Slavoj Žižek’s Against Progress is not a conventional monograph so much as a deliberately fissured surface that refuses to heal: a collection of analytic incursions that turn the received object—“progress”—into a problem that will not stop returning as symptom, screen, and compulsion. The wager is that only a description that never quite stabilizes can meet an epoch in which stabilization itself is the ideological ruse. Žižek escalates a double movement: he disassembles the narratives through which modernity pacifies itself with images of advancement, while he obstinately keeps open the demand for an affirmative transformation that does not merely invert the reigning platitudes. The result is a book that reads progress against itself, not to abolish the category but to wrench it away from the very uses by which it has been trivialized—uses that stretch from Enlightenment teleologies to Silicon-Valley futurity to the seductions of post-political “sustainability.” This ammounts to a description of progress as vigilance: neither accumulation nor ascent, neither soothing horizon nor nihilistic cancellation, but a restless, recursive labor of beginning again, of thinking and acting as if the emergency were unsurpassable and yet still not the last word.
This orientation is evident from the book’s inaugural dramaturgy, where Žižek adopts the magician’s trick in Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige to name the constitutive remainder of every historical upgrade: beneath each fresh presentation of the future lie the “squashed dead birds” that had to be rendered invisible for the trick to impress. Dialectically, the point is not cynical demystification but the insistence that a credible concept of progress must incorporate its casualties rather than outsource them to the wings—progress that knows its price. This scene sets the register for the essays’ traversal of imperial decolonizations, liberal endisms, socialist barbarisms, and the new authoritarian bargains—each revealing how our endorsements of the next stage depend on a forgetfulness that has to be produced and policed. Progress here is dislodged from linearity and returned to conflict: a field of incompatible temporalities, exclusions, and disavowed sacrifices.
If there is a single theoretical pressure point around which the essays constellate, it is the diagnosis of our collective incapacity to believe what we know—what Žižek, following Lacan, names the fetishistic split. We operate with the practical protocols of yesterday even as we assent to the data that annul yesterday’s premises: we keep commuting, producing, dieting, recycling, speculating, and reproducing as if ecological thresholds had not been crossed and as if the political grammar that organized the long twentieth century had not itself exhausted its plausibility. The effect is not just hypocrisy, it is a structurally necessary unbelief that props up the everyday. Žižek refuses to scold this unbelief from the outside; he treats it as the very material we have to work through if “progress” is to survive its own conditions of possibility. To describe that work is to abandon any global, continuous, or pacified narrative of advancement and to take seriously the fragmentation of horizons and the retroactive character of meaning, where every “after” rewrites the “before” for which it claims to answer.
Hence the strategic place of the book’s sustained polemic with eco-Marxist degrowth and its allied critiques of sustainable-development catechisms. Žižek grants much to Kohei Saito’s provocation—above all, the demand that the left relinquish its residual complicity with forces-of-production progressivism and confront the ecological unsustainability of capitalist modernization. But he insists that even radical deceleration, if it imagines a human subject freed of constitutive excess, misrecognizes the economy of desire that capitalism has organized, exploited, and, paradoxically, taught us to take seriously. It is not enough to reject “growth”; one must refuse the anthropology of constrained, harmonious satisfaction with which degrowth risks arming itself—an anthropology that slides, almost inevitably, into soft moralism or technocratic paternalism, and that, in structural terms, underrates capitalism’s agility to metabolize scarcity, sacrifice, and virtue as fresh markets and governance instruments. Žižek’s counter-proposal is not a naïve acceleration but a rehabilitation of planning and coordination adequate to catastrophe—planning that, precisely because it is not nostalgic for an organic unity with nature, is ready to denaturalize “nature” itself and to treat the planetary situation as a technical, political, and libidinal problem whose solution cannot be localized into cooperatives alone.
