93
Roland Végső*
On the Absolute Impossibility of the World’s 
Existence: Lacan Against the Cosmologists
Keywords
Joan Copjec, Immanuel Kant, Charlie Chaplin, Chris Marker, Sigmund Freud, sex, world, 
ethics of psychoanalysis
Abstract
This essay argues that the contemporary relevance of psychoanalysis and Joan Copjec’s 
Read My Desire can be derived from Sigmund Freud’s consistent rejection of the pro-
gram of the “re-enchantment of the world.” Facing the onslaught of technological mo-
dernity, many of Freud’s contemporaries lamented the disenchantment of the world. 
Today, this tradition persists as a renewed desire for a shared or common world; we col-
lectively mourn the loss of the world. But, in this context, Copjec’s work raises a disturb-
ing question: Can a sexed being have a world? In order to draw out some of the conse-
quences of this question, I examine the role Immanuel Kant’s philosophy plays in Read 
My Desire in two steps: First, I address the theoretical argument against the existence 
of the world and, second, I examine some of the practical consequences of this insight. 
By providing a parallel reading of Kant’s reflections on the antinomies of cosmological 
ideas and Jacques Lacan’s formulae of sexuation, Copjec effectively establishes the fact 
that “the world” and “sex” are mutually exclusive categories.
O absolutni nemožnosti obstoja sveta: Lacan proti 
kozmologom
Ključne besede
Joan Copjec, Immanuel Kant, Charlie Chaplin, Chris Marker, Sigmund Freud, spol, svet, 
etika psihoanalize
Filozofski vestnik
issn 0353-4510 | Volume 46 | Number 2 | 2025 | 93–113
cc by-sa 4.0 | doi: 10.3986/fv.46.2.04
*  University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA
 roland.vegso@uga.edu | https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2758-2824
94
roland végső
Povzetek 
Avtor v članku trdi, da lahko sodobni pomen psihoanalize in knjige Joan Copjec Read 
My Desire izpeljemo iz Freudovega doslednega zavračanja programa »za-čaranja sve-
ta«. Številni Freudovi sodobniki so se, soočeni s silnim napadom tehnološke moderne, 
pritoževali nad odčaranjem sveta. Danes se ta tradicija nadaljuje kot obnovitev želje po 
svetu, ki si ga delimo, oziroma skupnem svetu: kolektivno žalujemo za izgubo sveta. A 
delo Joan Copjec v tem kontekstu zastavlja mučno vprašanje: ali ima seksuirano bitje 
lahko svet? Da bi izpeljal nekatere posledice tega vprašanja, avtor v dveh korakih pre-
uči, kakšno vlogo igra filozofija Immanuela Kanta v knjigi Read My Desire: prvič, pre-
uči teoretski argument proti obstoju sveta, in drugič, preuči nekatere praktične posle-
dice tega uvida. Copjec skozi svoje vzporedno branje Kantovih refleksij o antinomijah 
kozmoloških idej in Lacanovih formul seksuacije učinkovito zagovarja dejstvo, da sta 
»svet« in »spol« medsebojno izključujoči kategoriji.
∞
One of the most memorable sequences of Charlie Chaplin’s film The Great Dicta-
tor—which was released on October 31, 1940, a year after Freud’s death—depicts 
the graceful yet comic ballet performed by one of the two characters played by 
Chaplin himself, Adenoid Hynkel (a character obviously modeled on Adolf Hit-
ler).1 The stark contrast between the “feminine” gentility of the dance and the 
sadistic political fantasy that it stages serves as the source of Chaplin’s humor-
ous political commentary. As the film suggests, before realizing itself as a bru-
tal reality, violent global imperialism first germinated as a genteel and artful 
dream. Two moments of this sequence are especially noteworthy as they pro-
pose a specific theory of fascism: Its opening scene articulates what we could 
call Chaplin’s take on the genesis of fascist desire, while its ending arguably pro-
vides a possible model for the destruction of this fascist desire.
It is striking that in Chaplin’s film the imperialist idea of world-conquest was 
not simply already present in the dictator’s mind: The desire for ruling the world 
had to be constructed through political machination. In fact, Hynkel’s charac-
ter is depicted as surprisingly naïve—an underachieving dictator who needs the 
devil’s help to live up to the demands of his office. After receiving news of a 
1 The Great Dictator, dir. Charlie Chaplin (United Artists, 1940).
95
on the absolute impossibility of the world’s existence
strike at a factory led by people who all happened to be brunettes, Hynkel’s min-
ister, the character called Garbitsch (modeled on Joseph Goebbels), in a devilish 
performance, implants the idea in Hynkel’s mind that the latter could become 
the “dictator of the world.” This goal can be achieved through the extermination 
of all the brunettes so that a purely blond-haired society can be created. The iro-
ny of the situation does not escape the two characters. After all, neither of them 
is blond. Yet, Garbitsch turns out to be a master dialectician and explains that 
this apparent contradiction is actually the only logical solution to the problem 
of world conquest: as the only brunette left in the world, the blonds will worship 
Hynkel as a god. Hynkel’s melodramatic response follows: “No, no! you mustn’t 
say it. You make me afraid of myself.”
Hynkel’s famous ballet with a balloon painted like a globe ensues. He literal-
ly floats around in his office, tenderly dancing around with the globe whose 
weightlessness belies the gravity of the situation. The sequence ends abruptly 
when the balloon suddenly pops. At this point, an expression of childish frus-
tration takes over Hynkel’s face as he collapses on his desk crying inconsolably. 
