Yannis Stavrakakis 
Beyond the Certainty Principle: Towards a Political 
Reading of the Modern Experience * 
The crisis of certainty 
An avalance of recent events has made us realize that the world in which 
we live is not as safe as we have been used to believe. The image of modern 
societies as societies which, armored with an absolute certainty guaranteed 
by scientific discourse, are in a position to control the totality of the real is 
suffering severe dislocations - which does not necessarily mean, of course, 
that the hegemony and the importance of science in modern culture is to-
tally undermined. So, what is wrong? What happened to the unqualified 
optimism promising an unlimited human domination on the totality of the 
real? Instead of this picture, what is now emerging is the surfacing of an 
element which, up to now, had been repressed from our perception of re-
ality, a perception which was previously thought to be objective and is now 
suddenly revealed to be the result of a contingent process of social construc-
tion. What can this element be? The most plausible answer seems to be the 
following: it is the element of uncertainty which now returns to haunt our 
certainties; it is an element of negativity which returns to dislocate our con-
structions of social positivity. In other words, what was thought to be impos-
sible is happening in front our very eyes. In Lacanian terms, we seem to be 
encountering the real in a way which is perhaps unprecedented. Consider, 
for example, the 'mad cow disease' issue. What is revealed now is that the 
certainties which supported our way of life, which made our way of life pos-
sible - a n integral part of that way of life was the consumption of meat -were 
not privileged and undeniable truths - as almost everyone was led to believe 
- but social constructions with limited duration and validity. In today's risk 
society - here Ulrich Beck's work is of prime importance - every certainty is 
increasingly being revealed as a social construction which can never neutral-
ize and domesticate the real - with all its Lacanian connotations. 
But what exactly do we mean when we say that the certainties support-
ing our way of life are nothing but social constructions? Obviously, the no-
* Some of the material included in this text comes from my forthcoming book Lacan 
and the Political, London: Routledge, 1999. 
Filozofskivestnik, XIX (2/1998), pp. 179-194. 179 
Yannis Stavrakakis 
tion of construction does not entail any accusations of conscious deception. 
What it implies is something deeper and constitutive: humans cannot live 
their lives and develop a knowledge regarding their environment, natural 
and social, without representing it, without constructing it at the symbolic 
and the imaginary level; without attributing to it logical coherence and pre-
dictability. This 'logical' veil which covers over the heterogeneous domains 
of the real is a phenomenon so massive and systematic that it is impossible 
to conceive it as a conscious deception (Pecheux 1988: 638). In other words, 
humans are, in a certain sense, 'obliged' to construct their reality due to their 
constitutive inability of knowing and mastering the real, due to their attach-
ment to language - humans inhabit language and are inhabited by language 
and thus have to approach the real indirectly and never in a definitive way. 
The problem here is that in spite of this human deficiency - or rather 
because of it — all human action has to be supported by an illusory social 
construction purporting to master the impossible real - what is illusory, of 
course, is not that this is a social construction but the fact that it promises 
an absolute mastery of the real. Let me briefly clarify this statement. No 
doubt, humans are required to 'act' and indeed 'act' all the time, transform-
ing their human and non-human environment, in order to follow the path 
of their desires and develop their civilization. All these actions presuppose 
some kind of a priori safety net, a net offered by the field of social construc-
tion (scientific assumptions, political calculations and institutions, person-
al plans, insurance policies, the welfare state etc.). What is usually neglect-
ed, however, is the relative and transitory character of all these constructions 
and of the safety they can provide. We demand from science and from our 
political system complete safety and this is something we are usually prom-
ised. What we are not offered is the knowledge - this would be a savoir and 
not a connaissance- that this supposed safety, even when it is consistent with 
the results of scientific research in a particular field, is never omnipotent, 
since science, as all discursive constructions, is not guaranteed a privileged 
direct access to the deep essence of things. This was clearly the dominant 
modern view, a view which accepted that scientists - especially natural sci-
entists - where in a privileged position to arrive at safe, 'objective' descrip-
tions of nature - of the deep 'essence' of nature - and thus to eliminate any 
uncertainty and risk entailed in human action. Contemporary epistemolo-
gy and history of science clearly undermine these assumptions. In other 
words, what is emerging today is the dislocation of scientific objectivism and 
essentialism. Certainty is not the same as it was. 
