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Who is Utopian Today?
…Those who manage to convince themselves that the order of the Other is here to stay, that the statist power of the present is firmly grounded and basically secure, are the ones clinging to a shaky arrangement with quiet desperation. Those who roll the dice betting on act/event-level transformations are, contrary to senseless common sense and vulgar popular opinion, sober realists; today’s self-declared “realists” (i.e., those banking on the indefinitely enduring continuity of current circumstances) are the ideologically intoxicated utopian idealists enthralled by dreams of a nonexistent, unattainable stability.
Uniting Subject and Structure
Last night, as I was reading Adrian Johnston’s Badiou, Žižek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change, I noticed an interesting isomorphism between Badiou and Kojin Karatani (Žižek fits here as well, I’m just too lazy to pull out efficacious quotes):