Žižek Research Articles

Music and the Crises of the Modern Subject by Michael L. Klein

Music and Crises of Modern Subject. By Michael L. Klein. (Musical Meaning and Interpretation.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. [xii, 191 p. ISBN 9780253017208 (cloth), $40; ISBN 9780253017222 (e-book), $39.99] Musical examples, works cited, index. Michael L. Klein's latest book, Music and Crises of Modern Subject, discards traditional avenues of music theory and instead penetrates musical subjects primarily through writings of psychoanalyst Jacques (1901-1981). Following twentieth-century French philosophy, which is not new musicology, is an un common path for subjects of music theory and analysis in early twenty-first century. Although monograph contains fewer than 200 pages, all six chapters include innumerable nuggets of mind-altering, and often sobering, musings that challenge previous interpretations of musical works (and texts) ranging from Franz Schubert and Frederic Chopin Witold I.utoskuvski and Kaija Saariaho. Klein's intimate and piercing writing (a la Slavoj Zizek) elucidates Lacan's layers of subjectivity by repeatedly emphasizing central terms, using literature and recent films as intertextual examples, and placing interrogative subheadings within each chapter. In short, and in form of a chiasmus (just one of many), Klein tries to clarify what Lacan's model of subjectivity means for our approaches music, and what music means for our approaches Lacan (p-2). In first chapter (Music and Symptom), Klein introduces Lacan's symptom and three orders of subjectivity--the Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real--through early discourse of music theory and hermeneutics. An article by Edward T. that presents two contrasting modes of interpretation--structural and expressive--in context of Moment musical no. 6 in A[flat] Major provides Klein's starting point (see Cone, Schubert's Promissory Note: An Exercise in Hermeneutics, 19th Century Music 5, no. 3 [Spring 1982]: 233-41). Near beginning of his Moment musical, Schubert writes an odd in relative minor that features an unresolved E[natural] in top voice, an E[natural] that calls a promissory note, a pitch or chord that withholds its voice-leading obligations until a later passage (p. 10; original italics). To transform this observation into expressive meaning, Klein remarks that Cone whispers words syphilis, desolation, and dread at end of his study (p. 7; italics in original). Klein views Cone's initial approach as unnecessary, however: Structural analysis as first step toward hermeneutics is a hopeless methodology because it only reinforces idea that meaning works like an equation in which a structural detail here is equivalent an extra-musical meaning there (p. 11). The latter attitude becomes a theme throughout book. Following Lacan, who believes the task of analysis involves making symptom speak, rendering it in language, Klein considers strange and unsettling passages in Moment musical [as] symptoms demanding interpretation (p. 17). In final parts of chapter, Klein confronts Johannes Brahms's beautiful Clarinet Sonata in F Minor, op. 120, no. 1, with Lacan's three orders of subjectivity. In second chapter (The Acoustic Mirror as Formative of Auditory Pleasure and Fantasy: Chopin's Berceuse, Brahms's Romanze, and Saariaho's 'Parfume de l'instant'), Klein borrows phrase acoustic from critical theorist Kaja Silverman describe musical passages by Chopin, Brahms, and Saariaho that reflect period just before Lacan's mirror stage of human development (p. 40). Chopin's Berceuse, op. 57, projects stability and comfort: The simple rocking of tonic and dominant harmonies for nearly entirety of piece makes it easy forget that we are hearing a series of variations: we relive of maternal swaying (p. 44). Klein writes of an enduring nostalgic fantasy that persists following our entrance into culture through language (i. …

An Empty Table and an Empty Boat: Empathic Encounters with Refugee Experiences in Intermedial Installation Art

Abstract This essay is an inquiry into two intermedial installations that address the experiences of people on the run from war or poverty, yet overtly hinder and problematize the viewer’s identification with the depicted refugees. By doing so, Friday Table (2013) by art collective Foundland, and Isaac Julien’s video installation Ten Thousand Waves (2010) differ from the many contemporary discourses dealing with the so-called refugee crisis that suggest a blind assumption of empathy’s benevolence. Taking theoretical texts concerning the relation between empathy, politics and the (lens-based) representation of refugees by, for instance, Slavoj Zizek (2016) and Jill Bennett (2005) as a starting point, I read Friday Table and Ten Thousand Waves as reflections on the pitfalls as well as the critical political possibilities of empathy in contemporary debates on refugees. Moreover, I argue that the two lens-based installations in question are able to examine the limits of empathy and identification with refugees through their common denominator: intermediality. Both Friday Table and Ten Thousand Waves combine lens-based media (photography, video and film) with non-lens-based medial forms such as drawings, graphs and calligraphy. As I will demonstrate, the interplay between different media is decisive when it comes to the way in which the three works of art produce, manage and reflect on the relation between spectators and depicted refugees.

