[pp 1-2]
One of the most deplorable aspects of the postmodern era and its so-called 'thought' is the return of the religious dimension in all its different guises: from Christian and other fundamentalisms, through the multitude of New Age spiritualisms, up to the emerging religious sensitivity within deconstructionism itself (so-called 'postsecular' thought). How is a Marxist, by definition a 'Fighting materialist' (Lenin), to counter this massive onslaught of obscurantism? The obvious answer seems to be not only ferociously to attack these tendencies, but mercilessly to denounce the remainders of the religious legacy within Marxism itself.
Against the old liberal slander which draws on the parallel between the Christian and Marxist 'Messianic' notion of history as the process of the final deliverance of the faithful (the notorious 'Communist-parties-are-secularized-religious-sects' theme), should one not emphasize how this holds only for ossified 'dogmatic' Marxism, not for its authentic liberating kernel? Following Alain Badiou's path-breaking book on Saint Paul, our premiss here is exactly the opposite one: instead of adopting such a defensive stance, allowing the enemy to define the terrain of the struggle, what one should do is to reverse the strategy by fully endorsing what one is accused of. yes, there i's a direct lineage from Christianity to Marxism; yes, Christianity and Marxism should fight on the same side of the barricade against the onslaught of new spiritualisms - the authentic Christian legacy is much too precious to be left to the fundamentalist freaks.
Even those who acknowledge this direct lineage from Christianity to Marxism, however, usually fetishize the early I authentic' followers of Christ against the Church's 'Institutionalization' epitomized by the name of Saint Paul: yes to Christ's I'original authentic messageI , no to its transformation into the body of teaching that legitimizes the Church as a social institution. What these followers of the maxim 'yes to Christ, no to Saint Paul' (who, as Nietzsche claimed, in effect invented Christianity) do is strictly parallel to the stance of those 'humanist Marxists' from the mid-twentieth century whose maxim was 'Yes to the early authentic Marx, no to his Leninist ossification'. And in both cases, one should insist that such a 'defence of the authentic' is the most perfidious mode of its betrayal: there is no Christ outside Saint Paul; in exactly the same way, there is no 'authentic Marx' that can be approached directly, bypassing Lenin.
[pp 16-21]
Does this mean, then, that the Marxist 'critique of political economy provides an adequate account of the process of capitalist globalization? More precisely: how do we stand today with regard to the opposition between the standard Marxist analysis of capitalism as a concrete social formation, and those attempts - from Heidegger's to Adorno and Horkheimer's -which view the crazy capitalist dance as self-enhancing productivity as the expression of a more fundamental transcendental-ontological principle ('will to power', 'instrumental reason') discernible also in Communist attempts to overcome capitalism, so that - as Heidegger put it - Americanism and Communism are metaphysically the same? From the standard Marxist standpoint, the search for some transcendental-ontological principle obscures the concrete socioeconomic structure that sustains capitalist productivity; while for the opposite side, the standard Marxist approach does not see how the capitalist excess cannot be accounted for on the ontic level of a particular societal organization.
One is tempted to claim here that, in a way, both sides are wrong. Precisely as Marxists, in the interests of our fidelity to Marx's work, we should identify Marx's mistake: he perceived how capitalism unleashed the breathtaking dynamics of self-enhancing productivity see his fascinated descriptions of how, in capitalism, 'all things solid melt into thin air', of how capitalism is the greatest revolutionizer in the entire history of humanity; on the other hand, he also clearly perceived how this capitalist dynamics is propelled by its own inner obstacle or antagonism - the ultimate limit of capitalism (of self-propelling capitalist productivity) is Capital itself, that is, the incessant development and revolutionizing of capitalism's own material conditions, the mad dance of its unconditional spiral of productivity, is ultimately nothing but a desperate forward flight to escape its own debilitating inherent contradiction....
Marx's fundamental mistake was to conclude, from these insights, that a new, higher social order (Communism) is possible, an order that would not only maintain but even raise to a higher degree, and effectively fully release, the potential of the self-increasing spiral of productivity which in capitalism, on account of its inherent obstacle/contradiction, is thwarted again and again by socially destructive economic crises. In short, what Marx overlooked is that to put it in the standard Derridean terms - this inherent obstacle/antagonism as the 'condition of impossibility' of the full deployment of productive forces is simultaneously its 'condition of possibility': if we abolish the obstacle, the inherent contradiction of capitalism, we do not get the fully unleashed drive to productivity finally delivered of its impediment, we lose precisely this productivity that seemed to be generated and simultaneously thwarted by capitalism - if we take away the obstacle, the very potential thwarted by this obstacle dissipates . . . (here we could envisage a possible Lacanian critique of Marx, focusing on the ambiguous overlapping between surplus-value and surplus-enjoyment). So, in a way, the critics of Communism were right when they claimed that Marxian Communism is an impossible fantasy - what they did not perceive is that Marxian Communism, this notion of a society of pure unleashed productivity outside the frame of Capital, was a fantasy inherent to capitalism itself, the capitalist inherent transgression at its purest, a strictly ideological fantasy of maintaining the thrust towards productivity generated by capitalism, while getting rid of the 'obstacles' and antagonisms that were - as the sad experience of 'actually existing capitalism' demonstrates - the only possible framework of the actual material existence of a society of permanent self-enhancing productivity.
