Slavoj Žižek says the future is undetermined

Nathan Gardels, A Quantum Theory Of History, Noema, May 2, 2025.

Recently, the philosopher Slavoj Žižek gave a lecture on “a quantum theory of history” at the Berggruen Institute Europe’s Casa de Tre Oci in Venice.

For Žižek, all major ideologies, from Liberalism to Marxism, believe history has a direction that moves inexorably toward their universal realization. But today, he maintains, we live in a moment where you can’t draw a straight line to the future.

As Žižek argued in a video interview prior to the lecture, the notion of “superposition” in quantum physics “fits our circumstances perfectly.” In this condition, multiple, non-universal configurations, or states of being, can exist simultaneously on trajectories that are not predetermined.

“We live in a situation,” he says, “where we have the remnants of the progressive, Enlightenment European dream. Then we also have something very different … which is precisely the anti-Enlightenment. I sometimes call this ‘soft fascism.’” It is not the same as totalistic Nazism. Rather, it combines the dynamism of capitalism with a strong state rooted in ethnic or religious traditional ideology to cement social bonds that would otherwise fray amid the dislocations of unleashed animal spirits.

In Žižek’s view, you see this everywhere. “In China, as Xi Jinping recently said, ‘We need to teach young people what? Not Mao, but Confucian tradition.’ Then you have Modi in India, Erdogan in Turkey and Putin in his own way in Russia.” Trump’s America now joins the mix. Instead of some harmoniously balanced multipolar order, Žižek sees each “trying to create their own small empire” in a discordant world.

Both the Enlightenment and anti-Enlightenment strains live side by side, neither with a determinist advantage in the long run, and both in a state of perpetual transformation.

In short, history is open in all directions. There is no through line you can draw that will tell us where it will all go and where it will end up. There are a multitude of possibilities and arrays of conditions everywhere, all at once, that will only have looked inevitable in retrospect.

What we are learning about nature through quantum physics changes our very concept of being. For Žižek, this means we must also change the ontological foundations of our perception of history. We now know that nature is neither stable nor linear, but mostly in a state of perpetual flux and plural potentiality that only apparently crystallizes when we observe contingent circumstances converging at a given time in a given space.

There's more at the link.

Tyler Cowen, Straussian reading, and Žižek in Wakanda

A couple of years ago I decided to write a post about Tyler Cowen’s use of the term “Straussian reading.” Tyler has now posted an account of the matter that was given, I presume, by ChatGPT and sent to him by a reader, Jeremy David: Ask the beast. I posted a longish comment to that post based on some of the notes I’d made toward my post on the matter.

As for my own post, the notes became sprawling and unmanageable, so I never finished it. However, since Tyler has put the question on the table I decided to post some of those notes. Here’s how I planned to open my post:

If you read Tyler Cowen’s entries at Marginal Revolution then sooner or later you will find something referred to as “Straussian” or as a “Straussian reading.” You may know exactly what Cowen means or, like me, you may not. Oh sure, I was pretty sure that it referred to Leo Strauss, whom I know only as a teacher of and an influence on Alan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind, a book I didn’t much like. Other than that, it’s a mystery.

Cowen is an economist and I’m not. He frequently uses terms of art – words, phrases, and acronyms – that are opaque to me. So I go to the web and see what I can see. Strauss wasn’t an economist but “Straussian reading” does and does not feel like a term of art. It’s a trope floating between a virtual cult-of-Tyler – he’s got a large and distinctive presence in the intellectual blogosphere, though no more than a modest presence in the Twittersphere (c. 160K followers), writes a regular column for Bloomberg, hosts a well-regarded podcast, and has recently become a philanthropist – and a larger and more diffuse aggregate floating in a libertarian conservative liberal sea – think of a frayed net on the water’s surface in a South Seas atoll.

When I went to the web I discovered that I’m not the only one curious about Cowen’s usage:

• Kevin Lacker, Straussian Reading
• KimStacks and bulksalty, ELI5: What does Tyler Cowen mean when he says “straussian”?
• Nigel Seel, Tyler Cowen: "a Straussian reading"

These are suggestive. I think the matter merits further investigation, and perhaps some actual thought on my part.

