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12:53

(In »Truth as an act – the road to the fourth singularity«)

At any rate, what is essential is that the Parisian street riots would be unthinkable without the printing press that became fully and widely accepted in society only after several transforming centuries. It first changed Europe and then the rest of the world beyond recognition, and the French Revolution’s geographical domicile has much more to do with the fact that France was the first country where a majority of the population could read and write than them being extraordinarily innovative or clear-headed. For Badiou and Zizek, it appears necessary to first let the singularity take place, thereafter wait for it to generate a new power structure, only to then wait for a bloody conflict within the new power structure – where the otherwise obese and physically the worse for wear philosophers indeed promise to man the barricades themselves and throw Molotov cocktails at the authorities – only to thereafter be able to speak of a genuine revolution. Hegel would most likely not accept such a static and culture-specific idea of revolution. It was hardly the intention that Paris in 1789 would fix the meaning of the word revolution, which in fact is a metaconcept, for all eternity in the way that the essentially conservative revolutionary romantics Badiou and Zizek assume. That is, with the revolution as the consistently failing, tragic repetition of the event in Paris in 1789, moreover always carried out by angry young men with weapons in their hands and oppressed by an authoritarian tyrant whose boots they love to lick.