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1. Article
Against prophecy
and utopia: Foucault
and the future
Mark GE Kelly
Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
Abstract
In this essay, I take as a starting point Foucault’s rejection of two different ways of
thinking about the future, prophecy and utopianism, and use this rejection as a basis
for the elaboration of a more detailed rejection of them, invoking complexity-based epis-
temic limitations in relation to thinking about the future of political society. I follow
Foucault in advocating immanent political struggle, which does not seek to build a deter-
minate vision of the future but rather focuses on negating aspects of the current conjunc-
ture. I extend this argument into an ethical register, arguing that the same arguments
apply mutatis mutandis to our personal lives. I conclude by engaging with Jacques Lacan’s
account of subjectivity, and the interpretation of its political import furnished by Yannis
Stavrakakis, drawing from these additional supports for my position, in particular the
rejection of utopianism as an attempt to avoid limitation by the real.
Keywords
Foucault, Lacan, Marxism, Stavrakakis, utopia
Introduction
There is no denying the basic phenomenological insight that the present as experienced
by human beings is inseparable from the projection of our intentions and expectations
forward into the future. There are no shortages of predictions and fantasies surrounding
the future which shape the present and, indeed, in turn, the future itself. While
acknowledging that it would make no sense to criticize thinking about the future as such,
we will here criticize two specific ways of thinking about the future, namely those
Corresponding author:
Mark GE Kelly, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.
Email: mark.g.e.kelly@monash.edu
Thesis Eleven
2014, Vol. 120(1) 104–118
ª The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/0725513613520621
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2. designated by Michel Foucault as ‘prophecy’ and ‘utopia’. Prophecy, clearly one of the
oldest ways of thinking about the future, is essentially a matter of making predictions
without what we might today call an adequate empirical basis. Utopianism is rather
different, since it is not a prediction per se. We will contend, however, that utopianism
implies knowledge claims more modest than those made by prophets, but which ulti-
mately suffers from similar faults.
Prophecy and utopia are both ways of situating our lives temporally, either as
determined by an inevitable horizon, or as given meaning by the effort to produce a
better world. I will, via Foucault, as well as Jacques Lacan and Yannis Stavrakakis, argue
for the elimination of these visions in favour of a rigorous openness towards the future,
both in relation to politics and personally, encompassing a reconception of the times of
our lives.
The history of prophecy
Foucault invokes the concept of prophecy in two contexts. First, he uses the notion as an
analytical category in relation to ancient thought, going back to his first engagement with
Greek texts in the early 1970s. Second, he uses the concept in criticizing contemporary
thought repeatedly from 1978 onwards.
Foucault’s treatment of prophecy in relation to ancient thought reaches its clearest
formulation in his most final Collège de France lecture series, The Courage of Truth
(2011). Here, he situates prophecy as one of four ‘fundamental modes’ of truth-telling,
the others being sage wisdom, technical education, and parrhesia, the last of which is the
main object of his study. Prophecy, according to Foucault, is a way of speaking in which
a prophet speaks a truth that is somewhat opaque, and not on his own account, but rather
acting in the capacity of a mouthpiece (Foucault 2011: 15). The prophet thus contrasts
with the sage, a wise man who speaks from his own experience (Foucault 2011:
16–7); with the technical teacher, who has a special knowledge he or she has learnt
from another and passes on (Foucault 2011: 24); and with the parrhesiast, who takes
a personal risk to tell a dangerous truth to the powerful. Foucault (2011: 29) sees both
parrhesia and prophecy as forms of telling a truth about the future.
Certain aspects of the practice of prophecy as Foucault describes it are clearly indexed
to the context of ancient history. To some extent, however, his fourfold typology of truth-
telling seems to be transhistorically applicable. He attributes the exemplary importance
of antiquity to the fact that these four modalities happen to have been clearly separate
from one another at that time. He thinks they have subsequently become mixed. In medi-
eval Christendom, in particular, the functions of parrhesiasts and prophets were inte-
grated in the figure of the preacher who tells the truth to the powerful while also
prophesying the end of days.
This brings us to Foucault’s invocation of prophecy in relation to contemporary
political thought. Today, Foucault sees himself as engaged in an active struggle against
those who continue to assume the prophetic mantle (Foucault 2001: 288). His rejection
of prophecy is sometimes couched in personal terms (he chooses not to prophesy),
sometimes in descriptive terms (prophecy is no longer a possible function today), and
sometimes prescriptive (we ‘should not’ prophesy) (Foucault 2001: 288, 384).
Kelly 105

3. Foucault (2011: 29–30) tentatively suggests that the function of prophecy has today
been taken over by ‘revolutionary discourse’. Again, we find here a mixture of parrhesia
and prophecy: a critical-political mode and one in which we are told what is going to
happen. Foucault, and I, following him, want to suggest that we should re-separate these
two discursive modes, jettisoning the latter in favour of the former.
