Access the full text.
Sign up today, get DeepDyve free for 14 days.
References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.
<jats:p>Gil Anidjar's essay reflects upon the occurrence of revolution in the context of user-generated content: as a self-promulgating and, purportedly, instantly consumable spectacle of power. Anidjar discusses the ‘seeming collapse’ of the temporal distance between the event and its narrative, its actor and its spectator, its survivor and its witness. Drawing on the valuation of spectatorship, in Immanuel Kant's insights on the French revolution, as embodying the significance of the event itself, and invoking the inherent element of ‘danger’ Kant perceived in the act of public utterance of judgment on the event, Anidjar suggests that such judgment may only, in Kantian terms, be responsibly pronounced in the immediate wake of the event as a manifestation of ‘treason’. To seek to endow the revolutionary effort with the urgency of fame will be a necessarily premature gesture, and the shortening of the distance between the event and its judgment an impossible exercise, Anidjar argues, since ‘we have not been granted the power to decide, much less to know whether, by our actions or reactions, we are betraying ourselves or our people or state, or whether we might be bringing about the faithful redemption of that which that people or that state of ours should already have been.’</jats:p>
CounterText – Edinburgh University Press
Published: Apr 1, 2015
Read and print from thousands of top scholarly journals.
Already have an account? Log in
Bookmark this article. You can see your Bookmarks on your DeepDyve Library.
To save an article, log in first, or sign up for a DeepDyve account if you don’t already have one.
Copy and paste the desired citation format or use the link below to download a file formatted for EndNote
Access the full text.
Sign up today, get DeepDyve free for 14 days.
All DeepDyve websites use cookies to improve your online experience. They were placed on your computer when you launched this website. You can change your cookie settings through your browser.