Here the film seems to suggest that this popping of the balloon (subtracting the 
sublime object of desire) is a possible strategy for the undoing of fascist desire. 
The film explains quite clearly that the idea of the “world” as a political catego-
ry, despite what its name might suggest, is not a tool of universal inclusion but 
precisely one of systematic exclusion. The existence of the world (as an object of 
desire) is predicated upon the extermination of those whose mere existence is 
construed as a threat to this world; and the excluded element haunts this pure 
world in the form of a sovereign exception. After the brutal extermination of all 
the undesirables, the dictator of the world will be the only brunette left in the 
world of blonds.
What happens when the balloon is popped and the world disappears? In what 
follows, I want to reflect on the consequences of this destruction or subtrac-
tion of the idea of the world from our theoretical and political discourses. In 
this sense, Chaplin’s film could be historically contextualized by reference to the 
dominance of the discourse on the “disenchantment of the world” during the 
first half of the twentieth century. The actual formulation of this thesis is usually 
derived from Max Weber’s analysis of the rationalization of production and so-
cial forms in the work of the decline of religion and the rise of science in modern 
society. In its broadest usage, however, the “disenchantment of the world” has 
96
roland végső
simply come to mean that, under the conditions of technological modernity, we 
have lost our relation to the organic and meaningful totality of life. Thus, the di-
agnosis of the “disenchantment of the world” has given rise to various attempts 
to “reenchant the world”—an obsession that is still with us today.
What sets psychoanalysis apart from these early twentieth-century discours-
es is Freud’s consistent rejection of the program of this “reenchantment of the 
world.” Apparently, both Chaplin and Freud saw that fascism (among other 
things) was a technology for the reenchantment of the world.2 As is well known, 
Freud’s systematic critique of mysticism, religion, as well as various political 
ideologies was rooted in his own definition of psychoanalysis as a science. The 
goal of this science was to enable an increasingly rational confrontation with 
the realities of human existence that rejects the consolation of these ideologies: 
“Thus I have not the courage to rise up before my fellow-men as a prophet, and 
I bow to their reproach that I can offer them no consolation: for at bottom that 
is what they are all demanding—the wildest revolutionaries no less passionately 
than the most virtuous believers.”3 In fact, in light of this inherent rejection of 
political as well as religious consolations, we could describe psychoanalysis as 
an ethics of disenchantment. We may recall here Freud’s definition of a Weltan-
schauung as a particularly useful example of this line of argument: “a Weltan-
schauung is an intellectual construction which solves all the problems of our ex-
istence uniformly on the basis of one overriding hypothesis, which, accordingly, 
leaves no question unanswered and in which everything that interests us finds 
its fixed place. It will be understood that the possession of a Weltanschauung of 
this kind is among the ideal wishes of human beings.”4 To the degree that Freud 
identifies this wish for total explanations as a fundamental human desire, he 
also designates the desire for a meaningful world as one of the primary points of 
intervention for psychoanalysis.
2 For example, this is how Freud describes Nazi ideology in The Future of an Illusion: “One 
may describe as an illusion the assertation made by certain nationalists that the Indo-
Germanic race is the only one capable of civilization; or the belief, which was only de-
stroyed by psycho-analysis, that children are creatures without sexuality. What is char-
acteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human wishes.” Sigmund Freud, The 
Future of an Illusion, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 39. 
3 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. 
Norton, 2005), 154.
4 Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, trans. James Strachey 
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 195−96.
97
on the absolute impossibility of the world’s existence
Chaplin’s film, therefore, is clearly trying to teach its audiences something about 
desire and its political uses. We can go even further: The film is teaching us to 
read for desire—but not just any desire. It is teaching us to read for the desire for 
the world. The fact that desire has an object comes as no surprise. But what hap-
pens when the object of desire is identified with the world itself, the totality of 
all existing and all desirable objects? Whatever form the object of desire might 
take, object-desire might have to be complemented by this desire-for-the-world. 
Accordingly, Chaplin’s film suggests that the very idea of the world must be lo-
cated on the level of desire. In other words, the world becomes an object only 
to the degree that it can be construed as the object of desire. The world itself as 
the totality of existing objects does not exist in an objective way. Therefore, the 
world cannot be one object among all the existing objects. Its objectivity must 
be of a different order than the objects it supposedly includes within itself. What 
the film suggests is that the only way to make the world exist, to give it an “objec-
tive” form, is to turn it into an object of desire. In this regard, every desire might 
be split between the desire-for-the-object and another dimension of desire that 
always points beyond the specific object at hand. The particularity of the object 
of desire is complemented by the utopian universality of the world as the ulti-
mate object of desire.5
* * *
To be able to account for this desire-for-the-world, however, we might have to 
first address a more fundamental question: Can a sexed being have a world? 
Psychoanalysis broached this very question in an unprecedented manner dur-
ing the first half of the twentieth century. The contemporary significance of psy-
choanalytic theory partly depends on this question. In the final analysis, the 
lesson of psychoanalysis appears to be that sex and the world are mutually 
5 The ambiguous ending of Chaplin’s film can be interpreted in this framework as well. 
Chaplin’s other character, Hynkel’s double, is the poor Jewish barber who, in the course 
of the events, gets mistaken for Hynkel and finds himself in the embarrassing position of 
having to address Hynkel’s supporters at a large political rally. At this point, Chaplin’s 
otherwise silent character breaks into a speech that is fully at odds with Hynkel’s political 
program: he makes an appeal to universal humanism (a universality without exclusion). 
