“Save It for When It’ll Make a Difference”: Cynical Reason and Revolutionary Agency

Abstract

One of the key questions at the heart of Ancillary Justice is when and how revolutionary actions can make a meaningful difference. If cynical reason—continuing to obey the commands of an unjust authority even if one privately disagrees with that authority—leads to paralysis, sometimes a certain kind of snap (or radical moment of emotional break) is required to impel us toward action. The novel thus suggests that revolutionary agency depends not only on individual acts of protest but also on articulating such acts of protest within an existing milieu of dynamic affective tensions. Ancillary Justice illustrates that actions always make a difference: they can either add to a given social system’s dynamism, or they can tilt an already-dynamic system past its tipping point, catalyzing powerful cascades of transformational change.