Here the argument cuts in several interlocking directions. First, as Žižek emphasizes, the institutional imaginary of the Sustainable Development Goals functions as pacifying theology—a new opium—to the extent that it presupposes the compatibility of its ends with the logic that produces their impossibility. Second, the envisaged transition to use-value regimes, reduced working hours, revaluation of care, and municipal democratizations remains descriptively compelling yet strategically underpowered if it does not postulate a level of centralized, even coercive coordination proportionate to the scale of the emergency. The paradox—Žižek is explicit—is that to “slow down” will likely require a brutal mobilization we do not yet know how to name, one that suspends the short-circuit in which “local” becomes a synonym for politically harmless.
It is in this sharpened light that he revisits the peculiar resilience of contemporary capitalism—whether we call its latest mutation “platform sovereignty,” “surveillance rent,” or, with Yanis Varoufakis, “techno-feudalism”—and rehearses the idea that capitalism alone has succeeded in operationalizing the constitutive failure of desire as an engine rather than an impediment. The consequence is not that capitalism is natural; it is that any project for its abolition must internalize the lesson that there is no return to a desire purified of excess. What makes degrowth perilous in Žižek’s eyes is not its scale of renunciation but its shaky psychology, its tacit confidence that one can subtract the turbulence of surplus-enjoyment without reinstalling the very authorities—sacral, corporate, algorithmic—tasked with policing that subtraction.
The book’s most disconcerting ethical turn is concentrated in the chapter whose title reads like an impossibly bleak slogan: We Are Biomass. Against the sentimental protocols that would either aestheticize catastrophe from a distance or fetishize identifications that our present ruins cannot sustain, Žižek wagers another solidarity, cold and uncompromising: a solidarity of the dumped, of those whose condition is the indistinction of organic and inorganic, of living and inert, of human, animal, and machine. He is drawing here on Michael Marder and Levi Bryant, as well as on the visceral phenomenology of spaces like Agbogbloshie or Mumbai’s waste infrastructures, to argue that the only solidarity that has not already been co-opted by the biopolitics of optimization is one built from within the debris-field itself. This is not an ethics of purity but of refusal: the squashed birds unionize not by transcending the dump but by insisting that the dump is the world-form that planning must inhabit, politicize, and transform. The provocation is twofold: it repudiates a consoling “return to nature” and it exposes the ecological dream of total recycling as capital’s fantasy of finally leaving no remainder at all.
Such an ethics clarifies why Žižek is not seduced by the ambient discourse of “care” when it functions as depoliticized remediation—an infinite labor of smoothing that provides capitalism its moral exoskeleton. The solidarity of biomass does not heal; it collectivizes the wound so that organization can be thought from the worst and not in denial of it. In this sense, his reading of the rubble in Gaza is not an allegory but a refusal of allegory: the point is not that every site of devastation stands in for the world but that the world already speaks from within these sites. One can only judge as reactionary the nostalgia that longs to cleanse the political of such sites, or the managerial fantasy that would invisibilize their remainder through a “circular economy” whose underlying metaphysics is the completion of capital’s metabolic circuit.
The theoretical grammar that allows these moves to cohere is not drawn exclusively from Marxian and Lacanian sources. A central chapter is explicitly experimental, staging the “holographic” thesis as both metaphor and method. The claim is double: first, that history must be read top-down, as Marx already did when he grasped pre-capitalist formations retrospectively from the vantage of capitalism’s emergence; second, that this retroactivity is not a license for teleology but an acknowledgment that the present renders visible the superposed possibilities of the past it actualizes and occludes. Žižek pushes the analogy with quantum mechanics as far as it can go without collapsing into scientism: the present is the interference pattern of unrealized pathways, and any politics worth the name must undertake the Benjaminian task of re-activating betrayed potentials as claims on the now—interruptions rather than culminations. It is this holographic logic that warranties his rejection of both despairing evolutionism and eschatological accelerationism: once we renounce the fantasy that history carries us somewhere, we can finally assume responsibility for the retroactive syntheses we perform.
