'Father, why is the sky blue?' - the child is not really interested in the sky as such; the real stake of the question is to expose father's impotenc… - Slavoj Žižek

...there is never a "right moment" for the revolutionary act - the act is always, by definition, "premature".

On Another Country "You are not a Communist because you understand Marx, you understand Marx because you are a Communist!" - that is to say, Judd understands Marx because he presupposes in advance, that Marx is the bearer of knowledge enabling access to the truth of history, like the Christian believer who does not believe in Christ because he has been convinced by theological arguments but, on the contrary, is susceptible to theological arguments because he is already illuminated by the grace of belief.

The shock of 1914 was – to put it in Alain Badiou’s terms – a désastre, a catastrophe in which an entire world disappeared: not only the idyllic bourgeois faith in progress, but also the socialist movement that accompanied it. Even Lenin himself lost his footing – there is, in his desperate reaction in What Is to Be Done?, no satisfaction, no ‘I told you so!’ This moment of Verzweiflung, this catastrophe, opened up the site for the Leninist event, for breaking with the evolutionary historicism of the Second International – and Lenin was the only one at the level of this opening, the only one to articulate the Truth of the catastrophe. Born in this moment of despair was the Lenin who, via the detour of a close reading of Hegel’s Logic, was able to discern the unique chance for revolution. Today, the left is in a situation that uncannily resembles the one that gave birth to Leninism, and its task is to repeat Lenin. This does not mean a return to Lenin. To repeat Lenin is to accept that ‘Lenin is dead’, that his particular solution failed, even failed monstrously. To repeat Lenin means that one has to distinguish between what Lenin actually did and the field of possibilities that he opened up, to acknowledge the tension in Lenin between his actions and another dimension, what was ‘in Lenin more than Lenin himself’. To repeat Lenin is to repeat not what Lenin did, but what he failed to do, his missed opportunities.