>>> p. 1 Life is a heedless risk taken by us… Today, the principle of precaution has become the norm… Or
rather, is there, in life itself, a secret mechanism, a music that is uniquely
capable of displacing existence onto the front line we call desire?… At the instant of decision, risk calls into question our intimate
relationship with time.
>>> p. 2 As an act, risk lets chance take hold.
Risk is a kairos, in the Greek sense, a decisive instant. And what it determines is not only the future but also the past, a past behind our horizon
of expectation, where it reveals an unsuspected reserve of freedom. How
should we name that which, in deciding the future, thereby reanimates the
past, prevents it from becoming set in stone? […] When a sound loops back, it provokes a kind of secret intelligence that alone, perhaps, is liable to disarm repetition. Far from
being a pure “onward” bent on the future, risk subjects time and memory
to an inversion of priorities through a sort of revolt, a very gentle and
continual rupture. The instant of decision, the one in which a risk is taken,
inaugurates an other time, much as trauma does. But a positive trauma.
Miraculously, it would be the opposite of neurosis whose trademark move
is to capture the future in such a way that our present becomes modeled
on past experiences, leaving no room for the effraction of the new, for the displacement, albeit minimal, that opens a horizon line. Indeed, the feedback effect of risk would be the exact opposite. It would be a rewind from
the future, dismantling the reserve of fatality included in any past, opening
a possibility of being in the present—in other words, a line of risk.
>>> p. 33 – 35 Zero risk has become the obligatory horizon of our collective and individual decisions… our perception of reality has been… reformatted.
The zero risk we end up with is deadly. It strips the subject of responsibility for her acts; it divides her from within into a being of the drive who
risks anything and everything, a being who therefore must be protected
by consent or by force against herself, and a being of reason who is never
sufficiently reasonable. She is thus potentially a deviant…
It’s taken for granted
that no one wants to “risk” losing human lives; war, from now on, should
paradoxically be able to do without death.
In our
climate of ballyhooed economic austerity and political torpor, the prime
necessity is to ensure against risks that, in concentric circles, domestic or
planetary, create an atmosphere of diffuse fear and distilled anxiety for
which we have no one to incriminate but ourselves, always underinsured.
We can always recover from pain, catastrophe, or
mourning, but evil will always claim a share. We will never be saved in
advance.
performance practices_divergent temporalities 