In our examination of Empire, we have seen how Acker and the Situationists utilised the figures of topology and turbulence as operators of change, which, in conjunction with the fluid and the feminine, allowed for the transformative energy of past insurrection to flow into the present. We also saw that for Acker the event is not a realisation of the political goal of emancipation in itself, but rather a chance of achieving that goal. If Empire projects us back to the event, that fragile chaotic moment of opening the realm of possibility and beginning anew, in In Memoriam to Identity (1990) she insists on the role of individual commitment in realising and sustaining evental promise. She calls, implicitly, for a responsible subjectivity engaged in the hard, unpopular work which transposes the truth of the past event into a positive project – of restructuring society while remaining faithful to emancipatory ideals. As we will see, this is proposed at a time when traces of the past event have been obliterated and the prospects of a new event are few and far between. Existential concepts, such as responsibility, anxiety, passion, truth, commitment and engagement, are for Acker inextricably linked with the articulation of pre- and post-evental subjectivity. Embarking on a truth-procedure becomes in her work an opportunity for individuals to take responsibility for constructing a meaningful existence, allowing them to participate in collective action and the shaping of the world.

In Memoriam overlays the disenchanted years following the crushing of the Paris Commune in 1871 – an event forgotten by the official discourse of the Right, and registered in the Left as one of the most potent experiments in liberal democracy in Western history – onto 1980s America, and onto England's dwelling in the non-evental situation, where the naturalisation of capitalist ideology and the equation of democracy with the free market prevents the genesis of alternatives. The setting is the post-revolutionary landscape of Empire: that world where ‘nothing ever changes’, a universe of multinationals ‘where there are no more decisions’ (ES, 126). The late 1980s of In Memoriam amount to what Marcuse has described as the one-dimensional reality of ‘[a] comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom’.