Appointment in Samarra

Appointment in Samarra is an anecdote about a servant who flees from Death only to ride toward the place where Death expects to meet him. In Slavoj Žižek’s discussion, its familiar fatalistic logic becomes a more difficult question: if efforts to escape fate are already part of fate, might accepting the necessity of what happens offer a way out of its closed circle?

The Servant’s Flight

Retold by W. Somerset Maugham, the story begins in the busy market of Baghdad, where a servant on an errand encounters Death and is terrified by its gaze. He returns to his master and asks for a horse so that he can ride all day to Samarra, hoping to be beyond Death’s reach by evening. His master provides the horse, then goes to the market and confronts Death about frightening the servant. Death explains that the encounter was one of surprise: the servant had an appointment in Samarra that night. The flight intended to evade the meeting instead carries the servant toward it.

Fate and the Attempt to Escape

Žižek places the anecdote within a broader problem of freedom: a fate may appear closed not because it has no cracks, but because the subject’s effort to break out is already included in its course. The story’s reversal gives that problem a compact narrative form. The servant acts to avoid the meeting, yet his action brings him to the appointed place; escape becomes an instrument of the outcome it opposes. The anecdote therefore recalls the pattern of Oedipus, whose parents’ attempt to prevent his fate helps bring it about.

But the passage does not settle for the simple lesson that death cannot be avoided and resistance only tightens its grip. It raises the opposite possibility: accepting fate as inexorable might break its hold. The question is left open rather than demonstrated by the servant’s story. His flight ends in the appointment, while the proposed alternative—renouncing the effort to flee—remains a philosophical problem.

The Minority Report and an Inconsistent Future

The anecdote leads into a discussion of Minority Report, where the three precogs do not always share the same vision of the future. Their disagreement is not treated merely as an error in an individual prediction: as a medium of the Big Other, their discord can register inconsistency within the authority that appears to guarantee the future. A unanimous report is hoped for but seldom achieved; more commonly, two precogs agree while the third offers a slight variation, often in time or place.

This variation matters because the theory of multiple futures makes foreknowledge consequential: if only one time-path existed, knowing what was coming could not alter it. Read beside the Samarra anecdote, the minority report complicates the image of fate as a perfectly sealed appointment. The servant’s story figures a future seemingly secured by the very attempt to escape it; the conflicting reports suggest that the future’s apparent authority may itself contain a point of inconsistency. The anecdote thus serves less as a final proof of fatalism than as the question that the discussion of freedom and multiple futures keeps open.