Somewhere in the middle we find this:

Ask an Encyclopedia

Perhaps Wikipedia can offer some insight. I found this in the entry for “Leo Strauss”:

In the late 1930s, Strauss called for the first time for a reconsideration of the “distinction between exoteric (or public) and esoteric (or secret) teaching”. In 1952 he published Persecution and the Art of Writing, arguing that serious writers write esoterically, that is, with multiple or layered meanings, often disguised within irony or paradox, obscure references, even deliberate self-contradiction. Esoteric writing serves several purposes: protecting the philosopher from the retribution of the regime, and protecting the regime from the corrosion of philosophy; it attracts the right kind of reader and repels the wrong kind; and ferreting out the interior message is in itself an exercise of philosophic reasoning.

There’s more, but that gives you the basic idea.

But does it help? Yes and no. It doesn’t tell me much about the meanings Cowen has or might have in mind when he alludes to the existence of a Straussian reading for this or that text (or movie). But it tells me that Strauss did have a doctrine about reading philosophical (and other) texts and that, whatever else he has up his sleeve, Cowen is alluding to that doctrine.

That philosophical, or other (serious) texts, have “multiple or layered meanings” is of no particular interest to me. That’s where I started from as a literary critic. If that’s all Cowen has in mind then the only work he’s doing by using the word “Straussian” is signaling that he’s in or a fellow traveller of the Club of Straussians. Let’s set that aside.

But that Wikipedia snippet is about more than the existence of multiple meanings. It’s about the meaning of texts written under the condition of political oppression. There’s definitely something to that.

Here’s a section on Žižek:

Žižek in Wakanda

I have little interest in the work of the ubiquitous Slavoj Žižek, but from what I hear, he doesn’t need anyone’s permission to have intellectual fun. I am pretty sure, though, that he inhabits a different region of the intellectual universe than the one traversed by Tyler Cowen – though, I note in passing, that they recently had a congenial conversation. Thus I was a little surprised to discover that he had published a Straussian reading of Black Panther. Is the Straussian Cabal more deeply and extensively embedded than I have heretofor imagined?

Žižek, S. (2018) Quasi Duo Fantasias: A Straussian Reading of ‘Black Panther’, Los Angeles Review of Books, March 3, 2018:

Things thus seem clear, confirming Fredric Jameson’s insistence on how difficult it is to imagine a really new world, a world which does not just reflect, invert, or supplement the existing one. However, the movie offers signs that disturb this simple and obvious reading — signs that leave Killmonger’s political vision radically open. Reading the film in the way Leo Strauss read Plato’s and Spinoza’s work, as well as Milton’s Paradise Lost, we can recover this apparently foreclosed potential.

A careful Straussian reading draws attention to signs that indicate that the obvious hierarchy of theoretical positions has to be inverted. For example, although Milton follows the church’s official party line and condemns Satan’s rebellion, his sympathies are clearly with Satan in Paradise Lost. (We should add that it doesn’t matter if this preference for the “bad side” is conscious or unconscious to the author of a text; the result is the same.) Does the same not hold for Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, the final part of his Batman trilogy? Although Bane is the official villain, there are indications that he, much more than Batman himself, is the film’s authentic hero distorted as its villain...

So, back to Black Panther: which are the signs enabling us to recognize in Killmonger the film’s true hero? There are many; the first among them is the scene of his death, in which he prefers to die free than to be healed and survive in the false abundance of Wakanda. The strong ethical impact of Killmonger’s last words immediately ruin the idea that he is a simple villain. What then follows is a scene of extraordinary warmth: the dying Killmonger sits down at the edge of a mountain precipice observing the beautiful Wakanda sunset, and T’Challa, who has just defeated him, silently sits at his side. There is no hatred here, just two basically good men with a different political view sharing their last moments after the battle is over. It’s a scene unimaginable in a standard action movie that culminates in the vicious destruction of the enemy. These final moments alone cast doubt on the film’s obvious reading and solicit us to deeper reflection.

Cowen on Black Panther: *Black Panther* (evaluations, only minor spoilers), Feb 17, 2017

Christopher Lebron, ‘Black Panther’ Is Not the Movie We Deserve, Boston Review, Feb 17, 2018

Note that Žižek references Lebron in a note appended to his review.

That’s all folks!

Did Cowen approve that hot dog?

