Historical Materialism (2019) 1–18

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Last Philosophy: the Metaphysics of Capital from

Sohn-Rethel to Žižek

Alberto Toscano
Goldsmiths, University of London
a.toscano@gold.ac.uk

Abstract

Beginning with his engagement with Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s seminal treatment of ‘real
abstraction’, Intellectual and Manual Labour, Slavoj Žižek has repeatedly thematised
and excavated the proposition that capitalism is innervated by a kind of actually-
existing metaphysics, the scandal of an abstract form external to human cognition.
This essay investigates Žižek’s use and criticism of Sohn-Rethel and outlines some
of the developments and contradictions in his effort to confront capital’s challenge
to philosophy’s self-sufficiency. It problematizes Žižek’s tendency to elide a model
of abstraction as a hollowing-out or evacuation of social content (rooted in The
Communist Manifesto) with a much more promising conception of real abstraction as
its re-articulation or re-functioning, while querying Žižek’s recent efforts to transcend
the purported limitations of Marx’s conceptualisation of capital in the direction of a
(‘Lacanised’) Hegel.

Keywords

abstraction – capital – philosophy – Alfred Sohn-Rethel – Slavoj Žižek

The aftermath of the 2007–8 crisis stands as a massive process of disillusion-

ment for a critical left intelligentsia which thought that the palpable damage
wrought by financialised accumulation on the everyday lives of millions across
the world, combined with the possibility of truly ‘naming the system’, could
unleash an efficacious shift in our political imaginaries. Not only has ‘capital-
ist realism’ been reimposed with haste and brutality, through concerted elite
action (contrary to any cybernetic fantasy of a self-regulating system), but even

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efforts at a radical reformism have felt it necessary to euphemise capitalism,

not least by shifting structural contradictions onto the terrain of embodied
antagonisms (the corrupt, the caste, the 1%, and so on). This last remark is not
intended as a purist castigation of discursive realism (of the kind associated
in the Spanish context above all with Podemos), but an acknowledgment of
the strikingly constrained terms of contemporary thinking and action against
capitalism. On the one hand, we might say that, in this regressive, if not ter-
minal, phase, capitalism reaffirms its hegemony by material compulsions that
can largely bypass ideological inducements (see the ‘financial waterboarding’
of Greece after the Syriza victory). On the other, beneath episodic question-
ings of the viability of capitalism, we can discern that attachments to capital
relations go much deeper than we would often like to recognise, shaping our
desires intimately and collectively.1
Capital’s toxic resilience makes imposing demands on our theoretical
capacities. Indeed, it could be argued that critical theory as such is nothing if
not the systematic (if aporetic) attempt to confront the ways in which, when
it comes to capital, neither theoretical critique nor practical overcoming alone
suffice, unless they truly grasp the extent to which capital shapes our lives as a
kind of practically-existing metaphysics. The upshot of this realisation is that,
as Adorno suggested, what we require today is not a first philosophy, an
ontology that could ground our political practices, but a last philosophy – a
philosophy that truly confronts how our speculative activity is under condition
of capital.2
Though the work of Slavoj Žižek cannot, without remainder, be contained
within such a critical theory of capital, it is indisputable that the question of
capital’s philosophical status – and vice versa, the question of a philosophy
à hauteur du capital (to borrow a formulation from Alain Badiou) – has shad-
owed his writing from the start. This could not but be the case, one might
argue, given the centrality of ideology, and its contemporary redefinition, to
his project. Yet what deserves attention is the manner in which, from the very
start – which is to say, in his English-language incarnation, from the very first
pages of The Sublime Object of Ideology – Žižek has defined the problem of a
theory of ideology not simply in terms of the vitality of the Lacanian research
programme, but around a crucial tenet of a truly critical theory, namely the
(social, psychic, political) reality of the abstractions of capital. In what follows
I want to explore some of the figures taken by real abstraction in Žižek’s writ-
ings, teasing out some of the tensions in his attempts to articulate Kantian,

1  See Lordon 2010.

2  See Adorno 2013, p. 10.

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 Last Philosophy: the Metaphysics of Capital 3

