Slavoj Žižek on quantum history and the end of the past

2026-04-21

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Does the past even exist anymore?Quantum mechanics has long unsettled our understanding of matter and measurement. But what if its implications reach further — into history, politics, and the very structure of reality itself? If the present can retroactively reshape the past it emerged from, what does that mean for how we act, how we remember, and how we govern?These are not merely theoretical puzzles. In a world where liberal democracy appears to be fracturing, where AI and climate change d...

Does the past even exist anymore?

Quantum mechanics has long unsettled our understanding of matter and measurement. But what if its implications reach further — into history, politics, and the very structure of reality itself? If the present can retroactively reshape the past it emerged from, what does that mean for how we act, how we remember, and how we govern?

These are not merely theoretical puzzles. In a world where liberal democracy appears to be fracturing, where AI and climate change defy traditional political categories, and where new authoritarian currents are emerging from thinkers like Curtis Yarvin in the West and Wang Huning in the East, the question of whether reality offers any coherent ground for political action has never felt more urgent.

Few thinkers are willing to hold all of this together at once — to move from Niels Bohr to Stalinism, from Lacanian psychoanalysis to the collapse of the political centre, without flinching. Slavoj Žižek does precisely that. In his new book Quantum History: A New Materialist Philosophy (Bloomsbury, 2025), Žižek argues that incompleteness is not a failure of knowledge but a feature of existence itself — and that this demands an entirely new way of thinking about history and politics.

Slavoj Žižek is a Hegelian philosopher, Lacanian psychoanalyst, and one of the most provocative intellectuals of our time. Hosted by Omari Edwards.

Read the full transcript of this conversation at IAI News: https://iai.tv/articles/slavoj-zizek-on-quantum-history-and-the-end-of-the-past-auid-3437

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