Law, Utopia and Ontological Incompleteness

The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek deploys an interpretation of the work of Jacques Lacan to formulate a theory of the reality as fundamentally incomplete, relying on Lacanian figures of lack and excess to develop an argument that ranges from the individual psyches to political entities to quantum mechanical descriptions of the world. While Zizek’s position is vulnerable in certain ways, one of its signal advantages is the provision of a perspective from which certain common theoretical and philosophical approaches become visible as naïve utopianisms, criticisms that proceed by identifying all problems and aporias as temporary and contingent phenomena that will disappear with the messianic completion of reality. Relying partly upon Zizek’s thought and partly upon the work of the philosopher Gillian Rose, I analyze a selection of representative modernist philosophy and literature as instances of repression of what Zizek and Rose term the Law: that rupturing act of judgment, terrible in its contingency yet absolutely necessary, that announces that the giving of reasons and the struggle to understand must come to an end. I contend that the specific conditions of modernist intellectual production, culminating with the enormous proliferation of the university, have enabled this repression of the Law, and prevented the modernist intellectual field from embarking the process that Rose names mourning: the processing of those unbearably painful, aporetic moments of existence in such a way that a genuine return to life becomes possible.