Hegelian, Marxian and Lacanian conceptions of the operations of abstraction,

and reflecting on his contribution to the urgent if interminable task of think-
ing ourselves out of the current impasses of a critical thinking and a radical
political practice, for which the supremacy of capital over our everyday lives is
both banal and unintelligible.
The fact that ideology – in its socio-political and psychoanalytic dimensions –
is not to be grasped as a mere mystification or illusion, but as an operative real-
ity, an objective spirit, and that the psychic life and power of capital cannot be
cured away, is a conviction that, as I have mentioned, we can find already at
work in The Sublime Object of Ideology. It also determines, crucially, Žižek’s cri-
tique of the Althusserian paradigm (one which played a very significant role in
his intellectual milieu in Yugoslavia). Marx ‘invented the symptom’ precisely to
the extent that he did not treat abstraction as an intellectual operation, but as
something like a real illusion. On the contrary, the Althusserian understanding
of abstraction, in Žižek’s eyes, falls short of Marx’s true intellectual revolution –
one that cannot be treated as either epistemological or ontological, being
diagonal to traditional philosophical distinctions.
This is not to say that Žižek underestimates the brilliance of the Althusserian
turn – nor that we ourselves should.3 Notwithstanding his later Leninist rec-
tifications, much of Althusser’s work can be regarded as one of the boldest
attempts, starting from a Marxian framework, to produce a materialist theory
of thought. In Althusser’s acerbic terms, ‘The “concrete”, the “real”, these are
the names that the opposition to ideology bears in ideology. You can stay
indefinitely at the frontier line, ceaselessly repeating concrete! concrete! Real!
real! … Or, on the contrary, you can cross the frontier for good and penetrate
into the domain of reality and embark “seriously in its study,” as Marx puts
it in The German Ideology’.4 In the final analysis, something really happens
when abstraction takes place. Abstraction transforms (and the fact that what
it transforms is itself abstract does not make it any less real). Does Althusser do
justice to Marx’s theoretical revolution in the study of abstraction?
Revisiting a crucial text on real abstraction, Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s Intellectual
and Manual Labour,5 Žižek replies in the negative. Despite the affirmation of
the reality of theoretical practice as the production of concrete abstractions,
and notwithstanding the attempt to rescue a concept of the real from any em-
piricist deviation, Althusser, Žižek contends, cannot truly grasp the uniqueness

3  For a reflection on the thematisation of real abstraction in Althusser’s writings of the 1970s,
see Toscano 2015.
4  Althusser 1996, pp. 244–5.
5  Sohn-Rethel 1978.

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of Marx’s understanding of the relation between thought and capitalism.

That is why, although Althusser is able to think of a real that is also abstract
in the guise of theoretical practice, he cannot really accept the category of
‘real abstraction’.
Žižek will argue that Sohn-Rethel’s interpretation of Marx allows us to cap-
ture ‘the form of the thought previous and external to the thought’.6 What
might this mean within the context of Sohn-Rethel’s own account of real
abstraction? Sohn-Rethel sets off from a bold wager: to repeat, without suc-
cumbing to analogy or resemblance, Marx’s critique of political economy in
the field of thought; to engage, as the subtitle of his book specifies, in a Marxian
‘critique of epistemology’. The critique is founded on a basic discovery, which
Sohn-Rethel dates to 1921 and which was to be the object of numerous drafts,
under thankless conditions, up to (and following) publication of the first edi-
tion of Intellectual and Manual Labour: to wit, that there obtains an ‘identity
between the formal elements of the social synthesis and the formal compo-
nents of cognition’.7
The key to this identity lies in ‘formal analysis of the commodity’,8 which
is thereby able not only to unlock the (open) secrets of capital accumulation,
but to reveal their articulation with the division between manual and intel‑
lectual labour as well as the commodity’s centrality to any explanation of
abstract thinking. Sohn-Rethel thus undertakes a veritable expropriation
of abstract thought. We are not simply enjoined to move beyond the ideologi-
cal habits of empiricism and to consider the social and material reality of cog-
nition, or the solidarity between abstraction and capitalism. Sohn-Rethel is
arguing – against any claim for the scientific autonomy of theoretical practice –
that the fundamental forms of abstract thought (as manifest in the structure
of scientific laws, the postulations of mathematics, or the constitution of the
Kantian transcendental subject) all originate with the commodity-form and
its introduction, into the social universe, of the principles of abstract exchange
and calculability. In Žižek’s apt commentary, ‘Before thought could arrive at
pure abstraction, the abstraction was already at work in the social effectivity
of the market’.9
To the extent that Sohn-Rethel’s account serves as a kind of ‘primal scene’
for Žižek’s metaphysical conception of capitalism, we need to take a detour

6  Žižek 2008a, p. 14.

7  Sohn-Rethel 1978, p. 14.
8  Sohn-Rethel 1978, p. 33.
9  Žižek 2008a, p. 10.

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 Last Philosophy: the Metaphysics of Capital 5

through his work, to then return to how Žižek has elaborated capital’s real
abstraction in his philosophical works following The Sublime Object.
According to Sohn-Rethel, the ‘act of exchange has to be described as
abstract movement through abstract (homogeneous, continuous, and empty)
space and time of abstract substances (materially real but bare of sense-
qualities) which thereby suffer no material change and which allow for none
but quantitative differentiation (differentiation in abstract, non-dimensional
quantity)’.10 The same underlying schema accounts for the productive heuris-
tic fiction of homogeneous spatio-temporal individuation, and for the fact that
‘in the market-place and in shop windows, things stand still’, immersed as they
are in the separation of the practices of use and the acts of exchange in time
and space.11
It is this spatio-temporal distinction between use and exchange that makes
it possible to locate a ‘material’ and historical basis for formal and ahistorical
modes of thinking and practice. In a classical meaning of the verb ‘to abstract’,
the exchange abstraction subtracts from, is indifferent to, or suspends, the
‘materiality’ of the commodity – and it does so not through a cognitive act but
through unconscious social practice. In Sohn-Rethel’s elucidation:

The form of exchangeability applies to commodities regardless of their

material description. The abstraction comes about by force of the action
of exchange or, in other words, out of the exchanging agents practicising
their solipsism against each other. The abstraction belongs to the inter-
relationship of the exchanging agents and not to the agents themselves.
For it is not individuals who cause the social synthesis but their actions.
And their actions do it in such a way that, at the moment it happens, the
actors know nothing of it.12

The ‘moment’ of exchange is a most unusual moment. ‘The exchange-

abstraction’, Sohn-Rethel notes, ‘is the historical, spatio-temporal origin of
atemporal, ahistorical thought’.13 The nature of exchange is such that the
‘abstract’ activity of equivalence and commensuration is concrete, while use-
value becomes a matter of ideal representation, and thus turns out to be
abstract. This separation has to do with the purely social postulate that things
can indeed be instantaneously frozen, a logical requirement for the exchange

10  Sohn-Rethel 1978, p. 53.

11  Sohn-Rethel 1978, p. 25.
12  Sohn-Rethel 1978, pp. 44–5.
13  Sohn-Rethel 1978, p. 96.

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of commodities which is ‘then’ projected onto the natural world. The ‘mental’
reflection of commodity-exchange takes place through money as an abstract
thing. Coined money is the value-form made visible, and the token of a socially
unconscious practice: ‘Abstraction is therefore the effect of the action of men,
and not of their thought. In reality, it takes place “behind their backs”, at the
blind spot, so to speak, of human consciousness, that is there where the think-
ing and efforts of men are absorbed by their acts of exchange’.14 Unlike bind-
ing and embedded forms of pre-capitalist sociality, money as a social nexus is
‘formally unlimited’.15 This is a formal and logical echo of Marx’s reflections
about how money poses itself as the antithesis of any community, other than
itself. Money is not just formally unlimited but tendentially exclusive of other
standards of commensuration or mediums of intercourse.
In the second notebook of the Grundrisse, from November 1857, Marx noted
the way in which money

directly and simultaneously becomes the real community [Gemeinwesen],

since it is the general substance of survival for all, and at the same time
the social product of all. But as we have seen, in money the community
[Gemeinwesen] is at the same time a mere abstraction, a mere external,
accidental thing for the individual, and at the same time merely a means
for his satisfaction as an isolated individual. The community of antiquity
presupposes a quite different relation to, and on the part of, the individ-
ual. The development of money … therefore smashes this community.16

Or, as the mention of ‘mere’ abstraction suggests (which we could juxtapose to

the real abstraction of money), it recodes the pre-monetised community as an
auxiliary resource for the real community of money, deployed or retracted in
keeping with the shifting imperatives of accumulation.
But money is not just real community, it is also a sensus communis.17
Monetised exchange structures a socially transcendental aesthetic, which is
not solely a matter of commensurability (and of its dialectical reliance on sin-
gularity, or the appearance of uniqueness),18 but also that of a practical ar-
rest of time and evacuation of space, which customary tools of psychology, or

14  Sohn-Rethel 1978, p. 65.

15  Sohn-Rethel 1978, p. 67.
16  Marx 1973, pp. 225–6.
17  For an influential exploration of this notion from Kant’s Critique of Judgement, see Jean-
François Lyotard, ‘Sensus Communis’ (Lyotard 1992).
18  Horkheimer and Adorno encapsulated this feature of capitalist society in their analy-
sis of the pseudo-individuality of the culture industry: ‘The defiant reserve or elegant

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 Last Philosophy: the Metaphysics of Capital 7

indeed of philosophy itself, are ill-prepared to analyse. This monetised abstrac-

tion is an activity that is simultaneously relational and impersonal, rather than
in any sense primarily mental. It also for Sohn-Rethel differentiates between
socialised men and animals. In a vignette from Intellectual and Manual Labour,
he writes:

Money is an abstract thing, a paradox in itself – a thing that performs its

socially synthetic function without any human understanding. And yet
no animal can ever grasp the meaning of money; it is accessible only to
man. Take your dog with you to the butcher and watch how much he un-
derstands of the goings on when you purchase your meal. It is a great deal
and even includes a keen sense of property which will make him snap at
a stranger’s hand daring to come near the meat his master has obtained
and which he will be allowed to carry home in his mouth. But when you
have to tell him ‘Wait, doggy, I haven’t paid yet!’ his understanding is at an
end. The pieces of metal or paper which he watches you hand over, and
which carry your scent, he knows, of course; he has seen them before. But
their function as money lies outside the animal range.19

