Too Late to Awaken: What Lies Ahead When There Is No Future is Žižek at his most distilled and unflinching: a diagnosis of the present whose wager is that we can only act if we renounce the narcotic hope that action will preserve the continuity of how we live now. From the opening pages he reframes the very grammar of futurity, drawing a sharp line between futur—the extrapolated tomorrow that merely extends today’s trajectories—and avenir—the unforeseeable that “is to come.” In a world calibrated to countdown clocks and last chances, Žižek urges a reversal: imagine that the catastrophe has already happened, that we are five minutes past zero hour, and only this retroactive stance can carve out the space in which something genuinely new might appear. The future as futur is a dystopian “fixed point,” the inertial convergence of war, pandemics, ecological unraveling, and social fragmentation. The future as avenir requires, paradoxically, a decision in the present that treats the disaster as a fait accompli, so that we can finally interrupt the self-fulfilling drift toward it. In this key, time itself becomes dialectical: we do not simply anticipate outcomes, we change what was by how we decide now—history’s necessity is constituted after the fact.
This retroactive temporality structures the book’s sustained confrontation with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Rather than a morality play with a pacifying teleology, the war exposes the impotence behind obscene aggression, the scripted plebiscites and “popular will,” the theater of sovereignty that demands peace only as the pacification of the territory it occupies. Against the consolations of easy pacifism, Žižek insists on a difficult lesson: when an aggressor openly projects a world where “compromise” is proof of your weakness, abstract invocations of peace become complicit in the escalation they seek to avoid. Here he retrieves Lenin not as a saint of revolutionary purity but as a strategist of antagonism capable of holding together ruthless practical calculation with fidelity to an emancipatory cause. The point is not to celebrate war but to refuse the false alternative between naive idealism and cynical Realpolitik. Precisely today, he argues, Realpolitik is naive: it presupposes partners who share the basic rules of pragmatic bargaining when, in fact, the very rules are what’s under attack. We are beyond the stable deterrence of a previous era, trapped instead in a game whose operators deny that it is a game even as they mobilize its every lever.
On this terrain Žižek reads ideological production with perverse exactitude. Contemporary propaganda is not a crude denial of facts; it is a gleeful disclosure that tells the truth in order to neutralize it. The result is a kopi luwak ideology: emancipatory “beans” (anti-imperialism, decolonization, critique of financial elites) pass through the digestive tract of authoritarian power and reemerge as premium reactionary product. Slogans once associated with the Left are repurposed to sanctify aggression, to designate liberalism the secret author of Nazism, to call a holy war “defense” and a colonial annexation “decolonization.” This is why Žižek dwells on the obscene liturgy of “Goida,” on the safari gaze that coolly narrates catastrophe from a safe overlook, on the macabre theater of mercenary violence: the spectacle is not a symptom on the surface; it is the way the system shows you what it is doing so that you will learn to live with it. The truth is said in order not to be heard.
But war is only one rider of the present. Žižek’s central image is apocalyptic in the strict sense: plague, war, hunger, death—the old quartet—now ride with a fifth horseman, us. What allows the others to synchronize into a “perfect storm” is the unprecedented speed and scale of anthropogenic ecological transformation. Pandemics fold into supply shocks; heat domes trigger crop failures and mass migrations; the militarization of borders becomes the “rational” response to the crises created upstream. Against both catastrophism as moral anesthesia and technocratic optimism as moral outsourcing, he proposes a politics of concrete universality: a global solidarity that is most itself when it refuses to police the boundaries of belonging. In an aside emblematic of his wager, Žižek lingers on the Grass Mud Horse meme—the subversive punning that evades censorship by laughing with language rather than at it—to suggest that real universality requires the low, demotic textures of mockery and bricolage. A politics that cannot laugh cannot survive wartime conditions.
The book’s polemics on “culture war” intervene where the Left and Right mirror each other’s worst habits. The obscene leaders who openly flout legality model a new transparency of power: crimes are committed “in the name of” law; impunity becomes a proof of authenticity. Meanwhile, a portion of the academic and media Left rehearses a secularized moralism whose superego is as relentless as any Calvinist conscience: the more it is obeyed, the guiltier you feel. Žižek’s point is not to sneer at struggles over recognition but to expose the form they take when harm becomes the master-signifier capable of naming everything and thus clarifying nothing. In this configuration, “wokeness” functions as a false awakening: it keeps us asleep by furnishing the dream in which we are already awake. The superego thrives, and structural antagonisms are displaced into rituals of confession, denunciation, and excommunication—rituals whose jurisdiction remains largely confined to elite institutions while leaving the organization of production intact. What results is a false civil war in which neither camp speaks for the exploited: a theatrical polarization that, paradoxically, converges on hostility to universalist projects.