Foucault’s reference to revolutionary thought must primarily denote Marxism, qua
the continuously dominant form of revolutionary thought from the end of the 19th
century to the present. In Marxism, I think we can diagnose a mixture not only of critical
parrhesia and prophecy, but also of technical truth-telling, in the form of claims to scien-
tificity. The question of the scientificity of Marxism is, of course, contentious, but irre-
levant to our purposes. Our question is rather to what extent Marxism can be said to be
prophetic. Here, Marxism’s own claims to scientificity are relevant, inasmuch as they are
prima facie incompatible with prophetic characteristics, since prophecy by its very
nature is excluded from scientific epistemology. Indeed, it can be presumed that the pos-
sibility of prophetic discourse has been foreclosed by the death of God, inasmuch as it
does not make sense for anyone who does not believe in a supernatural source of knowl-
edge to believe in prophecy.
Many Marxists could be accused of engaging in prophecy by treating Marx himself,
or Marxism itself, as an inerrant source of knowledge. The ultimate question is, however,
whether Marx himself made prophetic pronouncements. I think it is quite clear that he
did, albeit that only a relatively minor element of Marx’s writings is explicitly in this
direction. Marx’s prophetic dimension is the theory of history that predicts that a final
revolution is coming that will finally supersede class society. This is a conclusion that
cannot possibly have an empirical basis, but rather helps itself to a form of prophetic
historical intuition inherited from Hegel. Hegel, by positing Geist, does give himself a
supernatural basis from which to speak prophetically about history and the future. Marx
rejects Hegel’s metaphysics, but this then means that he has no basis to predict the future
unfolding of history. That he does so would seem to be a Hegelian holdover.
While most of Marx’s writings are analyses of historical situations, then, this pro-
phetic dimension is always in the background. The prophetic dimension was built into
Marxism by Marx, with regrettable historical consequences. Marx’s historiography is
itself relatively unproblematic insofar as it is an interpretation of the past. I would argue,
however, though I do not have the space to develop this argument here, that the prophecy
of the supersession of class society in fact colours Marx’s entire account of history by
leading him to put more weight on class than he otherwise would have. Even if we allow
that Marx’s (Marx and Engels 1976: 482) thesis that ‘the history of all hitherto existing
societies is the history of class struggles’ is sustainable on empirical grounds, however,
the natural empirical inference from this would be that history will continue to be
marked by class division. To conclude, as Marx does, that class struggle will terminate
in the supersession of class is not a scientific move. It may seem trite, but I think it is
accurate to say that Marx has, from Hegel, assumed a Judeo-Christian eschatology,
which still haunts us in the form of a theological-eschatological inflexion of Marxism
to the present day.
The problem with prophecy is not merely epistemic but also political: prophetic
claims are dangerous. This danger is twofold. Prophecy first encourages a groundless
106 Thesis Eleven 120(1)

4. confidence about the prophesied outcome, when that outcome is in reality anything but
assured. This confidence, second, licenses an attempt to force a prophesied outcome.
Since it is going to come about anyway, it can be reasoned there can be no serious danger
of going awry in efforts to bring the prophecy about. Of course, since this confidence is
groundless, the danger is substantial that what this effort will produce has nothing in
common with the prophesied aim. Moreover, even if the prophesied outcome is pro-
duced, this neither means that the prophecy was correct (it does not demonstrate that the
prophet had an adequate epistemic basis for predicting it), nor does it, contrariwise, show
that the prophecy was self-fulfilling (the fact that it followed the prophecy does not
demonstrate that the prophetic utterance was decisive in the aetiology of the outcome).
The first basic danger of overconfidence can be found in general predictions of the
type ‘capitalism will collapse’. The generality of this statement, the lack of specified
timeframe or pattern renders it relatively harmless, but since we cannot guarantee the
truth of the statement (though it seems a reasonable supposition, given the fate of past
socio-economic systems), it engenders a false confidence that can lead people to act
inappropriately, which may be in the direction of complacency (since the outcome is
inevitable, we do not need to do anything) or of rashness (since the outcome is inevitable,
we cannot fail).
However, if we say in addition that ‘capitalism will end only when the proletariat
organize themselves as a dictatorship’, we have entered much more dangerous prog-
nostic territory. Many good reasons have been given for believing that this is the form
that any revolutionary supersession of capitalism must take. It is not, however, an
absolute certainty, and it is dangerous to take it as a certainty because of the way that
can lead us to act. The dangers of such detailed prognostication about revolution can be
seen in various ways in the Soviet experience. Among the manifold problems that
Marxism encountered in Russia were: 1) the success of a revolution in a country in
which the proletariat was a small minority, coupled with an insistence that the pro-
letariat alone was the truly revolutionary class; and 2) an historical schema that
categorized any society that overthrew the bourgeoisie automatically as socialist, blind to
the fact that the Soviet state was at no point a dictatorship of the proletariat or even of the
people, and to the fact they had created a society of a new type (what a minority of acute
Marxists have called ‘bureaucratic collectivism’).1
The Bolsheviks forged ahead against
various kinds of contrary evidence, assured that the revolution would necessarily follow a
basic set pattern, and that the contradictions of this pattern they experienced could only be
temporary and local anomalies, hence that history would bear them out.