Žižek on environmental catastrophe

Slavoj Žižek, Last Exit to Socialism, Jacobin, 7.21.2021:

So what should we do in such a predicament? We should above all avoid the common wisdom according to which the lesson of the ecological crises is that we are part of nature, not its center, so we have to change our way of life — limit our individualism, develop new solidarity, and accept our modest place among life on our planet. Or, as Judith Butler put it, “An inhabitable world for humans depends on a flourishing earth that does not have humans at its center. We oppose environmental toxins not only so that we humans can live and breathe without fear of being poisoned, but also because the water and the air must have lives that are not centered on our own.”

But is it not that global warming and other ecological threats demand of us collective interventions into our environment which will be incredibly powerful, direct interventions into the fragile balance of forms of life? When we say that the rise of average temperature has to be kept below 2°C (35.6°F), we talk (and try to act) as general managers of life on Earth, not as a modest species. The regeneration of the earth obviously does not depend upon “our smaller and more mindful role” — it depends on our gigantic role, which is the truth beneath all the talk about our finitude and mortality.

If we have to care also about the life of water and air, it means precisely that we are what Marx called “universal beings,” as it were, able to step outside ourselves, stand on our own shoulders, and perceive ourselves as a minor moment of the natural totality. To escape into the comfortable modesty of our finitude and mortality is not an option; it is a false exit to a catastrophe. As universal beings, we should learn to accept our environment in all its complex mixture, which includes what we perceive as trash or pollution, as well as what we cannot directly perceive since it is too large or too minuscule (Timothy Morton’s “hyperobjects”).

What to do:

The answer to the heat dome in the United States and Canada is not just to help the affected areas but to attack its global causes. And, as the ongoing catastrophe in southern Iraq makes clear, a state apparatus capable of maintaining a minimal welfare of the people in catastrophic conditions will be needed to prevent social explosions.

All these things can — hopefully — be achieved only through strong and obligatory international cooperation, social control and regulation of agriculture and industry, changes in our basic eating habits (less beef), global health care, etc. Upon a closer look, it is clear that representative political democracy alone will not be sufficient for this task. A much stronger executive power capable of enforcing long-term commitments will have to be combined with local self-organizations of people, as well as with a strong international body capable of overriding the will of dissenting nations.

I am not talking here about a new world government — such an entity would give opportunity to immense corruption. And I am not talking about communism in the sense of abolishing markets — market competition should play a role, although a role regulated and controlled by state and society. Why, then, use the term “communism”? Because what we will have to do contains four aspects of every truly radical regime.

First, there is voluntarism: changes that will be needed are not grounded in any historical necessity; they will be done against the spontaneous tendency of history — as Walter Benjamin put it, we have to pull the emergency brake on the train of history. Then, there is egalitarianism: global solidarity, health care, and a minimum of decent life for all. Then, there are elements of what cannot but appear to die-hard liberals as “terror,” a taste of which we got with measures to cope with the ongoing pandemic: limitation of many personal freedoms and new modes of control and regulation. Finally, there is trust in the people: everything will be lost without the active participation of ordinary people.

The Way Forward

All this is not a morbid dystopian vision but the result of the simple realistic assessment of our predicament. If we don’t take this path, what will happen is the totally crazy situation which is already taking place in the United States and Russia: the power elite is preparing for its survival in gigantic underground bunkers in which thousands can survive for months, with the excuse that the government should function even in such conditions. In short, government should continue to work even when there are no people alive on the earth over whom it should exert its authority.

H/t 3QD.

"the best tweet ever crafted"

First this:

BREAKING: this is footage of philosopher slavoj zizek scarfing down a frank on the run pic.twitter.com/C9MEtgSB7y

— John Ganz (@lionel_trolling) November 9, 2017

To which I respond with this:

Ah, the rebirth of the Frankfurt school! OOO, tastes so good! @arrroberts @the_eco_thought @DrZamalek

— Bill Benzon (@bbenzon) November 10, 2017

And then more like cheathawks (now with 50% more cheat)‏ responds with:

This is the best tweet ever crafted. https://t.co/PCNiF5MrC6

— more like cheathawks (now with 50% more cheat) (@eonge1) November 11, 2017

The tweet is, no doubt, a minor literary form, but I'll take it.

Thanks!

This, is of course, very deep in the weeds of academic jousting. A little help for the uninitiated, but only a little:

Frankfurt School
OOO

FWIW, I owe my taste for puns to my father, though in the past several months it has been inspired by the example of Adam Roberts.

