Spiritul filozofic faţă cu Revoluţia. Eugen Simion despre Mai ‘68

Abstract

Concentrating on the Parisian diary Timpul trăirii-Timpul mărturisirii (A Time for Living – A Time for Confession) of the prominant Romania literary critic Eugen Simion, the paper proposes that, as an intellectual coming to the French capital at the beginning of the 1970s with the experience of what used to be termed “the communist camp”, the author retrospectively construes the moment of May ’68 and weighs its consequences with the feeling that he deals simultaneously with a form of
“typological” past, a counterfactual present and an alternative future of his own domestic society and culture. As a committed Proustian, Eugen Simion experiments with transferring the experience of reverting the temporal flux, which is perfectly possible within the bounds of our personal memory, at the scale of the collective experience and of the civilizational processes.