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?