Retroactive Necessity (Will Have Been)

In his words 40

“An act is always blind. You do something, you cannot include into it its own result. You cannot include yourself into the picture. That's why you can only discover a necessity retroactively.”
28:03 The Return to Hegel · blindness of the act / retroactive necessity

“If Monsieur Balladur will win next weekend's election, his victory will be necessary.”
~24:54 The Irony of Buddhism · retroactive necessity — the Hegelian formula

“If at this pre-election Monsieur Balladur will win, his victory will be necessary. Once you do something, the moment you do it it becomes necessary.”
~1:44:44 Hegel, Modern Art and the End of Art · retroactive necessity (Dupuy)

The stories that teach it

the jokes and anecdotes he reaches for when he works in this idea, ranked by how many of its talks they turn up in; each card is one story, with every retelling on its page

joke · in 17 of its talks

coffee without cream / coffee without milk

A customer orders coffee without cream; the waiter says they have no cream but can offer coffee without milk. Even though the result is identical, the absent supplement matters, Hegelian negativity in a joke.

example · in 9 of its talks

Antigone rewritten, three alternate scenarios

Žižek describes his book rewriting Antigone in three alternate-history versions: (1) Sophocles' original; (2) Antigone wins the argument with Creon but this triggers revolt and ruin; (3) the Chorus executes both Antigone and Creon as traitors establishing Jacobin terror. He us…

example · in 7 of its talks

Kurosawa's Hamlet

Kurosawa's 1961 Japanese corporate-setting adaptation of Hamlet (The Bad Sleep Well) is the best cinema version of Hamlet precisely because it transposes it to a totally different cultural context, proving the work's universal greatness.

anecdote · in 6 of its talks

Zhou Enlai on the French Revolution

When asked in 1953 what he thought about the French Revolution, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai replied 'It's too early to tell', which Žižek uses to illustrate retroactive historical judgment: after 1989 the French Revolution looked like a mistake, but now it is rehabilitated.

anecdote · in 6 of its talks

The Banana Peel and the Lady

A hypothetical story where a man slips on a banana peel, a lady helps him up, they hate each other, meet again to thank her, and fall in love; this contingent event retroactively makes one's entire life appear as leading up to this point.

example · in 5 of its talks

Caesar crossing the Rubicon

Caesar's decision to cross the Rubicon was contingent, he could have stayed, but once made it became his fate and appeared inevitable; illustrates how contingent decisions retroactively constitute necessity.

Christ's Abandonment5 Tom and Jerry5 Borges/Kafka: great writers create their own precursors4 Light at the end of the tunnel is another train4 Billy Bathgate / bad novel and bad movie generating virtual ideal4 Freud and the SS man on Berggasse4 Zeuxis and Parrhasius4 Asking Occupy Wall Street 'what do you want?'4 Four Weddings and a Funeral4 Žižek and So On4

Where it comes up 119

189 moments located in the transcripts, click a timestamp to play from there

Slavoj Žižek — On G.W.F. Hegel, Lecture 1 [Remaster]2009-08 · 2:33:15

2:09:38 retroactive necessity

… Not the necessity of contingency but the contingency of necessity.

1:51:45 retroactivity

… What is missing here is some retroactive movement which another quote that I repeat all the time but I think this is again absolutely crucial to understand Hegel a movement described again I mention it in in some of my books what happened in this movement.

1:41:09 virtuality

… Of course his idea a typically romantic one was that when you play it's very Deleuzian idea of virtual, virtuality.

+3 more in this talk

The Return to Hegel2009 · 2:08:08

28:53 retroactive necessity

… It's always a retroactive necessity.

~1:59:01 retroactivity

of a sudden it was totally naturalized. Did it happen to you? That I—it was on the contrary already after a week or two that the life in the normal, non-military society became a kind of a vague memory and so on. So what happens …

2:05:39 pure past

… It's the strange notion of what Deleuze calls a pure past, an absolute past, a kind of an atemporal eternal texture where—quote from Deleuze—"where all events, including those that have transpired without trace, are stored and remembered as they're passing away," and so on and so on.

Slavoj Zizek -Timelapse Drawing [+Speech at The European Graduate School]2017 · 41:25

~23:38 retroactive necessity

for le pen, which's tough. i don't care. but let's make a pathetic example. there is war, my country is attacked and i have to decide. will i risk my life do it or not? this is a free decision by me, but if you …

~28:43 retroactivity

your beauty. now i will... complicate things. now, the end of self-plagizing, you will get some new stuff. this solution, this dialectical interconnection of necessity and freedom, where yes, there is necessity, but this necessity is in a deeper sense contingent. like you do something …

Why we are getting more stupid | Slavoj Žižek FULL INTERVIEW2025 · 38:19

20:36 retroactive necessity

… Necessity is always a contingent category.

~19:12 retroactivity

He meant quite by chance out of apes or whoever, humans developed. And once we are humans, the past appears to us as progressive. Marx says the same about capitalism. It offers us a clue of all past history, but he is very clear. He …

Slavoj Žižek Masterclass: Jacques Lacan: A Lateral Introduction. Part 3pub. 2018-11-28 · 1:55:54

1:11:50 retroactive necessity

… It's also the opposite: the true unity of necessity and contingency is contingency.

57:34 virtuality

… That is to say this is the proper sense for Deleuze of the term virtuality.

1:42:38 external teleology

… Why? Because this would have involved precisely the wrong external teleology.

+2 more in this talk