserve during the events of May and that, moreover, the closest theoretical allies of the protesters and strikers were in fact the main philosophical targets of structuralist anti-humanists, namely Jean-Paul Sartre and Herbert Marcuse with their schools of humanist Marxism (see Ross 2002). Seventeen years after Ross’s seminal book, it may be time to negate both the thesis from 1985 and Ross’s antithesis from 2002, and ask the following simple question: why, despite the massive presence of Sartre and Marcuse, and the equally massive absence of Foucault, Derrida, Bourdieu and Lacan, but also Gilles Deleuze and Louis Althusser, has the memory politics of May ’68 during the past half-century included the canonization of structuralism and post-structuralism at the expense of none other than humanism, be it Marxist or non-Marxist?

The numerous interpretations and evaluations of 1968 that have been developed over the past half-century can arguably be divided into two. On one side, there are those accounts that regard 1968 as the threshold across which an older form of modernity passed to become what student revolutionaries of the period began to call late capitalism; and although late capitalism itself quickly became a fissured thing, this view has become orthodox. On the other side, there are those who insist that ’68 was a Badiousian event, an outbreak of liberatory possibilities to which we not only have a responsibility to remain faithful, but which provided a template for later more or less insurrectionary movements; undoubtedly the strongest argument for ’68’s enduring radical meaning and potential has been made by Kristin Ross in her 2002 book, May ’68 and its Afterlives. This article is partly committed to arguing for a middle way between these two views. I accept that the processes leading to and following the events of 1968 triggered the development of a new kind of capitalist society as well as formed the template for the radicalisms we now have. This mediation might seem to involve a contradiction, but in the end it is more accurate not to see these two views as they see themselves, namely as enemies, but rather as dialectically and functionally united. Without the kind of capitalism that the 1960s triggered, no radical movement politics; without radical, post-communist movement politics, no such late capitalism. To see that, we need to think about ’68 in larger contexts and terms than is usual. I will call the context I wish to bring to bear general secularization.

This article on the French May ’68 addresses the gap between the immediacy of the event and the series of consequences that are supposed to have followed from it. In the eyes of the critics of May ’68 from all sides of the political spectrum, the events in France have been considered as having no consequence at all, as having no political but merely cultural consequences, or as producing political consequences that were opposite to the intentions of their actors. To these interpretations, which all account for the distance between the event and its consequences by means of completely disjointing the latter from the former, the article opposes two reflections on May ’68 – those by Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière – that attempt to examine the consequences of the very immediacy of the politics practised by the actors of the events, a politics that operates at a distance from mediation, representation and postponement. Badiou and Rancière propose some similar conclusions, but also two very different ways of reading the immediacy of the event.

This article offers a polemical comparison between conceptualizations of the University in the late 1960s and now. It has two main sections. The first and more substantial of these sections focuses on the left-wing student movements of the 1960s. These were underpinned by an understanding of the University as a political site: that is, an institutional formation and space structured by the ruling order. As such, the University was considered a locus of social contradictions, and could be occupied, extended and opened up, reformed, performed against the ruling order, and even abandoned or left behind. These different agendas are exemplified by drawing opportunistic lines from May 1968 in Paris to student movements in other contexts – Belgrade, Berlin, Berkeley, Tunis, Beijing, Kolkata – and back. A short section then comments on how the University has fared as a political site since. The entrenchment of managerialism, removal of policy-informing research to non-University centres, and dispersal of the University between material and digital spaces are some of the developments that are noted.

As part of the Yugoslav in-between periphery, Ljubljana became a site of interaction between an antisystemic movement, literature and theory, the fields that in Paris were arguably only co-present during the long 1968. Following Franco Moretti and Perry Anderson’s notion of modernism as a cultural field of force experiencing the imaginative proximity of social revolution, the experimental literature of the 1960s may be viewed as the last season of modernism. This is when modernism in Slovenia synchronized with Paris, the metropole that Pascale Casanova has described as the Greenwich meridian of literary modernity. Peripheries in the literary world-system are, for Moretti, forced into a belated compromise between local perspectives and globalized forms emanating from metropoles. In this case, however, it is due to its peripherality that Slovenian literature was able to produce an innovative political interlacement of theory and literature (for example, the internationally acclaimed neo-avant-garde group OHO and the Ljubljana Lacanian circle). In the 1960s and 1970s, the Ljubljana student journal Tribuna published experimental literature, (post)structuralist theory and antisystemic political writings. The mere contiguity of these discourses evoked their interaction. Even stronger modes of interaction characterized their production and mediation, such as writer-theorists translating French theory or various hybrids of theory and literature. Slavoj Žižek’s early hybrid texts show the emergence of theory as a parasite of literature and philosophy. They deconstruct the (nationalist) author function. A scandal provoked by Žižek in 1967 foretells the split of the ‘68 avant-garde between the theoretical and literary faction in the 1970s.

This article examines some of Slavoj Žižek’s very first texts, beginning with the poem-treatises he first published in the journal Problemi in May, 1968. It analyses how the imagery of rupture – born out of the spirit of ’68 – emerged as a key spatial metaphor that would go on to shape the theoretical topography of the philosophical platform of the now world-renowned Ljubljana School of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Beginning with Žižek’s usage of the term ‘razpor’ (‘break’) in his first poem-treatises, the article traces how this early concept is refined into the notion of ‘razdor’ in his first book, Bolečina razlike (The Pain of Difference, 1972), and finally into the later usage of ‘razcep’, which would go on to become a central concept for the entire Ljubljana School. Ultimately, the article documents the intellectual history of the notion of the ‘break’ in Žižek’s early work, thereby providing the genealogy of a concept that would later become a key component of the Ljubljana School’s theoretical platform.

