I like Žižek. He chokes on words, unable to keep pace with his thoughts. He seeks adversity. He is hungry. I like hungry. I listened to Curt Jaimungal’s podcast with Žižek recently. Among many topics discussed, freedom was the central attractor.
Freedom is Necessity
Žižek thrives on paradoxes. He takes a contrarian stance, melts antonyms together in a way that starts to actually make sense.
Freedom for him is not our ability to choose an ice cream flavor of our liking. It’s not simply being able to act of our own volition and with no coercion. Even free will and free choice seem not to be his prerequisites for freedom. Drawing on Kant, Hegel, Schelling, and existentialists, Žižek sees the ultimate freedom in building our own identity, following through on the self-imposed necessity, and bearing consequences.
To illustrate this, Žižek cites Sartre, who famously claimed, “never were we more free than under the German occupation.” Žižek interprets his words as follows: during the occupation, facing a formidable adversary allowed individuals to build their true authentic selves through difficult moral choices. He contrasted this with a shallow existence during peacetime, when social rules are pre-written and understood, making it all too easy to simply drift with the current.
Building on this paradox, Žižek points to Kant’s view that if we merely do as we please, we remain slaves to our nature; true freedom is found only in choosing to act from duty rather than inclination. In this light, necessity becomes the ultimate form of freedom.
For me, this idea of freedom evokes another thought: learning and growth only happen while overcoming resistance, whether it is “no pain, no gain” at the gym, working through a difficult theorem in the classroom, speaking up against injustice, or even writing this essay instead of doomscrolling Twitter. An absence of resistance might be a sign that we are either stagnating or on the wrong path entirely.
Borrowing from Lacan, Žižek sees the resistance, or confrontation, as the defining force of our individuality. Subjectivity emerges when a child observes their parents, peers, or teachers and tries to decipher their intentions: “What do they all want from me?” (Che vuoi?). We typically notice things only when they fail (the tap that won’t run or the lamp that won’t light) so that we are forced into action. Similarly, we become aware of our own subjectivity through tension, forced to guess at others’ desires and modify our behavior. Paradoxically, paranoia can be viewed as a “rational” response, with the brain finally hallucinating a definitive answer: “Yes, now I finally know what they all want from me!”
Freedom is Negation
Radical freedom even transcends life itself. Being radically free means having the capacity to negate the immediate demands of life. Following Freud, Žižek identifies this capacity with the Death Drive: a darker side of the human psyche that manifests as the ability, and sometimes the readiness, to end one’s own existence.
While the “Life Drive”, the urge to survive and reproduce, is a trait we share with all living beings, the Death Drive is what Žižek believes makes us uniquely human. Only a human can decide to step out of life’s biological imperatives. Before a society can elevate ideals like freedom, justice, or mercy into something worth dying for, an individual must first accept death itself as a genuine possibility. In this sense, heroic feats of the spirit can be viewed as the reintegration of a dark, inner desire for negation.
This capacity for negation echoes the Hegelian concept of “the Night of the World,” which views the self as ultimate negativity, the ability to withdraw from any given identity or reality. For Žižek, there is no true freedom without this foundational “Night.”
Freedom is Unknowability
Žižek rejects determinism in both the social and physical realms. In the former, he follows Hegel, claiming that philosophy can only grasp a social order when it is already in decay: “The owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the onset of dusk.” The future is radically open, becoming explainable or even necessary only retroactively. In this view, necessity is contingent. Like falling in love and only then explaining every prior event as a deliberate path leading to that specific outcome.
In physics, Žižek rejects the idea of a unified “God’s eye view” of totality. He argues that the underlying reality in quantum mechanics is unknowable and ungraspable in principle. He brings up an example of the mutually contradicting (or complimentary?) wave-particle properties of quantum phenomena, which remain incompatible with our everyday perception of reality.
This notion of indeterminism is deeply persuasive to me. I used to be a naive rationalist, believing there must be an underlying, yet undiscovered, reality behind quantum uncertainty; perhaps through local hidden-variable theories of the kind Einstein favored. After I’ve learned more on quantum foundations (cf. Bell’s theorems), superdeterminism became my emergency lifeboat. Now, I find myself drifting further toward “idealism”, beginning to accept that fundamental reality, or “ontology,” may be unknowable in principle.
Of course, by “idealism”, I do not mean a belief in the physical existence of ghosts or souls: those would be perfectly materialistic claims subject to experimentation. Rather, I mean that our only accessible “fundamental reality” is a construct within our minds, an approximation (or simulation?) to something that exists beyond our direct reach.
Consequently, I view the Everettian many-worlds interpretation as essentially “materialistic”, as it postulates a wave function of the entire multiverse, knowable in principle to a hypothetic outside observer (“God’s eye view”). Currently, I am more drawn to purely epistemological interpretations like QBism, which forgo bold ontological statements about “what really exists” in favor of a humble, operational focus on what we can actually observe and act upon.
The so-called paradoxes of quantum mechanics, such as the (apparent) wave-particle dichotomy, mirror debates in other sciences. Like what is the stance of an individual against society? Some thinkers say that the society is simply a social construct, an agreement between rational individuals. Others argue that because we are born into a society and do not negotiate its rules, the society was always first, and the very concept of an individual is a modern invention. Žižek dismisses this question as another false dichotomy.
One has to be careful with Žižek though: he uses labels such as “idealist” or “materialist” quite unconventionally. He calls both Marx and Einstein idealists because they both believed in an internally coherent totality, whether governed by societal or physical laws. Conversely, he labels Hegel and Bohr as materialists because they embraced ultimate unknowability. This “unknowability” is what Žižek refers to by the Lacanian term “the Real”, that which exists out there, resisting symbolization and preceding the Logos.
As a true Socratic philosopher, Žižek does not give definite answers, but asks provocative questions which force us to reevaluate everything we hold for granted. I like Žižek.
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