The film, however, suggests that the desire for world conquest and the desire for this uni-
versal humanism are merely mirror images of each other. The crowd cheers for them the 
exact same way.
98
roland végső
exclusive categories. The fact that the English language often locates both of 
them in the register of “having” (one can “have” a world and one can “have” 
sex) might have led some of us to believe that sex is the fundamental anthro-
pological determination or the human praxis (since “having” sex implies a set 
of bodily practices) that will necessarily lead us to the construction of a shared 
world.6 After all, even in Freud’s theory of the duality of the drives Eros first 
appears as the “life-instinct” that drives sexed beings toward each other and 
toward cosmic unification: “Thus the Libido of our sexual instincts would co-
incide with the Eros of poets and philosophers, which holds together all things 
living.”7 This depiction of Eros captures something essential about a dominant 
understanding of the ontological, the phenomenological, and the political sig-
nificance of sex. Nonetheless, Freud’s Eros is not the Eros of the poets and phi-
losophers. As is well known, the entire wager of Beyond the Pleasure Principle 
was to demonstrate (in a quasi-dialectical fashion) that, despite all appearanc-
es, Eros stands in the service of Thanatos. As a result, we also need to modify our 
understanding of the sexed being’s relation to the world. In this Freudian sense, 
therefore, on the broadest metaphysical level, being sexed (rather than having 
sex) means that this “being” cannot ever be conceptualized as a closed totality. 
On the phenomenological level, this assumption implies that we can get only 
partial local consolations for this constitutive incompleteness of being. Even if 
on the level of lived experience we have the sensation that we are inhabiting var-
ious worlds, this phenomenological sensation cannot fully hide the ontological 
fact of the impossible closure of being. From time to time, we will have to come 
face-to-face with this metaphysical reality. On the political scene, it means that 
world-building does not carry an inherent positive political or social value in 
itself. Whatever meaning world-building might take on in a concrete historical 
setting, taken in its abstract generality “world-building” is not an ontological-
ly grounded political project forever sheltered by its absolute necessity. We can 
surely imagine reprehensible political worlds that most of us would not hesitate 
to declare simply undesirable.
6 For Jacques Derrida’s discussions of what it means to “have” a world, see his readings of 
Martin Heidegger in The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II, trans. Geoffrey Bennington 
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 90.
7 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. 
Norton, 1989), 60−61.
99
on the absolute impossibility of the world’s existence
In fact, Freud’s entire theory is based on the presupposition of the fundamental 
worldlessness of life.8 We should, once again, return for a moment to the prob-
lem of the duality of the drives. Freud first introduces the question of the sexual 
drives in his discussions of the “germ cells” responsible for the reproduction of 
the organism. Some instincts must govern these cells that accede to a physical 
independence from the organism of which they originally formed a part. In their 
independence, these germ cells “work against the death of the living substance 
and succeed in winning for it what we can only regard as potential immortali-
ty.”9 Nevertheless, the drives that “watch over the destinies” of these germ cells 
do have the same structure as the death drive: “one portion of their substance 
pursues its development to a finish, while another portion harks back once 
again as a fresh residual germ to the beginning of the process of development.”10 
This brings us to Freud’s oft-quoted description of the sexual or life drives: 
They are conservative in the same sense as the other drives in that they bring back 
earlier states of living substance; but they are conservative to a higher degree in 
that they are peculiarly resistant to external influences; and they are conservative 
too in another sense in that they preserve life itself for a comparatively long pe-
riod. They are the true life drives. They operate against the purpose of the other 
drives, which leads, by reason of their function, to death; and this fact indicates 
that there is an opposition between them and the other drives.11
The conservative nature of sexual or life drives is defined here in terms that si-
multaneously assert a similarity and some differences. On the one hand, the life 
drives also bring back earlier stages of development, but they are even more re-
sistant to external influences than the other drives. In a sense, we could say that 
they are even more worldless than the death drive. But, unlike the death drive, 
their goal is not death but a form of immortality. To put it differently, while the 
death drive represents some kind of an urge toward worldlessness (a return to 
an inorganic state), at first it appears that the life drives represent an urge to-
ward the world. The point Freud insists on, however, is that life, as a principle 
of self-cancellation, has the structure of a self-interrupting development: “One 
8 See Roland Végső, Worldlessness After Heidegger: Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, Decon-
struction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 128−92.
9 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 48.
10 Freud, 48.
11 Freud, 48−49; translation modified, “drives” for Strachey’s “instincts.”
100
roland végső
group of drives rushes forward so as to reach the final aim of life as swiftly as 
possible; but when a particular stage in the advance has been reached, the other 
group jerks back to a certain point to make a fresh start and so prolong the jour-
ney.”12 The movement described here is the original structure that might even 
predate the historical emergence of sexuality. Freud concludes that we must 
assume that the life drives were associated with the death drive from the very 
beginning.13 Thus, the original structure of the drive (that predates the histori-
cal emergence of sexual reproduction) looks something like the following: The 
drive is a self-interrupting force whose goal is to return to a state of worldless-
ness. The sexual or life drives interrupt the death drive in order to guarantee that 
the latter can fulfil its original program. The whole purpose of Beyond the Pleas-
ure Principle is to show not only that there is something beyond the pleasure 
principle but also that this “beyond” actually determines the functioning of the 
pleasure principle. Freud often repeats the thesis according to which the repe-
tition-compulsion is more primitive than, and independent from, the pleasure 
principle, which in the end means for him that “the pleasure principle seems 
actually to serve the death drive.”14 In the same spirit, then, the worldlessness 
of the sexual drives should be defined in reference to the death drive. Sexual re-
production aims at the immortality of the species, but this immortality is in the 
service of the death drive. 
