The Act

"An Act always involves a radical risk, what Derrida, following Kierkegaard, called the MADNESS of a decision: it is a step into the open, with no guarantee about the final outcome- why? Because an Act retroactively changes the very coordinates into which it intervenes. This lack of guarantee is what critics cannot tolerate:they want an Act without risk- not without empirical risks, but without the much more radical 'transcendental' risk that the Act will not only simply fail, but radically misfire...It is here that one can see how an Act proper cannot be contained within the limits of democracy (conceived as a positive system of legitimizing power through free elections). The Act occurs in an emergency when one has to take the risk and act without legitimization, engaging oneself in a kind of Pascalean wager that the Act itself will create the conditions of it's retroactive legitimization."

Slajov Zizek from his book Welcome to the Desert of the Real

Our group has been talking lately about leaps into the unknown (un-knowable). My problem with Zizek's approach is: how does one recognize such an "emergency"? George Bush sensed such an emergency and invaded Iraq and Afghanistan wagering the acts would later be legitimized.Hitler, Stalin, PolPot, Franco, The Symbionese Liberation Army, they all felt their moment to be an "emergency" and that history would later absolve them.

This is where the inner liberal comes out in me, the one who senses something in the warnings of Isaiah Berlin, Popper and Arendt at the same time he rejects their anti-utopian arguments. Since we can never KNOW the true moment of emergency, I would rather put my lot in with some degree of popular will, knowing full well it can be quite wrong. At least we must stop and ask if we are acting purely as a vanguard or it we are listening as well.

What about those in Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon, Western Sahara, soon probably Iran? These movements certainly argue for the Act as does any uprising in the past for justice. So how might we discern the necessity for an Act? Which side of history we are on when we decide to stop talking and start doing?

In his book Picture Imperfect Russell Jacoby makes a case for Utopianism which confronts much the same dilemma. He says beware the "blueprint utopian" who "more often betray a will for domination than for freedom; they prescribe how free men and women should act..". Jacoby argues for "iconoclastic utopians" who "did not surrender to the drumbeat of everyday emergencies" . Still, the "everyday" unfolds before us and presents Moments when one must choose whether to Act or not. Perhaps there is no trustworthy guide, only imagination and will.