Early in 2020, while we were preparing for the Chinese lunar calendar’s New Year’s Day and Spring Festival on 25 January, the Covid-19 first appeared in Wuhan, the capital city of Hubei Province and one of China’s biggest cities. The virus quickly spread through the entire country, causing thousands of people to lose their lives and many more to be hospitalized or quarantined. As a natural disaster suddenly appearing in the present world, the virus is a kind of revenge of nature upon human beings, who have exhausted the earth’s natural resources, ill-treated nature, and sometimes continued eating wild animals during the past few decades, as the grand project of modernity led to a process of globalization. The Butterfly Effect of this Black Swan, the coronavirus, set off a global upheaval. In China itself, through the joint efforts of ordinary people and medical personnel as well as central and local government intervention, the virus was effectively contained. Cases imported from abroad still flare up now and again though, and the epidemic escalates globally. Since this is a global health emergency, it should be contained by global governance.

Shortly after hosting the Seventh CISM Military World Games, the city of Wuhan was hit by Covid-19, and thus became a centre of global attention. To protect the life and health of the people in Wuhan, China declared an all-out war to contain the virus. Using drastic measures that exacted high socio-economic costs, Wuhan was gradually restored to peace, vitality, and prosperity. In a city under lockdown, coordination, management, and governance at different levels were facilitated by information and communication technologies. This article examines the enhanced capabilities of individuals and institutions in a digital age to respond to crises, and the debates and ideological entanglements relating to the virus. It concludes with an anticipation of the ‘New Normal’ after the pandemic by responding to Giorgio Agamben’s views on the ‘state of exception’.

Given its special geographical location and size, Shanghai is a key hub linking world and locality, in this case China, in the implementation of anti-Covid-19 measures. By coordinating all the work according to the rule of law, Shanghai has outlined the basic framework for fighting the epidemic; by establishing the community grid governance model, Shanghai has soundly harnessed the ‘political potential energy’ and effectively filled in the internal mechanism of anti-Covid-19 and urban governance; and by respecting professionalism and the role of the masses, Shanghai seized the best opportunity to fight against the epidemic. Therefore, Shanghai has built up public value and gained spiritual support to fight against the epidemic and fundamentally improved the governance efficiency of the city. The experience of Shanghai’s anti-epidemic measures and governance forms an organic whole through mutual embedding and ultimately relies on efficient and fair governance.

This article analyses Chongqing Daily’s narratives about the front-line workers during the pandemic outbreak and their role in containing the Covid-19. These narratives foreground the disruption of filial connections and family life of those on the front lines as well as the physical toll their work takes on the bodies of these workers. By highlighting the suffering of front-line workers through familiar experiences relating to the body and family connections, this article argues that these narratives enabled inter-subjective connections between the front-line workers and the rest of the population and, therefore, helped foster a feeling of solidarity among the population in controlling the virus. The descriptions about the practices of front-line workers in the quarantined areas and their social moral meaning also functioned as action models and explanatory frameworks for the public to rationalize and assign meaning to the behaviour required of them during the lockdown period, and thus encouraged a shared commitment to combating the virus. Thus, the Chongqing Daily narratives strengthened the social cohesion in Chongqing and helped unite the population for a total war against the pandemic.

The Covid-19 pandemic reminds people of the 1918 influenza pandemic which lasted for two years and which is estimated to have taken between 17 million to 50 million lives. The current Covid-19 pandemic, a force majeure, causing tension between states and the distancing of people physically, is steering the world into an unknown future. This article attempts to delineate the biopolitical practices in Beijing, from spring to summer, in the dimensions of the disciplinary supervision of government work, the allocation of medical resources, and the implementation of social control. Therein lies the mingling of sovereign power and biopower, conceptualized as a mutated pattern of ‘governmentality’. The public obedience to strict social control, an expression of the ‘general will’, originates from the conception of nationalism, underpinning the official narrative of ‘China’s experience’. Finally, a new pattern to handle the second outbreak, which started at Xinfadi market, has shed a new light on the thinking about ‘China’s path’.

With a special focus on the Republic of Serbia, this article will examine the macroeconomic performance of the external macroeconomic sector and its impact on the economic progress of developing countries. Our aim is to prove that economic development and the growth of the external macroeconomic sector are correlated. We will do so by analysing how macroeconomic parameters are conditioned. By analysing the macroeconomic and primarily dynamic indicators of countries in transition, including Serbia, it is possible to determine the situation and changes as well as potential causes of economic development. A macroeconomic analysis of developing countries can also determine the characteristics of economic development and mutual relations between macroeconomic indicators.

Although the European Union (EU) has a Common European Asylum System (CEAS), the policy stance of the Member States towards the Syrian crisis caused some problems in the implementation of the CEAS. Within this context, Turkey has turned into the most important partner of the EU due to the fact that it prevents the entrance of the asylum-seekers into the territory of the Member States. Therefore, the Syrian issue has become a bargaining chip between Turkey and the EU. This article examines the Europeanization process of Turkey’s asylum policy as well as the development of the CEAS and its implementation with respect to Syrian refugees within the EU.