Žižek’s psychoanalytic thread tightens here. Interpassivity—delegating our feeling, mourning, or belief to others—was the lubricant of late-capitalist normality. Its disintegration under pandemic conditions exposes our rawness: mourning no longer stabilized by public rites slides into compulsive activism and paralyzed scrolling, a jittery oscillation that mistakes hyperactivity for agency. This is fetishistic disavowal at scale: I know very well, and precisely for that reason I act as if I didn’t. The catastrophe is acknowledged through memes, films, and reports; the point is to keep the machinery of everyday life humming—if possible with a sly smile. The emblem of this new feudalization is not only the intelligence–platform nexus but the metaverse imaginary, a privatized “beyond” that promises frictionless coexistence while enclosing the commons and renting our attention back to us. In that world Assange appears as a scandal not because he revealed unknown secrets, but because he made it impossible for us to go on not knowing what we already knew. The target of the punishment is the fragile conscience of the liberal public, that convenient medium in which power’s self-disclosures dissolve without residue.
If the book is unsparing toward liberal pieties, it is equally merciless toward reactionary pseudo-anti-capitalism. “Tax the rich” will not do. Against Hollywood Marxism’s morality tales and the soothing arithmetic of philanthropic redistribution, Žižek argues for something both more prosaic and more radical: rebuilding the capacity of collective institutions to plan, coordinate, and decide at a scale commensurate with the crisis. That means inscribing transgressive measures into the regular functioning of the state rather than treating them as states of exception; it means embracing a wartime reorganization of energy, healthcare, and logistics—not as militarization for its own sake but as civil mobilization that removes key infrastructures from the anarchy of the market. The thesis is not that “the state” in its existing form will save us, but that there is no path to emancipation that does not pass through the hard problem of instituting universality: how to bind ourselves to decisions that enable collective freedom rather than outsource responsibility to benevolent billionaires or punitive moral codes.
This institutional argument is inseparable from a demand that the Left risk confronting the embarrassing parts of its own side. Žižek refuses the alibi that says the urgency of defense (of Ukraine, of liberal rights, of minority protections) suspends critique. Fidelity to a cause is proved precisely in the insistence on uncomfortable truths: the need to confront the anti-Semitic episodes in nationalist canons, the temptations of ressentiment dressed up as decolonial justice, the ways “anti-imperialism” becomes a mask for smaller imperialisms. The point is not to distribute equal blame but to avoid the fatal logic in which we justify any means by the urgency of our ends. Here the Hegelian motif returns: antagonism is not the name for an enemy to be destroyed in order to arrive at reconciliation; it is the form of a world in which the very conditions of emancipation are internally contradictory. Politics worthy of the name is not a police operation that restores equilibrium; it is the art of deciding in the field of non-innocence.
Running through the book is an ethics of attention to what is “too late.” Too late does not mean “give up.” It names the loss of innocence that enables transformation. Adorno and Horkheimer’s bleak extrapolations were not prophecies designed to paralyze; they were warnings meant to be wrong—if we heard them in time. Žižek extends this logic: only by staging the fixed point of disaster—by accepting that our horizon as futur is ecological breakdown, permanent war economy, and algorithmic feudalism—can we displace its inevitability and open the interval in which avenir can appear. “Superposed necessities” is his phrase for the paradox we must inhabit: it is necessary that catastrophe is coming, and it is necessary that we act to prevent it. The act, if it arrives, will retroactively make the catastrophe non-necessary: history will have been otherwise. That is not mysticism; it is how decisions work when outcomes depend on whether we treat them as avoidable.
The conclusion is accordingly neither consoling nor despairing. The Ukrainian war, for all its horror, has catalyzed anti-corruption energies and civic reinvention that might—if not captured by oligarchic circuits—prefigure a different social compact. The crisis of Europe is an opportunity to repay colonial debts in deeds rather than words, to refuse the anesthetic calculus of gas prices over lives. The deepening annexationist turn in Israel clarifies the stakes of universalism more sharply than any debate could: the only truly “partisan” position is the one that insists on equal rights and refuses the theological capture of sovereignty. And the crumbling of health systems across the continent is not an argument for austerity but the strongest case for a civil mobilization whose “war footing” means the exact opposite of militarism: prioritizing the workers and infrastructures people instinctively turn to when everything else fails.
Žižek’s style—laced with jokes, cinema, psychoanalytic parables, and philosophical detours—serves a precise function: it dislodges the reader from the stupefying realism of incremental doom. The seemingly wayward anecdotes are not ornaments but levers. They pry open the false alternatives that keep us compliant: peace or war (instead of a just peace that requires struggle), freedom or planning (instead of institutions that make freedom something other than a consumer choice), culture wars or “hard” economics (instead of recognizing that the forms of our quarrels are already economic), technological salvation or primitivist retreat (instead of political decisions about technology’s use). Too Late to Awaken is urgent not because it promises a last-minute rescue, but because it demands that we abandon last-minute thinking altogether. It is accessible not because it simplifies, but because it insists that clarity is a form of courage.
What lies ahead when there is no future? The answer is scandalously simple: what lies ahead is what we dare to begin after we stop dreaming that tomorrow will be an improved today. The task is to learn to act as if the worst has already happened—the only way to make it untrue. In doing so, Žižek forces the reader to inhabit the only temporality in which politics is possible: the retroactive present where necessity is written by our decisions, where awakening comes, as in Freud’s story, not from the noise of the world but from the voice that says, Father, can’t you see that I am burning? The world is that burning child. To awaken “too late” is to finally hear it.
Simon Gros 
Leave a comment