L'oscena flatulenza della realtà - Cinico tv : un'analisi ideologica

The short films of Cinico tv, directed by Cipri and Maresco, shooted during the 90's and settled in Palermo, show an unclear comedy. Many people consider them an unfair way to humiliate the poor characters that are victim of poverty and ignorance. Nevertheless, even if the sorrow is object of a pitiless survey, it is radically 'dramatized' up to the point that we can consider the clips as a parody of the kitch representation of television.How do the mechanism of parody and of irony work in our humoristic era, that is to say when the retoric tool of understatement has become a fundamental feature of the ideological representatiopn of medias? Is it a well founded accusation the one that consider Cinico tv an attempt against morality?We'll try to answer these questions, trying to figure out witch kind of comedy is the Cinico's one through the analisys of formal and thematic features of several clips and being aware of the critic of ironic society by Slavoj Zizek.

Neoliberalism, Moralism, and Critique in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses

ABSTRACTSalman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1989) diagnoses Margaret Thatcher’s brand of capitalism as self-ironizing, cynical, and postmodern. This article focuses on a largely ignored portion of Rushdie’s novel—its satire of Britain’s shift from Keynes’s “dependency culture” to Thatcher’s “enterprise culture.” Citing Slavoj Zizek’s (1989) claim that cynicism is a dominant form of ideology today, the article discusses why moralistic discourses such as identity politics fail to effectively critique those cynical figures who, like Thatcher’s elite entrepreneurs, trumpet multiculturalism and satirize themselves in advance. Rushdie confronts this critical impasse by doubling down on the power of satire, exchanging the politics of blame and victimization for a form of mutually implicating humor. Rushdie’s text often blames everyone—including itself—by insisting that we are all, to different degrees, risible, mutually implicated subjects, especially in our postcolonial, neoliberal age.

An Ideological Conception of Politics—Critique of Zizek on Political Theology

For some time now, Slavoj Zizek has provocatively maintained that the radical left needs a ‘politics of universal Truth’ whose model is Pauline theology’s transformation of the Hellenistic world. Furthermore, in light of the worldwide resurgence of religious militancy after 9/11, Zizek also contends that political theology provides the conceptual resources for thinking historical materialism today. Zizek here represents the leading wing of a ‘theological turn’ amongst radical intellectuals, for whom religion is a last resource of hope following the collapse of historical communism. In this article, I show that this rather desperate position leads to an ideological conception of politics, one that introduces mystified representations of social antagonism and class struggle into the heart of progressive theory. Through an imminent critique of Zizek’s work that draws upon its Althusserian foundations, I demonstrate that, although Zizek makes some important contributions to the critique of ideology, his theoretical position contains a significant problem. The idea that ideology and politics are structurally the same, which is what allows him to discuss problems of socialist strategy in the medium of political theology, is seriously flawed. It leads Zizek inevitably towards metaphysical notions of the subject of history, and away from theoretical engagement with rethinking the concept of class struggle for the new century.

