Slavoj Žižek on how to "change our past"

Slavoj Žižek is a well-known philosopher who often has worthwhile observations and analysis. He also tends to say irritating things that seem to be just provocative.

But he’s a leading Hegel scholar. And in a recent article (What Lies Ahead? Jacobin 01.17.2023), he has some worthwhile reflections on historical determinism. What he has to say is also useful in thinking about the current polemics over the Russia-Ukraine War.

He talks about two kinds of futures. One is the future that emerges from a series of events under way. The other is the future that develops if the pattern of events is changed so that produces a different outcome.

[Jean-Pierre] Dupuy’s point is that, if we are to confront properly the threat of a catastrophe, we have to introduce a new notion of time, the “time of a project,” of a closed circuit between the past and the future: the future is causally produced by our acts in the past, while the way we act is determined by our anticipation of the future and our reaction to this anticipation. We should first perceive the catastrophe as our fate, as unavoidable, and then, projecting ourselves into it, adopting its standpoint, we should retroactively insert into its past (the past of the future) counterfactual possibilities (“If we were to do that and that, the catastrophe we are in now would not have occurred!”) on which we can act today.

One could say, oh, that’s just a way of saying that a series of events leads to a result and a different series leads to a different result, so what?

We might say that is, uh, one way of organizing the information.

But it has some particular implications in political affairs. In the public polemics about the war in Ukraine, the New Cold Warriors (neocons and liberal interventionists) look at developments in Putin’s rule and tend to paint a picture of a relentless development of a ruthless imperial project over a period of decades. foreign policy “realists” and “restrainers” find themselves calling attention to a series of events in which Western nations on one side and Russia on the other acted and reacted to each other in ways that led to what German Chancellor Olaf Scholz called the “Zeitenwende“ (turning point) marking by Russia’s invasion of February 24, 2022.

But it’s important to remember when sorting through the process in the past that led to a particular results to remember that events tend to look more like an inevitable result of developments in retrospect than while they are happening. Once a particular “future” is realized in the present, its easy to forget that the past events involved people making decisions that were open until they were actually made.

What he calls retroactively inserting counterfactual possibilities into the past is a way of understanding current possibilities by analysing how choosing alternative options in the past could have lead to a more desirable result.

Žižek gives this an interesting twist:

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. (my emphasis)

This notion of changing the past recalls the philosopher Walter Benjamin's meditation on a Klee painting of what he took to be the Angel of History looking at the ruins of the past and trying to fix them, but cannot because she/he is being relentlessly blown backwards into the future by the wind of progress blowing out of Paradise.

Paul Klee, Angelus Novus (1920)

As Benjamin put it in his Or, in his "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1940):

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth hangs open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage hurling it before his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call Progress. (my emphasis)

It’s a good way of framing the need for a creative and critical view of history. Žižek continues, quoting Dupuy further:

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.

This not only stresses the value of critically and creatively understanding the past. It also emphasizes that when we see a course of events leading to a catastrophe, we should take it seriously as a coming catastrophe that we also have a responsibility to avoid or mitigate.

We know that nuclear proliferation and the climate crisis are catastrophes in the making. Or, in the climate case, even a catastrophe in progress.

Pretending that they are anything else won’t make them go away.