"CONTRA EL PROGRESO" - Slavoj Zizek

“AGAINST PROGRESS” is a book by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, published in English in 2025 and translated and edited into Spanish this year. We walk along a Möbius strip, advancing along one side and returning to our starting point. After centuries in which visionaries of every ideology dreamed of humanity advancing as a whole, we come to the conclusion that the only progressive goal we can conceivably achieve today, in the face of ecological and other threats, is simply survival. Zizek argues that the modern idea of ​​“Progress” can no longer be understood as it was understood until the 20th century, as linear, global, and linked to the presumption of permanent improvement. In one of his common cinematic metaphors, Zizek proposes discovering the dead birds left behind by all the dynamics of progress; always behind a new and surpassing stage, he maintains, there remains some dead bird, on the path from the previous stage. That is why we must renounce any idea of ​​linear and global progress for humanity, whether formulated by Karl Marx, the liberal Fukuyama, or the dialectics of the Enlightenment. Zizek does not advocate abandoning the idea of ​​progress, but rather redefining it, based on the recognition of the uncomfortable, shameful, and painful realities that have occurred in recent history in the name of progress. We don't have to look far to encounter the dead birds left behind by the path of progress. The champions of artificial intelligence speak of the freedom it brings, but they fail to specify the what, for whom, and the purpose of that freedom. Freedom for humanity to pursue leisure and meditation? Or freedom so that a small oligarchy of technocrats has no limitations whatsoever in reducing humanity to a cog in AI's infinite self-reproduction? Should we perhaps relocate the focus of progress seen as a general objective, pursuing equality, for example, and relocate it to more limited coordinates, in the realm of individual and personal satisfaction? From Kohei Saito's Degrowth to Nick Land's Accelerationism, passing through Ethical Progress, these are part of Slavoj Zizek's journey in times of Artificial Intelligence, Posthumanism, Postpolitics, and Ecological Crisis, places to which the so-called indefinite progress has brought us.