Modalities of a rupturing experience: applying Žižek’s topological reading of the Lacanian real to COVID-19

COVID-19 can be viewed as a societal rupture, a phenomenon that caused widespread disorientation. Studies applying Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis to social sciences have shown this by arguing that COVID-19 was an ‘encounter with the real,’ representing a disordered upheaval that questions social norms and cultural customs, as the real is a register of impossibility that reveals a void or gap in the socio-symbolic structure. What remains unaddressed in these studies is the topological nature of the Lacanian real and how it is embedded in every register of psychic experience, which Lacanian theory classifies as the imaginary, symbolic, and real. Slavoj Žižek has highlighted this by constructing ‘knots’ of ‘imaginary-real,’ ‘symbolic-real,’ and ‘real-real.’ In this paper, I will use these knots to analyse the experience of COVID-19 as a societal rupture.