We can also see, now, why the above-mentioned procedure of supplanting Marxist analysis with reference to some transcendenta-lontological foundation (the usual way Western Marxists try to respond to the crisis of Marxism) is deficient: what we need today is not the passage from the 'critique of political economy to the transcendental-ontological 'critique of instrumental reason', but a return to the 'critique of political economy' that would reveal how the standard Communist project was utopian precisely in so far as it was not radical enough - in so far as, in it, the fundamental capitalist thrust of unleashed productivity survived, deprived of its concrete contradictory conditions of existence. The insufficiency of Heidegger, Adorno and Horkheimer, and so on, lies in their abandonment of the concrete social analysis of capitalism: in their very critique or overcoming of Marx, they in a way repeat Marx's mistake - like Marx, they perceive unbridled productivity as something that is ultimately i.ndependent of the concrete capitalist social formation. Capitalism and Communism are not two different historical realizations, two species, of 'instrumental reason'- instrumental reason as such is capitalist, grounded in capitalist relations; and 'actually existing Socialism' failed because it was ultimately a subspecies of capitalism, an ideological attempt to 'have one's cake and eat it' to break out of capitalism while retaining its key ingredient.
Our answer to the standard philosophical criticism of Marx (his description of the dynamics of capitalism should be rejected, since it is meaningful only against the background of the notion of Communism as the self-transparent society in which the production process 'Is directly subordinated to the 'general intellect' of collective planning) is thus that while one accepts the kernel of this argument, one has simply to take a reflexive step back and perceive how Marx's notion of Communist society is itself the inherent capitalist fantasy a fantasmatic scenario for resolving the capitalist antagonism he so aptly described. In other words, our premiss is that even if we remove the teleological notion of Communism (the society of completely unbridled productivity) as the implicit standard by which Marx, as it were, measures the alienation of existing society, the bulk of his 'critique of political economy', his insight into the self-propelling vicious cycle of capitalist (re)production, survives. The task of today's thought is thus double: on the one hand, how to repeat the Marxist 'critique of political economy' without the utopian-ideological notion of Communism as its inherent standard; on the other, how to imagine actually breaking out of the capitalist horizon without falling into the trap of returning to the eminently premodern notion of a balanced, (self-)restrained society (the 'pre- Cartesian' temptation to which most of today's ecology succumbs).
So where, precisely, did Marx go wrong with regard to surplus-value? One is tempted to search for an answer in the key Lacanian distinction between the object of desire and surplusenjoyment as its cause, Henry Krips evokes the lovely example of the chaperone in seduction: the chaperone is an ugly elderly lady who is officially the obstacle to the direct goal-object (the woman the suitor is courting); but precisely as such, she is the key intermediary moment that effectively makes the beloved woman desirable - without her, the whole economy of seduction would collapse. Or, take another example from a different level: the lock of curly blonde hair, that fatal detail of Madeleine in Hitchcock's Vertigo. When, in the love scene in the barn towards the end of the Film, Scottie passionately embraces Judy refashioned into the dead Madeleine, during their famous 360-degree kiss, he stops kissing her and withdraws just long enough to steal a look at her newly blonde hair, as if to reassure himself that the particular feature which transforms her into the object of desire is still there.... Crucial here is the opposition between the vortex that threatens to engulf Scottie (the 'vertigo' of the film's title, the deadly Thing) and the blonde curl that imitates the vertigo of the Thing, but in a miniaturized, gentrified form.
This curl is the objet petit a which condenses the impossible-deadly Thing, serving as its stand-in and thus enabling us to entertain a livable relationship with it, without being swallowed up by it. As Jewish children put it when they play gently aggressive games: 'Please, bite me, but not too hard . . .' This is the difference between 'normal' sexual repression and fetishism: in 'normal' sexuality, we think that the detail-feature that serves as the cause of desire is just a secondary obstacle that prevents our direct access to the Thing - that is, we overlook its key role; while in fetishism we simply make the cause of desire directly into our object of desire: a fetishist in Vertigo would not care about Madeleine, but simply focus his desire directly on the lock of hair; a fetishist suitor would engage directly with the chaperone and forget about the lady herself, the official goal of his endeavours.
So there is always a gap between the object of desire itself and its cause, the mediating feature or element that makes this object desirable. What happens in melancholy is that we get the object of desire deprived of its cause. For the melancholic, the object is there, but what is missing is the specific intermediary feature that makes it desirable. For that reason, there is always at least a trace of melancholy in every true love: in love, the object is not deprived of its cause; it is, rather, that the very distance between object and cause collapses. This, precisely, is what distinguishes love from desire: in desire, as we have just seen, cause is distinct from object; while in love, the two inexplicably coincide - I magically love the beloved one for itself, finding in it the very point from which I find it worthy of love. And - back to Marx - what if his mistake was also to assume that the object of desire (unconstrained expanding productivity) would remain even when it was deprived of the cause that propels it (surplus-value)?