In my reading of Don Quixote and its component ‘Russian Constructivism’, I showed how Acker strove to inspire political meaning in ‘night time’. She contested the rationality of modern cynicism and realpolitik with their opposites: militant Cynicism and dreampolitik. She then offered alternating ‘pictures of hope and despair’ in relating St Petersburg and New York, dehabitualising perception and looking for passion in their abstract and melancholy topographies.

Acker believed that with Empire of the Senseless (1988) she left the deconstructive phase which had culminated in Don Quixote and became interested in more constructive impulses. She wrote: ‘Perhaps our society is now in a “post-cynical” phase. Certainly, I thought as I started Empire, there's no more need to deconstruct, to take apart perceptual habits, to reveal the frauds on which our society's living. We now have to find somewhere to go, a belief, a myth. Somewhere real.’ In this chapter, I look at how this novel opens history by bringing into proximity three revolutionary contexts, arguing that Acker fuses the events of May 1968 in France, the Algerian Revolution and the Haitian Revolution to create a new global revolutionary space in the present. The politics of proximity in Empire, I will suggest, is realised through Acker's continuation of the Situationist avant-garde project and their shared experiments with topology and turbulence, which in my analysis are complexly interwoven with the fluid and the feminine as operators of change.

At the crossroads

Empire is narrated alternatingly by two main characters, Abhor and Thivai, who tell the story through each other, and also through other voices and narrators. Thivai is a white male who wishes to become a pirate, and Abhor is his ‘partner, part robot, and part black’ (ES, 3). Both names activate our detective instincts, taking us to widely differing locations. Abhor and Thivai are collocations of mythical places: Mount Abora or the river Abora, and the city of Thebes. Thebes plays a significant part in Greek mythology, and is primarily known as the setting for the story of Oedipus, Dionysus, and the city founder Cadmus, among others. In the first section of Empire, entitled ‘Elegy for the World of Fathers’, Acker engages with the worn Oedipal script, which forms part of what she calls the ‘Theban cycle’, before attempting to dismantle it in the subsequent sections.