There is no need to ask what remains of the revolution. Nothing remains of the revolution, because the revolution is always what remains. Remnant, excess, surplus: the revolution is not what first exists and then leaves a halo that its children will try to assume, channel or take up again. The revolution is precisely that something that remains and exists only because it is the halo, the illuminated outline whose only real existence lies in being fleeting. It is a fleeting coin, which someone holds in their hands, as the repository of an awkward residue.
Louise Michel, a militant of the Paris Commune, tells a story that could well fit on a page drawn by Hugo Pratt. After the failure of the “assault on heaven” in 1871, the surviving communards are deported to the island of New Caledonia, a French possession in Polynesia. A few more years pass, and they witness a Kanak uprising: the island’s natives were tired of the French colonists. Louise Michel sympathised with the Kanaks, unlike the other French exiles. Louise had already embraced anarchism…
One of the Kanak natives, Taiau, was employed by the French colonial administration and was responsible for bringing food to the Commune prisoners. Taiau had committed himself to the rebellion, and Louise recounts the moment when she said goodbye to him. The young Kanak was going to swim in a storm to join his people. ‘Then, I divided the red scarf of the Commune, which I had kept through a thousand difficulties, in half and gave it to him as a souvenir”, says Louise Michel.
That scarf was the symbol of the Parisian revolutionaries, who wore it across their chests. Louise divides that famous tiara. She will split the scarf-emblem in two. There is nothing better to represent the idea of revolution than that which “remains”, that which exceeds and is transmitted. There is no revolution other than the transmission of a remnant. And in Louise’s case, this situation is evident, for the scene is exotic and unexpected. It could have been witnessed by Corto Maltese. A woman from western Paris, capitalist, Bonapartist and Baudelairean, an anarchist woman, an energetic inhabitant of a large European city, passes on half of a sacred object, a scarf, to a rebellious Polynesian native. In which of the two halves is the revolution? In neither, because the revolution is that division, that act of passing on.
Asking “what remains of the revolution” leads to nostalgia, to the denunciation of a “detour” or to the proclamation of everlasting “loyalty”. If, on the other hand, the revolution is “what remains”, we avoid becoming pensioners of what was not and guardians of what will be. And what remains, without an archetype behind it, is always multiple, open, unexpected, illegal, irregular, unplanned, unpredictable, unresolved, unthinkable.
Many have said that “the revolution is over”. Many of those men of the Commune said so, and they founded political parties. In 1917, Russian Mensheviks, Populists and Labour Unionists said so, in the face of the relentless rise of Leninism. And Yves Montand portrayed it in that film of the same name [The Confession, 1970], taken from the book written by Jorge Semprún. Here is a couple, Montand-Semprún, relentlessly associated with that phrase, ‘The revolution is over’. But it is not a just phrase, even if it is suggestive (for it is always suggestive to portray men who once believed, at the moment when they no longer believe). It is not just, because the revolution never ends; because in order to exist, the revolution must always be in a constant state of farewell.
Trotsky recounts in his Autobiography that the revolutionaries of Smolny, in the early days of the October Revolution, not knowing whether they would last long or not, were busy drawing up grand written plans for what the revolution would be. If they failed, those words would remain “for history”. That was the revolution: not knowing if it would last, writing to the winds. Read that Autobiography, an exceptional document of our time, to see to what extent a revolution, rather than having a “canon” and then a “betrayal”, is always that situation of farewell.
Constantly saying goodbye is what Ernesto Guevara, a revolutionary if ever there was one, has always done. It is not only his well-known letters from 1965 – to Castro, his parents and his daughter – that reveal this feeling. It is necessary to read what he wrote in 1956, almost ten years earlier, to understand the extent to which this feeling of “leaving” strictly composes a single portrait. In that early year, he had written to his parents in Buenos Aires, before the imminent landing in Cuba, that he was “saying goodbye in a not very grandiloquent but sincere way”, and he quotes a fragment from Nazim Hikmet: “I will only take to the grave the sadness of an unfinished song”.
Is it any wonder, then, that he later said, in his final farewell, that “I have fulfilled my part of the duty and I bid you farewell” (to Castro). It was all an unfinished song, a single, complete farewell. Revolution is always a farewell. A revolutionary listens to Goyeneche singing “first you have to know how to leave…” and knows that in that verse by Homero Espósito, there is something that concerns him. Revolution is a farewell that has no fixed abode; it is a surplus that has no previous substance. In this way, revolution is not the work of the believer who will later find her/his opposite, the unbeliever, the mocker or the renegade; because if it is always “what remains”, that will exempt us from later searching for those who would have betrayed it.
Source: Lobo suelto!, 29/07/2025. Published in the magazine Fin de Siglo Nº 3, September, 1987.
For a suggested reading about/on Horacio González, click here.