At this juncture, therefore, we are not far from the conclusion that sex is world-
less. Although sex appears to be a primary means of encountering the alterity of 
the world, for Freud it is not primarily or essentially a drive towards world-build-
ing. Yet, the psychoanalytic point is not simply that sex is worldless because it is 
fundamentally auto-erotic in nature and always leads the subject back to itself. 
Sex is worldless precisely because it introduces difference into the world. It is a 
fundamental opening up to otherness and, as such, it shatters every world. In 
other words, sex is not a way of accessing the world, but an agency of undoing 
the illusion of the world in order to finally return the subject to a state of world-
lessness. The infamous Freudian “discontent” in civilization is itself a symptom 
of this worldlessness: a sexed being cannot simply inhabit social constructions 
as fully constituted worlds. The discontent produced by culture is the direct 
12 Freud, 49.
13 Freud, 69.
14 Freud, 77.
101
on the absolute impossibility of the world’s existence
correlate of the fact that only sexless beings would be able to live together har-
moniously. No doubt, this understanding of sex is disturbing—a fact that also 
explains what Tim Dean and Oliver Davis diagnosed as the persistent “hatred of 
sex.” Yet, as Dean and Davis argue, this hatred should not be conceptualized as 
a cultural construct or a mere fodder for historicism. Its universality is its most 
disturbing aspect.15
* * *
Published in 1994, Joan Copjec’s Read My Desire was a product of a historical 
moment when the politics of globalization reached one of its decisive turn-
ing-points: the early post-Cold War era that coincided with what today we call 
the rise of neoliberalism on a global scale.16 As we know, this era defined itself 
ideologically as the glorious advent of the “end of history,” which supposedly 
meant that the “world” finally came into being as a unified global market with-
out the threat of Communism. According to this narrative, history ended precise-
ly at the moment when the world was finally born as a unified entity.17 Of course, 
the dominance of this narrative turned out to be short-lived, but it is worth em-
phasizing that the “world” itself was essentially reconceptualized in the ear-
ly post-Cold War context as a post-historical concept. A unified world becomes 
possible only after the end of history since the term “history” itself implies that 
the fundamental antagonisms of humanity prevent us from constructing a truly 
global political and cultural universality. Historicism responded to this political 
15 The authors make a set of openly “universal” claims about sex that are, at the same time, 
grounded on the insight that sex is in fundamental opposition to any conceivable iden-
tity: “Identities pose a special problem when it comes to sex because, as prototypically 
bound forms, they remain antipathetic to the effects of unbinding that characterize sexual 
pleasure at its most intense. Sex undoes identity. The contemporary shibboleth of “sexual 
identity’ is, from the psychoanalytic point of view, a contradiction in terms.” Oliver Davis 
and Tim Dean, Hatred of Sex (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022), 32.
16 In this context, Susan Buck-Morss’s concept of a “dreamworld” (borrowed from Walter 
Benjamin) might be especially helpful for understanding this transition to neoliberalism 
under the conditions of the Cold War; see Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of 
Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).
17 The unification of this world beyond the geopolitical divisions of the Cold War also im-
plied that history ended precisely when the world was finally about to become flat. The 
two classic works in this context are Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last 
Man (New York: The Free Press, 1992) and Thomas L. Friedman’s The World is Flat: A Brief 
History of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2005). 
102
roland végső
conjuncture by deconstructing narratives that threatened to do away with histo-
ry itself: The world is not yet born, these historicists claimed, because as a his-
torical entity its arrival will always have to be postponed. Lacan, on the other 
hand, provided a different approach, since his works demonstrated that the real 
is worldless. In effect, the Lacanian argument renders obsolete the false choice 
between a post-historical, unified world and a historicized plurality of worlds.
In her book, Copjec formulated an ontological orientation, an aesthetic ap-
proach to cinema, and a theory of politics that can all be articulated with refer-
ence to the question whether a sexed being is capable of having a world. This 
concern with the world is a consistent theme in Copjec’s work, including beyond 
Read My Desire. We can quote here Imagine There is No Woman to illustrate its 
persistence in her thinking:
One of psychoanalysis’s deepest insights is that we are born not into an already 
constituted world that impinges on our senses to form perceptions, but in the 
wake of a primordial loss; it is not, then, our relation to the order of things, but 
our relation to das Ding that decides the objectivity of our reality or its collapse. 
[. . .] In short, psychoanalysis does not take reality or the world for granted, but 
asks how the subject comes to constitute and thus “have” a reality or world.18
In this sense, at least, psychoanalysis already comes after the end of the world. 
One of the historical and theoretical preconditions of the rise of psychoanalysis 
is that the subject’s relation to the world must first become problematic. “Hav-
ing a world” is no longer a phenomenological given (as it was, for example, for 
Edmund Husserl or Martin Heidegger). Psychoanalysis belongs to those intellec-
tual traditions that become possible only after “the world” is no longer a meta-
physical certainty and, therefore, accounting for its existence (either in the sin-
gular or the plural) becomes once again an urgency. As the quotation above also 
illustrates, however, psychoanalysis comes after the world in yet another sense. 
The subject is constituted by a “primordial loss.” On this level, the subject is not 
constituted by a desire for the world but by a hopeless quest after the “thing,” 
that partial object that cannot be integrated seamlessly into the ordered hierar-
chies of a world.
