Recently, the philosopher Slavoj Žižek gave a lecture on “a quantum theory of history” at the Berggruen Institute Europe’s Casa de Tre Oci in Venice.
For Žižek, all major ideologies, from Liberalism to Marxism, believe history has a direction that moves inexorably toward their universal realization. But today, he maintains, we live in a moment where you can’t draw a straight line to the future.
As Žižek argued in a video interview prior to the lecture, the notion of “superposition” in quantum physics “fits our circumstances perfectly.” In this condition, multiple, non-universal configurations, or states of being, can exist simultaneously on trajectories that are not predetermined.
“We live in a situation,” he says, “where we have the remnants of the progressive, Enlightenment European dream. Then we also have something very different … which is precisely the anti-Enlightenment. I sometimes call this ‘soft fascism.’” It is not the same as totalistic Nazism. Rather, it combines the dynamism of capitalism with a strong state rooted in ethnic or religious traditional ideology to cement social bonds that would otherwise fray amid the dislocations of unleashed animal spirits.