The Holocaust: reality vs. the Real

00:26:52 — The Holocaust: reality vs. the Real

To illustrate retroactivity without collapsing into relativism, Žižek distinguishes ‘reality’ from the Lacanian Real. The Real of the Holocaust is non-negotiable; the reality — how the event is installed in collective meaning, what it commands, what it permits — can still be rewritten by subsequent ideological shifts. He walks consciously into the horror of imagining a future in which anti-Semitic revision relativizes the event precisely to make the structural point: the past’s meaning is not yet locked.