The polemic with accelerationism is in this register less a normative rebuke than a conceptual dissection. “Dark Enlightenment” names, for Žižek, not an alternative to modernity but its obscene truth: the fantasy of completing the work of deterritorialization by abolishing the human remainder altogether, whether in the technognostic rapture of a Singularity or in the catastrophic war that cleanses politics of contingency. Against this eschatological appetite, Žižek retrieves the Freudian death drive not as a telos of annihilation but as stubborn postponement: the insistence of an undead compulsion that refuses finality. If accelerationism dreams the end of conflict in a post-political fusion—be it algorithmic omniscience or imperial “historical eternity”—Žižek’s anti-eschatological materialism restrikes the coin: there is no end of politics because there is no end of antagonism as long as there is a social. This is not a resignation but a directive to organize under conditions of permanent pre-war, as Donald Tusk bluntly names the atmosphere of our epoch: we must plan for emergencies “as if” they were certain in order to tilt the probabilities against their actualization.
The ethically densest sections of the book are those in which Žižek refuses to treat “authority” as an archaic residue simply supplanted by expertise, populism, or clerical cynicism. The wager, via Kierkegaard, is that authority which appeals to an objective, eternal grounding must be discredited in favor of a logic of “repetitive movement”: transformation unmoors itself both from gradualist teleology and from punctual miracle. The result is a paradoxical picture of progressive action: neither incrementalism nor rupture, but a discipline of beginning that is structurally allergic to closure and that knows failure as its element. Such repetition is not a cycle but a training; it is what allows the book’s closing insistence—there is hope, just not for us—to read not as despair but as critique of that “us” whose fantasies of stability are the thread by which catastrophe leads us.
The same Kierkegaardian thread tightens the book’s consistent suspicion of therapeutic politics: not because therapy is misguided but because the patient presupposed by managerial compassion is the wrong subject for an epoch that demands partisanship. Žižek’s recurring exposure of “fake self-criticism” has less to do with moral hypocrisy than with a structural operation by which liberal orders metabolize dissent into tolerable difference. Here, the older diagnosis of a culturalization of politics is extended, not to deny the materiality of culture but to insist that “tolerance” functions as a sub-contracting of conflict to the sphere where transformation cannot occur. The remedy is not an antinomian cult of the political but a politicization of culture that returns the management of possibility to collective decision rather than preference-sorting. That this inevitably requires planning—centralization, coordination, enforcement—is neither authoritarian relapse nor romantic fantasy but a corollary of the scale of what confronts us. The risk, Žižek concedes, is great; the alternative is the managerial soft fascism already in view.
No summary can do justice to the density with which Žižek threads these lines through concrete conjunctures—the opioid economy as the capitalist commodity in its purest destructive utility; BRICS as an object lesson in how anti-colonial rhetoric can mask the flattening of emancipatory antagonisms; the reemergence of the obscene Strongman as symptom of a populace that has lost even the fantasy of a credible future. Nor can a review reproduce the text’s signature juxtapositional speed, its flights from particle physics to South Korean web sosoeol, its argument by example and joke and detour. What can be said is that the style is not ornament but method: the essays “worry” the object from incompatible angles, because only worry can match objects whose coherence is itself a product of power. The reader is alternately exhilarated and exhausted; both states are required.
What, then, remains of “progress” after this book has finished with it? Not redemption as end-state; not growth as secular soteriology; not sustainability as bureaucratic pacification; not a pastoral restoration of the human to nature; not a cheerful embrace of an annihilating Singularity. What remains is an ethic of adequation to the real that refuses to sentimentalize the real’s horrors; a politics of planning that starts from the dump rather than the garden; a philosophy that treats retroactivity not as the enemy of truth but as the very mechanism by which truths become binding; a psychoanalysis of desire that ceases to dream of a subject freed from excess and instead learns to organize excess under conditions of planetary contraction. This remainder is not consolation, but it is a program: we plan without teleology, we mobilize without eschatology, we repeat without nostalgia. In that precise sense—and only in that sense—Žižek’s book is optimistic. It affirms the possibility of acting as if without the guarantees that made acting easy; it insists that the only credible hope is the hope that begins from the worst and therefore does not require lying about where we live.