18 Joan Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge, MA: MIT 
Press, 2004), 192.
103
on the absolute impossibility of the world’s existence
At the heart of Copjec’s “linguistic materialism,” therefore, we can identify two 
broader ontological assumptions, most clearly articulated in the introduction 
and the last chapter of Read My Desire. These two propositions can be reduced 
to the two following slogans: “structures are real” and “the world does not ex-
ist.” In fact, it is the specific combination of these two ideas that makes Copjec’s 
position especially interesting, because together these two theses demonstrate 
that Copjec does not see psychoanalysis as a simple form of metaphysical nihil-
ism. The affirmation of the inexistence of the world does not immediately lead 
to the wholesale rejection of all forms and structures. The real is worldless, but 
this worldlessness is not a state of some kind of primordial chaos that is devoid 
of all kinds of formalizable organization. In other words, according to this posi-
tion, the real in its very worldlessness is nevertheless structured.
In her critique of Michel Foucault and the historicism that his work inspired, 
Copjec takes us on an adventure in non-existence. Her argument follows three 
steps. First, language itself needs to be identified with the precondition of ex-
istence. As she puts it, “the existence of a thing materially depends on its being 
articulated in language, for only in this case can it be said to have an objective—
that is to say, a verifiable—existence, and that can be debated by others.”19 At the 
same time, however, the second step consists of asserting the non-existence of 
a metalanguage: “No phenomenon appearing [in the field of phenomena] may 
be taken to account for, interpret, all the others; none stands above the others 
as the final interpretant, itself beyond interpretation.”20 As Copjec observes, this 
linguistic argument that simultaneously asserts language as the precondition of 
existence and denies the existence of a metalanguage might appear to “flatten 
out” the field of phenomena as it seems to reduce all phenomena to an undif-
ferentiated field of immanence. But, in the final step, Copjec argues something 
quite different. It is precisely the non-existence of the “whole” that prevents this 
flat closure of all phenomena. The impossibility of a metalanguage guarantees 
that “the whole of society will never reveal itself in an analytical moment; no di-
agram will ever be able to display it fully, once and for all.”21 
19 Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 
1994), 8.
20 Copjec, 8. 
21 Copjec, 8.
104
roland végső
Nevertheless, this rejection of the whole does not mean that Copjec wants to do 
away with the concept of totality. Totality remains an operative concept for her 
analyses, only it is now considered to be an effect of an ideological suture. In 
fact, Copjec explicitly states that one of the central concepts of Read My Desire is 
a specific notion of “totality” that sets Lacan and psychoanalysis apart both from 
deconstruction and historicism: the idea of a totality marked by an internal lim-
it. Lacan’s “paradoxical conception of the whole” holds that the infinite play of 
difference is based on a limit (which essentially produces a closed totality).22 And 
Copjec adds, “the theories of suture, of groups, of sexual difference, all emerge 
from this logic.”23 While suture names the way a totality is formed out of the infin-
ity of differences (in the register of the “as if”), sexual difference names the loca-
tion where sex itself emerges as the internal limit of signification, sense, and rea-
son. In the book’s concluding chapter, the function of this internal limit is demon-
strated through the Kantian analysis of the antinomies of cosmological ideas:  
Kant avoids the skeptical impasse by refusing to answer the question “Is the 
world finite or infinite?” and by instead negating the assumption implicit in the 
question: the world is. As long as one assumes that the world exists, the thesis 
and antithesis of the cosmological antinomy have to be regarded as contradictory, 
as mutually exclusive and exhaustive alternatives. One is thus forced to choose. 
But once this assumption is shown to be ill founded, neither alternative need be 
taken as true; a choice is no longer necessary. The solution to this antinomy, then, 
lies in demonstrating the very incoherency of this assumption, the absolute im-
possibility (Kant’s words) of the world’s existence. This is done by showing that 
the world is a self-contradictory concept, that the absolute totality of an endless 
progression is inconceivable, by definition.24
But the central argument of Read My Desire is that the Kantian antinomies of 
reason help us better understand the psychoanalytic notion of the sexuation of 
the subject. Copjec juxtaposes Kant’s cosmological arguments to Lacan’s for-
mulae of sexuation and finds that the non-existence (or failure) of the world can 
be articulated in two different ways: The world can be impossible, or it can be 
prohibited. In Copjec’s words: “Rather than defining a universe of men that is 
22 Copjec, 60. 
23 Copjec, 60.
24 Copjec, 219−20.
105
on the absolute impossibility of the world’s existence
complemented by a universe of women, Lacan defines man as the prohibition 
against constructing a universe and woman as the impossibility of doing so. 
The sexual relation fails for two reasons: it is impossible and it is prohibited. Put 
these two failures together; you will never come up with a whole.”25 Sex and the 
world seem to enter here a mutually exclusive relation. There is sex only to the 
degree that the world does not exist. Should the existence of the world be possi-
ble to demonstrate rationally, sex itself would cease to exist.
