Abstract

This essay attempts to formulate an ethical program for today's left by showing that such a program should necessarily involve both the insistence on a subjectivity, in the sense of a revolutionary self-determination that would go beyond the liberal pre-established autonomy and an openness to the new and unrecognized that would go beyond all liberal tolerance. I further argue that the only way to understand the co-articulation of subjectivity and openness is to accentuate the event as the origin of open subjectivity. Moreover, borrowing a motif from Kant,1 I will speak of the “orientation” in history that an event provides…