Living in the End Times. Slavoj Žižek

Lenin’s “Theses”—far from being an opportunist flattering and exploiting the prevailing mood in the party, Lenin’s views were highly idiosyncratic. Bogdanov characterized the “April Theses” as “the delirium of a madman,” and Nadezhda Krupskaya herself concluded: “I am afraid it looks as if Lenin has gone crazy.” Lenin immediately perceived the revolutionary chance which was the result of unique contingent circumstances: if the moment was not seized, the chance for the revolution would be forfeited, perhaps for decades. So we have here Lenin himself entertaining an alternative scenario: “What if we do not act now?”—and it was precisely his awareness of the catastrophic consequences of not acting that pushed him to act.

      But there is a much deeper commitment to alternative histories in a radical Marxist view: it brings the What-If logic to its self-reflexive reversal. For a radical Marxist, the actual history that we live is itself a kind of realized alternative history, the reality we have to live in because, in the past, we failed to seize the moment and act. Military historians have demonstrated that the Confederacy lost the battle at Gettysburg because General Lee made a series of mistakes that were totally uncharacteristic: “Gettysburg was the one battle, fought by Lee, that reads like fiction. In other words, if ever there was a battle where Lee did not behave like Lee, it was there in southern Pennsylvania.”⁶ For each of the wrong moves, one can play the game of “What would Lee have done in that situation?”—in other words, it was as if, in the battle of Gettysburg, the alternate history actualized itself. In his less well-known Everlasting Man, Chesterton makes a wonderful mental experiment along these lines, in imagining the monster that man might have seemed at first to the merely natural animals around him:

      The simplest truth about man is that he is a very strange being; almost in the sense of being a stranger on the earth. In all sobriety, he has much more of the external appearance of one bringing alien habits from another land than of a mere growth of this one. He has an unfair advantage and an unfair disadvantage. He cannot sleep in his own skin; he cannot trust his own instincts. He is at once a creator moving miraculous hands and fingers and a kind of cripple. He is wrapped in artificial bandages called clothes; he is propped on artificial crutches called furniture. His mind has the same doubtful liberties and the same wild limitations. Alone among the animals, he is shaken with the beautiful madness called laughter; as if he had caught sight of some secret in the very shape of the universe hidden from the universe itself. Alone among the animals he feels the need of averting his thought from the root realities of his own bodily being; of hiding them as in the presence of some higher possibility which creates the mystery of shame. Whether we praise these things as natural to man or abuse them as artificial in nature, they remain in the same sense unique.⁷

      This is what Chesterton called “thinking backwards”: we have to leap back in time, before the fateful decisions were made or before the accidents occurred that generated the state which now seems normal to us, and the way to do so, to render palpable this open moment of decision, is to imagine how, at that point, history might have taken a different turn.

      However, this does not mean that, in a historical repetition in the radical Benjaminian sense, we simply go back in time to the moment of decision and, this time, make the right choice. The lesson of repetition is rather that our first choice was necessarily the wrong one, and for a very precise reason: the “right choice” is only possible the second time, after the wrong one; that is, it is only the first wrong choice which literally creates the conditions for the right choice. The idea that we might already have made the right choice the first time, and that we just accidentally blew the chance, is a retroactive illusion. To clarify this point, let us take an example from recent historiography.

      Bryan Ward-Perkins’s The Fall of Rome describes the gradual disintegration of the Roman empire from the fourth to seventh centuries CE, emphasizing the economic and civilizatory regression, catastrophe even, that this disintegration brought about: in a short period, the majority of imperial lands fell into a state even worse than they were prior to the Roman occupation.⁸ The book’s explicit polemical targets are recent “revisionist” attempts to portray late Antiquity not as a traumatic regression to the early medieval “Dark Ages,” but as a (mostly peaceful) gradual transformation of the united Roman empire into multiple new states, a process in which ethnic groups, freed from brutal Roman domination, matured into tolerant coexistence. Instead of collapse, one could even say that progress was taking place . . . Against this new doxa, Ward-Perkins convincingly demonstrates the breathtaking decline of economic and social complexity (the decline in literacy, the virtual disappearance of the complex network of trade routes and thus of the large-scale production of everyday objects, etc.). His emphasis on the economy and daily life is a welcome correction to Foucauldian analyses focusing on spiritual shifts in late Antiquity, describing the rise of new forms of subjectivity. Ward-Perkins’s book confirms two old insights: first, that all history is a history of the present; second, that our understanding of actual history always implies a (hidden or not) reference to alternate history—what “really happened” is perceived against the background of what might have happened, and this alternate possibility is offered as the path we should follow today. The two insights are thus closely linked—as we have said, Walter Benjamin had already conceptualized social revolution in this way (it will redeem the past by repeating past revolutionary efforts, finally actualizing their missed potentials). Here, however, we get a more conservative case. The “lesson for today” is directly spelled out in the book’s last paragraph:

      there is a real danger for the present day in a vision of the past that explicitly sets out to eliminate all crisis and all decline. The end of the Roman West witnessed horrors and dislocation of a kind I sincerely hope never to have to live through; and it destroyed a complex civilization, throwing the inhabitants of the West back to a standard of living typical of prehistoric times. Romans before the fall were as certain as we are today that their world would continue for ever substantially unchanged. They were wrong. We would be wise not to repeat their complacency.⁹

      Echoes of the notion of a developed secular West threatened by new fundamentalisms are unmistakable here—let us not repeat the Roman mistake and minimize the mortal danger the new barbarians pose, otherwise we will find ourselves in a new Dark Ages . . . But what is even more interesting for a critico-ideological analysis is the alternate history that sustains this vision: it is the possibility that the Ostrogoths, who ruled Rome from the mid-fifth to the mid-sixth century, might have remained in power, defeating the invading Byzantine army:

      if events had fallen out differently, it is even possible to envisage a resurgent western empire under a successful Germanic dynasty. Theodoric the Ostrogoth ruled Italy and adjacent parts of the Danubian provinces and Balkans from 493; from 511 he also effectively controlled the Visigothic kingdom in Spain and many of the former Visigothic territories in Southern Gaul, where he reinstated the traditional Roman office of “Praetorian Prefect for the Gauls” based in Arles. This looks like the beginnings of a revived western empire, under Germanic kings. As things turned out, all this was brought to an end by Justinian’s invasion of Italy in 535. But, given better luck, later Ostrogothic kings might have been able to expand on this early success; and—who knows?—might have revived the imperial title in the West centuries before Charlemagne in 800.¹⁰

      Among historians, Peter Heather has developed this hypothesis most forcefully.¹¹ There is also an alternate history novel—Lest Darkness Fall (1941) by L. Sprague de Camp—which imagines this version: a modern archaeologist is transported through time to Ostrogothic Italy, helps to stabilize it after Theodoric’s death, and averts its conquest by Justinian. The underlying vision here is one of the productive synthesis of Roman civilization and Gothic strength and vitality: the Goths, who saw themselves as protectors of Roman civilization, would have been able to pull the dying empire out of its inertia and invest it with new vigor. In this way, there would have been no Dark Ages, and we would have passed directly from the Roman empire to Charlemagne, and so to a strong and civilized Europe.

      But there are dark ideological investments at work here, investments which found expression in Felix Dahn’s novel Struggle for Rome, from 1876. (Returning to Germany, Robert Siodmak made a big historical spectacle out of this novel in 1968, with Orson Welles as Justinian—it was Siodmak’s