There is no future: from despair to avenir

00:43:05 — Hope is for those not ready to act

Žižek grounds his political ethic in a throwaway line from the film Munich. Hope, in its everyday consoling form, is a deferral — an expectation that someone else, later, will handle it. Real action requires the opposite: the removal of that expectation. Only when the future stops supplying reassurance does the present become a site where something has to be done, now, by whoever is there.

00:43:31 — Future vs avenir: ’there is no future'

Žižek exploits a lexical gap in English. The ‘future’ most politics promises is only more-of-the-present, extrapolation within existing coordinates. What French (and Slovene) mark with avenir is something else: a coming that breaks the extrapolation. Reading ’there is no future’ as a political motto is therefore not nihilism but its inverse — a refusal of the reassuring continuation that keeps the actually new permanently postponed.

00:44:02 — Democrats as Fukuyamaists — ‘party of the future’

The Democratic Party’s self-branding as ’the party of the future’ is, in Žižek’s vocabulary, a self-indictment. It marks them as belated Fukuyamaists — still operating within the end-of-history assumption that the existing order only needs incremental tending. Fukuyama himself, as Žižek notes with amusement, has since moved to the left; his American custodians have not.

00:44:53 — Bernie Sanders as avenir

Inside the normalization pageant of the 2021 inauguration, Žižek locates an unintended eruption of avenir: the viral image of Bernie Sanders sitting alone. What captured millions was not a program but a tonal incongruity — a refusal of the ceremony’s soothing message. The mass fascination with an image that, strictly speaking, decoded nothing, is evidence that popular intuition can still sense the difference between the ‘future’ being sold to it and the opening of something else.