Abstract

An essay on Robin Wagner-Pacifici's 'What Is and Event?'. The essay argues that Wagner-Pacifici's book offers a platform from which it again becomes possible to rethink the relationship between system and transformation, and that this is precisely what the human and social sciences need if they are to retain their ability to critically interpret the dense fabric of late capitalist society and culture – a society of the spectacle if there ever was one, a world from heel to head made up by events. The essay assess Wagner-Pacifici's analytical apparatus of political semiosis, and it shows that aesthetics, and literary and visual interpretation, to a large extent explains why Wagner-Pacifici can make a tremendous contribution to a theory of political emergence. Finally, the essay argues that aesthetic theory offers an intersection where social theory and the theory of history may begin a new conversation about human agency, social change and historical experie