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Beyond the Certainty Principle: Toiuards a Political Reading... 
Certainty and modernity: a constitutive tension ? 
But surely this is not something new within our modern context. In fact, 
modernity is primarily associated with the dislocation of certainty, of the 
certainties characterizing pre-modern societies. With modernity, the unex-
pected and doubt - elements which were foreclosed by traditional forms of 
reason - resurface in the horizon and are inscribed, perhaps for the first time 
with such force, in scientific and philosophical discourse and political im-
agination. Descartes' example is revealing since his whole enterprise is based 
on the recognition of the constitutive nature of doubt. But this position is 
not eliminating the traumatic character of uncertainty. It was understanda-
ble for people who were used to seek the support for their way of life in 
absolute certainties to continue to need them within the modern universe 
of meaning. This is why modern science 'reoccupied' the field of pre-mod-
ern certainties. One should not forget that even in Descartes's argument the 
constitutivity of doubt is acknowledged only to be eliminated, in a second 
move, by the emergence of absolute certainty. Thus, the recognition of doubt 
causes new anti-modern outbreaks that attempt to eliminate doubt anew and 
create new certainties that would put an end to the continuous questioning 
modernity entails in its critical dimension (Beck 1996a: 183). 
Simply put, although modern science is founded on the critique of pre-
modern certainties, of 'objective' reason in Horkheimer's vocabulary, it did 
not manage to 'abandon the idea of a harmony between thought and the 
world, but just replaced the medieval idea that this harmony was preordained 
with the notion that thought and world could be brought into harmony with 
the use of a »neutral« and »objective« scientific discourse'. The aim is, in 
both cases, to eliminate the distance between the real - what is impossible 
to represent - and reality - the field of imaginary and symbolic representa-
tion; to articulate privileged representations of the world with a universal 
validity independent of any social, cultural or discursive context (Szerszyn-
ski 1996: 107-108). Thus, modernity identified itself with the emergence of 
new absolute certainties in the place of the dislocated pre-modern ones. The 
problem here is that seeking final and objective answers and failing to rec-
ognize that every answer of this kind is finite, articulated within a particular 
historical and social context, signals a return to the pre-modern world (Doug-
las and Wildavsky 1982: 30). Negating its own founding moment, the mo-
ment of doubt and critique, Enlightenment, becomes trapped in the pre-
modern urge to master the totality of the real, to reach absolute certainty. 
This is the project of a royal science: 
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Yannis Stavrakakis 
The project of a knowledge that would unify this multiplicity of »things 
to be known« into a homogeneous representable structure, the idea of a 
possible science of the structure of the real, capable of making it explicit, out-
side of any false semblance, and of assuring the control over this real with-
out the risks of interpretation (therefore a scientific self-reading of the real, 
without faults or lack) - this project obviously corresponds to an urgency 
so vivid, so universally »human«, tied (knotted) so well (around the same 
stake of domination/resistance) to the interests of successive masters of this 
world, as well as to those of the wretched of the earth, that the phantasm of 
such an effective, manageable, and transmissible knowledge could not fail 
historically to use any means to make itself materialize. 
The promise of a royal science as conceptually rigorous as mathemat-
ics, as concretely effective as material technologies, as omnipresent as phi-
losophy and politics - how could humanity resist such a godsend? (Pecheux 
1988: 640) 
As Jacques Lacan has put it, through this fantasy modern society returns 
to a state of myth: 'How is one to return, if not on the basis of a peculiar 
(special) discourse, to a prediscursive reality? That is the dream - the dream 
behind every conception (idea) of knowledge. But it is also what must be 
considered mythical. There's no such thing as a prediscursive reality. Every 
reality is founded and defined by a discourse' (Lacan 1998: 32). 