The crucial thing to grasp is that Sohn-Rethel’s derivation does not move
from the density of empirically observable and palpably material social rela-
tions, to the supposedly distorting and transcendent illusions of philosophy; it
takes its cue from Marx’s conception of value as a social form to ground ideal
abstractions in real abstraction. In this account, philosophy can thus be seen
to develop from the ‘socialised mind of man’. As Sohn-Rethel declares, in one
of the most peremptory and provocative of his formulations, philosophy ‘is
money without its material attachments, immaterial and no longer recogni-
sable as money and, indeed, no longer being money but the “pure intellect” ’.20
The aim here is that of ‘putting Kant back on his feet’, by analogy with Marx’s
notorious statement on Hegel; to show how the synthetic powers of the tran-
scendental subject are really social powers. Or, as Adorno argued in Negative
Dialectics – partially acknowledging the considerable impact of Sohn-Rethel’s
thesis on the development of his own thought ever since their first contact in
the late 1920s – the transcendental subject is society unconscious of itself.21

appearance of the individual on show is mass-produced like Yale-locks, whose only dif-
ference can be measured in fractions of milimeters’. Horkheimer and Adorno 1997, p. 154.
19  Sohn-Rethel 1978, p. 45.
20  Sohn-Rethel 1978, p. 130.
21  Adorno 1973, p. 10. The key document for the Adorno/Sohn-Rethel relationship is their
correspondence, currently being translated into English: Adorno and Sohn-Rethel 1991.

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The elimination of society from abstract philosophical thought is a product of

society itself; it is an abstraction that society makes from itself, in the exercise
of intellectual labour and in the primacy of exchange as form of mediation.
Capitalism is an abstract society, where the social nexus is not generated pri-
marily by custom, reciprocity, or tradition – though these remain the mate-
rial and forms of appearance of capitalist society – but in the indifference of
exchange. The profound theoretical originality of Marx is thus to be sought in
the fact that he provides ‘the first explanation of the historical origin of a pure
phenomenon of form’.22
Žižek will characteristically treat this origin as meta-historical or quasi-
transcendental, but he will retain Sohn-Rethel’s attention to Marx’s formal
(which is precisely not to say, formalist) revolution. Contrary to a Marxism of
content, for which it is the unveiling of the concrete, bodily, hidden abode
of production which demystifies capital’s hold over our minds and sentiments,
Žižek takes up Sohn-Rethel’s nexus of capital, abstraction and form to recog-
nise Marx’s discovery as that of a transcendental and pathological formal phe-
nomenon, which no empiricist materialism will ever be able to grasp. Marx’s
discovery is also Freud’s (and a fortiori Lacan’s, and perhaps Lenin’s), the one
refracting the other. In a truly founding statement, Žižek thus writes:

there is a fundamental homology between the interpretive procedure of

Marx and Freud – more precisely, between their analysis of commodity
and dreams. In both cases the point is to avoid the properly fetishistic fas-
cination of the ‘content’ supposedly hidden beneath the form: the ‘secret’
to be unveiled through analysis is not the content hidden by the form
(the form of commodities, the form of dreams) but, on the contrary, the
‘secret’ of this form itself … the real problem is not to penetrate the ‘hidden
kernel’ of the commodity – the determination of its value by the quan-
tity of the work consumed in its production – but to explain why work
assumed the form of the value of a commodity, why it can affirm its social
character only in the commodity form of its product.23

But if, following Sohn-Rethel, we take Marx’s concept of form into the domain
of philosophy itself, we experience a veritable expropriation or (emancipato-
ry) desublimation of philosophy’s (and the philosophical subject’s) supposed
sovereignty. If the abstract categories of thought first obtain as practical uncon-
scious acts structuring commodity exchange, then, Žižek continues:

22  Sohn-Rethel 1978, p. 45.

23  Žižek 2008a, p. 3.

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 Last Philosophy: the Metaphysics of Capital 9

the transcendental subject, the support of the net of a priori categories,

is confronted with the disquieting fact that it depends, in its very for-
mal genesis, on some inner-worldly, ‘pathological’ process – a scandal, a
nonsensical impossibility from the transcendental point of view, in so far
as the formal-transcendental a priori is by definition independent of all
positive contents: a scandal corresponding perfectly to the ‘scandalous’
character of the Freudian unconscious, which is also unbearable from
the transcendental-philosophical perspective.24

