historicity vs. historicism In short, what Badiou seems to miss here is the minimal structure of historicity (as opposed to mere historicism), which resides in what Adorno called die Verbindlichkeit des Neuen/the power of the New to bind us: when something truly New emerges, we cannot go on as if it has not happened, since the very fact of this New changes all the co-ordinates. After Schoenberg, composers cannot continue to write music in the old Romantic tonal mode; after Kandinsky and Picasso, artists cannot paint in the old figurative way; after Kafka and Joyce, writers cannot write in the old realist way. More precisely: of course they can do so, but if they do, these old forms are no longer the same; they have lost their innocence, and now look like a nostalgic fake. Zizek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, Verso, 2008 (second edition), p.lxxxvi
Posted on: Wed, 19 Mar 2014 16:44:11 +0000
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