A review by whogivesabook
Evento by Slavoj Žižek

5.0

This work was so thought-provoking and refreshing that I just encourage you to pick it up.

Here Žižek explores the idea of the event. An occurrence that shatters everyday life. Something that cannot be predicted because it miraculously develops into more than the sum of its parts. It is the name we give to the moment where a recognisable alteration to reality occurs.

He spins ideas from various pop culture examples. Examining the topic from multiple angles, but it was politically that he sounded a bell within me.

'Perhaps we should begin by effectively renouncing the myth of a Great Awakening - the moment when, if not the old working class, then a new alliance of the dispossessed, multitude or whatever, will gather its forces and master a decisive intervention. We should return to Hegel here: a dialectical process begins with some affirmative idea towards which it strives. However, in the course of this striving, the idea itself undergoes a profound transformation (not just a tactical accommodation, but an essential redefinition), because the idea itself is caught up in the process, (over) determined by its actualization. Say we have a revolt motivated by a request for justice: once people get really engaged in it, they become aware that much more is needed to bring true justice than just the limited requests with which they started (to repeal some laws, etc.). What happens in such moments is a reframing of the universal dimension itself, the imposing of a new universality.'

What can we say, except... Shit. Maybe this explains why we've had multiple abortive attempts at change with various movements in recent history... Occupy, #MeToo, Anonymous, BLM...

I could write forever on this but I would only be howling at the air, again.

Read this. I'll be moving on to Heaven in Disorder.