It is crucial, at this juncture in Žižek’s work, that capital’s real abstraction – as

revealed in Sohn-Rethel’s heretical elucidation of Marx, and by homology with
Freud – be understood to map onto the Lacanian conception of the symbolic
order. Sohn-Rethel’s real abstraction (or exchange-abstraction, to indicate its
siting at the level of circulation, nor production) has the ‘same’ structure, the
‘same’ scandalous, pathological short-circuit of transcendental ‘form’ (univer-
sality) and worldly ‘content’ (matter, praxis) as the unconscious. Indeed, in a
productive détournement of Sohn-Rethel, Žižek notes that the unconscious too
could be defined as ‘the form of thought whose ontological status is not that of
thought’.25 The unconscious, like the market (or should it be with the market,
through the market, in a properly capitalist unconscious?), is an ‘Other Scene’
in which the form of thought is articulated before and outside and unbeknownst
to the thought. Specifying his use of Sohn-Rethel against Althusser, Žižek
will write:

Sohn-Rethel is thus quite justified in his criticism of Althusser, who con-

ceives abstraction as a process taking place entirely in the domain of
knowledge and refuses for that reason the category of ‘real abstraction’ as
the expression of an ‘epistemological confusion’. The ‘real abstraction’ is
unthinkable in the frame of the fundamental Althusserian epistemologi-
cal distinction between the ‘real object’ and the ‘object of knowledge’ in
so far as it introduces a third element which subverts the very field of this
distinction: the form of the thought previous and external to the thought –
in short: the symbolic order.26

Later episodic references to Sohn-Rethel indicate that this perspective on the

Marxian and Freudian (but not Freudo-Marxist!) discovery of the secret of form

24  Žižek 2008a, p. 11.

25  Žižek 2008a, p. 13.
26  Žižek 2008a, pp. 13–14 (my emphasis).

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will continue to shape Žižek’s thought. But not without significant variations.
As I hope to show, the shifting concerns of Žižek’s thought introduce other ele-
ments into his understanding of the metaphysics of capital, some of them at
variance with the paradigm delineated in The Sublime Object of Ideology – and
with interesting repercussions on the politics of this philosophical critique of
political economy.
Among the significant variations is Žižek’s periodic consideration of capi-
tal’s abstracting powers not as a matter of real social forms – in keeping with
Marx’s analysis of the value-form in Capital – but as one concerning the evacu-
ation of social contents. The model here is transparently that of The Communist
Manifesto, in which all belonging, community, identity is drowned in the ‘icy
water of egotistical calculation’, torn and shredded (deterritorialised, in the
language of Deleuze and Guattari) by the barbarous dynamism of a planetary
bourgeoisie. This abstraction-as-evacuation is, understandably, often present
in Žižek’s writings on nationalism and identity in general.
In Looking Awry, for instance, reversing the view of capital’s universality
underlying our particularisms, Žižek proposed that the formal universality
of democracy finds its underside, its obscene supplement in the materialised
enjoyment of the national Cause as Freudian Das Ding. This is ‘an exemplary
case of the Lacanian logic of not-all where the universal function is founded
upon an exception: the ideal levelling of all social differences, the production
of the citizen, the subject of democracy, is possible only through an allegiance
to some particular national Cause’. The pathological remainder of passion-
ate national attachment is not the opposite, but the obverse of ‘pure’ formal
democracy, its secret condition of possibility: ‘democracy is possible only
on the basis of its own impossibility; its limit, the irreducible “pathological”
remainder, is its positive condition.’ Here, again, Žižek calls on Marx:

At a certain level, this was already known to Marx (which is why, accord-
ing to Lacan, the origin of the notion of the symptom is to be found in
Marx): the ‘formal democracy’ of the market, its equivalent exchange,
implies ‘exploitation,’ appropriation of the surplus value, but this imbal-
ance is not an indication of an ‘imperfect’ realization of the principle
of equivalent exchange, rather equivalent market exchange is the very
form of ‘exploitation,’ of the appropriation of surplus value. That is to say,
formal equivalence is the form of a nonequivalence of contents. Herein
lies the connection between the objet petit a, surplus enjoyment, and the
Marxian notion of surplus value (Lacan himself coined the term surplus
enjoyment on the model of surplus value): surplus value is the ‘material’
remainder, the surplus contents, appropriated by the capitalist through

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 Last Philosophy: the Metaphysics of Capital 11