Book Review: Agon Hamza (ed.), Repeating Žižek

Book Review: Agon Hamza (ed.), <i>Repeating Žižek</i>

Boris Groys: The Intruder

Boris Groys, In the Flow, London, Verso, 2016.Boris Groys, On the New, London, Verso, 2014.Boris Groys, Under Suspicion: The Phenomenology of Media, New York, Columbia University Press, 2012.Only a handful of philosophers have managed to make a successful transition from Eastern Europe into the Western context and make their impact there over the last one hundred years or so - Alexandre Kojeve, Julia Kristeva, Slavoj Zizek, Boris Groys. To come from another cultural context and philosophical tradition is to be haunted by the spectre of otherness and to act, inevitably, as an intruder in the host culture. Boris Groys has managed to turn these circumstances - his appearance on the Western philosophical scene after his immigration from Russia to Germany in 1981 - into one of the most distinctive aspects of his strategy of inquiry.Holding professorial positions in Karlsruhe and New York universities, while also being part of the European Graduate School as well as acting as a curator of projects ranging from documenta to the Venice Biennale, Groys has attracted a growing following since his Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin (1988), published in English as The Total Art of Stalinism in 1992, urged a radical reconsideration of the relationship between Stalin's totalitarianism and the Russian avant-garde. Fredric Jameson described the book as 'a remarkable act of interpretation' and credited it with a much-needed reinvigoration of the field of utopian studies.1 Groys's thesis in that book was that, instead of being a mortal enemy of the Russian avant-garde of Malevich and the Constructivists, Stalinism represented its logical outcome, fulfilling the most profound avant-garde inspiration: the total transformation of reality in accordance with an aesthetic plan. By claiming for itself the role of demiurge previously occupied by God, the avant-garde prepared the development that Stalin brought to a logical conclusion by merging art and politics and thus achieved a realisation of a utopian vision in practice. Groys's analysis in The Total Art of Stalinism reversed the established understanding of continuity and rupture, and set up paradox as the main methodology of his philosophical work, an impulse that becomes even stronger in his later writing.Groys is fluent in English and French but writes mainly in Russian and German. The complicated history of translation means that Groys's works often reach their Anglophone readership belatedly. Prompted by Verso's recent publication of his new book In the Flow, this article reflects on its relationship with two earlier monographs by Groys: On The New (1992/2014) and Under Suspicion: The Phenomenology of Media (2000/2012). All three deal with one of Groys's primary fields of inquiry: the constant movement and change within the realm of what Yuri Lotman would call the semiosphere, which includes art objects as well as their interpretations, products of mass media, the circulation of theories, and linguistic expression in general. On the New investigates what constitutes innovation in art, theory and thought; Under Suspicion looks at what animates this dynamic of change, or which forces operate beneath the media surface; while In the Flow engages with the recent transformations in art and media brought about by the emergence of the Internet and digitisation more generally. Groys's overriding explanatory logic in these works is based on an economic paradigm, but one that differs in significant respects from both the market economy and the notion of 'creative economies' now favoured in cultural studies.On the New takes as its point of departure postmodern critiques of truth and their insistence on the inaccessibility of 'the signified, reality, being, meaning, evidence, or of the presence of the present' (On the New, p7) - a critique that for Groys, rather than making the question of the new impossible, allows us to pose it adequately for the first time. For, as Groys understands it, innovation does not imply that something has been created or revealed that was previously absent or hidden, but rather that something which has always been seen, known and open is revalued. …

Lacan and Zizek : treatment of the subject or ‘treatment of society’?

Lacan and Zizek : treatment of the subject or ‘treatment of society’?

TheJouissanceof Trump

Donald Trump stormed onto the political scene as the realization of the obscene figure of enjoyment that Slavoj Zizek associates with the decline of “symbolic efficiency.” The symptoms of this decline include the debunking of representation associated with a fragmented and conspiracy-theory-ridden public sphere coupled with attempts to resuscitate direct access to the “real.” Reality TV is one cultural manifestation of this combination and Trump has become its political avatar. The demagoguery and resurgent forms of political violence associated with Trump’s campaign demonstrate the authoritarian tendencies of this combination.

Paradoxical Splits: Race and Journalists’ Identity in Post-apartheid South Africa

ABSTRACTSince the new democracy, journalists in South Africa have been faced with a particularly subjecting call from the ruling party, the African National Congress: a call to be loyal, conflating this in the process with the liberation project of the past. This article examines how black journalists reacted to this call, and what sort of ‘turns’ they made in the aftermath of a luncheon organised by the Forum for Black Journalists in 2008, from which their fellow white colleagues were excluded. By examining the journalists’ discourse and the demise of the FBJ, this article concludes that race is not the master signifier in journalism and through journalism. In some instances, there were erratic signs of passionate attachments to signifiers that oppress, for instance, apartheid and colonial norms. The method is conceptual and theoretical. The article deploys concepts developed by Judith Butler (such as passionate attachments, unhappy consciousness, and resignifications) and Slavoj Zizek’s deployment of signifiers (that of master- and floating-signifiers) and applies these to race and journalism in post-apartheid South Africa.

