T.S. Eliot: a new work rewrites the whole past

00:39:49 — T.S. Eliot: a new work rewrites the whole past

Žižek reaches for T.S. Eliot as a non-Marxist articulation of retroactive causation. A new major artwork does not merely add itself to the shelf of existing works; it reorganizes the entire tradition that precedes it, so that what was always already there now appears differently. The point is not to defend interpretation over fact, but to locate retroactivity at a deeper level than interpretation — in the very ontology of the past.