2 October 2008

In his recent piece for the Spectator (via Faith & Theology), Rowan Williams traces the current financial crisis back to capitalism’s tendency to make “pseudo-things” out of notional gains or out of financial risk, and to reify “the Market” itself. But against Williams’s attempt to call us back to “the specific, goal-related transactions of borrowing and lending,” Zizek insists that such a reification is absolutely necessary to a proper understanding of those specific transactions. Consider the following from Zizek’s Violence:

“The notion of objective violence needs to be thoroughly historicised: it took on a new shape with capitalism. Marx described the mad, self-enhancing circulation of capital, whose solipsistic path of parthenogenesis reaches its apogee in today’s meta-reflexive speculations on futures. It is far too simplistic to claim [as Williams occasionally seems to] that the spectre of this self-engendering monster that pursues its path disregarding any human or environmental concern is an ideological abstraction and that behind this abstraction there are real people and natural objects on whose productive capacities and resources capital’s circulation is based and on which it feeds like a gigantic parasite. The problem is that this ‘abstraction’ is not only in our financial speculators’ misperception of social reality, but that it is ‘real’ in the precise sense of determining the structure of the material social processes…. Marx’s point is not primarily to reduce this second dimension to the first one, that is, to demonstrate how the theological [?] mad dance of commodities arises out of the antagonisms of ‘real life.’ Rather this point is that one cannot properly grasp the first (the social reality of material production and social interaction) without the second: it is the self-propelling metaphysical dance of capital that runs the show, that provides the key to real-life developments and catastrophes. Therein resides the fundamental systematic violence of capitalism…”

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Tags: Economics,Rowan Williams,Slavoj Zizek