Horacio González: Half a scarf or an unfinished song
There is no need to ask what remains of the revolution. Nothing remains of the revolution, because the revolution is always what remains. Remnant, excess, surplus: the revolution is not what first exists and then leaves a halo that its children will try to assume, channel or take up again. The revolution is precisely that something that remains and exists only because it is the halo, the illuminated outline whose only real existence lies in being fleeting. It is a fleeting coin, which someone holds in their hands, as the repository of an awkward residue.
Louise Michel, a militant of the Paris Commune, tells a story that could well fit on a page drawn by Hugo Pratt. After the failure of the “assault on heaven” in 1871, the surviving communards are deported to the island of New Caledonia, a French possession in Polynesia. A few more years pass, and they witness a Kanak uprising: the island’s natives were tired of the French colonists. Louise Michel sympathised with the Kanaks, unlike the other French exiles. Louise had already embraced anarchism…
One of the Kanak natives, Taiau, was employed by the French colonial administration and was responsible for bringing food to the Commune prisoners. Taiau had committed himself to the rebellion, and Louise recounts the moment when she said goodbye to him. The young Kanak was going to swim in a storm to join his people. ‘Then, I divided the red scarf of the Commune, which I had kept through a thousand difficulties, in half and gave it to him as a souvenir”, says Louise Michel.
That scarf was the symbol of the Parisian revolutionaries, who wore it across their chests. Louise divides that famous tiara. She will split the scarf-emblem in two. There is nothing better to represent the idea of revolution than that which “remains”, that which exceeds and is transmitted. There is no revolution other than the transmission of a remnant. And in Louise’s case, this situation is evident, for the scene is exotic and unexpected. It could have been witnessed by Corto Maltese. A woman from western Paris, capitalist, Bonapartist and Baudelairean, an anarchist woman, an energetic inhabitant of a large European city, passes on half of a sacred object, a scarf, to a rebellious Polynesian native. In which of the two halves is the revolution? In neither, because the revolution is that division, that act of passing on.
Asking “what remains of the revolution” leads to nostalgia, to the denunciation of a “detour” or to the proclamation of everlasting “loyalty”. If, on the other hand, the revolution is “what remains”, we avoid becoming pensioners of what was not and guardians of what will be. And what remains, without an archetype behind it, is always multiple, open, unexpected, illegal, irregular, unplanned, unpredictable, unresolved, unthinkable.
Many have said that “the revolution is over”. Many of those men of the Commune said so, and they founded political parties. In 1917, Russian Mensheviks, Populists and Labour Unionists said so, in the face of the relentless rise of Leninism. And Yves Montand portrayed it in that film of the same name [The Confession, 1970], taken from the book written by Jorge Semprún. Here is a couple, Montand-Semprún, relentlessly associated with that phrase, ‘The revolution is over’. But it is not a just phrase, even if it is suggestive (for it is always suggestive to portray men who once believed, at the moment when they no longer believe). It is not just, because the revolution never ends; because in order to exist, the revolution must always be in a constant state of farewell.
Trotsky recounts in his Autobiography that the revolutionaries of Smolny, in the early days of the October Revolution, not knowing whether they would last long or not, were busy drawing up grand written plans for what the revolution would be. If they failed, those words would remain “for history”. That was the revolution: not knowing if it would last, writing to the winds. Read that Autobiography, an exceptional document of our time, to see to what extent a revolution, rather than having a “canon” and then a “betrayal”, is always that situation of farewell.
Constantly saying goodbye is what Ernesto Guevara, a revolutionary if ever there was one, has always done. It is not only his well-known letters from 1965 – to Castro, his parents and his daughter – that reveal this feeling. It is necessary to read what he wrote in 1956, almost ten years earlier, to understand the extent to which this feeling of “leaving” strictly composes a single portrait. In that early year, he had written to his parents in Buenos Aires, before the imminent landing in Cuba, that he was “saying goodbye in a not very grandiloquent but sincere way”, and he quotes a fragment from Nazim Hikmet: “I will only take to the grave the sadness of an unfinished song”.
Is it any wonder, then, that he later said, in his final farewell, that “I have fulfilled my part of the duty and I bid you farewell” (to Castro). It was all an unfinished song, a single, complete farewell. Revolution is always a farewell. A revolutionary listens to Goyeneche singing “first you have to know how to leave…” and knows that in that verse by Homero Espósito, there is something that concerns him. Revolution is a farewell that has no fixed abode; it is a surplus that has no previous substance. In this way, revolution is not the work of the believer who will later find her/his opposite, the unbeliever, the mocker or the renegade; because if it is always “what remains”, that will exempt us from later searching for those who would have betrayed it.
Source: Lobo suelto!, 29/07/2025. Published in the magazine Fin de Siglo Nº 3, September, 1987.
For a suggested reading about/on Horacio González, click here.