Žižek with Marx: Outside in the Critique of Political Economy

This chapter elucidates in particular what is at stake in Marx within Žižek’s work, by focusing above all on the theoretical complexity of the relation between the form of capital and the form of the subject. The specific wager made by Žižek is that the insight of Marx simultaneously provides us a theoretical physics through which we see how the Cartesian subject, in order to emerge as the subject of the enunciation, must be reduced to “a disposable piece of shit” in the form of the subject of the enunciated. The chapter’s thesis is that this split of the subject is also an intervention in the critique of political economy: that Žižek’s work, rather than merely appealing to a certain Marxist politics to supplement the psychoanalytic field on the level of the social, enacts or performs an intervention into the question of the splitting of capital as a social relation.