In 1989, as the institutions of an earlier radicalism began to crumble in Eastern Europe, Kathy Acker reflected on her sense of the possibility of a new radical literature. “Perhaps our society is now in a ‘post-cynical’ phase. Certainly, I thought as I started Empire, there's no more need to deconstruct, to take apart perceptual habits, to reveal the frauds on which our society's living. We now have to find somewhere to go, a belief, a myth. Somewhere real.” In that novel, Acker represents this “movement from no to yes” as the transformation of terrorists into pirates. The scene of this transformation is a multinational, posthistorical Paris, a city where forms of domination and oppression from every period, from slavery to a futuristic form of mind control, are wielded by shadowy masters against the alienated and dispossessed multitude. This is a world where “the right-wing owns values and meanings,” where every aspect of society, every form of social relation, has been infiltrated and thoroughly polluted by a malevolent, multiform sovereignty (ES 73). The oppressed masses, represented by Acker as the postcolonial Algerians, turn to terrorism in protest against these conditions, “arrang[ing] for the poisoning of every upper-middle and upper-class apartment in Paris” (ES 77).