Menghayati Kembali Iman Kristen Lewat Anateisme

With this essay, I aim to provide an alternative way of embracing Christian faith in this postmodern era, by considering both Richard Kearney's concept of anatheism as well as Slavoj Zizek's radical materialism. With the death of the God of ontotheology—as accomplished by modern atheism—Kearney posits anatheism to desribe a further experience of faith that "rebounds" back to God. As such, it assumes a new dimension of encounter with (a/the) postonthotheological God by means of a "wager of faith." In contrast to this God-ward return, the radical materialism of Slavoj Zizek’s theological approach foregrounds the very absence of an "absolute-yet- fragile" God within secular, public space. This paper will outline also my own proposal for leveraging nihilism as constructive dialectic for refining and amplifying Christian faith within the site of struggle that is the contemporary postmodern era.

Yeats and S. Žižek: An Exploration into Presence

Yeats and S. Žižek: An Exploration into Presence

The Slovene trilogy Alice in Crazyland by Evald Flisar

The British writer Lewis Caroll exerted influence upon Slovene authors writing for young readers for his Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871). Contemporary Slovene writer Evald Flisar wrote his trilogy about Alice as a fantasy tale (Alice in Crazyland, 2008), a play (Alice in Crazyland: an ecological force, 2010) and as a comic strip and a graphic novel (Alice in Potteroonia, 2013, illustrated by P. Kovacic). His trilogy, particularly Alice in Crazyland (2008), reflects the philosophy of the Slovene theoretical Slavoj Zizek in his pathological Narcissus as a Socially Mandatory Form of Subjectivity (1985).

Review of Tony Wall and David Perrin: Slavoj Žižek: A Žižekian Gaze at Education

Review of Tony Wall and David Perrin: Slavoj Žižek: A Žižekian Gaze at Education

Reseña de libros: Tres semblanzas sobre el cuerpo

Absorto –del latín ab-sorptus– es el participio pasado del verbo absorbere, literalmente, “ingerir”, “absorber”, “tragar”. De entrada entonces, el-ojo-absorto es un sintagma inquietante. Un ojo que traga lo que ve. Un ojo, un órgano, que deviene cuerpo. Pero no para saciarse de aquello que devora, sino para hacerlo poesía. Para transformarlo, a partir de la mirada que nos devuelve la pantalla del cine. La portada del libro ya nos pone en tema. Se trata de una obra del singular diseñador cubano Pepe Menéndez, y representa un ojo, con su iris azulado y una negra pupila, enmarcado en un carretel de cine. El objeto resultante está apoyado en una superficie blanca, como si este peculiar “ojo -cine” pudiera ser separado del cuerpo. O mejor: como si el ojo mismo, cine mediante, hubiera devenido él mismo un cuerpo –autónomo, fragmentado, pero cuerpo al fin. Al inicio de nuestro periplo, entonces, el cuerpo ya aparece intervenido. Como si el autor nos advirtiera, desde la propia imagen de la portada, que dentro de los límites del encuadre cinematográfico, el cuerpo queda avistado, examinado y metamorfoseado en virtud del ejercicio de ver. Esta reseña de la obra de Alberto Garrandés1 propone, en fidelidad con el autor, una interlocución con el núcleo real que destilan sus ensayos. La propuesta es relativamente sencilla: tres jóvenes investigadoras argentinas aportan sus textos en sintonía con sendos pasajes de El ojo absorto. No comentan el libro, sino que lo multiplican, aportando la lectura analítica rioplatense. El libro de Garrandés, enorme en sí mismo, se ve suplementado por este ejercicio narrativo y a la vez éticoclínico. Porque ahora el cuerpo emerge doblemente tratado: desde el ensayo literario y desde el cine como esbozo, como rudimento de un análisis. A las variadas fuentes referidas por Garrandés, se suman autores como Alain Badiou, Jacques Lacan, Julio Cabrera, Barbara Cassin, Massimo Recalcati, Stanley Cavell, Slavoj Zizek, otorgándole así al cuerpo un estatuto que trasciende sus bordes iniciales. Estatuto que emerge de un encuentro impensado entre La Habana y Buenos Aires.

