ABSTRACT
Archaeologies of the Future, Fredric Jameson observed that postmodernism marked the end of traditional utopias, insofar as we can no longer imagine alternatives to global capitalism. Lacanian anti-utopianism, writes Balasopoulos, differentiates between political theorists for whom Lacan is the principal advocate of a politically and conceptually radical anti-utopianism and ones who use his work as a means of constructively reconceptualizing the utopian impulse from a psychoanalytically informed perspective. Stavrakakis's critique of utopia is certainly not without foundation in Lacan but, as Adrian Johnston has noted, the term utopia rarely occurs in Lacan's work: Over the twenty-seven year course of the Seminar, Lacan directly mentions the notion of utopia a mere four times. The chapter considers the basis for anti-utopianism with respect to Lacan's own texts. Alain Badiou's deploys the real here in Lacan's sense as that which is unsymbolizable but exists in a given world, and under very specific conditions.