The Foucauldian point to make about prophecy ultimately is that prophecy is not what
it purports to be. It presents itself as telling the truth about the future, but it cannot be that,
for there is no mechanism for it to know. What it is, in its reality, is a form of discourse
that circulates in the present, which has effects in the present, and on the future, which
cannot be regularly self-fulfilling. One might defend prophecy on the basis that it serves
the purpose of inspiring people to make the prophesied vision come true. This in fact runs
up against more or less the same problem epistemically, however: we cannot know whether
this stratagem will have this putative effect, or rather occasion entirely opposite ones.
Kelly 107

5. Utopianism
Foucault’s alternative to prophecy is to show problems ‘in all their complexity’ (Foucault
2001: 290). This is in effect a task of critical parrhesia, to point out unpalatable facts that
are already discernible in a situation. The basic problem with prophecy for Foucault is,
I think, quite simply that it does the opposite of showing complexity. It is, rather, a form of
gross simplification.
When it comes to predicting the future, there is a major problem of epistemic opacity
occasioned by the complexity of society. Indeed, this opacity applies even to the past and
present: we do not have anything like the capacity to understand in its minutiae how
society works now or has ever worked, because it is simply too complex. While it might
exhibit predictable patterns, this is true only over a relatively modest time-span. It is in
any case not possible to predict when or how significant changes will occur, or a fortiori
to state in advance how we can change it. It should be acknowledged that Foucault does
not explicitly formulate the problem of complexity in these terms, but I would argue that
this formulation is at least compatible with his remarks regarding complexity, and that he
is aware of and reacting to this basic problem of the indescribable complexity of social
reality across his work.2
Foucault’s (2001: 288) response ‘is to raise questions . . . with
the maximum complexity and difficulty so that a solution doesn’t spring from the head of
some reformist intellectual or suddenly appear in the head of a party’s political bureau’.
Foucault presents his position as a matter of two different imperatives, one relating to the
inadequacy of off-the-peg solutions of politicians and technocrats to the complexity of
social problems, and the other a matter of the profoundly undemocratic nature of such
solutions from above.
Here, complexity and the democratic imperative are, I would argue, closely inter-
twined: complexity means that adequately complex solutions can only come out of the
operation of social complexity itself, not from above. Foucault’s work tries to assist the
evolution of social change from below by producing maximally complex accounts of
society and its history. This is a necessary effort, despite the unavoidable inadequacy of
any such theory to fully articulate what has taken place. When it comes to the future,
however, the obstacles to analysis are massively greater, since we have no empirical
knowledge of what will take place, attempts to prescribe ready-made social solutions
cannot have any adequate basis, though speculation about various possible scenarios
may be both necessary and helpful.
The denial of complexity is not the unique province of prophecy. Prophecy is a
particularly crude form of the denial of complexity, but the basic problem afflicts a
broader spectrum of claims to be able to predict the future, which are between them more
or less coextensive with the political field today. Foucault speaks more than once in the
same breath of silencing both ‘prophets and lawgivers’ (Foucault 2001: 288; cf. Foucault
1991: 159, 1990: 124). Both types are forms of prognosticator, I will argue: while
prophets claim to know the future, those who offer us political solutions claim to know
what is best for the future.
The putting forward of a contingent vision of the future as the best option is, in a
word, utopianism. There are of course other definitions of utopianism, including one that
is currently in vogue, in which utopias are taken to be a matter of literary images of the
108 Thesis Eleven 120(1)

6. future that are supposed to inspire us, but are not meant to be brought about literally. We
will use the term, however, to refer to utopian schemes that seek to establish what
political society should look like, the sense of the term used, to very different effect, by
both John Rawls and Robert Nozick. While prophecy is not a mission that many con-
temporary political thinkers would explicitly embrace, utopianism is taken up as such by
these seminal figures of analytical political philosophy.
Foucault (1998: 178), in his 1967 essay on ‘heterotopias’, defines utopias as
‘emplacements that maintain a general relation of direct or inverse analogy with the real
space of society. They are society perfected or the reverse of society, but in any case
these utopias are spaces that are fundamentally and essentially unreal’. This is compa-
tible with either definition of ‘utopia’ we have just outlined. It allows us to see, however,
what is wrong with positing a utopia as the way things should be, rather than as a
heuristic flight of fancy: if a utopia is ‘essentially unreal’, then it cannot be achieved, by
definition. We will argue that this is a necessary feature of all utopias as such.
The epistemic problems and political dangers of utopianism have considerable
overlap with those of prophecy. The danger of utopianism is obvious, namely the use of
the utopian ends to justify political means. Like prophecy, utopianism can instil false
confidence. As with prophecy, the danger from overconfidence is compounded by the
lack of basis for positing this end in the first place. Of course, epistemically, utopianism
differs from prophecy in that it does not claim to know how the future will unfold. It
does, however, involve lesser knowledge claims, beliefs about what is both possible and
desirable for the future.
A basic premise of utopianism in our sense is that it is possible to bring one’s utopia
about. Utopianism is often challenged on the basis that a given utopia is not possible. My
objection is in effect a variant of this challenge, but significantly different from its usual
form. I do not claim that it is impossible a priori for the utopian vision to be realized in
the details provided by its advocates. I deny rather that they can definitely know that it is
possible to produce their utopia. I furthermore deny that their utopian vision can con-
stitute an adequate description of any social arrangement, hence even achieving their
aims will not count as achieving utopia.
On the first count, we cannot know in advance whether it is possible for a society
simultaneously to exhibit all the characteristics laid out in any given utopian vision. The
epistemic opacity here is again due to the complexity of a society: we cannot model
society with enough accuracy to know what features can obtain simultaneously. It is an
inadequate conception of social possibility simply to say, as we are used to saying in
philosophy, that if we can imagine such a society, it is possible, since I deny precisely
that we can adequately imagine society. It is a fortiori impossible to know whether we
can realistically produce a given utopia from the starting conditions that actually obtain.
Now, it may be objected that it is not necessary to be certain that it is possible to
realize a given utopian vision to subscribe to the utopian cause. That is, one might say
that the point is not so much to realize the vision as to get as close to it as possible. It is in
precisely this sense that Foucault (1997: 298) criticizes utopianism as such, however,
using the term ‘utopia’ pejoratively to refer to Jürgen Habermas’ concept of an ideal
speech situation (Habermas 1984: 25, 26, 42). Habermas posits this situation only as a
regulative ideal, that is, an idea that is supposed to regulate our conduct in non-ideal
Kelly 109

7. situations, rather than as something we must try to realize. It is precisely as such that
Foucault rejects Habermas’ concept. From Foucault’s point of view, the problem is the
same whether the utopia is posited as a concrete goal or merely as regulative. Either way,
the goal functions in the present in a way that is quite distinct from its intentions. From
Foucault’s earlier definition of utopia as a vision of a ‘society perfected’, we can extra-
polate a general condemnation of the way utopias operate by providing a vision of the
way society should operate, to motivate behaviour, while remaining ‘essentially unreal’.
From a Foucauldian point of view what is important about such utopias is not the thing
they aim for, but what practices they actually produce in the here and now. Most utopians
are blind to this consideration. Habermas does seem to grasp it, however.
Yet, even Habermas’ position runs up against the second epistemic problem for
utopias, relating to the desirability of the utopia. While the criterion of desirability itself
must be normative and hence not purely epistemic, the assertion that a utopian vision is
desirable implies the ability to know that the society our utopianism will produce will
meet one’s normative desiderata. I deny, however, that it is possible to know this. The
features we posit a utopia having cannot be enough to tell us how the whole society
would operate under the posited conditions, because of the complexity of interactions
entailed, and the great portion of society and its interactions that are missing from the
description of the utopian society. Thus what might seem an attractive state of affairs
could be a nightmare in practice because of all kinds of unimagined side effects. It is
certain that it will involve all kinds of effects not projected by its designers.
One reason that utopias can be defined as essentially unreal is that no vision of an
alternative society is ever a complete description, since it is impossible entirely to
describe a social totality at all, still less in advance of its existence. Utopian thinkers may
indeed admit this, and own rather that the point is to isolate certain salient social desi-
derata, things that are desirable all things being equal. However, all things will not be
equal, and hence we should not trust any utopian vision, no matter how apparently
attractive.
This is true not only of a fully realized utopia but any attempt to move towards one,
even asymptotically, inasmuch as we cannot know in advance that any change we will
bring to society is good (by whatever standard of the good we adopt) before it occurs.
Moreover, it is impossible to know that positing such a goal will lead us closer to it at all.
Indeed, it is not clear how one knows whether one is actually approaching a goal, unless
it is defined in simply quantitative terms. If one’s utopian goal is simply that all children
should be able to read, then this progress can reasonably be charted. Such a goal is not in
itself utopian, however. A utopia is a multifarious vision, not merely a key indicator.
The difficulty here is encapsulated in a maxim attributed to Foucault that we know
what we do, but do not know what we do does (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983: 187). We are
quite certain to produce effects we never intended. I may claim that my political activity
is aimed at abolishing capitalism, but this claim, no matter how sincere, guarantees no
effectuality. Any connection between actions of persons and large-scale social change is
contingent and unpredictable.
