Politicisation, de-politicisation, re-politicisation: French poetry after May 1968

This article grapples with the changing relationships between politics and aesthetics in post‐1968 French poetic production. With reference to some of the salient socio-economic shifts that have occurred since the 1970s ‐ from the neoliberal disciplining of the working classes initiated in the late 1970s and the ideological and critical ‘paralysis’ that followed, to the proto-fascist mutations of capital in the current period ‐ it distinguishes three moments. First, it focuses on the TXT review as an example of the way in which ‘poetry’ and ‘politics’ could be articulated by ‘neo-avant-gardist’ poets, in the period that ended at the same time as the Keynesian compromise settlement, in the mid-1970s ‐ a time when Marxist politics were widespread. By the 1980s, however, following the neoliberal onslaught and the acute de-politicisation to which it contributed, the avant-gardist pledge to ‘change life’ by acting on its forms had become inconceivable, as exemplified in Prigent’s trajectory (the second moment considered here). Lastly, in the context of the resurgence of visible forms of social struggle since the 1990s ‐ and in contrast to the then-dominant neo-lyrical poetics ‐ a new generation of poets is discussed, a generation which offered interesting if inconsistent ways of tackling the prospect of political action, both within literature and outside of it.