Choosing our Fate

Slavoj Žižek

http://www.lacan.com/thesymptom/?page_id=1934

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If we are effectively to counteract the drift towards catastrophe, it is not enough just to submit to a critical analysis the standard notion of historical progress; one should also deploy the limitation of the ordinary «historical» notion of time: at each moment of time, there are multiple possibilities waiting to be realized; once one of them actualizes itself, others are cancelled. We need to break out of the ”historical” notion of temporality which runs from the past to the future, and to introduce a new mode of time, the ”time of a project“(Jean-Pierre Dupuy), 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. This, then, is how Dupuy proposes to confront the catastrophe: we should first perceive it 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 had done that and that, the catastrophe we are in now would not have occurred!”) upon which we then act today. Therein resides Dupuy’s paradoxical formula: we have to accept that, at the level of possibilities, our future is doomed, the catastrophe will take place, it is our fate – and, then, on the background of this acceptance, we should mobilize ourselves to perform the act which will change fate itself. Instead of saying “the future is still open, we still have the time to act and prevent the worst,” one should accept the catastrophe as inevitable, and then act to retroactively undo what is already “written in the stars” as our fate.
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