The radical act: Towards a spatial critique

What if the dominance of the spatial metaphor in political reasoning and imagination risks an ultimately anti-political structuration of the field, leaving no space for acts that re-shape relations of power and to power? This tendency can explain the movement away from space towards an appreciation and prioritization of temporality in contemporary political theory. And yet, as Zizek's fetishization of the 'radical act' as pure temporality reveals, no solution is to be found in reversing the terms of this binary opposition. Pure space and pure time form an imaginary double further enhancing the repression of the political. What is thus needed is a more sophisticated registering of the unavoidable space-time dialectic, able to allow a topological rethinking of space and to encourage democratic acts aiming at the reflexive re-institution of social orders.