I'D LIKE TO TELL YOU A STORY of an Oneida show and see if you can place it in our fifteen-year history. I imagine it will be instructive to anyone with any kind of fantasy about being in a band.

Haas wore leather pants when he performed. He was tall and rail-thin with large hands and an obsession with bebop and hard bop music of the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s — Charlie Parker especially. When we arrived for that first class he handed out a transcription of the solo from Parker’s tune “Koko” and played the recording from which it came. It was a revelatory experience. I saw the genius of Parker’s instant composition — the nuances, the harmonic development — all over the course of a two-minute piece. The recording ended and I looked up from the paper transformed — I was almost crying. Up until that moment jazz was a blur of notes, an approximation of a form I wasn’t able to grasp, but that recording with the notation unlocked the form for me.

I became possessed and was made despondent by the music. Possessed because there was an infinite reserve of recordings to mine and only a few weeks of concentrated study to crack the surface, and despondent because I was 20 years old and still a mediocre musician.

When I was a child, my mother told me that by the time I was old enough to die, a machine would have been developed to prevent it. Like the child in “The Eye,” I believed in this consolation until an inappropriate age, when its impossibility arrived all at once, with a similar hollowing force. The experience of recognizing a moment of your own emotional life in a piece of fiction — the reason, I think, that most of us read fiction — is especially characteristic of Munro’s work [...]

As with any crossover success, Balibar’s offered grounds on which purists might complain of betrayal. Civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights activists all spoke the language of rights. (This has also been true, though more obliquely, of the antiwar and environmental movements.) By demanding legislative action, these movements acknowledged the legitimacy of the state to make laws and guarantee rights. In the eyes of some, such an acknowledgment, even a tacit one, could only be a right-wing deviation. It’s the liberals, not us, who talk about democracy and human rights. We’re the ones who know that the state is a tool of the capitalist class, right? How is it possible that Balibar lets himself be seen shamelessly keeping company with bourgeois concepts and institutions?

Something like this was no doubt going through Badiou’s mind when he called Balibar a reformist.

I suspect the problem here for American readers may not be the concepts of democracy and human rights as such, or even the word liberal (which is not yet so firmly established in the US as to be obligatorily shunned by the pure of heart). Skepticism will more likely come from a natural repugnance for the triumphal narrative of America’s unique moral and political greatness. As materials out of which this self-congratulatory narrative is frequently constructed, human rights and democracy will naturally suffer a sort of guilt by association, as will the idea of progress. The rules of this game are familiar: I prove my independence of mind by seeing through the complacent Whiggery all around me. You naively tell me that something somewhere is no longer quite so awful as it used to be. I shake my head in gentle disbelief and reveal to you all the bad stuff you have somehow forgotten about.

There is never any shortage of bad stuff. And yet it doesn’t follow that the job of the left is always and everywhere to harp on it. That would not be an independent thing to do (on the contrary). Nor would it be the authentically left thing to do. The fact that progressive narrative is claimed, exaggerated, and disfigured by liberals does not mean it can be abandoned to them. You have to believe progress is possible in order to get up and try to make some. That’s why they used to call us progressive.

Paradoxical as it may seem, giving up on politics has probably been part of Marxism’s seductiveness for a long time. No one in Balibar’s cohort (Balibar was born in 1942, Badiou in 1937, Rancière in 1940, Žižek in 1949) could have felt confident that as Marxists they came of age at a propitious time for plunging into the class struggle. If 1968 didn’t turn out to be the revolutionary conjuncture, no moment that has followed has come closer. In nonrevolutionary times, the most tempting and pervasive of revisionisms is to give up on changing the world and just interpret it. Nothing supplies serviceable analytic distance like the conviction that you don’t have a horse in this race. Witness the quietism of the New Left Review, the foremost organ of Marxism in the English-speaking world and yet a journal that you go to for searching analysis, not for uplifting news of movements and conflicts. For some years NLR, strongly influenced by Althusser, ostentatiously ignored thinkers in the messianic mode — and bless them for it. But isn’t there a sort of secret alliance between messianism and quietism? How can you stay so coolly detached unless you’re absolutely sure that in the end your day will come?

[...] Does Žižek really think that when he runs this rather tainted phrase up the flagpole, his readers are going to salute? It seems unlikely. This is not carelessness on Žižek’s part. He’s got to know that what it will most likely do is make people stay in their seats, fully entertained, enjoying the outrageousness rather than marching or leafletting or (God forbid) joining anything. When Žižek proclaims his communism, he is not recruiting. There’s no piety, and there are no strings — and having no strings is part of the magic formula that keeps his audiences so thoroughly entertained. It doesn’t seem coincidental that the phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat” (on which Balibar has also written provocatively, but in 1976) is resuscitated on the same page as an endorsement of Badiou’s argument “against participation in ‘democratic’ voting.”