Mad Max: Fury Road – An empty vessel anyone can fill?

Matt McKenna at 3 Quarks Daily:

Fury Road is so open to whatever interpretation one would like to attribute to it, websites that usually find themselves in utter ideological disagreement have praised the film for being a fantastic example of the topic they normally write about. Jezebel, a popular feminist website, calls Fury Road a "feminist blockbuster" and praises it for confronting the "the obsession of fertility" referring to women's reproduction rights back in the real world. Breitbart, a comparably popular conservative website that one would assume shares little overlap in readership with Jezebel, likewise praises the movie and its depiction of women, but instead of referencing the female characters' independence regarding reproductive issues, the Breitbart writer focuses on the female characters' "breaking away from a cult of personality and its tyrannical central government." Depending on which site you're more likely to frequent, you may find either website's take on the movie to be reaching/reasonable. I think this is exactly what Zizek is saying about some works of art functioning as empty containers, open to all possible meanings.

Slavoj Žižek, a Note

I've read almost nothing by the man. Yes, I understand that he's a major thinker in some pretty large intellectual circles. Alas, I can't help but regarding him as a last gasp in a Continental intellectual tradition that peaked in middle of the previous century. Just what's going to become of that tradition in this, the 21st century CE, I do not know. I suppose something will keep going on as a kind of alchemy astrology theosophical New Age critique add-on. But we need a more vital interpretive tradition.

Anyhow, Žižek was interviewed at the U. of Chicago by Kerry Chance some time after 2006 [there's no date on the interview, but Žižek mentions The Parallax View (2006) as his previous book]. Concerning the cognitive sciences:

. . . they should be taken seriously. They should not be dismissed as just another naive, naturalizing, positivist approach. The question should be seriously asked, how do they compel us to redefine the most basic notions of human dignity, freedom? That is to say, what we experience as dignity and freedom is it all just an illusion, as they put it in computer user terms, a user's illusion. . . .

The thing to do - and I'm not saying I did it, I'm saying I am trying to do it - is to take these sciences very seriously, and find a point in them where there is a need for an intervention of concepts developed by psychoanalysis. I think - I hope - that I isolated one such point. I noticed how, when they tried to account for consciousness, they all have to resort to almost always the same metaphor of this autopoesis, self-reflexive move, some kind of self-relating, self-referring closed circuit. They are only able to describe it metaphorically. What I claim is that this is what Freud meant by death drive and so on.

But it's not that we psychoanalysts know it and can teach the idiots. I think this is also good for us - and by us I mean, my gang of psychoanalytically oriented people. It compels us also to formulate our terminology, to purify our technology as it were.

I can't say that I find the cognitive sciences particularly interesting on human dignity and freedom. It's interesting that Žižek chooses this as a point of contact while saying nothing about what the cognitive sciences have to say about perceptual and cognitive mechanisms and structures.

But who's going to develop a discourse of freedom and dignity in the context of the computational sophistication of the cognitive sciences? What would that look like?

The Galloway Affair: Sokal 2?

One Alexander Galloway has a piece in Critical Inquiry, a top-tier lit crit journal, in which he takes certain philosophers to task. Some of those philosophers, and their allies, have gotten upset with the critique as it unceremoniously dumps them in bed with Ewww! capitalism. I’ve not read the article myself, but I have read a long post in Galloway did which covers similar philosophical ground, A response to Graham Harman’s “Marginalia on Radical Thinking.”

Boy, did that ever kick up a fuss! 105 comments, some quite long, and who knows how many posts on other blogs. This Galloway fellow seems to have his pulse on something or another.

If it IS Galloway who wrote it. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

* * * * *

It’s early 1969 and I’ve just read The Pooh Perplex: A Freshman Casebook, by Frederick Crews. Crews satirized literary criticism by writing a bunch of articles about Winnie the Pooh, each in the style of a different critic. Though, in most cases, I didn’t recognize Crews’ target, I thought the whole exercise was wonderful.

And so I decided to try my hand at it. I wrote a learned and somewhat florid analysis of this little ditty:

In days of old when knights were bold

and rubbers weren’t invented

They wrapped a sock around their cock

thus babied were prevented.

My college’s student newspaper published it and the result was a minor one-day scandal. I’m told it was the talk of the table in the faculty dining room that day.