How to Translate Cultural Revolution

In the Chinese Cultural Revolution – the epicenter of the last great political sequence at worldwide level in the Sixties and Seventies – the flashing of unprecedented possibilities of post-party politics was entangled with the epochal closure of a network of political culture. Cultural Revolution proves to be extremely refractory to historical investigation because it undoes the established conceptual bridges between history and politics, bridges that all other social sciences crossed for studying politics. Therefore, new theoretical perspectives and new protocols of investigation are required, and not only for those events, but in the last analysis for the study of all political situations. The author discusses three main points for finding a new perspective. First, a basic distinction should be stressed between the intermittent nature of politics – one of the rarest mode of subjectivity, which exists only in singular intellectually inventive sequences – and the structural invariance of the state, despite the incessant historical mutations of its particular forms. Moreover, the relationships between the present state of depoliticization and the previous political situations deserve close analysis. The hypothesis is that the concrete form of the state in a given moment is the hollow imprint of the last great political sequence, or that it is shaped by a reactive de-politicization. Finally, the declarations and the related behaviors of the actors during the events are the major analytical elements in the study of politics. However, the Cultural Revolution was marked to an unprecedented degree by increasing dissonances and finally irremediable ruptures between the processes created by the subjective declarations and the same network of political culture within which they were formulated.