* * *
Yet, as is well known, in spite of the theoretical demonstration of the absolute 
impossibility of the world’s existence, Kant draws a set of practical conclu-
sions from this cosmological antinomy that seems to reassert the necessity of 
the world. Kant’s solution aims to avoid the skeptical impasse which otherwise 
would lead to moral relativism: Even if the world does not exist, he argues, we 
should act as if it existed. This conclusion is implicitly present in his analysis of 
the “teleological judgment,” where he argues that we must proceed as if nature 
in its totality served some kind of purpose: “But what does even the most com-
plete teleology of all prove in the end? Does it prove, say, that such an intelligent 
being [who created the world for a purpose] exists? No; all it proves is that, given 
the character of our cognitive powers, i.e., in connecting experience with the su-
preme principles of reason, we are absolutely unable to form a concept of [how] 
such a world is possible except by thinking of it as brought about by a supreme 
cause that acts intentionally.”26 As a result, science itself needs the purposive-
ness of nature in order to be able to describe the physical universe: “through this 
concept [the purposiveness of nature], we present nature as if an understanding 
contained the basis of the unity of what is diverse in nature’s empirical laws.”27 
Still, this desire for the world is also legible in some of Kant’s ethical reflections 
where once again the theoretical assertion of the impossibility of the world’s 
existence is directly tied to the practical necessity of the world. This argument 
is most clearly legible in the essay entitled “To Eternal Peace,” where Kant cites 
25 Copjec, 235.
26 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 
1987), 281. 
27 Kant, 20. 
106
roland végső
Ferdinand I’s Latin motto: fiat justitia, pereat mundus [let justice be done even 
if the world should perish].28 The theoretical complication encapsulated in this 
motto is quite disturbing. Upon first reading, it seems to suggest that the ethical 
imperative to do what is just is more important than the world itself. If we take 
this proposition literally, we must conclude that there might be situations in 
which the ethically correct act might imply the perishing of the world. Yet, how 
can an ethical act be content with the destruction of the world as one of its pos-
sible consequences? Is it even possible to conceive of an ethics that would be a 
fundamentally world-destroying agency? 
Kant does have an answer to these questions which aims to restore the world 
to its rightful glory. The solution is simple: The ethical act does not destroy the 
world. To the contrary, the rational constitution of the subject entails that the 
ethical disposition of humanity will eventually lead to the fully rational and just 
organization of the world. In other words, if we follow Copjec’s lead and read 
for the desire that is articulated here, we find that the motto fiat justitia, pereat 
mundus is not a program for the destruction of the world but an expression of 
the Kantian desire for the world in spite of its theoretical impossibility. Kant ef-
fectively shows that it would be irrational to strive for the perishing of the world 
and further argues that irrationality is a self-eliminating tendency in humanity. 
The irrational “rogues” will be eventually eliminated by history, leaving only 
rational and ethical creatures behind. As a result, when justice is done, it is not 
the whole world that is destroyed but only its undesirable elements.29 
This is why I find it important to emphasize that Copjec draws a very different 
set of conclusions from the non-existence of the world. At least, this is how I in-
terpret the concluding imperative of Read My Desire, which announces the need 
for a new kind of ethics: “Another logic of the superego must commence.”30 This 
imperative suggests that we need to establish a different relationship to the law 
and, thus, to the world itself: a properly feminine ethics that escapes the “su-
peregoic logic of exception or limit.”31 This alternative or other logic, however, 
28 Kant, “To Eternal Peace,” in Basic Writings of Kant, ed. Allen W. Wood (New York: Modern 
Library, 2001), 467.
29 For a brief overview of Kant’s definition of the world, see Sean Gaston, The Concept of the 
World from Kant to Derrida (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2013). 
30 Copjec, Read My Desire, 236. 
31 Copjec, 236.
107
on the absolute impossibility of the world’s existence
cannot be the mere inversion of the opposing theses of the antinomies of reason. 
It must provide us a way out of these aporias—including the Kantian tension be-
tween the theoretical impossibility and the practical (or, in the language of the 
third Critique, the teleological) necessity of the world.
The imperative of our times is that of world-building which translates into a 
specific, superegoic command. To put it differently, Hannah Arendt’s principle 
of amor mundi (the love of the world), formulated in the middle of the twentieth 
century as her response to the modern “disenchantment of the world,” has in 
the meantime become a superegoic command: You must love the world!32 As has 
been noted by a number of psychoanalytically-oriented thinkers, this inversion 
is characteristic of our times. For Arendt, the love of the world primarily meant 
that human beings needed to learn to accept the world as it really is with all its 
imperfections. She believes that this love is fully consistent with a critique of 
social and historical formations. The contemporary problem that we are facing 
now, however, is that the idea of the world has been increasingly elevated to a 
plane beyond criticism. Arendt’s message, “You should learn to love the world,” 
has been transformed into the objection: “How can you not love the world?” In 
various discourses of our times, therefore, the idea of the world has been effec-
tively fetishized.33
Against this tendency, Read My Desire proposes a different approach. Copjec’s 
work suggests that the world as an object of desire cannot be the predetermined 
guiding principle of our actions. Rather, we need a position “beyond” the love 
of the world. If Copjec’s central argument against historicism was that the lat-
ter failed to account for the historically specific production of a relation to the 
non-historical real, we can also assume that her ethics will have a similar struc-
ture. This ethics is oriented toward something irreducible to the status of both 
an inner-worldly object as well as the status of a world that could be the total-
ity of phenomena or objects. The promise of this new ethics, therefore, is not 
that “another world is possible” (which would simply return us to a historicist 
32 Arendt discusses the idea of “amor mundi” in her journals in some detail. The evidence 
seems to suggest that this term was going to serve as the original title for the project that 
was later published as her book The Human Condition. See Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch, 
1950−1973, ed. Ursula Ludz and Ingeborg Nordmann (Munich: Piper Verlag, 2002), 523.
33 For a discussion of the fetishization of the idea of the world, see Claire Colebrook, Who 
Would You Kill to Save the World? (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2023). 
