Resistance Nostalgia: Jorge Semprún and the Long 1968

Abstract:Relatively little attention has been devoted to Jorge Semprún’s engagement with the 1968 generation, when young French men and women raised in relative prosperity effected a cultural revolution while speaking the language of political revolution. Semprún’s work focused on the radical politics he had lived, but his stories of transmitting what he had learned to the next generation are told and received within a culture as attuned to questioning authority as to faithfully embracing or rejecting political organizations and ideologies. Analyzing Semprún’s work written or set in the long 1968 reveals a nostalgia for a particular experience of resistance that he increasingly fears that only he finds irresistible. Nostalgia does not make for a transmissible collective memory.