Saturday, January 30, 2010

Action, context, revolution.

"The same gesture, performed at a wrong moment (too early or too late), is no longer an act...what makes an act 'unconditional' is its very contingency: if the act were necessary, this would mean that it is fully determined by its conditions, that it can be deduced from them (as the optimal version arrived at through strategic reasoning or rational-choice theory). [...] The link between the situation and the act is thus clear: far from being determined by the situation (or from intervening in it from a mysterious outside), acts are possible on account of the ontological non-closure, inconsistency, gaps, in a situation." ~Slavoj Zizek ( 2008 In Defense of Lost Causes)