108
roland végső
future that projects an infinity of possible worlds for us or to a deconstructive 
postponement of the final arrival of the world) but something more sinister and 
more promising at the same time: Something other than a world is possible.
* * *
Copjec’s readings of cinema also allow us to interpret this specific media tech-
nology and art-form as a historical correlate of the modern desire for the world. 
Georg Lukács makes a similar argument about the novel as a specifically mod-
ern genre in The Theory of the Novel. Lukács argues that the novel is the quintes-
sential literary genre of an age that already knows that the world does not exist 
but nonetheless still needs to think in terms of totality. In this sense, for Lukács, 
a long fictional prose narrative becomes a proper novel only if its form somehow 
marks the impossibility of formalizing modern historical experiences.34 In a sim-
ilar way, Copjec’s analyses of various films suggest that cinema is certainly capa-
ble of providing for the viewing subjects the desired “suture” of their fragment-
ed historical experiences. Yet cinema is also capable of marking, on the level 
of its formal constitution, the “absolute impossibility of the world’s existence.”
Copjec’s reading of Chris Marker’s classic film, La Jetée, is a case in point. Cop-
jec turns to the film in the context of a discussion of anxiety and goes as far 
as saying that this film “is one of the most compelling examples one will ever 
find of the anxiety that attends the experience of the uncanny.”35 The film takes 
place after World War III, in a post-apocalyptic Paris, where the survivors of 
atomic war are forced to live underground. In order to try to save what is left of 
their world, scientists are experimenting with time travel. The protagonist of 
the film is one of their test subjects, who shows an unusually strong attachment 
to the past: He is haunted by a childhood memory that provides the title for the 
film. In this memory—which, the narrator tells us, is his only memory that sur-
vived from before the war—the child is standing on the main jetty (the observa-
tion deck) at Orly airport watching the planes depart in the sunset. The memory 
is dominated by the image of the face of an unknown woman. Suddenly, there 
34 Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of 
Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974). 
35 Copjec, Read My Desire, 130.
109
on the absolute impossibility of the world’s existence
is a disturbance, and an unidentified man is killed in the crowd gathered on 
the jetty.36
At this point, one might suspect that the film is a variation on an already famil-
iar theme: The protagonist needs to solve the mystery of this childhood memory 
to save the world. However, Copjec’s reading fully inverts the terms of this in-
terpretation. In fact, she argues that the first thing we need to accept is that the 
film is about “the necessity of forgetting” rather than the protagonist’s need to 
remember: “At the end of World War III, the world in which the hero lives is on 
the edge of complete extinction, it cannot ‘take flight,’ remains stuck in place. 
Why? The world has survived, barely, the nuclear war, but what it cannot sur-
vive is the hero’s refusal to reject this memory. It is he who has condemned his 
world to destruction; the world is in danger as long as the memory endures.”37 In 
other words, the film is about the necessary struggle to negate the obsessive im-
age that haunts the protagonist’s present. Yet, at first this might seem like a par-
adoxical proposition, since the memory image is precisely that of “the world” 
before it was destroyed by atomic warfare. To put it differently, it is the memory 
of the fullness of the world that needs to be eliminated in order to guarantee the 
survival of humanity.
What does the film propose in place of this memory of the world? In effect, the 
solution to the mystery of the memory is that the protagonist needs to under-
stand that it was his own death that was preserved in this memory rather than 
his love of the world. As part of the scientific experiments, the protagonist is 
sent back to the past where he develops a relationship with the woman whose 
image appeared in his childhood memory. As Copjec puts it, “In La Jetée the 
hero allows himself to enjoy the woman.”38 However, this enjoyment beyond 
prohibition is at odds with the world itself: “The negativism of psychotics is 
proof of this; libidinal cathexis is withdrawn from the world, producing the psy-
chotic experience of the ‘end of the world.’”39 
36 La Jetée, dir. Chris Marker (Argos Films, 1962).
37 Copjec, Read My Desire, 130−31.
38 Copjec, 131.
39 Copjec, 131.
110
roland végső
After these successful adventures into the past, the scientists decide to send him 
to the future. While the representatives of the technologically more advanced 
future society that our protagonist encounters there clearly disapprove of his 
presence in their time, they nevertheless accept the argument that, by saving 
their own past, they can guarantee the existence of their own present. In the 
end, they provide him with “a power unit strong enough to put all human in-
dustry back into motion.”40 It looks like the world is finally saved. This is not 
where the story ends, though. Once our protagonist returns to his own present, 
he understands that he has served his purpose for his jailers and will be execut-
ed. Even if the world is saved now, the subject has become a redundant exces-
sive element. The narrator explains, “Now he only waited to be liquidated with, 
somewhere inside him, the memory of a twice-lived fragment of time.”41 While 
in this state of “limbo,” the representatives of the future society contact him 
once again. They give our protagonist a choice: He can return to the lost world 
of the past or he can enter the “pacified” utopian world of the future. The man 
willfully rejects the utopian future world as well as the dystopian dying world of 
his present and asks to be returned to “the world of his childhood” to be reunit-
ed with the “woman who was perhaps waiting for him.”42
This is the moment for the final revelation of the film. Once he is returned to the 
past, the protagonist finds himself in the middle of the childhood memory that 
haunted him his entire life. He is once again standing on the main jetty at Orly 
facing the woman he loves. But now, in place of the lost world, he is merely giv-
en a revelation: He understands that there is “no escaping time,” and that he 
had never had a world but merely an “image of his own death.”43 As he is run-
ning toward the woman on the jetty, he recognizes a man in the crowd who has 
been following him. This man is an agent sent by his underground jailers to kill 
him. The recovery of the lost world of the past is prevented by his death. As the 
final image of his dead body fades out and the film ends, we are led to believe 
once again that the subject and the world are mutually exclusive categories. In 
other words, the “image” that haunted the protagonist might refer to something 
real—the fact of human finitude—but it does not constitute a world.