the very form of the equivalent exchange between capital and the
labor force.27

Žižek turns to capitalism’s abstractive-evacuative side in his recent work of

philosophy, Absolute Recoil. Arguably, the dialectic of universality and pathol-
ogy is formulated with less nuance – or at least with a blunter take on its po-
litical repercussions. Žižek turns to the Christian-theological theme of kenosis,
to direct our attention to capital’s capacity to empty out contents. In keeping
with the putative spirit of The Communist Manifesto, Žižek suggests that this
‘emptying of life forms should be given all the weight of the Christian keno-
sis as a step towards redemption, as its necessary precondition, which is why
one should absolutely avoid an anti-capitalism based on the defence of par-
ticular life forms’.28 Now, though Žižek insightfully proposes, right after this
statement, that true universality is not to be attained by rising toward a pure
height cleansed of particularity, ‘but downwards, from the totality of a particu-
lar life form to the elements which signal its instability and inconsistency’, in
a universalism of interstices and interruptions, one could argue that retain-
ing the historical metaphysics of the Manifesto is an obstacle to understanding
the significance of Marx’s revolutionary conception of real abstraction. It
suggests that the imposition of capitalist relations necessarily dislocates and
deterritorialises traditional identities, that the proletarian to come is a kind of
apotheosis of the voided or barred subject. At its worst, as in Žižek’s miscon-
ceived declarations about the universalisable virtues of Western or European
values,29 it can be a hostage to liberal narratives of the emancipatory features
of modernisation, with their insistent colonial spectres. But it is crucial to
grasp that Marx’s discovery of real abstraction has nothing to do with the idea
that social life is becoming actually emptied out, voided of historical content. The
abstraction of the Manifesto, in other words, should be sharply distinguished
from the abstraction of Capital. Žižek’s Looking Awry, with its far more dialec-
tical attention to the articulation of the pathological content of nationalism
and the pathological forms of capital is much more pertinent to our present
conditions: capitalist abstraction does not empty out but rather rearticulates
historical and affective contents, and there is nothing emancipatory as such in
its abstractive dynamics.
If we should distinguish the symbolic from the kenotic dimensions of capi-
tal’s real abstraction, what of that other figure of capital in Žižek’s work, that

27  Žižek 1991, pp. 166–7.

28  Žižek 2014, p. 260.
29  See his article on the refugee crisis, ‘The Non-Existence of Norway’ (Žižek 2015).

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of capital as Real? This latter formulation can have significant virtues of philo-
sophical elucidation. It allows us, in a Lacanian vein, to distinguish capital as
Real from capitalism as reality (though we would be mistaken to treat this as
a kind of ontological difference). In Žižek’s formulation: ‘“reality” is the social
reality of the actual people involved in interaction and in the productive pro-
cesses, while the Real is the inexorable “abstract” spectral logic of Capital which
determines what goes on in social reality’.30 This is, at least in part, in keeping
with the Sohn-Rethel-inspired intuitions of The Sublime Object. Capital is (the)
Real to the extent that the real is not a stable universal form applied to a con-
tent, but a ‘short-circuit between form and content’,31 a pathological a priori
or Lacanian sinthome: ‘a pathological (in the Kantian sense of innerworldly
contingency) element that sustains the consistency of the formal frame within
which it occurs’.32 Against modern theories of reflexivity, with their praise of
disenchantment as a condition for the communicative and deliberative virtues
of the autonomous subject, commodity exchange is the particular pathological
content to which the global forms of liberalism and democracy are anchored,
or sutured. In the strongest interpretation of Sohn-Rethel’s work, which would
consider the real abstraction of capitalist market exchange as a precondition
for abstract thought as such, capital is Real, in Žižek’s precise sense of opening
up the horizon of historicity, and real abstraction, in keeping with the discov-
eries of both Hegel and Freud, can be understood as a ‘“meta-transcendental”
gesture of accounting for the very genesis of the a priori transcendental frame’.33
And yet these formulations also raise some thorny problems. How can capi-
tal be understood as a spectral logic – which is certainly resonant with Marx’s
understanding of the ‘spectral objectivity’ of the value-form – while at the same
time the Real is ‘impossible to symbolize, to formulate as a symbolic norm’,
‘resisting the movement of symbolization and/or dialectical mediation’?34
Was not commodity exchange itself, in The Sublime Object, to be understood
as a symbolic order? And in what precise sense does capital resist ‘dialecti-
cal mediation’? It seems that at this point – where the impossible-unsymbol-
isable is conceived as ‘determining the structure of the material processes
themselves’35 – the homology between capital and the unconscious breaks
down. The immaterial or spectral character of capitalist form, as well as its
‘pathological’ meta-historical origin, do not appear to require the concept of

30  Žižek 2008b, p. 331.

31  Ibid.
32  Žižek 2008b, p. 332.
33  Žižek 2008b, p. 328.
34  Žižek 2008b, pp. 326–7.
35  Žižek 2008b, pp. 330–1.

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 Last Philosophy: the Metaphysics of Capital 13

