History’s Bad Present
We all like to think of time moving consistently along a path, a set of tracks. Like our own lives, and the entire world with them, are on some mythical quest just humming along. Almost as if each passage of history sits on a conveyor belt. Each hour, week, or year is like a little container being carried past, which we must fill to feel we have made good use of our time. The containers all move toward their great destination and, so the story goes, the contents are slowly improving as they go.
Every now and again, though, we glimpse something in one of those containers that looks violently out of place. Maybe we hear political commentators wheel out the familiar line that “history is repeating itself.” It is a reassuring sentence, not because repetition is reassuring, but because it implies coherence. The containers keep moving. Progress resumes. Sure, every now and again there is something unpleasant in one, just like that staff party Secret Santa present from Jerry last year, which produces the uncomfortable feeling that the ground beneath our “modern” world is sliding in ways we had hoped never to experience again. But the belt keeps rolling.
That reassuring idea only works because we smuggle a hidden assumption into it.
We act as if there is a coherence underneath everything. As if the story is already written and our job is just to spot the rhymes, or notice when Jerry spoils one. But the idea of history as a continuous narrative is itself a fantasy we retroactively impose. We do not live inside a story or a neat container trundling along the conveyor belt of history toward the great Amazon warehouse in the sky. We generate a story after the fact to make the chaos feel necessary.
Which is why the contemporary “return of fascism”, or the fear of it, should not be understood as repetition at all. The point is not that the same thing is happening again. It is that something unresolved in the present cracks the symbolic order open and reactivates tensions we preferred to imagine as settled. That terrible joke from Jerry did not suddenly appear in the container. It was there all along.
What we call progress is always shadowed by whatever had to be suppressed, foreclosed, or denied for it to appear as progress in the first place.
The sense of historical direction is always constructed from the vantage point of the present. And this construction only works because it hides the bad present along the way, the disavowed failures, the lost alternatives, the contradictions that did not vanish so much as lie dormant.
The danger today is not simply the resurgence of fascism. It is the temptation to believe that history itself has a logic we can trust.
Slavoj Žižek describes true history not as gradual evolution but as a series of restructurings, moments where the entire symbolic field is reconfigured. The whole shifts. And when the whole shifts, the past changes with it. Not in a postmodern “choose your own history” way, but in a precise dialectical sense he calls retroactive necessity.
This is the part that makes people nervous, because it sounds like relativism. But the openness of history is not that all interpretations are valid. It is that meaning becomes fixed only after a rupture forces a new structure into place. It is like how you thought Jerry was being kind by buying everyone coffee every morning, until you discover he has been putting it on a tab under your name, including his full breakfast. Suddenly, the past looks very different.
Once that new structure emerges, it retroactively defines what the past “was.”
That is retroactive necessity.
The path becomes necessary only once it has already been taken.
Everything else becomes a bad present, not a lost alternative, but a non possibility built into what actually occurred.
This is why Žižek is so insistent that the “big Other” of history, the idea of some overarching neutral authority that guarantees meaning, does not exist. But this is not an argument for nihilism or “anything goes.” It is an argument for partisanship. Because if every position is partial, some positions are partial in a way that reveals the underlying antagonism, while others conceal it.
Alenka Zupančič puts it bluntly when she argues that contradiction is not something we simply endure, but something that can become the very engine of emancipation. All perspectives are partial, yes, but not all partialities are equal. Some spotlight the contradiction itself. Others function to obscure it. And the position that presents itself as neutral is almost always just the voice of the dominant order.
To see the bad present clearly, neutrality is not an option. You have to take a side. Not a side within the conflict as it is officially presented, but the side aligned with the contradiction itself.
This is why the “spectre of fascism” today matters less as a prediction and more as a structural signal. Its reappearance in our language is a tacit admission that history is unfinished. That the past was not properly settled. That progress was never secured. Our little container did not leave the errors of earlier containers behind. Something in the present has reactivated the antagonism that made fascism possible in the first place.
And here is the hardest part. If the past can be reopened, then so can the present.
Our symbolic coordinates, the way we make sense of ourselves, our institutions, our futures, are not fixed. They are reorganised each time the underlying antagonism shifts. To talk about the openness of history is not to celebrate chaos. It is to recognise that the meaning of any event only becomes clear from the vantage point of its consequences.
Stories make sense at the end, yes. But Žižek’s point is stronger than that. The end changes what the beginning was. The new order demands a new past to make itself legible.
This does not mean we are trapped in cycles. It means we live in a structurally inconsistent field, one defined by deadlocks, limits, and points of failure. Those cracks reveal what no ideology wants to admit. There is no historical guarantee. The coordinates from which we act are themselves up for redefinition.
Which is where hope quietly enters. Not the cheap optimism of upward curves and “arc of history” clichés. But a sharper, more adult kind of hope, one grounded in the fact that history is never finished.
Because if the meaning of the past can still shift, then the meaning of the present can too. And we are not simply watching history unfold from the side of the conveyor belt. We are already inside the antagonism shaping what the past, the present, and the future will have been.
Maybe our little container can finally stop pretending the belt guarantees anything at all. Because that unfinishedness, as frightening as it is, is also the only space where something genuinely new can appear.