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Books

Too Late To Awaken by Slavoj Žižek

T.W.J Moxham reads Slavoj Žižek’s little book of Hegelian horrors.

In order to change humanity’s fate, to avoid catastrophe, we must perceive the future differently, redefining its trajectory; only if we make a radical change within ourselves can this be achieved. This is the premise of Too Late To Awaken, the latest work by the ever-controversial Slavoj Žižek, which at times reads more like a political manifesto than a philosophy book. When considering the future, we often perceive in it humanity’s annihilation, whether through ecological disaster or nuclear warfare. But for Žižek, this is not inevitable.

His provocative books are known to sometimes confuse, contradict, or enrage their readers, and Too Late is no different. While the main theme pivots around the question of Why aren’t we doing anything when we know we need to do something?, Žižek tries to build a holistic answer through weaving together an understanding of topics including the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Wokism, Alt-right ideology, Lenin, Assange, and more, making this pamphlet feel rich and dense.

The title may initially seem awkward, but it has significant meaning that needs to be explained in order to reveal the book’s ambition. Drawing from psychoanalysis and finding commonalities with Hegel, Žižek uses Jacques Lacan’s notion of ‘awaken’ in his title to describe our current predicament.

In Too Late, Žižek recounts a rather horrific psychoanalytic case first recorded by Freud and later reinterpreted by Lacan. A boy has just died, and after watching over the boy’s body for some time, the grieving father is eventually convinced to go and sleep. While asleep, he dreams of his son who says to him “Father, can’t you see I am burning?” The father wakes up and find his son’s hand caught in a candle flame. Freud suggested that the son’s presence in the dream was to prolong the sleep state until some external stimulus – such as the smell of burning flesh – became overwhelming and woke him up.

Lacan – and Žižek – offer a different interpretation. Initially, the father constructs a dream to prolong his sleep, however it is not the external stimulus that wakes him up, but rather being confronted by his feelings of guilt and responsibility over the death of his son, a feeling he does not want to face. To avoid processing it, the father wakes up. That is, in order not to deal with the actual issue at hand – namely facing the reality that he feels guilty about his son’s death – the father literally awakens from experiencing his real feeling to avoid it and pretend it doesn’t exist. Or as Žižek says, “the father literally awakened so he could go on dreaming.”

The book’s title then, implies that we, like the father, are ignoring the real problems at hand – such as climate change and famine – because we don’t want to face up to the changes needed to resolve them. However, given our trajectory towards annihilation, if we don’t confront these issues now, it will be too late. Only by tackling them today, even if this means radically changing the way we see and act, can we secure our future and avert humanity’s destruction.

Too Late opens by examining how we perceive the future. In English, there is only one word – future – to describe what is to come. However, in French, there are two: futur and avenir. According to Žižek, futur stands for the continuation of the present, similar to the English concept of future, while avenir represents a discontinuity of the present – “something new that is to come, not just what will be.”

To many, including myself, our civilisation’s long-term future seems likely to consist of tragedy followed by eventual annihilation, whether through nuclear war, climate change, economic collapse or social chaos. The Doomsday Clock of the atomic scientists chillingly conveys this sense of inevitability.

Žižek argues that if we perceive catastrophe as unavoidable and project ourselves into that future, we retroactively insert it into the past, making it seem like it was always meant to be. This fatalistic perception is self-imposed and realising this is perhaps the first lesson on how to awaken, how not to drift into the dream of reality.

One of the overarching questions Žižek asks in Too Late is why, in the face of ecological crisis, climate change, famine, and numerous other existential threats, war now erupts, with other potential conflicts looming (such as China and Taiwan, the US and North Korea, and Israel and Iran) just when people ought to be uniting.

Žižek finds an answer in Hegel, who believed that “the co-existence of sovereign states implies the necessity of war.” States, having historically established and maintained control through violence, are in a constant master-slave dialectic with other states. They each pose a threat to one another’s power. A state’s ideological apparatus – its moral outlook and primary concerns – is about maintaining control through a monopoly on the use of violence. However, with this continued conflict, if the current state ideology continues, Žižek argues, we will end up in a third world war with unimaginable consequences.

This is, amongst other reasons, why Žižek calls us to radically change; to avoid the doom to which the world’s competing states are taking us. It is necessary to unite to tackle the global problems and have a ‘new mode of relating to our environment’. We need to drastically change our actions and thoughts in order to survive.

Žižek goes on to outline how state power had started to wane over recent years and argues that in a bid to retain power, ruling elites have reverted to traditional forms of control through war, using it to foster patriotism and unity. Even on the verge of the abyss, they subordinate global issues to their own short term interests.

Clearly there is a jarring gap between where Žižek says we are, and where we need to be. As he remarks, “We could even say that the new wars do not simply ignore climate change and other global troubles; they are a reaction to our global problems.” The wars are a response precisely to the waning of power and the need for unity.

From this position, Žižek calls on us to revolt; to create an avenir future. He says that either there will be a war and then a revolution, or else the war will be supplanted by revolutionary intervention. Either way, revolution is necessary.

While I found this to be an insightful book, I have at least two significant concerns about its theoretical basis.

Firstly, Žižek’s universal prescription of ideology seems over-stretched. The examples he uses are interesting, but the conclusions drawn from them do not universally apply. Žižek aims to demonstrate that the structures of power as he describes them are universal (or a totality), but it often feels like the examples he gives are niche or have been reshaped to fit a Hegelian narrative. This becomes apparent not only by examining the information presented, but by noting the lack of information in Too Late (a lot of data and critical analysis is missing that would likely show the conclusion to not be wholly correct). Žižek’s approach to justifying his position oversimplifies reality and it sometimes feels like the intention is to prove his theory of ideology, rather than to objectively examine the facts.

Secondly, even if we hypothetically accept Žižek’s ideological outlook, we are still drawn into a false conclusion: that either there will be war followed by a revolution, or else a revolution will prevent war. This false dichotomy projects a fatalistic outcome, which is ironic given that Žižek asks us to reject fatalism. His portrayal of the global situation is overly simplified, ignoring the reality of the actions being demanded of us. Many alternative futures could occur where, for instance, progressive social change leads to a better state of existence without the need for revolution and violence. Moreover, this fatalistic approach towards violence lends to a deeper concern: rather than critiquing the ideological superstructure of the state, Žižek’s call for violence seems to mirror it. By presenting conflict as the inevitable solution, he unwittingly reinforces the state’s narrative of inevitability and violence that he aims to challenge.Therefore Žižek’s call to revolution struck me as neither necessary nor wholly convincing, making it questionable altogether what we really should be doing.

This pamphlet-sized book is filled with thought-provoking ideas, many of which illuminate the dogmas exacerbating our current predicament. Žižek’s call for us to change the future and not succumb to fatalism about humanity’s survival is necessary and refreshing. However, as is common with Žižek’s work, it is also at times clunky and confusing. There are moments when his relentless provocations seem a tad cringe-worthy, and his ideas appear to be an attempt to squeeze all phenomena uneasily through a Hegel-shaped hole. This book is a mix of the profound and the perfunctory.

T.W.J. Moxham has a Master’s Degree in Philosophy from the University of Sheffield

• Too Late To Awaken: What Lies Ahead When There Is No Future?, by Slavoj Žižek, Penguin Books, 2024, 192 pages, £9.73 pb, ISBN13: 978-1802063677.