Slavoj Žižek appears at once amused and wary as he confronts a journal issue devoted to his own corpus, a sentiment that sets the scene for a compact yet many-layered exchange with the editors and podcast hosts Frank Ruda and Agon Hamza. He confesses to postponing a close reading out of a characteristic fear of being both overly flattered and unexpectedly disoriented by the mirror that other readers place before him. The confession is not a mannerism but a thread that binds together his approaches to theology, ideology, politics, and science: one must enter a field already vibrating with others’ determinations, allow oneself to be unsettled by what returns from that field, and only then assume a position. The special issue of Crisis and Critique that occasions this discussion, edited by Hamza and Ruda, assembles an unusually diverse set of interlocutors, among them Dominik Finkelde, Matthew Flisfeder, Todd McGowan, John Milbank, Robert Pfaller, Zahi Zalloua, and a focused symposium featuring Joan Copjec, Mladen Dolar, and Christopher Fynsk engaging Žižek’s forthcoming reflections on liberal fascism; Žižek himself contributes a programmatic text and a wry letter to the editors. The breadth of the table of contents anchors the conversation’s range and signals its final stakes: not celebration, but collective testing of a work that has sought to put theology, psychoanalysis, dialectics, and political strategy into a shared, if volatile, orbit.
At the center of Žižek’s theological provocation lies the distinction he draws between what he calls Christian atheism and what he sees as the defanged ethos of cultural Christianity. The latter holds on to Christian morality after conceding God’s nonexistence, as if ethics could be insulated from the trauma that the concept of God both names and disavows. The former insists on passing through the experience of the death of God, not as a literary conceit but as a subjective operation that severs the residual theistic frame and reveals the vertiginous paradox at Christianity’s core: the origin of evil is not a foreign intrusion that religion manages, but an internal torsion inscribed into the figure of God. Only by enduring this contradiction does atheism become something other than a declarative stance; it becomes an assumption of responsibility in the absence of guarantees. This is the same movement that renders merely ethical appeals insufficient: when ethics is untethered from this negative center, it becomes a decorous humanism that can coexist with cruelty so long as the right sentiments are affirmed.
The political correlate of this theological move is Žižek’s analysis of contemporary authoritarianism under conditions of maximalized individual freedom. He resists the reflex that names any disliked phenomenon “new fascism,” yet he also insists that a paradoxical form of domination emerges precisely where libertarian fantasies are pursued most rigorously. In that Hegelian turn, unbounded market freedoms, far from yielding spontaneous pluralism, demand ever more intricate regulation to stabilize their own consequences; the result is a regulative dictatorship that masquerades as the acme of choice. What differentiates this regime from classical fascism is not its benignity—Žižek is explicit that its “softness” names durability rather than mercy—but its capacity to perpetuate itself without the openly suicidal drives of the twentieth-century model. The taxonomy that follows is diagnostic rather than polemical: there are Trump-style formations that sacralize transgression, technocratic-national variants that present themselves as pragmatic guardians of order, and putatively left or post-colonial regimes that cloak oligarchic extraction in moralizing national narratives. The common denominator is a convergence between theatrical freedom and deepening depoliticization: the more loudly subjects are invited to express themselves, the more tightly the horizon of possible collective organization is constrained.
Žižek’s critical vocabulary for ideology has long turned on the gap between lived pain and the discourses that would claim to translate it into meaning. Against procedural conceptions of critique that rest on tacit norms, he stresses that the first datum is not a principle but a cry. Suffering appears before it is framed, and there is no transparent passage from the fact of suffering to the legitimacy of any given political account of it. This is why rival ideological projects can accurately narrate large portions of reality yet diverge decisively when they attribute causes and assign enemies. The task is not to deny the need for norms but to reverse the order of explanation: one does not criticize from the secure vantage of already justified universals; one struggles over which conceptual apparatus will be allowed to claim the orphaned authority of pain. The point is sharpened by his recurring example: reactionary strategists can lucidly describe how globalized capitalism dissolves livelihoods, but they convert that lucidity into racialized and patriarchal fantasies once the question of responsibility is posed.
In this exchange he radicalizes that older framework by inserting quantum theory into his triptych with Hegel and Lacan, and he does so in a manner precise enough to resist the banalization of physics into metaphor. The appeal of quantum mechanics is not that it licenses a vague celebration of contingency; it is that contingency itself has a rigor. Superposition does not abolish lawfulness; the distribution of possible collapses is constrained by the dynamics formalized in Schrödinger’s equation. History, on this reading, is not a garden of forking paths where any choice would do, but a structured field in which the eventual “measurement”—the event that retrospectively determines which potential becomes actual—exhibits necessity only after the fact. The result is a dialectics of contingency: the past is literally re-inscribed when a collapse occurs, not because facts change, but because the order of relevance, the internal articulation of what counted as a tendency, is rewritten by the actuality that selects among possibilities. What draws Žižek to contemporary ontological debates around quantum theory—the rival pictures of collapse, many worlds, and objective indeterminacy—is that their disputes over how to bind lawful evolution to singular outcomes uncannily mirror the theoretical antinomies of historical materialism. It is not indeterminism that flatters politics, but the disciplined account of how necessity is made.
This is why he proposes a substitution at the level of his own method: critique of ideology gives way to a quantum science of ideology, not because the former collapses into relativism, but because the latter better grasps the retroactive logic by which acts produce their conditions. In a deliberately jarring example, he names Stalinism as the collapse that revealed, in a horrifying register, the latent potentials braided into Lenin’s wager. The point is not to canonize the outcome but to insist on a sober temporality of decision: the subject does not transparently choose among options; the choice is always made under misrecognition, and it is only the second act—the repetition that acknowledges the first act’s blindness—that discloses what was truly at stake. Political strategy, then, cannot be a catechism of correct roads; it must be a discipline of improvisation that preserves principles while refusing to confuse them with procedural maxims. Sometimes insurgent energies can be channeled within existing party structures; sometimes the formation of a new organizational locus is the only way to catalyze a disaffected majority. There is no general algorithm for when to pursue which path. The imperative is to avoid letting the adversary dictate the menu of options.
The same retroactive grammar shapes his comments on censorship and ideological purging. He recounts with grim humor that a recent Russian directive listed dozens of titles for removal from bookshops, including the Russian edition of his jokes, a gesture that aligns literary policing with wartime mythologies of besiegement. Across the Atlantic, a mirrored gesture appears when newly zealous believers purge their shelves of once cherished critical theory, as if burning objects could undo the subjective history they bear. In both cases, it is the afterimage of an act that matters: a regime that files literature as contraband at once elevates and neutralizes it; a convert who destroys a book simultaneously disavows and confirms its enduring power. The dialectical lesson is not symmetrical condemnation but the recognition that the theater of censorship and renunciation is itself an attempt to stabilize an unstable world by erasing traces of prior measurement.
When the exchange turns to immediate geopolitical crises, Žižek warns against a moralizing immediacy that substitutes edible fables for analysis. He asks for the patience of a crime novel, not because political violence is entertainment, but because guilt and causation rarely align with the first figure who fits a popular template. Consent is abundant—everyone agrees that climate futures, militarized borders, and humanitarian catastrophes demand action—yet acceptance is scarce, which is to say, the second act where one binds oneself to the implications of what one has said is incessantly deferred. The task of interpretation, on this view, is neither to reconcile the irreconcilable nor to distribute blame evenly, but to maintain a vantage that allows for the possibility of genuine twists—revelations about who benefits from an ongoing stalemate, which alliances are structural rather than accidental, and how declarations of necessity are engineered. It is precisely here that he locates the value of the Crisis and Critique project: the platform cultivates a collective intelligence capable of holding paradox without paralysis, an arena where sympathetic readers are invited not to canonize a system but to superimpose their own determinate readings and see which collapse they induce. The conversation thus closes where it began, with Žižek’s ambivalence about being read and his insistence that the most faithful response is neither repetition nor refutation but a disciplined act of overlay—Copjec’s lacanian refractions, Dolar’s severe humor, Fynsk’s meditations on friendship and authority, and the editors’ own bids to name the present under the heading of liberal fascisms.
What emerges, taken together and treated in the quantum key Žižek prefers, is a coherent triad. In the beginning, the scene: a thinker who insists that one must pass through the kenotic abyss of Christian atheism to speak honestly about ethics and politics at all. In the middle, the method: a shift from normative critique toward an analysis that accepts contingency’s rigor and necessity’s retroactivity, allowing him to diagnose how maximal freedom hardens into subtle dictatorship and why the translation of suffering into meaning is always a contested act. In the end, the wager: a call for opportunistic discipline, for organizing that does not confuse principle with program, and for collaborative reading as a political practice in its own right. The journal issue and the podcast are not merely vehicles for dissemination; they are the experimental apparatus within which these superpositions are prepared and measured—contributors and editors as detectors, the public as a medium of decoherence, and Žižek as both subject and object whose oeuvre can only be seen by the specific kinds of questions it incites. That is why, even as he professes fatigue and self-repetition, he asks his readers to write the next iteration: to perform the measurement that will have been necessary.
As this conversation indicates, several threads will be elaborated imminently in long-form. Quantum History is scheduled for publication in mid-November and promises to formalize the physics-dialectics articulation sketched here, while the forthcoming essays gathered under the rubric Liberal Fascisms will chart the political landscape that, in Žižek’s telling, arises from the contradictions of our present. One may disagree with the diagnoses and still grasp the coherence of the proposal: begin from the wound rather than the norm; do not rely on the first narrative that fits; and assume that what was truly decided will be known only when we commit to act again.
Simon Gros 
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