obvious aspect of Obama's assassination campaign is that it is a terrorist act. One can only imagine the response if US citizens were annihilated by missile strike in Iowa by another sovereign country claiming that those killed were suspected of plotting terrorism. When Obama was first elected I was worried that he wouldn't make it through his first term, that he'd be topped by some fringe Tea-Party type with a high-powered rifle. Instead it's Obama carrying out the assassinations. Obama's criminal use of drones brings to mind Alain Badiou's idea of the Event, something that does not make sense within conditional paradigms, an irruption which must have the rules of conditional normality rewritten to accommodate it. To put it another way, getting your head around an Event like Obama's use of Hellfires is like suddenly being told that Jaws was a really a Disney movie. Badiou's philosophical lineage goes right back through the work of Jacques Lacan; indeed, he and Chantal Mouffe, Slavoj Zizek and Ernesto Laclau and others, have been loosely grouped under the heading of the 'Lacanian Left', an invention yet to really exist but which is worth discussing nonetheless. This is a Left that foregrounds a radicalising of democracy, not the traditional utopian politics of revolutionary imagination, of which it is highly sceptical. Sometimes when we advocate revolution we can just be acting out our paranoia, our desire for a universal, actionable meaning. The Left has often been plagued by paranoid orthodoxies. Perhaps that is why the