Reading Žižek’s The Ticklish Subject with Lacan’s Seminar 23: Exploring the Concept of the Subject beyond ‘the Sinthome without Joyce’ and ‘the Dreadful Real’

Reading Žižek’s The Ticklish Subject with Lacan’s Seminar 23: Exploring the Concept of the Subject beyond ‘the Sinthome without Joyce’ and ‘the Dreadful Real’

THE PARTIALITY AS A DEMAND TO A HERMENEUTIC OF HUMAN RIGHTS AND ITS RELATION WITH LAW AS A DESIRING INSTITUTION

This work develops the concept of Law based on the lacanian theory over desire, associating it to the necessary posture of partiality regarding Human Rights, which act as conduit of the society desiring influx towards instauration of freedom, equality and fraternity precepts. For this purpose, we initially discuss Law as the institute of lacanian desire, referencing mostly Slavoj Zizek’s concepts. Hereupon, we introduce the normative jushumanism theory and how Human Rights fit as essential source of judicial decisions in concrete cases. Finally, we conclude that, Law has no direct connection with any object from the phenomenal world, but with the interpersonal relation, that leads to desire confrontations and that it deserves to be observed, judicially, according to the singularity of the situation, for a partial decision on behalf of the emancipation and dignity of the human person.

Losing Hold of Experimenting

In his description of the tenet of the 56th Venice Biennale All the Worlds’ Futures (2015), curator Okwui Enwezor builds a thought-provoking bridge across current historical ruptures in the fields of art, culture, politics and economics, and Walter Benjamin’s famous description of the Angelus Novus, the Angel of History, who is so confused about the storm of progress blowing from paradise that she can only fly backwards towards the future, her eyes persistently stuck on the events of the past. By bringing this mythological premodern figure to the current global landscape with its unforeseen number of refugees and immigrants, environmental upsets, chaos, dystopia, and promise of change, Enwezor makes visible why the challenge of seeking new realities, truths and futures – that we have learned to link with the idea of experimenting – is not a mere cliche of utopian modernity, but even some sort of imperative of the present time that we simply cannot stop pondering or practicing. Yet, in the age of post-colonialism, post-modernism, and post-humanism that have all questioned the modern labels of ‘progress,’ ‘objectivity,’ ‘potentiality,’ and the ‘new,’ we are also painfully aware that we are ‘living in the end times’ as Slavoj Zizek expresses it, and that there is not necessarily anyone waiting for us at the end of history any more. In the midst of these puzzling considerations, many avant-garde artistresearchers have started to consider experimentality from partly new perspectives aiming not so much at building new laboratories and showrooms for (white, elitist, and male-centered) Enlightenment thought, but to discuss and practice various kinds of experimental activities in ways that pay homage to unknown others, be they other human beings or some other groups of animals, spirits, dark material, trees, air, historical ghosts, or whatever. Along this development, the criteria for experimenting have also changed, even radically. The positivist and utopian tones of modernity have largely been replaced by epistemologically more complex, even messy, forms of knowing, participating and presenting, that now also guide many activities of art and science. As Giorgio Agamben and Gilles Deleuze suggest, the potentiality inherent in this ‘new logic’ can be developed further only by a refusal to represent issues and phenomena that in themselves escape representation (Agamben 1999). In other words, we need to understand that ‘potentiality,’ be it artistic, scientific or whatever, must remain ‘enigmatic yet non-arbitrary; in short, a new logic, definitely a logic, but one that grasps the innermost depths of life and death without leading us back to reason.’ (Deleuze 1997: 82) Giving up overtly rationalized forms of reasoning and experimenting has also led to rethink the methodologies of both art and science. As Brian Massumi emphasizes, we should no longer label or categorize newness and innovation in already existing labels and concepts, especially if we tend to reproduce the social worlds of predetermined order and discourses of methodological certainty. 1 The new methodology of experimenting might also be described in terms of ‘ungrounded,’ ‘fluid,’ or ‘groundless’ methodology, for it seeks no longer merely rational and linear rules for knowing, but aims instead to stimulate deeper and also more engaged ways to reflect, participate, and accommodate anticipated social and existential situations and preferred spatial and timely dimensions. 2 Seen in this way, experimenting becomes differentiated also from the ‘normal’ – or normality acts in this new context no longer as a gradient for the ‘new,’ but more like a cut-off point actually preventing all experimenting, including from falling or failing. Against this background, one might think that the decision to choose ‘experimentation’ in 2015 as the main theme for the 1st Artistic Research Pavilion in Venice was not only topical and important, but at the same time extremely challenging, even risky. Would the curators and initiators of the research pavilion

In Defence of the Real: The ‘Pathology’ of Violence in Buddhist Folk Rituals and Statecraft of Sri Lanka: A Psychoanalytic Review

