Writing about the various trappings of the work of commemoration of the May 68 protest in France, Kristin Ross (2002) singles out sociological analysis and individual biographical accounts as the most dangerous dilutions of the radical revolutionary project that unfolded during that period. In the wake of the 2011 revolution, and as the Tunisian public sphere transformed through the lifting of 60 years of state-imposed censorship and repression of political dissent, a group of leftist revolutionaries who were active from the late 1960s to the early 1980s experience similar dilutions. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2013 and 2016, this paper follows them in the various forums they negotiate their former trajectory. It traces the discursive mutations, and political distortions, of their revolutionary aspirations and actions in the emerging – predominantly liberal – Tunisian public sphere. Specifically, the group chafes against projects of new memory making that disentangle it from the landscape of global radical politics and enfold it in a purely national framework as a distinct sociological category. The group also struggles with transitional justice initiatives that individualize their communitarianism and remold its members into the more generalizable category of victims of state repression. The paper explores the simultaneity of consciousness raising with the losses that this liberal translation entails for the group in question. It argues that the double bind of recognition through liberal translation limits our understanding not only of the 2011 revolution, but also of the Tunisian democracy that ensued from it.