The legitimacy of modernity 
Given this whole context, modernity is revealed as a deeply ambiguous 
project. This ambiguity of modernity is directly related to the question of 
the so-called legitimacy of modernity. Our reference to the concept of re-
occupation in the previous section of this text could serve as an introduc-
tion to this problematic. The basic issue here is reflected in the following 
question, 'Is modernity enough modern?' K. Lowith, in his seminal Mean-
ing in History, written in 1949, presents an argument according to which 
modernity and the modern conception of history have inherited many of 
their features from Christian eschatology. For Lowith, for example, the 
modern conception of time and temporality is clearly Christian: 'even the 
articulation of all historical time into past, present and future reflects the 
temporal structure of the history of salvation. It is only because of our habit 
of thinking in terms of the Christian tradition that the formal division of all 
historical time into past, present and future times seems so entirely natural 
and self-evident' (Lowith 1949: 185). Besides this conception of temporali-
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Beyond the Certainty Principle: Toiuards a Political Reading... 
ty, the whole concept ion of history, the revelatory character of modern his-
torical and emancipatory narratives, the ultimate goal of a reconciled soci-
ety and the idea of progress itself are derived from Christian eschatology. 
One could cont inue this line of argumentation ad infinitum. In fact isn't the 
scholastic Veritas est adequatio rei et intellectus the first symptom of modern 
representationalism and of the modern claim for a total representability of 
the world? (Yannaras 1988:129). The modern world is in fact irreligious, but 
on the o ther hand , depends on Christianity f rom which it is emancipated 
(Lowith 1949: 201). However, one must not think that modernity is just a 
mere consequence of Christianity. The secularization thesis elaborated by 
Lowith does not imply that. What Lowith argues is that modern historical 
consciousness is Christian by derivation and not by consequence. 
At the seventh German philosophy congress in 1962, Hans Blumem-
berg criticized Lowith's secularization category. Furthermore, in his book 
The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, he elaborated a new theory on how Christi-
anity influenced the emergence of modernity (Blumenberg 1986). Trying 
to prove unintelligible the secularization thesis, he argues that the continu-
ity characterizing Christianity and modernity is not a continuity of solutions, 
but a continuity of problems or questions. We are not faced with the trans-
formation of something that was originally Christian but with a reoccupation, 
a process that is present in every historical age. In our case a reoccupation 
occurs when modern historical forms are led to answer questions belong-
ing to a pre-modern period instead of abandoning them altogether. The 
English translator of Blumemberg's book argues in relation to this particu-
lar point: 
Christianity, he (Blumenberg) says, through its claim to be able to ac-
count for the overall pattern of world history in terms of the poles of crea-
tion and eschatology, had put in place a new question, one that had been 
(as Lowith so forcefully insists) unknown to the Greeks: the question of the 
meaning and pat tern of world history as a whole. When modern thinkers 
abandoned the Christian »answers« they still felt an obligation to answer the 
questions that went with them - to show that modern thought was equal to 
any challenge, as it were. It was this compulsion to »reoccupy« the »position« 
of the medieval Christian schema of creation and eschatology - rather than 
leave it empty, as a rationality that was aware of its own limits might have done 
- that led to the grandiose construct ions of the philosophy of history. 
(Blumemberg 1986: xx-xxi) 
As Ernesto Laclau has pointed out, modernity should be viewed as a 
result of the conflation of the notions of reason - an Ancient Greek con-
cept - and the Christian not ion of an eschatological representation of the 
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Yannis Stavrakakis 
totality of the real (Laclau 1991: 56). Thus history and society are referred 
to a single ground of human rationality. This strategy however is not unprob-
lematic. The problem is that modernity denotes a demand 'for external 
guarantee [a 'reoccupation' of a Christian ground for Blumenberg or a 're-
appropriation' in Vattimo's vocabulary] inside a culture that has erased the 
ontological preconditions for them' (Connolly 1988:11). As ment ioned 
above, the result of this play can only be an irreducible tension. 
