![]() Revolution is possible because whatever manifests the System, at any time-control, totality, government, state, etc.-comes up against the undecidable, the event, process, indeterminacy, and all those things we like in critical theory. It’s undeniably satisfying, consoling even. Now this banal yet surprisingly tenacious view of things has been around for a long time. I’ll quote him: “We can now see the sense in which the Truth-Event is ‘undecidable’: it is undecidable from the point of view of the System, of the ontological ‘state of things’” (155). From the chapter in The Ticklish Subject called “The Politics of Truth” he repeats what I think of as his basic philosophical decision. The problem with Žižek lies more in the way things seem more decidable than they actually are. So this would not be a fault of Žižek particularly. The reasons for why this should lie outside the control of even those writers themselves. We’re always trying to catch up with thinkers who seem to have come from our future rather than from our past. That’s partly why, in this tradition, when faced with a text by Plato or by Aristotle, reading becomes a matter of catching up. ![]() ![]() ![]() A text worth reading, I said, makes impossible demands on its readers. My suggestion about knowing how to read was general. John Phillips: It would be foolhardy to attempt an answer to this one without taking a few pains. ![]()
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