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Exporting the Revolution – The New Inquiry

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Youth is provisional. The stuff of market pictures, loans and auctioned prospects, finance and gentrification, enhancement and anxiety. Or else it is, away from the metropole, the material of the drain, which is to say that either youth itself is drained, or the nation-state is drained of the youth: it is either unemployment or remittances. If youth is ever fatally confrontational, they say it is misdirected will, gone too soon. It is without history. There is a delay before the learned persons of an era adequately register the proclamations made by the youth. Ten years ago, Alain Badiou made a distinction between “immediate riot” (race riots in France and UK) and “historical riot” (“Arab Spring”). To make this kind of distinction is to miss the writing on the wall for the dirt that the inscriptions were made with. If we wait long enough for the books, we may find out whether the feminist uprising currently underway in Iran is historical, or not. Between the romance of the moment of

Youth is provisional. The stuff of market pictures, loans and auctioned prospects, finance and gentrification, enhancement and anxiety. Or else it is, away from the metropole, the material of the drain, which is to say that either youth itself is drained, or the nation-state is drained of the youth: it is either unemployment or remittances. If youth is ever fatally confrontational, they say it is misdirected will, gone too soon. It is without history. There is a delay before the learned persons of an era adequately register the proclamations made by the youth. Ten years ago, Alain Badiou made

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