ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses revolutionary actions and events using a theoretical framework more commonly used to think about normal actions and events, namely, John McTaggart's distinction between a series and B series representations of time. It focuses on Hannah Arendt's conception of revolutionary actions and Alain Badiou's conception of revolutionary events. In Logics of Worlds, Badiou attempts to do justice to the A series aspects of the two-fold picture. Badiou's generic orientation requires that events be essentially rare: an event must stand out against a normal background; that is, it must appear to faithful subjects as an exception, albeit one that attests to a universal truth about an entire situation. The form of incompatible truth procedures, a discursive predicament that Arendt represents as the clash of political opinions. Badiou's characterization of revolutions as events rather than actions, his theory of generic truth procedures might seem to have a fundamentally spectatorial character.
