Introducing Slavoj Žižek

 I learned of and read Slavoj Žižek while in prison. Some day, if I live so long, the notes on my reading will be here. I found him interesting, and even more interesting were his footnotes. This is where I got the inspiration to write a play where Antigone lived. 

Jacobin published Slavoj Žižek: What Lies Ahead?. Which will need to suffice for a while as introduction to Žižek. (There also videos on YouTube.)

There are in French (and some other languages like my own, Slovene) two words for the “future” which cannot be adequately rendered in English: futur and avenir. Futur stands for the future as the continuation of the present, as the full actualization of the tendencies which are already present, while avenir points toward a radical break, a discontinuity with the present — avenir is what is to come (à venir), not just what will be. If Trump were to win against Biden in the 2020 elections, he would have been (before the elections) the future president but not the president to come.

In the contemporary apocalyptic situation, the ultimate horizon of futur is what philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy calls the dystopian “fixed point,” the zero-point of nuclear war, ecological breakdown, global economic and social chaos, etc. Even if it is indefinitely postponed, this zero-point is the virtual “attractor” toward which our reality, left to itself, tends. The way to combat the future catastrophe is through acts which interrupt our drifting toward this “fixed point.” We can see here how ambiguous the slogan “no future” is: at a deeper level, it designates not the impossibility of change but precisely what we should be striving for — to break the hold the catastrophic “future” has over us, and thereby to open up the space for something new “to come.”

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To put it in another way, the past is open to retroactive reinterpretations, while the future is closed since we live in a determinist universe. This doesn’t mean that we cannot change the future; it just means that, in order to change our future, we should first (not “understand” but) change our past, reinterpret it in such a way that it opens up toward a different future from the one implied by the predominant vision of the past.

Will there be a new world war? The answer can only be a paradoxical one. If there will be a new war, it will be a necessary one: “If an outstanding event takes place, a catastrophe, for example, it could not not have taken place; nonetheless, insofar as it did not take place, it is not inevitable. It is thus the event’s actualization — the fact that it takes place — which retroactively creates its necessity.” Once the full military conflict will explode (between the United States and Iran, between China and Taiwan, between Russia and NATO . . . ), it will appear as necessary. That is to say, we will automatically read the past that led to it as a series of causes that necessarily caused the explosion. If it does not happen, we will read it the way we today read the Cold War: as a series of dangerous moments where the catastrophe was avoided because both sides were aware of the deadly consequences of a global conflict.

Change will need to be more than waiting for the spool of time to unwind. Read the whole thing, a different perspective.

sch 1/19/23