Žižek, Slovoj. In Defence of Lost Causes. (2008) London: Verso, 2009. page 403.
Badiou reads this failure [of the Chinese Cultural Revolution] — and, more generally, the demise of Communism — as signaling the end of the epoch in which, in politics, it was possible to generate truth at the universal level, as a global (revolutionary) project: today, in the aftermath of this historical defeat, a political truth can only be generated as (the fidelity to) a local event, a local struggle, an intervention into a specific constellation. However, does he not thereby subscribe to his own version of postmodernism, of the notion that, today, only local acts of “resistance” are possible? What Badiou (Like Laclau and Butler) seems to lack is a meta-theory of history that would provide a clear answer to the alternative that haunts “postmodern” theorizations of the political: is the passage from “large” to “small” (hi)stories, from essentialism to contingency, from global to local politics, and so forth, itself a historical shift, so that, prior to it, universal politics was possible, or is the insight into the local character of political interventions an insight into the very essence of poltics, so that the previous belief in the possiblity of universal political intervention was an ideological illusion?
Bartlebian Act: Saragmago’s Seeing: voters en masse refuse to vote instead casting invalid ballots. It is the dialectical difference between not-voting (cynical indifference) and not not voting, (they instead un-vote). As Ž explains the difference is a focus on the big Other, “the majority of those who do not vote do t not as an active gesture of protest, but in the mode of relying on others — “I do not vote, but I count on others to vote in my place …” Non-voting becomes an act whe it affects the big Other.” (In Defence 410)
One needs to add here, when one no longer relies on a big Other,