Chahid Akoury

Creative Deactualization: Rethinking the Idea of Revolution Chahid Akoury

The premise of this text propounds the arrival to radical change as starting with an admission of the unsolvability of crises and confl icts, and in considering any revolutionary act not as an answer to a problem, but the problematic idea itself. Rather than remaining caught in repeated patterns of true or false solutions, this text thinks revolution as the generator of radical otherness "to come", in opening up free spaces of unregulation which so loosen an arrangement as to allow for sensations of something new, other aff ects, and other precepts. The aim is to acknowledge the shortcomings of the current notion of revolution, and to rethink revolution as the genuine openness and spacing in the Heideggerian sense, without which surprises and future developments remain impossible. Such a rethinking is applied in terms of a Deleuzean reading of revolution. Deleuze is duly pertinent in order to read change as the being of becoming. Becoming corresponds to the notion of repetition: in the proper Deleuzean sense only through repetition that the new can emerge. Rethinking the idea of revolution, and thus taking the notions of difference and repetition as starting points, capacitates for presenting the possibility of true change, where revolution is considered outside of historical contingencies, and in terms of the virtual which in its actualization has no semblance, but a genuine creation. The text considers the revolutionary event as a creative process of deactualization present in the form of an opening up in both time and space. This process asserts the experience of creative diff erence, and thus the emergence of the truly new, by freeing the future from the limit of expected convergence present in historical contingencies, and as prefi gured by past and present events. What the spacing of the revolution attests to is creating space as the gathering site of the infinite intensitive multiplicities, singularities, and their diff erential relations, operating at an atemporal threshold moment, accompanied by a spatial bridging that diff erentiates as it leads. This is elaborated in this text by way of artistic, musical, architectural, poetic, and mathematical approaches.