40 La Jetée, dir. Chris Marker.
41 La Jetée, dir. Chris Marker.
42 La Jetée, dir. Chris Marker.
43 La Jetée, dir. Chris Marker.
111
on the absolute impossibility of the world’s existence
We must also note, however, that the overall formal characteristics of the film 
must be interpreted through this same conclusion. The film’s most compelling 
peculiarity is that it is narrated through static photographic images. As Copjec 
herself remarks, there is only one exception to this rule: “there is no illusion of 
movement in this “photo-novel’ composed of still photographs, except at one 
point where the woman whose image the hero refuses to surrender opens her 
eyes to look at the hero—an image of desire rather than anxiety.”44 This image of 
desire (which is also a desire for the world) is in stark contrast with the anxiety 
produced by the rest of the film. To put it differently, the aesthetics of the film 
can be interpreted in terms of a dialectical destruction of cinema itself. On the 
one hand, on this formal level, the film simply exposes the material essence of 
cinema. As we all know, every film consists of static photographic images that 
are projected in a quick temporal sequence. On the other hand, however, the 
film destroys the illusion of motion that is the primary effect of film. Apart from 
one image, we are not watching proper “motion pictures” in this film. The ulti-
mate effect of this technique is that La Jetée denies us the cinematic illusion of a 
projected world. In this sense, it reproduces on a formal level the same impossi-
bility that marked its content. Just as the protagonist, as a sexed being, is inca-
pable of regaining his lost world, the film itself denies its audiences the illusion 
of a projected full world precisely by exposing the material structure of cinema. 
Cinema is capable of evoking the desire for the world (which is represented here 
by the woman’s illusory look); but, through a different deployment of the same 
mechanisms that created this desire, it is also capable of exposing this illusion 
as a mere fantasy.
So, just as Chaplin’s film provided us a formula for popping the balloon of the 
world, La Jetée offers us a lesson in the politics of desire. If the desire for the 
world, like all desire, is a historical effect rather than an immanent cause, its in-
tense contemporary emergence exposes one of our most dangerous weaknesses. 
Just as La Jetée suggests, today, the desire for the world might very well be the 
point where the totality of life can be captured by ever more efficient technolo-
gies of power. As many commentators have observed, we are living in a histor-
ical era that is increasingly defined by a generalized sense of cultural disorien-
tation. This catastrophic experience is often described as the loss of a common 
or shared world. It is, therefore, not a surprise that over the last several decades 
44 Copjec, Read My Desire, 131. 
112
roland végső
the proliferation of “apocalyptic” narratives announcing the end of the world 
(due to natural, economic, social, and political catastrophes) has gone hand-
in-hand with the intensification of the rhetoric of world-building. La Jetée, how-
ever, shows us that, caught between the promise of a fully pacified future and 
the memory of a lost world, the subject finds itself thrown into a technologically 
manipulated and worldless present. Using Copjec’s terms, therefore, we could 
conclude that the film is asking us to reconceptualize our relation to this inalien-
able worldlessness: it suggests that we need to leave behind the masculine pro-
hibition on the world (which is the dialectical source of the desire for the world) 
in favor of the feminine impossibility of the world. 
Data availability statement
Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed dur-
ing the current study.
References
Arendt, Hannah. Denktagebuch, 1950−1973. Edited by Ursula Ludz and Ingeborg 
Nordmann. Munich: Piper Verlag, 2002. 
Buck-Morss, Susan. Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and 
West. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.
Chaplin, Charlie, dir. The Great Dictator. 1940; Los Angeles, CA: United Artists. 
Colebrook, Claire. Who Would You Kill To Save the World? Lincoln: University of Nebraska 
Press, 2023.
Copjec, Joan. Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation. Cambridge, MA, MIT 
Press, 2004.
. Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994.
Davis, Oliver, and Tim Dean. Hatred of Sex. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022.
Derrida, Jacques. The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II. Translated by Geoffrey 
Bennington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Freud, Sigmund. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920).” In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 
Group Psychology, and Other Works, 1920–1922, edited by James Strachey, 2−64. Vol. 
18 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. 
London: Hogarth Press, 1955.
. Civilization and Its Discontents. Translated by James Strachey. New York: W. W. 
Norton, 2005.
. The Future of an Illusion. Translated by James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton, 
1989.
113
on the absolute impossibility of the world’s existence
. New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. Translated by James Strachey. New 
York: W. W. Norton, 1989.
Friedman, Thomas L. The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. New 
York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2005.
Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press, 1992.
Gaston, Sean. The Concept of the World from Kant to Derrida. New York: Rowman and 
Littlefield, 2013.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Translated by Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: 
Hackett, 1987. 
. “To Eternal Peace.” In Basic Wreitings of Kant, edited by Allen W. Wood, 433−76.
Lukács, Georg. The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of 
Great Epic Literature. Translated by Anna Bostock. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974.
Marker, Chris, dir. La Jetée. Paris: Argos Films, 1962.
Végső, Roland. Worldlessness After Heidegger: Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, Decons-
truction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020.