According to Slavoj Zizek, ‘Real’ is the world before it is carved up by the Symbolic. The Symbolic is the big Other that distorts/represses the Real. Fantasy is the mask that covers up this distortion and makes people of necessity live with repressed or sublimated forms of pleasure in different versions of the Symbolic. The discontent that issues from this inhibition constitutes psychic trauma and manifests in clash of denominational and racist fantasies. In this article, I attempt a Lacanaian-Zizekian analysis of the traumatic that inflects the subject positions in violent Buddhist state politics of Sri Lanka and seek to trace its continuity in the (anti)-ethics of Sinhala Buddhist folk rituals practised in the southern (low) part of the country. The psychodynamics of violence that engender the political engagement of the state, the JVP and the LTTE in the 1980s are not dissimilar from that of the sacrificial violence of Buddhist exorcism rituals in vogue in parts of Sri Lanka today. This is a fresh attempt to understand why violence becomes ‘unavoidable’ even in denominational identities that otherwise preach ahimsa (non-violence), and in statecraft that professes to be governed by such principles.

After the Event: Toward a Post-Capitalist Conception of Structure and Habit

ON THE LIMITS OF THE EVENT Habit, Structure, Event: recent theory would privilege the later concept over the former two. As concepts, habit and structure suggest fixity, rigidity, inattentiveness, unconsciousness--certainly not the stuff of which radical political transformation is usually made. If anything, habit and structure are typically understood to be akin to ideology. Thus, Pierre Bourdieu articulates his concept of habitus as an embodied conception of ideology in which person's class position is marked by series of unconscious dispositions, habits, and beliefs. Similarly, Althusser invokes the idea of structure to theorize the workings of capitalism and the reproduction of its conditions of production. Event, as concept, on the other hand is transformational, sexy, revolutionary. It is the unpredictable, the new, the contingent, that which gives us hope in the face of capitalism's overwhelming systematicity. Certainly this is how the concept has functioned in the work of Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek. (1) Yet, what are the conceptual limitations that structure the concept of the event itself? What if its alterity to all structure, which makes it excellent for negating the present, also limits its ability to imagine the future. What if the emphasis on the event's novelty suggests that the concept is haunted by the very forms of innovation and novelty that it is designed to negate? What if our refusal to think beyond the event is symptomatic of the colonization of the future that Maurizio Lazzarato argues is central to the logic of financialization and debt? If the answer to these questions is affirmative, it does not negate the event so much as mark its limits as concept. The event is thus both necessary and insufficient. A genuine left alternative will need to think what the anti-capitalist or post-capitalist future holds after the dynamic negation produced by the eruption of the event. In doing so, we may find ourselves returning to those very unsexy terms that the theory of the event seemed to negate: habit and structure. Such is the gambit of the following essay. Rather than merely figurations of containment, ideology, and constraint, habit and structure can also be concepts around which we can organize post-capitalist or anti-capitalist future. IN SEARCH OF AN EXIT Empire and multitude; capitalism and schizophrenia; reification and utopia; fundamental fantasy and its traversal; the virtual and the actual; being and event; one and zero: much radical theory seems to be caught in binary logic. This binary logic is absolutely necessary even as it is regularly eschewed. While perhaps only Jameson and Zizek are honest enough to locate the generation of such logic at its Hegelian source, theory seems, at its most radical, to require negative force powerful enough for, as Benjamin Noys puts it, a practice of the necessary destruction of existent positivities (Persistence 14). (2) Given the way in which capitalism, and its attendant aesthetic and philosophical mode, what Mark Fisher terms capitalist works to colonize the present and the future, such negation (conceptual or actual, violent or, hopefully, non-violent) seems fundamental to imagining, and more importantly, producing different, just, and sustainable future (7). Thus we have the proliferation of theories of the event in the present. There are any number of ways we can read this proliferation. At its most dispiriting, theories of the event seem willfully counterfactual. They are way of holding on to the possibility of radical break, locus of unpredictable possibility and revolutionary change in period (whether we call it realism, post-postmodernism, neoliberalism, or just more of good old postmodernism) that seems only fixated on an ever-worsening more of the same. If dystopia, with its four horsemen, financialization, austerity, biopolitical control, and environmental devastation, seems to be the only game in town (and here is where periodization that distinguishes our own moment from the giddiness of eighties, and nineties, postmodernism or neoliberalism makes sense), then theories of the event are way to still hold open the possibility of something other, something better, some global possibility that is not just slow slide into collective suicide. …