Every revolution, every authentic revolution, promises to redeem the failures of its predecessors. This is what Walter Benjamin thought — or at least, this is what Slavoj Žižek says Benjamin thought at the end of The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012). Paraphrasing Benjamin, Žižek says in the film that all the unsettled ghosts of the past will at last find rest in the new freedom born out of the true revolution to come.
Yet he warns the path to this freedom comes with no guarantees. There is no train of historical inevitability that can be ridden to the safe harbour of emancipation. Getting there all depends on a fickle crowd of free riders, a ragtag huddle of the flighty and the faithless. They should be a familiar bunch because, it turns out, they are us.
Our liberation rests on nobody’s shoulders but our own.
Lend your ear for a moment to the strain of Judgement Day that sounds through Benjamin’s thinking. What ghosts haunt our present? What injustices await deliverance from the purgatory of lost causes? Following Benjamin’s logic, if we want our fight — for a better world, for a livable world, for life itself — to be a successful fight, we had better make sure we know what undead armies stand behind us. Without setting their struggles to rights, they will remain our curse. Plus, there is always the risk that we might fail, and in failing join their ranks, dooming ourselves to wait for the next righteous heave to drag us out of the boneyard and into the future. That is, if a shred of hope for any kind of future — indeed, if the planet itself — survives us.
Young guy in a vest, holding a clipboard, came to the door.
His timing wasn’t good – we were busy. “Thanks, sorry, can’t today,” I said through the crack in the door.
“One minute, max,” he said.
“Sorry, man, no.”
It wasn’t clear what he was canvassing for, and I didn’t have time to find out.
But he wasn’t leaving. My No hadn’t registered. He’d actually stepped forward. He was half inside the house. Only his hind end stuck out into the cold.
“Listen, man. No! Look at me: No!”
He looked me in the face. Blinking like a carp.
I felt my fist wanting to go somewhere I’d regret. I redirected it into my pocket and found a ten—here, bugger off.
The guy didn’t take it.
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