Reply: What to Do When Evil Is Dancing on the Ruins of Evil

Replying to the critical remarks in “Poeticizing Revolution,” the text clarifies the topic of Mao Zedong’s dialectics and of the possibility of radical social transformation today. It points out Mao’s total misunderstanding of what Hegel meant by dialectical process: Mao’s dialectics is a new version of the ancient cosmology of the eternal struggle of antagonistic forces. As to the possibility of radical change, it points out the ambiguous functioning of the coupled possible/impossible in today’s ideology: while in the domain of technology and private pleasures, unheard-of things are becoming possible, the economic domain is perceived as the domain of the impossible — even a modest move against neoliberal economics is rejected as potentially catastrophic.