The political ontology of social construction 
Today that these modern reoccupations are being slowly dislocated, 
certainty is reduced to a human construction. The main point here is the 
following: if, in the past, it was thought possible to acquire an objective rep-
resentation or symbolization of reality, even of the deep essence of things, 
constructionism argues that the failure of all these attempts, of all these 
reoccupations, the historical and social relativity of human representations 
of reality, show that this reality is always the result of a process of social con-
struction. What we accept as (objective) reality is nothing but a social con-
struction with limited duration. Reality is always constructed at the level of 
meaning and discourse. Lacan, for example, although he is not the paradig-
matic case of a constructionist theorist, suggests that social reality is not a 
stable referent, a depository of identity, but a semblance created by the play 
of symbolization and fantasmatic coherence. Reality is lacking and, at the 
same time, attempting to hide this lack through the symbolic and imaginary 
means at its disposal - this is, in fact, the aim of all modern reoccupations. 
Although Lacan is not a traditional constructionist - and we will see why 
in a minute - his argument includes certain constructionist assumptions. For 
Lacan, reality is always discursively constructed. In his unpublished seminar 
on the Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis, he points out that any reference to 
reality, to reality as an objective whole, should generate a certain mistrust 
(seminar of 24 February 1965); elsewhere he refers to the myth of reality. 
And, in Encore, he concludes: 'There isn't the slightest prediscursive reality, 
for the very fine reason that what constitutes a collectivity-what I called men, 
women, and children - means nothing qua prediscursive reality. Men, wom-
en, and children are butsignifiers' (Lacan 1998: 33). Existence depends on 
linguistic representation; what cannot be articulated in language, strictly 
speaking, does not exist. In short, reality 'is upheld, woven through, consti-
tuted, by a tress of signifiers'; reality, in other words, 'implies the subject's 
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Beyond the Certainty Principle: Toiuards a Political Reading... 
integration into a particular play of signifiers' (Lacan 1993: 249). It is the 
signifier that produces reality: 
Day and night, man and woman, peace and war - I could enumerate 
more oppositions that don't emerge out of the real world but give it its frame-
work, its axes, its structure, that organize it, that bring it about that there is 
in effect a reality for man, and that he can find his bearings therein. The 
notion of reality that we bring to bear in analysis presupposes this web, this 
mesh of signifiers. (Lacan 1993: 199) 
Furthermore, this whole symbolic production of reality is always sup-
ported by a whole fantasy construction. The construction of reality, the illu-
sion of the world as a well-structured whole, would not be possible without 
the intervention of this element of fantasy. In Lacan's view, 'everything we 
are allowed to approach by way of reality remains rooted in fantasy' (Lacan 
1998: 95). As Jacques-Alain Miller has put it with a touch of exaggeration, 
'reality is fantasy' (Miller 1995: 12). 
Lacan's position, however, cannot be reduced to the standard argumen-
tation of social constructionism. While standard constructionism remains 
trapped within the level of construction - since it does not take into account 
anything beyond this level - Lacan, on the contrary, centers the last part of 
his teaching around the concept of the real, of what is impossible to con-
struct, of what escapes representation at the imaginary and the symbolic 
level. From a Lacanian point of view construction can make sense only 
against a background of real impossibility. 
The field of social construction is the field in which the symbolization 
of this real is attempted. Chaitin is correct when asserting that 'symboliza-
tion has the creative power to produce cultural identities, but at a price, the 
cost of covering over the fundamental nothingness that forms its founda-
tion ... it is culture, not nature, that abhors a vacuum, above all that of its 
own contingency' (Chaitin 1996: 4-5), of its ultimate inability to master the 
real, of the irreducible impossibility of symbolizing this real: 'there is a struc-
tural lack in the symbolic, which means that certain points of the real can't 
be symbolized in a definite manner. ... the unmitigated real provokes anxi-
ety, and this in turn gives rise to never-ending, defensive, imaginary con-
structs' (Verhaeghe 1994: 60). Simply put, 'all human productions ['Socie-
ty itself, culture, religion, science'] ... can be understood in the light of that 
structural failure of the symbolic in relationship to the real' (Verhaeghe 1994: 
61). 
