Sometimes I think my attraction to these French thinkers stem from the other weighty narrative that they lived through: May 68. From an interview with JB on Utopie:
How did you meet Hubert Tonka?
The whole thing began started with Lefebvre. I had known Lefebvre at the beginning of the 1960s. He was at the center of a group interested in urbanism. He taught at the Institut d’urbanisme and Tonka was his assistant. We got to know one another in 1962 and 1963. Utopie truly began at Lefebvre’s place at Navarrenx, in the Pyrenees, in 1966. Lefebvre and Lourau were already there…There, in 1966, I got to know the group. In fact, just before 1968. All of this really began right before 1968…
What was your relationship to the “enrages” at Nanterre?
Nanterre…the sociology department…Cohn-Bendit…the 22nd of March…We were at the center of the “events”. We participated in AG, we went to the barricades…The “spirit of May” circulated for several years at Nanterre. We still had a certain power. The students were behind us. We defended the department of sociology above all. This situation lasted until 1973-1974. I stayed on a few more years, through inertia. During the work of mourning, for me, there was no longer any activity. I had passed to the side of theory. Leftism, or what it had become, closed militarism, was no longer an option.
You were never tempted by Vincennes…
Why not? Lourau went there, Lyotard too…Tonka…Undoubtedly I should have gone, but I made a bet, I said: no, I’ll stay here, I’ll stay till the end, I want to see what happens, in the end, at Nanterre. I haven’t regretted having made this choice, even when it was clear that I couldn’t stay at Nanterre any longer. It was simply too late to go to Vincennes. The story, for me, ended at Nanterre…
Where do you situate Utopie in this intellectual and political context?
There were a number of movements like it during those years, analogous anticipations that wanted to be marginal. We should remember that there was still a phobia about official political action and about parties, a refusal of all political and intellectual nomenclature. The Situationists were closest to us, but the Situationists didn’t want to see anyone else. And we didn’t really seek them out. We had known them, with Tonka, at the beginning of the 1960s, just before their break with Lefebvre. The position of the Situationists, in 1968, became very problematic. Previously, at Nanterre, between the anarchists, Cohn-Bendit, and the Situationists, there was an extraordinary focal point, but the workers councils the Situationists extolled in 1968 seemed irrelevant to us. We had the feeling of having surpassed this kind of initiative. Debord disappointed us in 1968, with his “old moons”, and again twenty years later, rereading what he had written, cloning himself by saying: nothing has changed, what I said was absolutely true, there is nothing more to say about it. While completely recognizing the value of what happened before, he was nevertheless already fossilized for us. The 1960s were really extraordinary, more than the 1970s, which were more ’spectacular’. The 1960s were more rich, more complex, even if it was also during these years that I began mourning “politics”. For us, 1968 was already more than politics. It was symbolic, almost ‘metahistorical’. Thereafter, it was all over. In the 1970s, we passed beyond the end. Thereafter, we passed entirely to the side of theory. This is also the moment that Utopie effectively ceased all engaged activity, even all activity relative to architecture. We passed inexorably towards disappearance, a disappearance tending toward the most radical…