the Real, and little in Marx’s oeuvre would suggest that capital is in any way
‘impossible to symbolise’, or that it sustains an analogy, following Žižek, with
the Lacanian conception of sexual difference. More enlightening perhaps is
Žižek’s mapping of capital in terms of the Big Other: ‘The spectral presence of
Capital is the figure of the big Other which not only remains operative when all
the traditional embodiments of the symbolic big Other disintegrate, but even
directly causes this disintegration’.36 That would certainly appear to be the
very definition of what Mark Fisher has dubbed ‘capitalist realism’. However,
we cannot help but notice that the fluctuations of capital’s homological ref-
erents (the symbolic, the real, the Big Other) are perhaps best taken as testa-
ments to how it not only expatriates philosophy, following Sohn-Rethel, but
how it dislocates the formalising efforts of Žižek’s own Hegelian Lacanianism
(or Lacanised Hegelianism).
The problem of capital’s metaphysics is of course also a problem of Marx’s
relation to the philosophical tradition, and namely to the two philosophers
that form one of Žižek’s (and of Marxism’s) parallaxes: Kant and Marx. It is
worth noting in this regard that, over against the tendency to give great promi-
nence to the use of Hegel in Marx’s efforts to excavate the metaphysics of
capital, Žižek is strongly influenced by two of the most ‘Kantian’ of Marx’s
creative interpreters: Sohn-Rethel and Kojin Karatani. Their Kantianism,
and it is perhaps no accident, also involves dislocating Marxism’s traditional
prioritising of the sphere of production – and an attention to the secrets of
form. Žižek notes how Karatani’s identification of the realisation of value pro-
duced by labour in the contingencies of market exchange can be understood
as a kind of Kantian salto mortale (or even Kierkegaardian ‘leap of faith’), and
thus as a kind of antidote to an understanding of capitalism in the vein of a
(pseudo-)Hegelian holism. Karatani thereby also introduces a retroactive tem-
porality into an understanding of Marx, which is deeply attractive to Žižek,
considering the place of the futur antérieur in his own conception of the act.
But above all passing through Karatani (after Sohn-Rethel) permits us to grasp
how Marx’s key move is not towards content (of production), it is not one ‘from
the fascination with the domain of exchange to the site of production as its
secret core; Marx’s basic move is the opposite one, the move back to the secret
of the form itself’, ‘the form itself is essential’.37 This centrality of form also
allows Žižek to note how we can invert the traditional anti-reductivist move of
partisans of the autonomy of the political, against Marxist ‘economism’, namely

36  Žižek 2008b, p. 431.

37  Žižek 2009, p. 55.

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 14 Toscano

by pointing out how ‘the field of the economy is in its very form irreducible
to politics’.38
In more recent works, however, Žižek has explored the place of Hegel in the
Marxian (non- or anti-)philosophy of real abstraction. It is indeed from Hegel
that Žižek endeavours to source a ‘properly dialectical notion of abstraction’.
He incisively notes how:

what makes Hegel’s ‘concrete universality’ infinite is that it includes

‘abstractions’ in concrete reality itself; as their immanent constituents.
To put it another way: what, for Hegel, is the elementary move of phi-
losophy with regard to abstraction? It is to abandon the common-sense
empiricist notion of abstraction as a step away from the wealth of con-
crete empirical reality with its irreducible multiplicity of features: life
is green, concepts are gray, they dissect, mortify, concrete reality. (This
common-sense notion even has its pseudodialectical version, accord-
ing to which such ‘abstraction’ is a feature of mere Understanding, while
‘dialectics’ recuperates the rich tapestry of reality.) Philosophical thought
proper begins when we become aware of how such a process of ‘abstrac-
tion’ is inherent to reality itself.… It is life without theory which is gray,
a flat stupid reality – it is only theory which makes it ‘green’; truly alive,
bringing out the complex underlying network of mediations and ten-
sions which makes it move.39

Žižek’s gambit here is to argue that, contrary to Sohn-Rethel’s argument that

Marx’s real abstraction dethrones philosophical sovereignty, that the true (dia-
lectical, Hegelian) philosophy is already marked by the notion that reality itself
is abstract or abstractive, that abstraction is not a mere product of intellection
or ratiocination.
In Žižek’s most recent works there is an increasing sense, then, that we need
to move from Hegel to Marx, and back to (a Lacanian) Hegel (perhaps with
Sohn-Rethel and Karatani’s Kant as a ‘vanishing mediator’). The crucial the-
sis here is that what a proper understanding of Hegel permits is to grasp the
dimension of ‘objective fantasy’ at work in capital’s self-engendering of value,
its monstrous and unlimited (bad infinite) movement. Contrary to (Žižek’s)
Marx, Hegel’s dialectic is not just ‘an idealist formulation of capitalist domina-
tion’. Rather:

38  Žižek 2009, p. 56.

39  Žižek 2012, p. 395.