The best example of this effect in Foucault’s work is that of the prison in Discipline
and Punish (1977). The prison system is supposed to reform criminals, to combat crime,
but it doesn’t. Rather, as Foucault details, it produces a stable layer of criminal
110 Thesis Eleven 120(1)

8. recidivists, a criminal caste. This is well evidenced, but it is never fully acknowledged.
Though Foucault does not quite say as much, the reason for this blindness to the
objective functioning of the prison is that reality is screened by a utopia. A utopian image
of the prison, not as it is, but as it should be, in which only the guilty are punished,
proportionately and appropriately, such that they are rehabilitated, is what sustains the
prison system. This does not mean that the reality particularly resembles the utopia, still
less that it is oriented towards its final production. The utopia rather serves as the excuse
for its own nonexistence: the imperfection of the system is allowed on the basis that the
utopia is being tendentially produced, but since the existing reality does not tend in this
direction, the utopian vision in effect acts against its own production. This does leave an
unresolved tension between reality and the utopian vision, the persistence of which is
explained below in relation to Stavrakakis’ work on utopias.
Communism similarly functioned as a utopian excuse in the Soviet Union: a real
excuse that was unreal as a prospect, though it was posited as right around the corner.
(That said, neither I nor Foucault accuse Marxism in general of being utopian. Marx
himself rejected utopianism explicitly. I would argue that his concept of communism is
not utopian, since it is defined essentially as the negation of class society. My claim here,
then, is only that Marxism came contingently to have a utopian function in the Soviet
Union.) It is also how microeconomics functions as a guarantee of contemporary
capitalism: the market ultimately will benefit everyone, once the kinks have been ironed
out (please ignore the man lying in the gutter).
We can thus conclude that we should reject utopianism because there is an immanent
contradiction in it. Utopianism posits a goal as the basis for action, but it is impossible to
link action adequately to that goal. Rather, the utopian goal is apt to serve as justification
in the present for something entirely different. Indeed, this effect is inevitable: any given
utopianism is an artefact of the present, existing in the present as part of a strategy of
power.
The alternative
It could be objected that, by this point, I have rejected not only utopianism and prophecy
but politics itself. If we do not know what we do actually does, if we cannot know how
we affect the future, how can we engage in political activity at all?
There are non-utopian and non-prophetic forms of politics that do not involve episte-
mological wantonness, however. Most obviously, there are forms of political action
involving no determinate vision of the future. These are, namely, immanent struggles
aiming at the negation of certain features of the present. (We will leave aside the question
of whether these struggles might be oriented towards positive values, such as truth,
peace, or justice. My suspicion is that any such value is at least the kernel of utopianism,
hence why Marx and Foucault refuse to invoke them.) In such cases we are concerned
solely with what we are doing, not with what we are doing actually does, although such
struggles must aim at a futural outcome, inasmuch as the negation will not occur imme-
diately. Clearly, it is possible for such efforts to come to nought. Moreover, such changes
will lead to a society that is different in unpredictable ways, a changed society that will
inevitably have new problems that we cannot predict in advance. However, there is no
Kelly 111

9. contradiction produced by any of this: we experience something we do not like, we try to
get rid of it. Our arguments above imply that we cannot weigh up the future versus the
present according to some kind of objective calculus, because it is hard enough to have a
decent account of the present where society is concerned, let alone the future we would
compare it to. We act then according to what seems apt now, which is to say, according
to available evidence and analysis.
We can certainly allow various kinds of public policy too on Foucauldian grounds.
Foucault walks a tightrope when it comes to the question of public policy. This is
palpable in a 1977 interview, where Foucault begins:
My position is that it is not up to us to propose. As soon as one ‘proposes’ – one proposes a
vocabulary, an ideology, which can only have effects of domination. What we have to
present are instruments and tools that people might find useful. By forming groups spe-
cifically to make these analyses, to wage these struggles, by using these instruments or
others: this is how, in the end, possibilities open up. (Foucault 1990: 197)
To reject ‘proposal’ indeed seems to reject policy formation as we know it tout court.
Foucault goes on in the same interview, however, to say that:
in the end, I’ve become rather irritated by an attitude, which for a long time was mine, too,
and which I no longer subscribe to, which consists in saying: our problem is to denounce and
to criticize; let them get on with their legislation and their reforms. That doesn’t seem to me
the right attitude. (Foucault 1990: 209)
Foucault at this very time was giving recommendations by invitation to a French
committee for the reform of laws relating to sex (Defert 2001: 70).
It is possible to discern a coherent position between these two comments, however. It
is one that abstains from policy formation, yet refuses simply to leave this ground to
politicos, to ‘render unto Caesar’. Rather, Foucault advocates challenging them directly.