To call Against Progress a “call to action” would be to domesticate it into a genre it systematically undoes. It is a call to description at a pitch that does not let the reader rest. The stance is neither prophetic nor managerial; it is dialectical and clinical at once. Dialectical, in its refusal of smooth transitions; clinical, in its refusal of consolations that are diagnoses in disguise. The position is hard to hold—hence the need for repetition as practice.
The book teaches that the measure of any future use of the word progress will be its explicit accommodation of its squashed birds, its explicit abandonment of closure, its explicit recognition that the emergency is not a deviation but our material. Žižek, whose irony so often serves to puncture premature seriousness, is in these pages deadly serious. He will have progress, but only if it can endure the knowledge that its very name has been the site of the worst. And because he will have it only under these conditions, one leaves the book with something like resolve, which is not quite hope and not quite despair. It is the willingness to begin again, with planning that can bite, with institutions that can direct and be directed, with a solidarity that does not purify but collects the remainder and calls it we. That this resolve is as paradoxical as it sounds is not a flaw; it is the form of thought appropriate to a time in which every non-paradoxical optimism is complicity and every non-paradoxical pessimism an alibi.
There is a further insistence worth isolating. Žižek retrieves, from the ruins of the Enlightenment and the failures of emancipatory projects, the negative criterion by which historical breaks declare themselves: what had been debatably normal becomes unthinkable, and any attempt to reintroduce it now appears as farce or monstrosity. That this criterion can be reversed—so that torture, open racism, or theocratic imposition return as matters of “debate”—is the surest index of regression. To mark such reversals is not to indulge in moralism; it is to set the minimal boundary conditions for any meaningful use of the word progress. The corollary is that even when we cannot make the case for linear advance, we can register the activation of a sign—Kant’s term remains useful—when collective acts make visible a possibility, not as inevitability but as right. Žižek’s alignment with such acts is not sentimental. It enlists them to break the spell of necessity, not by promising that the best is to come, but by showing that the present’s coherence is not compulsory. In that way, the book is redemptionist only in Benjamin’s specific sense: the past is not justified but demanded—its betrayed potentials insist on us.
If this description sounds complex, it is because Žižek wants to withhold the rhetorical equilibrium in which a concept like “progress” is safely returned to us as enlightened common sense. The book’s achievement is to make common sense feel like the politics we can least afford: the politics of waiting for better news, of letting markets tell us where coordination is possible, of exporting the remainder into the zones we do not have to see. Against Progress obliges us to inhabit the opposite axioms: that there will be no “outside” to which the remainder can be sent; that planning without sovereignty is a phrase; that the difference between organization and domination is not given but must be forced by institutional invention and recursive critique; that the human is the animal that desires too much and that this is the exact material with which any credible egalitarianism must work. Under those axioms, progress ceases to be a slope and becomes a discipline. The essays are training in that discipline: they do not deliver an answer; they induce a posture. And if a posture can be a politics, that is because it can be a program for institutions that refuse both the sacral exemption of authority and the cozy managerialism of expertise. It is not accidental that Kierkegaard presides, nor that Hegel is everywhere implicated: repetition and retroactivity are the techniques of a future that knows why it cannot promise itself.
Reading Žižek here is difficult, and it should be. The text demands a slowness incompatible with the cultural tempo that “progress” now names in practice. But the slowness is not quietism; it is a labor of differentiation against the homogenizing speed that turns every proposal into a business model and every refusal into a lifestyle. One closes the book with a sharpened allergy to cheerful talk of innovation, inclusion, resilience, and sustainability—words that, without planning and conflict, are the diction of entropy. One also closes the book with a sharpened intolerance for despair that performs its own sophistication while it licenses non-action. Between these falsities is the narrow path Žižek forces: to plan as if there were time and to act as if there were not; to desire without promising satisfaction; to repeat without thinking one has returned to the same place. If this is what “against progress” amounts to, it is not against it at all. It is the only way the name might again deserve to be spoken.
Simon Gros 
Leave a comment