The 'quietism' approach to Politics

This other sort of temporal discipline would be neither the undisciplined impatience of hurriedly doing anything and everything to enact some ill-defined, poorly conceived notion of making things different nor the quietist patience of either resigning oneself to the current state of affairs drifting along interminably and/or awaiting the unpredictable arrival of a not-to-be-actively-precipitated "x" sparking genuine change (Badiou's philosophy sometimes seems to be in danger of licensing a version of this latter mode of quietism). Those subjected to today's frenetic socio-economic forms of late-capitalism are constantly at risk of succumbing to various forms of what one could refer to loosely as "attention deficit disorder," that is, a frantic, thoughtless jumping from present to ever-new present. At the political level, such capitalist impatience must be countered with the discipline of what could be designated as a specifically communist patience (designated thus in line with Badiou's assertion that all authentic forms of politics are "communist" in the broad sense of being both emancipatory as well as "generic" qua radically egalitarian and non-identitarian) - not the quietist patience condemned above, but, instead, the calm contemplation of the details of situations, states, and worlds with an eye to the discerning of ideologically veiled weak points in the structural architecture of the statist system. Given the theoretical validity of assuming that these camouflaged Achilles' heels (as hidden evental sites) can and do exist in one's worldly context, one should be patiently hopeful that one's apparently minor gestures, carried out under the guidance of a pre-evental surveillance of the situation in search of its concealed kernels of real transformation, might come to entail major repercussions for the state-of-the-situation and/or transcendental regime of the world.