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 Last Philosophy: the Metaphysics of Capital 15

what the Hegelian dialectical process deploys is the (mystified) expres-

sion of the mystification immanent to the circulation of capital, or, in
Lacanian terms, of its ‘objectively-social’ fantasy – to put it in somewhat
naive terms, for Marx, capital is not ‘really’ a subject-substance which
reproduces itself by way of positing its own presuppositions and so
on; what this Hegelian fantasy of capital’s self-generating reproduction
obliterates is workers’ exploitation, that is, how the circle of capital’s self-
reproduction draws its energy from the external (or, rather, ‘ex-timate’)
source of value, how it has to parasitize workers.40

The suggestion is that, rather than truly attending to the spectral and dialecti-
cal character of a Hegelian conception of capitalist abstraction, moving ‘from
nothing through nothing to nothing’ Marx backslides to a philosophy of con-
tent, the content of production, the anthropological ‘positivity’ represented
by the ‘productive force of human labour’. Has Marx forgotten that ‘form is
essential’, or has Žižek forgotten that Marx never did? More precisely, though
it largely exceeds the limits of this paper, what Žižek has forgotten is perhaps
that Marx asserted the centrality to an understanding of capital’s real abstrac-
tions of abstract labour, which is not the concrete, physiological ‘content’ of
production, but precisely the ‘pathological’ ‘inhuman’ form of production
under capital.41
In Žižek’s most recent formulation, in Absolute Recoil, we get in a sense what
is a temporary synthesis of this oscillation between the Hegelian and Marxian
poles of real abstraction, in the acute observation that Hegel’s Smithian mis-
understanding of capital involved his incapacity to see its properly Hegelian
dimensions (something for which one had to wait for Marx, in another futur
antérieur). He articulates this in terms of another figure of Capital, as subject.

The subject does not come first: it is a predicate-becoming-subject, a

passive screen asserting itself as a First Principle, i.e., something posited
which retroactively posits its presuppositions. It is in this sense that, for
Marx, Capital is a subject: capital is money which becomes a subject,
money which not only mediates between commodities as their gen-
eral equivalent but also becomes the active agent of this mediation, so
that the entire movement of the exchange of commodities becomes the

40  Žižek 2012, p. 251.

41  Authors such as Anselm Jappe or Moishe Postone have stressed the limits of a Sohn-
Rethelian conception of abstraction precisely in terms of the pivotal place of abstract
labour in Marx’s theory.

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 16 Toscano

self-movement of Capital. And the paradox is that what Hegel was not
able to see was this very ‘Hegelian’ dimension of the emerging capitalist
order: the limit of the return to Hegel is simply Capital itself, for Hegel
was not able to grasp the capitalist dynamic proper.42

It is thus via Hegel – a Hegel who can finally see his system refracted, mon-
strously, in the real abstractions of capital – that we can properly articulate
the fact that capital qua ‘automatic subject’ is both fantasy and reality. Hegel
allows us to grasp, according to Žižek, how the self-engendering monstrosity
of capitalist value is not a merely ideological abstraction (in the ‘vulgar’ sense
of ideology, Žižek’s own, arguably, being inaugurated under the sign of ‘real
abstraction’).

The problem is that this ‘abstraction’ is not only in our (financial spec-
ulator’s) misperception of social reality, but is also ‘real’ in the precise
sense of determining the structure of very material social processes: the
fate of whole swathes of society and sometimes of whole countries can
be decided by the speculative dance of Capital, which pursues its goal
of profitability with a blessed indifference to how its movements will
affect social reality.… This is why Hegelian references abound in Marx’s
deployment of the notion of Capital: in capitalism, value is not a mere
abstract ‘mute’ universality, a substantial link between the multiplicity of
commodities; from being a passive medium of exchange it turns into the
‘active factor’ of the entire process.… what Hegel was not able to see was
not some post-Hegelian or post-idealist reality but rather the properly
Hegelian aspect of the capitalist economy. Here, paradoxically, Hegel was
not idealist enough, for what he failed to see was the properly speculative
content of the capitalist speculative economy, the way financial capital
functions as a purely virtual notion processing ‘real people.’43

Hegel returns, beside and beyond himself. Ultimately, the order of hierarchy –
Lacan over Hegel, Hegel over Marx, Marx over both, who is beyond whom, and
so on – is of little import. After all, the form of the thought is already outside
the thought, and if that is the case, then philosophy, philosophers and their
sovereignty or capacity to totalise take second stage, to the task of grappling
with the open secrets of capital’s forms. It is there, in the symbolic order that
Žižek detailed in The Sublime Object, that many of today’s struggles against the

42  Žižek 2014, pp. 29–30.

43  Žižek 2014, p. 31.

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 Last Philosophy: the Metaphysics of Capital 17

very concrete effects of the ‘purely virtual’ take place. With and against Žižek,
we can learn to find contemporary ways to interpret, and transform, Marx’s
epoch-making observation from the Grundrisse that individuals are today
dominated by abstractions. We may do so, keeping in mind an acute obser-
vation by Althusser, not about capital as subject but about capital as object
(another parallax worth developing):

Every abstract concept therefore provides knowledge of a reality whose

existence it reveals: an ‘abstract concept’ then means a formula which is
apparently abstract but really terribly concrete, because of the object it
designates. This object is terribly concrete in that it is infinitely more con-
crete, more effective than the objects one can ