Isn’t it funny realizing the consequences of seemingly insignificant day to day choices? We often consume the narrative à la How I Met Your Mother where every tiny event, new encounter, romantic disappointment leads the protagonist Ted Mosby one step closer to the moment he meets the future mother of his children (which would be impossible without every random occurrence beforehand). Well, I feel that I had my own little HIMYM loop closed the other day when [drum rolls] I finally got on Reddit! And what was the tiny seemingly insignificant step leading to it? None other than me picking up Žižek’s Living in The End Times at a moment where I had all of my books packed in boxes.
Still in the Denial chapter, there exists a section called “Legal Luck, or, the Loop of the Act”, which threw me right in the arms of the Žižek Subreddit!
In Part 1 of this series, I briefed and mused on living in this era of ideological denial for matters turned to the present moment - such as getting an ad to donate for charity and what that implies. In Part 2, ideology casts her spell on us in our relation to the past moments.
Žižekpresents us with a logical paradox taken from Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s analysis of Vertigo (1958). I admit, I initially struggled to understand how it related to the prisms of denial or ideology. Hence, me going on Reddit for help understand the section, starting with:
An object possesses a property x until the time t, after t, it is not only the object no longer has the property x; it is that it is not true that it possessed x at any time.‘
Beautifully, Dupouy’s text is titled “When I Die Nothing of Our Love Would Have Ever Existed” ( ‘Quand je mourrai, rien de notre amour n’aura jamais existé’). I am a big fan of the statement because it is radical enough to make me truly reflect on whether I subscribe to it or not.
If we were to take it on its own, it easily sounds even a bit crazy. We have all cared deeply for, loved even, people who are no longer in our lives. Thus, to blatantly claim a sentiment never existed sounds unnatural. But Dupouy and Žižek show its significance, of course, inextricably linked to the context of Hitchcock’s movie Vertigo.
I am yet to watch it (I shall!), but since this is the third time I read about it, I feel quasi-qualified to give a briefing. Let’s say, what matters is there is Madeleine whom the main guy, Scottie, was in love with but has lost. Then, he recreated her in another woman - Judy, who was a fake. At the end of the film, Judy is revealed to have been the real Madeleine and the original Madeleine to have been a fake. Here, this is as simple as I could do it!
What this loop shows is quite literally Madeleine possessed property x (being Madeleine) until time t (until she dies), but when we reveal at another time t2 Madeleine not only no longer had x - she never had it to begin with.
While for most of us (I sincerely hope) such tricky love configurations will remain only on screen, the philosophy behind that example remains pertinent. Once we fall out of love, even in the most amicable circumstances, we inevitably change the narrative and stories we tell ourselves.
Yet, for me it is much easier to see it in the inverted version - falling in love:
Falling in love changes the past: as if I always-already loved you, our love was destined to be, is ‘the answer of the real’ My present love changes the past which gave birth to it.”
If that is so, falling out of love also changes the past by retroactively creating possibilities, recontextualizing reality - making what the past was no longer what it was, the property x never having existed in this exact way. Maybe in saying love never truly was we see an object that had something close to x, yet it never had x.
All that said, surprisingly, I found myself subscribing to the quote “When I die, nothing of our love would have ever existed.” Not from a place of bitterness or because I am a vengeful ex but because I believe love rewrites the past, present, and future, and its illogical nature makes even paradoxes to be true. A special shout-out to the good people of Reddit’s r/Žižek for helping me understand this passage!
So it’s not necessarily that all love must disappear after death. Stories can be told, like Romeo and Juliet, where the statement “Romeo and Juliet loved one another” makes sense after their deaths. But meaning is never stable, the past is always subject to revision, is something that keeps being created anew.”
On that long note, the central question Žižek answers is in a way, from the standpoint of the here and now, did what was before ever possess the qualities it enunciated?
As we saw, the past is revealed to be dynamic and changeable. That being so, do we all not bear a disorienting similarity to Scottie from Vertigo in our denial of both the past and precisely its alterable nature?
