The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to 'be active', to 'participate', to mask the nothingness of what goes on. People intervene all the time, 'do something'; academics participate in meaningless debates, and so on. The truly difficult thing is to step back, to withdraw. Those in power often prefer even a 'critical' participation, a dialogue, to silence - just to engage us in 'dialogue', to make sure our ominous passivity is broken. The voters' abstention [in Saramago's Seeing] is thus a true political act: it forcefully confronts us with the vacuity of today's democracies.Slavoj Žižek, Violence (London: Profile Books, 2009), 183.