What is most important, however, is that the problematic of the real 
introduces a certain political element to our discussion. When the exclud-
ed real resurfaces within the field of our constructions these constructions 
185 
Yannis Stavrakakis 
can enter into a period of crisis revealing their ultimate political ground-
ing; what is realized is that they were not privileged representations of the 
real but sedimented forms of a political institution. Every dislocation, every 
encounter with the real, signals the resurfacing of the political since dislo-
cation can only be (partially) symbolized through a decision taken within 
the context of a hegemonic play. As soon as this decision is taken, as soon 
as we have a new (temporary) symbolization which hegemonizes the social, 
the political is again forgotten. In other words, social construction, the im-
aginary and symbolic sedimentation of the social, presupposes a certain 
repression of the constitutivity of the political. It entails an impossible at-
tempt to erase the political ontology of the social. When we limit our scope 
within socially constructed reality we are attempting a certain domestication/ 
spatialization of the political, we move our attention from the political per 
se (as the moment of the disruption and the undecidability governing the 
reconstruction of social objectivity and certainty) to the social (as the locus 
of this construction itself, of the sedimented forms of objectivity and certain-
ty) (Laclau 1990: 35). This sedimentation of social reality requires a forget-
ting of origins, of the contingent force of dislocation which stands at its foun-
dation; it requires the symbolic and fantasmatic reduction of the political 
as an encounter with the real. Let me further illustrate this point in relation 
to the particular status of modernity by returning to the Cartesian argument. 
Descartes and the political 
As I have pointed out earlier, it is doubt that, in Descartes' conception, 
functions as the point of departure in order to reach absolute and certain 
knowledge. In doubt Descartes founds the absolute certainty of existence. 
Let me briefly demonstrate how this certainty is produced. The first point 
of his argument is the affirmation of the uncertainty of the world. For Des-
cartes supposes that our sense and our memory, in fact our own mind or a 
superficial deceiver are indeed deceiving us. 'What then shall be considered 
true? Perhaps only this, that there is nothing certain in the world' (Descartes 
1968: 102). However, he does not stop here, as the sceptics and Montaigne 
did earlier (Sutclife in Descartes 1968: 18). He is going to transform this 
problem into the only basis for his argument. We know, by now, that we can 
doubt everything. But then we have to accept that we cannot doubt the fact 
that we can doubt. Thus, we now positively know that we can doubt. As a 
result, if doubt is an intellectual function, an act of thought, then we know 
positively that we are thinking. However, in order to be able to think, one 
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Beyond the Certainty Principle: Toiuards a Political Reading... 
has first to exist. Hence, if I think therefore I am, I exist: 'I am, I exist, is 
necessarily true, every time I express it or conceive it in my mind' (Descartes 
1968: 103). 
In Descartes' argument we can easily distinguish two distinct moments: 
the moment of doubt and that of certainty. These two moments do not ex-
ist separately as the supposedly dual nature of the human world. On the 
contrary, the first moment , that of doubt and uncertainty, is affirmed only 
to be used as a foundation in order to elaborate its own negation, that is to 
say, absolute truth, objectivity and transparency; in order to found certain-
ty. In this sense, the moment of doubt is considered as an object of thought 
only to be forgotten later, eliminated as it is by its own consequence. What 
is of prime interest here is that this mastery of the uncertainty of our world 
by absolute truth (individual thought) is not merely a matter of academic 
philosophical interest. I shall try to show that it is rather a political issue and 
thus I will try to articulate a certain political reading of Descartes which is 
directly relevant for our discussion up to now. 
In fact, Descartes himself admits that his problem is not doubt itself. 