Foucault forswears the activity of looking at a problem from afar and then prescribing
the solution, but insists that we should not yield the arena of policy formation as a space
of contestation to others.
‘Proposal’ for Foucault refers to a form of policy-making that is high-handed, the pro-
posal of a ready-made solution from above, one which doesn’t emerge from below on the
basis of experiences. Such proposals are at least typically utopian or prophetic, for rea-
sons I will explore to some extent in the next section.
Possible objections
It might be said that such a position is itself utopian, positing a utopian vision of a world
devoid of utopianism, by which to condemn the present, predicting, without knowing it,
that things will work better without utopianism. Neither Foucault nor I do this, however.
We offer no vision of how a world without utopianism might operate, no claim that it will
lead to any particular practical consequence. We only identify a certain form of practice
existing in the present that we advocate, over other practices in the present that I argue
are immanently self-contradictory. I make no claim about the dangers or lack thereof in
112 Thesis Eleven 120(1)

10. non-utopian procedures, only that they avoid the specific dangers of utopianism and
prophecy.
Another possible line of objection is that anti-utopianism is associated today with
reactionary politics. Alain Badiou (2001: 13) points out that today any positive political
project is attacked as utopian, which is to say as unrealistic. It is true that such criticisms
are widespread, but they are often incorrect. While there are utopianisms on the left, rev-
olutionary thought is not generically utopian. Revolution is compatible with my position,
in the form of an immanent revolution from below, in which the participants attend to
and deal with the radically new and unforeseeable conditions as they emerge in a revo-
lutionary situation. The point is to prevent revolution being utopian or prophetic.
The critique that castigates left-wing politics in general as utopian is the inverse of
our critique of utopianism. Where we claim that utopianism fails because it attempts to
say how society should work, critiques of left-wing thought as utopian tend to claim
that left-wing positions are insufficiently articulated, hence ‘utopian’ because they
cannot offer an alternative vision. We would argue that utopianism is marked not by
the absence of a utopian vision, but by its presence. According to my argument, the
inability to imagine how something would work is no argument against its possibility,
just as the ability to imagine how something would work does not adequately demon-
strate that it is actually possible, since the complexity of the social outstrips our ability
to model society in our minds.
There is nothing utopian about saying that ‘another world is possible’, where this
slogan is raised without detailing what this world would look like. Badiou’s own position
is utterly non-utopian, because it is a matter of fidelity to a truth event in the past that is
neither about reviving the past situation nor aiming at producing any particular future
situation. Badiou’s philosophy is one of profound openness which is inimical to utopian-
ism as I have described it. Conversely, however, it is problematic to say that another
world is not possible, that ‘there is no alternative’. Such pronouncements are prophetic.
The claim that communism is impossible has the same flaw as the claim that communism
is inevitable: we cannot know whether a determinate form of social organization is either
inevitable or impossible, possible or desirable, in advance. Grand historical claims are
prophetic, even if they are negative, like Fukuyama’s famous neo-Hegelian diagnosis
of the end of history.
The heart of the problem with liberal and conservative positions is not that they
prophesy their own success, although they do. It is that their positions are utopian.
Indeed, it seems to me that it is centrist and right-wing thought, and not revolutionary
thought, that is generically utopian, in both its liberal or conservative forms. Social lib-
eralism posits an idealized version of society as its goal, as in Rawls’ (1999) ‘realistic
utopia’. Right-wing versions of liberalism are also utopian, if in a different direction.
Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia wears its utopianism clearly on its sleeve. All lib-
eralisms find their utopia in the market, with or without a sizeable state to support it.
Conservatism, which is of course these days normally encountered fused to liberal-
ism, is also utopian. Conservatism traditionally rejects grand schemes for the
improvement of society, even ones based on the market. One may refer here to Edmund
Burke’s classic mistrust of abstract ideas. Now, such a position does seem anti-utopian,
but it is clearly different from Foucault’s, inasmuch as he certainly is not averse to new
Kelly 113

11. abstract concepts. Conservatism forbids novelty because it goes against its own utopia,
which amounts to an idealized version of either a past it aims to restore or of a present it
aims to preserve. The idealization of the past as something that can be returned to implies
the same epistemic difficulties and political pitfalls as any utopianism: an inadequate
account of how a real society works, and, even to the extent things ever worked like the
conservative thinks, the lack of any guarantee of either the possibility or desirability of
realizing this again in the future. Even a conservatism that simply consists in defending
the status quo would have the similar problem that maintaining the status quo against the
forces of change risks changing it in quite unpredictable but other ways. Moreover, con-
servatism never defends the status quo based on a faultless understanding of its variety,
but rather on an idealized image of it to which it does not correspond. As such, far from
being a genuine defence of things as they are, it inevitably becomes a matter of suppres-
sing elements of the status quo that it does not like on the basis that these elements are
peculiarly novel and threatening.
