Heroes of Greece: The Age of Troy, Pointe-à-Callière, Until 7 March 2027
“And you too, your fate awaits you too, godlike as you are, Achilles — to die in battle beneath the proud rich Trojans’ walls!”
—The Ghost of Patroclus, The Iliad
When the mythological figure and fast runner Achilles decides of his own free will to oppose Agamemnon, his mother, Thetis, a powerful sea nymph who was known to metamorphose into fire, water, lions, and snakes, warns her son that it will spell his demise. And so, Achilles retreats. But Achilles’s fury will eventually twist fate and lead to the fulfillment of his wretched destiny.
“Fate,” says Anastasia Balaska, scientific coordinator of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture, “is something different than the will of the Gods. And also, there is free will. Even though fate has been written, people are responsible for their actions. Achilles knew that his fate was to die. He knew that he was a tragic person. But his actions were his. He could be a hero, or he could stay at home.”
This is in contrast to the Christian notion of choice — which is what separates humans from beasts — and the connection between free will and salvation. “Christians believe that we have free will and we get what we deserve in the afterlife,” Balaska says. “The Greeks had a hero code.”
Alexei Kolakis-Landon & Tomas Dessureault, Ceremony, 6595 St. Urbain, 4-7 June 2026
“The vague is a positive state of intensive activity enveloping all possible varieties of experience. The tendency to take form may be suspended and held in intensity.”
—Brian Massumi, Not Determinately Nothing
When you first see a new painting, the world of possibilities is open and endless. It is pure potential. There is nothing yet determined. This is the most exciting moment for an onlooker: to see without regarding, to experience in advance of identification.
When you first encounter a new face, an analogous world opens up, and every interpersonal possibility is potentially an option. This is the most exciting moment for a lover: to be overwhelmed with beauty, to resist and then settle into recognition.
The opposite of memory is pure anticipation.
William Basinski with Kathryn Mohr, Théâtre Fairmount, 2 June 2026
“There is no ‘substantial’ difference between the God of Love and the God of excessive arbitrary cruelty, lo ’mperador del doloroso regno, it is one and the same God who appears in a different light only due to a parallax shift of our perspective.”
—Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View
The sole concept that is allowed to be infinite in Western culture, albeit begrudgingly, is God. Perhaps this is because both infinity and God are unknowable to the Western mind, inconceivable to our contemporary and technocratic and increasingly binary consciousness.
An eternal existence simply does not compute in modern civilization. The de facto teleological trajectory that we recognize is from indeterminate to determined. The infinite cannot be a starting point because infinity has no beginning. Nor, for the same reason, can God be the end.
Leonard Cohen sang in his 1992 song entitled “The Future” of a deficiency in quantification — “won’t be nothing,” Cohen growled, “you can measure anymore.”
However, the reverse is proving to be true. Everything is measurable, quantifiable, either off or on, never neither.
Quatuor Molinari plays Dmitri Shostakovich, Conservatoire de musique de Montréal, 31 May 2026
I’ve been in this town so long
So long to the city
I’m fit with the stuff
To ride in the rough
And sunny down snuff, I’m alright
By the heroes and villains.
—Brian Wilson, “Heroes and Villains”
That heroism is so often associated with war, and victory in war, is what Karl Marx or Sigmund Freud would have likely diagnosed as the impediment to the growth of culture. Still, in today’s wars, there is no victory. Or rather, victory is expressed in the ability to sustain ambient engagement rather than to prevail in any given battle.
In order to transcend capitalism, which we must now acknowledge is commensurate with war and the decline of culture, it is necessary to devolve to a state of persistent vagueness, for incongruity and indeterminacy to endure. We should redefine heroism, then, not as victory or defeat but as resistance to the tendency to take form.
Lynda Gaudreau, Romances, VOX, centre de l’image contemporaine, Until 20 June 2026
“The hatred directed against war is perhaps like the mania that alone has the strength to free the subject from the tyrant.”
—Judith Butler, The Force of Non-Violence
There is a segment of any crowd that will cheer for the bad guy. At the movies or in the boxing ring, or even in the American presidency, villains are charismatic and command transgressive attention.
Strength is a quality of both heroism and villainy. The evil force flexes its muscle, and the hero overpowers this force with superior strength. There is built-in drama in this conflict, a familiar narrative arc along which we can plot our progress. The further we are away from victory, the closer we must be to the beginning of the narrative, and the more the necessity to build strength.
But cultivating weakness, what is currently understood as “soft power,” refusing the narrative arc of conflict, posits an alternative story to the might-is-right barbarism that dominates global affairs, from politics to music and art and everything between.
The dominant narrative is that if a narrative doesn’t represent the victims of domination, invent a stronger narrative. But reinforcing strength, whether through militarism or through the stories that we tell each other, only further entrenches the universal notion of an arms race.
A call to action is no longer the appropriate response to violence when “CTA” also describes effective marketing copywriting. Strength is inherently capitalistic. Strength is a virtue of the God of Love and the God of excessive arbitrary cruelty.
I propose a call to inaction. Inaction is not interesting. It is not productive. It is not a compelling narrative. Inaction can be neither good nor evil. Inaction neither wins nor loses. It is neither perpetrator nor victim, neither villain nor hero.
Inaction is indirection. It has no subject nor object. It has no aim nor purpose. But neither is it purposeless.
Inaction at once acknowledges and disregards God’s will, our will, and fate.◼︎
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Cover image: Statue of Zeus, the arbiter of fate, 2nd century BCE, Marble, National Archaeology Museum, Athens. Photographed for NicheMTL.
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