The problem is that we have to make decisions without being certain of their 
outcome and success - which links the Cartesian argument to the problem-
atic developed in the opening statements of this text. In other words, there 
is a gap between 'the power' we 'have of knowing things' and the power of 
choice, or free will, that is to say between our 'understanding' and our 'will' 
(Descartes 1968:135). Man is free and freedom means that it is possible for 
him to misjudge, to make mistakes; it means that he is exposed to certain 
deficiencies. Descartes cannot stand this open, contingent, undecidable, 
deeply uncertain and political character of human action. He wants to elim-
inate it. He attempts to master the political (as an encounter with the real, 
as opening a non-algorithmic field of decision) by basing decision on a cer-
tain, undoubtful, absolute knowledge (although this move empties decision 
from every possible meaning in terms of human will). For Descartes, human 
will is more extensive than human understanding, but in order not to mis-
use free will, the knowledge of understanding must always precede the de-
termination of the will (Descartes 1968:139). This royal knowledge of un-
derstanding is now possible due to his own argument: 'I have not only learnt 
today what I must avoid in order to escape error, but also what I must do in 
order to arrive at knowledge of the truth' (Descartes 1968:141). 
To sum up, what is revealed in our reading of Descartes is the strategy 
through which scepticism - a reaction to the first signs of the 'Death of God' 
and the dislocation of traditional systems of meaning - gives its place to 
certainty; to the creation of a new foundation through rational methods. This 
187 
Yannis Stavrakakis 
is what one could call the ideotypical modern strategy of reoccupation. Here 
the traces of the contingency of the emerging certainty are always blurred. 
The modern drama, however, is that these traces are persistently re-emerg-
ing, leading modernity to various crises and to a fur ther proliferation of 
defensive rationalist strategies up to Habermasian rationalism. This is evi-
dent even in Descartes' own writings. Ironically the tragical and ambiguous 
nature of our brave new world, the constitutive lack around which it is al-
ways structured, is depicted in the last sentence of Descartes' Meditations 
where the most grandiose attempt towards total certainty seems to refute and 
contradict itself, in the following way: 
But because the necessities of action often oblige us to make a decision 
before we have had the leisure to examine things so carefully, it must be 
admitted that the life of man is very often subject to error, in particular cas-
es; and we must, in conclusion, recognize the infirmity and weakness of our 
nature. (Descartes 1968: 168-169) 
This is the place from which a political deconstruction of the Cartesian 
argument could start, the place where the political dislocates certainty and 
construction is revealed as the limit of human knowledge. 
Creating a political modernity 
It seems that today we are moving closer to this last Cartesian statement 
than to the modern reoccupations of pre-modern certainties. Today's soci-
eties are faced with the return of uncertainty, with the resurfacing of the 
inability to master the real (Beck 1996a: 84). We are forced, so to speak, to 
acknowledge the ambiguity of our experience and to approach self-critical-
ly our abilities vis a vis controlling the real (Beck 1996a: 88). From a past 
characterized by the quest for scientific, ethical and social certainties we turn 
to a present where the possibility of reaching certainty itself is questioned. 
We might be witnessing the end of a type of rationality which is now proven 
untenable for our societies (Gulbenkian commission 1998: 61), the end of 
reoccupation in our vocabulary. 
This creates the chance to return to the founding moment of moder-
nity or to reconstruct it anew. Such a move entails recognizing the irreduc-
ible character of impossibility, the constitutivity of the real as expressed pri-
marily in the failure of our discursive world and its continuous rearticula-
tion through acts of identification (this is the form decision takes). It pre-
supposes a reorientation of science and knowledge. Recognizing the con-
stitutivity of the real does not mean that we stop symbolizing; it means that 
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Beyond the Certainty Principle: Toiuards a Political Reading... 
we start trying to incorporate this recognition within the symbolic itself, in 
fact it means that since the symbolic entails lack as such we abstain from 
covering it over with fantasmatic constructs. The guiding principle in this 
kind of approach is to move beyond the fantasy of certainty towards a self-
critical symbolic gesture acknowledging the contingent and transient char-
acter of every symbolic construct, acknowledging the political ontology of 
the social. 