Personal anti-utopianism
Thus far, we have been discussing politics. However, it seems to me that the arguments
developed above on the basis of Foucault’s remarks in relation to politics are also
applicable to personal life.
We can be utopian or prophetic in our personal life as in our political thinking: we can
act according to a belief in a personal fate or according to an idiosyncratic vision of a
perfect life. I would argue that such thinking has similar dangers for us personally as it
does for us politically.
Prophecy has been discredited at a personal level much as it has been politically, even
if many people continue to believe in fate and fortune-telling. Belief in a foreknown per-
sonal fate runs the same broad risks as political prophecy: it may make us overconfident,
may push us to do things that we would be wiser to avoid, may lead to disappointment.
Utopianism, on the other hand, is normal, in personal life as in politics. We develop
personal goals, visions of the life we want to lead, and work towards these. Such personal
utopias seem to me to be amenable to the same criticisms as political utopianism. Our
attempts to produce a desired-for personal future never turn out as planned. As in poli-
tics, the desirability of one’s vision cannot be assured in advance. As in politics, utopian-
ism in personal life functions as a screen that allows us to lead a life not conforming to
our desire on the basis that it will one day lead to the outcome we want.
This leads us to recommend an ethical anti-utopianism that recapitulates the political
version outlined above. The ethical and political are indeed closely intertwined here. The
existence of political utopianism surely relies on individuals taking a political utopia to
be their own goal, in seeing in utopian politics the answer to their personal problems.
Thus, the two questions are intertwined ineluctably: if we are seriously to oppose polit-
ical utopianism, we must explain how we can get along without personal utopianism.
It seems to me that we can, personally and politically, follow desire toward specific
objectives without a larger teleology. Doubtless, realizing our immanent desires will lead
to all kinds of unexpected and even undesirable effects, but so will any course of action.
114 Thesis Eleven 120(1)

12. Foucault (1978: 157) himself is hostile to desire, famously preferring pleasure for
political reasons, but this is because he sees desire as attaching to determinate content.
Pleasure is more immediate and knowable than desire, which is by contrast conceptual,
deferred, never satisfying. His rejection of desire is also in the direction of anti-utopian
immanence in personal life.
In rejecting desire, Foucault was disagreeing with much of his French intellectual
milieu, most notably perhaps with Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Lacan. I do not follow
Foucault’s rejection of desire, precisely because I follow Lacan in holding that desire is
not something we can do without. Indeed, Foucault does not himself argue we can do
without desire, only that we should emphasize pleasure to combat the machinations of
power that our desire harbours.
Lacan’s position is a particularly useful contrast to Foucault’s here, because it offers a
possible challenge, by positing fantasy as the necessary corollary of desire. On Lacan’s
account, fantasy provides us with the object of desire: we do not desire real objects, but
fantasized versions of objects. Disappointment with the object of our desire is thus more or
less inevitable from a Lacanian perspective, as the truth of the real object continually
threatens to break in on our fantasy. Moreover, for Lacan our desire is premised on wanting
to fill a lack within us that no object, fantasized or otherwise, can actually fill, since this
lack, which can be identified with desire itself as such, is constitutive of our subjectivity.
This does not amount for Lacan to an objection to desire, however, but rather tells us why
desire is necessary. Forming fantasies to pursue desire is all we can do given our incurable
lack, hence Lacan’s (1992) ethical injunction is that we should never give up on our desire.
If Lacan is right – and I think he is – it would seem that any political or personal desire
must organize itself around fantasies which contradict reality. This might be taken to
imply that utopianism is the necessary lubricant of politics and human life in general.
According to Lacan, we cannot exist without imaginary, fantasy, ideological relations to
the bare existence which he calls ‘the real’. We cannot simply exist in the real world as it
is, without ideas about it that distort it. Foucault and Lacan are united on this point (see
Kelly 2009: 21–23). For Lacan, we need the mediation of imagination between us and
the dangerous, unsettling real, since it is not cognizable. Lacan indeed takes it that this
imaginary mediation is so necessary that he refers to it as ‘reality’. Reality is in this sense
for him a protective fantasy of coherence and comprehensibility imposed on the real
(Miller 1995: 12). From a Lacanian perspective we cannot condemn utopianism simply
because it is an inaccurate fantasy, because for Lacan much of what we believe is
necessarily fantastical, or even in a sense delusional.
Some do indeed argue that Lacan’s position implies that politics must be utopian
(Stavrakakis 1999: 112). At a minimum Lacan’s ethics seems to imply that if we have a
utopian desire, we should not give up on it. I contend, however, that one can mean-
ingfully distinguish between fantasy simpliciter and utopia from a Lacanian perspective.
In this, I follow Yannis Stavrakakis (1999), who has articulated a Lacanian anti-
utopianism, arguing that Lacanian principles lead to anti-utopian conclusions. As will
become clear in what follows, Stavrakakis’ sense of ‘utopia’ is entirely compatible with
the Foucauldian sense of the word I have been utilizing.
