The article is an attempt to rethink the relationship between chance and necessity in the work of Stanisław Lem. The author of the article uses both the expository and lit- erary philosophy of the writer himself as well as Lacanian psychoanalysis (especially the topological view of the unconsciousness of desire) and Michel Foucault’s archeol- ogy of knowledge (especially the problem of the limits of representation and analogy as an alternative to dialectics). The two main theses of the article are: 1. classical philosophy (Kant, Hegel) provides Lem with such fundamental categories as critical imagination or abolition of genesis, and is treated as parallel (not secondary or supple- mentary) to biotechnological theory; 2. the writer approaches the problem of Other- ness from the anti-dualist perspective.