This can be the basis for a scientific discourse different from the rei-
fied science of standard modernity. In his text 'Science and Truth' (it is the 
opening lecture of his 1965-66 seminar on The Object of Psychoanalysis) Jacques 
Lacan stages a critique of modern science as it has been articulated up to 
now, that is to say as a discourse that identifies the knowledge it produces 
with the truth of the real. If the constitutive, non-reducible character of the 
real introduces a lack into human reality, to our scientific constructions of 
reality for example, science usually attempts to suture and eliminate this gap. 
Lacan, for his part, stresses the importance of that which puts in danger this 
self-fulfilling nature of scientific axioms: the importance of the real, of the 
element which is not developing according to what we think about it. In that 
sense, Lacan's science entails the recognition of the structural causality of 
the real as the element which interrupts the smooth flow of our fantasmat-
ic and symbolic representations of reality. Within such a context, this real, 
the obstacle encountered by standard science, is not bypassed discretely but 
introduced within the theory which it can destabilize. Truth, as the encounter 
with the real, is 'encountered ' face to face (Fink 1995: 140-141). It is in this 
sense that psychoanalysis can be described as a science of the impossible, a 
science that does not foreclose or repress the impossible real. For Lacan, 
what is involved in the structuration of the discourse of science is a certain 
Verwerfungof the Thing which is presupposed by the ideal of absolute knowl-
edge, an ideal which 'as everybody knows ... was historically proved in the 
end to be a failure' (Lacan 1992: 131). In other words, we cannot be cer-
tain that definite knowledge is attainable. In fact, for Lacan, certainty is not 
something we should attribute to our knowledge of things. Certainty is a 
defining characteristic of psychosis. For Lacan, it constitutes its elementary 
phenomenon, the basis of delusional belief (Lacan 1993: 75). 
Given this context, opening up our symbolic resources to uncertainty 
seems to be the only prudent move we have left. What we can know has to 
be expressed within the structure of language but this structure has to in-
corporate a recognition of its own limits. This is not a development which 
should cause unease; as Nancy has put it 'W^hat will become of our world is 
something we cannot know, and we can no longer believe in being able to 
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Yannis Stavrakakis 
predict or command it. But we can act in such a way that this world is a world 
able to open itself up to its own uncertainly as such ... Invention is always 
without a model and without warranty. But indeed that implies facing up to 
turmoil, anxiety, even disarray. Where certainties come apart, there too 
gathers the strength that no certainty can match' (Nancy in Lacoue-Labar-
the and Nancy 1997: 157-158). 
These brief remarks on science and knowledge initiate a whole new 
understanding and structuration of the social. What could be some of the 
parameters of this new organization of the social in our late modern terrain? 
Beck's theory seems to be relevant in this respect. According to our reading 
of Beck's schema, contemporary societies are faced with the re turn of 
uncertainty, a return of the repressed without doubt, and the increasing 
inability of mastering the totality of the real. We are forced thus to recognize 
the ambiguity of our experience and to articulate a self-critical position 
towards our ability to master the real. It is now revealed that al though 
repressing doubt and uncertainty can provide temporary safety of meaning, 
it is nevertheless a dangerous strategy, a strategy that d e p e n d s on a 
fantasmatic illusion. This realization, contrary to any nihilistic reaction, can 
become the starting point for a new form of society which is emerging 
around us, together of course with the reactionary attempts to reinstate an 
aging moderni ty : 'Perhaps the dec l ine of the lodes tars of p r imary 
Enlightenment, the individual, identity, truth, reality, science, technology, 
and so on, is the prerequisite for the start of an alternative Enlightenment, 
one which does not fear doubt, but instead makes it the element of its life 
and survival' (Beck 1997a: 161). Beck argues that such an openness towards 
doubt can be learnt from Socrates, Montaigne, and others; it might be 
possible to add Lacan to this list. 