The Lacanian objection to utopianism is not that it is a fantasy, since our conception
of reality is always phantasmic, hence always doomed to disappointment. It is rather that
Kelly 115

13. utopianism is immune to disappointment. Where ordinary objects of desire can be
achieved, inevitably disappointing us with their failure to live up to our fantasized
expectations, utopian fantasies are articulated in such a way that they are eternally
deferred. This is because, in ways we have already discussed, utopias are impossible.
Where a desire for another person, for example, has a clear, obtainable object, utopia is
of a different order. It is not an object that exists to be acquired. Rather, it is something
that must be made to exist. Thus, rather than accepting we have reached our object and
that the object has not turned out as we wanted, utopians claim that the object still
remains yet to be produced. Utopianism is thus eternally frustrated, but never properly
disappointed or disillusioned. Rather, it insists that someone else is to blame for its
deficiencies.
Stavrakakis claims that utopianism’s central problematic feature is the constitution of
‘scapegoats’. Utopia is posited as the perfect state we ought to be in. This then leads to
the question of why we are not there yet. Since we are never in a perfect state, this means
that someone or something must be to blame. For Stavrakakis this entails an explanation
in terms of an agent who is preventing us from reaching utopia, who can therefore be
blamed for all the problems of our society. Anti-Semitism is the case that he takes up
most clearly to explain his theory. In our example from Foucault, the prison system,
depending on one’s perspective, one blames the failures of the method either on the lib-
eral reformers who make it too soft, or on the conservatives who do not implement
proper rehabilitation programmes.
From a psychological point of view, the problem with utopianism is that, where
ordinary desires have the real as a kind of limit beyond which they can only be pushed by
a psychotic subject, utopia acknowledges no limit. Utopianism rather seeks to reconfi-
gure the real to match the fantasy (Stavrakakis 1999: 107). The real can be expected to
resist this process, which leads to inevitable frustration, experienced not as a problem
with the utopian vision but a problem with the real. Of course, in some sense all politics
involves some attempt to alter the way things are. Utopianism implies the wholesale
negation of the real, however, in favour of itself.
Stavrakakis (1999: 111) affirms hope against utopia, an appropriately open-ended
solution. This should not be taken as an endorsement of the vacuous slogan of hope,
as raised so successfully by Obama in 2008. Hope is not a political programme but an
attitude which allows us to engage in more concrete political commitments. I do not
advocate the substitution of abstraction for politics. This essay is an exercise in political
philosophy, rather than politics, for this reason.
More dubious is Stavrakakis’ connection of this hope to Derrida and Mouffe contra
Habermas, with the implication that radical democracy escapes the utopianism of the
ideal speech situation (Stavrakakis 1999: 112).3
While it is true that radical democracy
lacks the determinacy of Habermas’ utopianism, it is still amenable to a thinking of ‘if
only we had true democracy’, and thus enables the identification of a scapegoat. Even if
it does not breach the Lacanian injunction against attempting to negate the real, I think
it falls afoul of various objections to utopianism made above. It moreover means
restricting our hope to the limited horizon of the radicalization of democracy.
Lacan (1992: 293–4) rejects a psychoanalysis of adaptation to existing conditions in
favour of following our desires. For Lacan, desire is something that fantasy strives to
116 Thesis Eleven 120(1)

14. capture, but which is itself beyond encapsulation, which serves only to continually
provoke us in producing specific demands. From this point of view, utopianism means
believing in a wonderland in which we will actually understand and realize our real
desire itself. For Lacan, this attempt is impossible: the only meaningful way to follow
desire is through following the metonymy by which one demand leads to another. Contra
Foucault, I think desire qua the basis for the continual emergence of new and unpre-
dictable demands is a suitable grounding for politics.
From both Lacan and Foucault, however, we can draw broadly the same conclusion.
From both their perspectives, the problem with utopias is their essential unreality, that
they remain essentially unfulfilled and operate instead as a powerful motivator to engage
in actions not ultimately connected to the production of the proposed utopia. From either
perspective, the appropriate prophylactic to utopianism is a more immanent form of
practice.
Notes
1. My justifications for these statements are of necessity much more detailed than can be given
here. On both the dictatorship of the proletariat and bureaucratic collectivism, see Draper
(1987), though I disagree with many of his specific claims.
2. For an account of Foucault as a complexity theorist avant la lettre, see Olssen (2008).
3. Mouffe’s (1999) critique of Habermas, though multi-faceted, does not include a critique of his
utopianism, but only of the specific content of his vision.
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Author biography
Mark GE Kelly was Lecturer in Philosophy at Middlesex University from 2008 to 2012.
He is the author of The Political Philosophy of Michel Foucault (Routledge, 2009).
118 Thesis Eleven 120(1)