In wanting to recreate the lost order, to make a new and distinguished Madeleine out of today’s promiscuous and vulgar Judy, they [today’s ethico-legal conservatives] will sooner or later be forced to admit not that it is impossible to restore Madeleine (old traditional mores) to life, but that Madeleine was already Judy: the corruption they are fighting in the modern, permissive, secular, egotistic, etc., society was present from the very beginning. One can compare with Zen Buddhism: those who criticize the Westernized New Age image and practice of Zen - its reduction to a relaxation technique - as a betrayal of authentic Japanese Zen, forget the fact that the features they deplore in Westernized Zen were already there in “true” Japanese Zen: after World War II, Japanese Zen Buddhists immediately started to organize Zen courses for business managers, whilst during the war the majority supported Japanese militarism, and so on.
This point holds true not only for the “ethico-legal conservatives” Žižek talks about above but for a multitude of cases, in which ideology masks itself as neutral knowledge, opposing itself or being ironically positioned in regards to what is perceived as “common ideology”, the common understanding of the past and so forth.
This year, I was reading Rebecca Solnit’s “Wanderlust: A History of Walking” and in a chapter focusing on modern day treadmills and overall gym exercises, I found an intriguing notion. In my case, running on the treadmill or doing an endless series of squats at the gym have both made me question “Why the hell am I doing this?” However, not only in the context of an exacerbated, miserable gasp for air but also in the genuine wonder: Why did we, as a society, end up incorporating such unnatural activities?
Walking on the treadmill in an enclosed space dedicated for leisure exercise fulfills a physical necessity but also performatively replaces the function of walking in a cultural, political, personal way - as a way to be in the world and create the spaces around us by simply walking. Similarly, many machines in the gym are made to imitate movements habitual for other types of lives - fishers’ rowing, farmworkers or construction workers lifting, and so on.
As Solnit points out:
The everyday acts of the farm had been reprised as empty gestures, for there was no water to pump, no buckets to lift. I am not nostalgic for peasant or farmworker life, but I cannot avoid being struck by how odd it is that we reprise those gestures for other reasons.
There is a perceived “neutral knowledge” here: it is good to exercise in the gym and walk on the treadmill in a life where many of us no longer need to exert physical effort; this is healthy and could theoretically maintain us “in shape.”
The ideology behind gyms can simply be viewed as an idea against leading a sedentary life. It’s hard to argue that there’s anything wrong there. However, the same idea also ends up masking the ideological message of “There is no relationship between our muscles and our world! We can cultivate one completely separately from the other.”
It is not difficult to imagine people going to the gym five times a week, while in their day to day life choosing to drive even walkable distances and not using the strength and endurance they train for in any actions outside the confined limits of a gym.
All that said, I am still “guilty” of going to the gym and surely not because I experience a concrete need in my daily life to do bench presses with heavy weights. While my actions also affirm this world view of separation between body and world, I often at least try to look for some relatedness between the muscles I am trying to work on and my everyday life - for instance, I am particularly motivated to work on muscle groups that help you pull yourself upward, which helps me climb harder routes. Yet, let’s be real - I am far from exercising for any real need or for, like back in the good ol’ days, I would need to be strong and perform hard physical labor!
That said, Rebecca Solnit slid in the important distinction of not being reminiscent of a past in which conditions required hard labor (“ I am not nostalgic for peasant or farmworker life”). I am happy she did so because otherwise such nostalgia would have played into an ideological reconstructing of the past. And in a way, I am most guilty of falling into that particular trap: reminiscing about a past Madeleine for a time when people lived “in harmony” with nature (literally never happened!), naturally moving and not having unhealthy fitness beauty standards (also not exactly true, we always had beauty standards that were convenient for some and less so for others) and so on.
In the end, Žižek’s exploration of denial and ideology exposes the subtle ways in which we participate in shaping and reshaping our reality, often without realizing it. Whether through love, memory, or daily routines, we are constantly revising our past, our present, and our beliefs about the future. The illusion of standing outside ideology - whether through ironic detachment or imagined objectivity - is itself a form of denial, a refusal to confront how deeply ingrained these systems are in our lives.From the treadmill at the gym to the seemingly small, personal acts of nostalgia or regret, I realize that much of what we take for granted is not as neutral or separate from ideology as we may think. Perhaps, then, the challenge lies not in trying to escape ideology, but in recognizing and understanding its hold over us - acknowledging the loops we live in, and deciding which ones we want to break.
To my dear followers, I hope you enjoyed and stay tuned for Part 3 of Reading Žižek where we turn our gaze to yet another surprising ideological apparatus - animated films!