“Buddhism Can’t Explain This” and other musings with Zizek

Why reality is ontologically incomplete, and what that costs us.

I sat down with Slavoj Žižek, who teaches at the University of Ljubljana, holds a senior research post at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities in London, and is a global distinguished professor at NYU.

For those who know him only through his political writing, this conversation will read like a different author. I asked him at the start to keep it apolitical. He agreed immediately, and the next two hours went to what Žižek actually cares about: ontology, quantum mechanics, consciousness, and the materialism he has spent a decade reading out of Hegel.

His claim is compact. Quantum indeterminacy is the substrate being, as he puts it, less than nothing. The universe is unfinished. Freedom lives in that gap.

Of course, I press him (politely and with respect) on these claims, and we have some fun.

We cover:

• “Freedom is a self-chosen form of necessity.“ Why falling in love is the cleanest example of a free act.

• The pushback: I press Žižek …