Within this context, doubt, which threatens our false-certainties, can 
become the nodal point for another modernity that will respect the right 
to err: scepticism 'contrary to a widespread error, makes everything possible 
again: questions and dialogue of course, as well as faith, science, knowledge, 
criticism, morality, society, only differently ... things unsuspected and 
incongruous, with the tolerance based and rooted in the ultimate certainty 
of error' (Beck 1997a: 163). Doubts liberate; they make things possible. First 
of all the possibility of a new vision for society. An anti-utopian vision founded 
on the principle 'Dubio ergo sum' (Beck 1997a: 162) more close to the 
subversive doubtfulness of Montaigne than to the deceptive scepticism of 
Descartes. Although Lacan thought that in Montaigne scepticism had not 
acquired the form of an ethic, he nevertheless pointed out that 'Montaigne 
is truly the one who has centered himself, not around scepticism but around 
190 
Beyond the Certainty Principle: Toiuards a Political Reading... 
the living moment of the aphanisis of the subject. And it is in this that he is 
fruitful, that he is an eternal guide, who goes beyond whatever may be 
represented of the moment to be defined as a historical turning-point' 
(Lacan 1998: 223-4). 
This is a standpoint which is both critical and self-critical: there is no 
foundation 'of such a scope and elasticity for a critical theory of society (which 
would then automatically be a self-critical) as doubt' (Beck 1996:173). Doubt, 
the invigorating champagne of thinking, points to a new modernity 'more 
modern than the old, industrial modernity that we know, The latter after all, 
is based on certainty, on repelling and suppressing doubt' (Beck 1997a: 173). 
Beck asks us to fight for 'a modernity which is beginning to doubt itself, which, 
if things go well, will make doubt the measure and architect of its self-limita-
tion and self-modification' (Beck 1997a: 163). He asks us, to use Celan's phrase 
to 'build on inconsistencies'. This will be a modernity instituting a new poli-
tics, a politics recognizing the uncertainty of the moment of the political. It 
will be a modernity recognizing the constitutivity of the real in the social. A 
truly political modernity (Beck 1997a: 5). 
In fact, the elimination of uncertainty from our life on top of being 
impossible, is also undesirable. Only when there is uncertainty there is room 
for responsibility and ethics. Without uncertainty, in a totally certain world, 
humans would be reduced to predetermined automata. A world without 
uncertainty would be a world without freedom. Thus we are led again to the 
political dimension of our discussion. Uncertainty is not only an ethical but 
also a deeply political issue. The only thing that still remains certain is that 
we will continue to take decisions within an undecidable terrain, within a 
terrain of uncertainty; no support for these decisions can be found in con-
structing fantasmatic symbolizations/reoccupations of certainty. Once this 
is granted what is also opened is the question of the legitimization of these 
decisions. The fact that they can no longer be legitimized by recourse to an 
illusory certainty guaranteed by a supposed direct access to the real offers 
the opportunity to enhance the potential of modern democracy. The trust 
in the decision making process can only depend on the open character of 
this process. 
This is then our closing statement: the revelation of the constructed 
character of every certainty, the recognition of the constitutive character of 
uncertainty in human experience, makes necessary the open political ad-
ministration of this uncertainty, an administration through democratic pro-
cedures. What is thus emerging is the profile of a society which discusses the 
consequences of its decisions before these are taken by someone else (an 
'omnipotent ' scientist, technocrat or politician). In this form of civil socie-
191 
Yannis Stavrakakis 
ty decisions which were previously taken behind closed doors, through sup-
posedly de-politicized 'objective' procedures, are politicized again (Grove-
White 1997: 119). Since none can master a certainly permitting him to de-
cide in a totally safe way on our behalf, it becomes more prudent to decide 
democratically. Although this way it seems as if are assuming a higher risk, 
this is only an illusion: the risk is not different. The only difference is that it 
is assumed by all of us instead of being administered by 'someone else' (a 
supposedly full Other): we are all called to accept the responsibility for the 
political nature of human culture. In that sense, recognizing uncertainty 
becomes one of the most important democratic challenges of our age, a 
difficult task but a task that has to be assumed urgently. 
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