Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Žižek’s project at times presents itself as an ontological strawman: reality is either complete or incomplete. It is either compatible with the fulness of an eventual theory of everything, or reality is unfinished, ontologically ‘open’, leaving a theory of everything impossible. Žižek himself comes to choose the latter. His reading of Hegel, Lacan, and quantum physics permits him to conclude that ‘epistemological insufficiency is in fact ontological incompleteness’ or that God was a lazy programmer. In this paper, I argue that a more radical alternative is possible, an alternative more faithful not only to the real, paradoxical insights of Hegel, Lacan, and quantum mechanics, but to the figures often abandoned by the Lacan-Hegel tradition: Jung and Nietzsche. Reality is not incomplete, it is hypercomplete. It occupies mutually incompatible positions, furnishing effects and inconsistencies that it cannot reduce back to itself. I also end with a response to Žižek’s own critique of my rejection of his ‘ontological incompleteness’.
Author: Rafael Holmberg
Institution: University College London
Language: English
Subfield: Clinical Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7128150980