The Beautiful Language of My Century: Reinventing the Language of Contestation in Postwar France, 1945-1968

"The Beautiful Language of My Century" describes the various forms of critical culture that culminated in the events of May 1968, and investigates the ways those forms have come down to us today.
McDonough explores the montage practice developed by Guy Debord and his situationist colleagues under the name of detournement and its expression in the later fifties as a form of cultural theft. He addresses the influence of colonialism on these practices, examining a 1961 exhibit of torn posters of the Algerian War ("La France dechiree"), Godard's early film Le Petit Soldat, and Christo's Project for a Temporary Wall of Steel Drums. He discusses the French left's adoption in the mid-sixties of the "end of art" as a theoretical position and describes the leftist idea of the fete as a Rabelaisian and revolutionary upwelling of everything that is low.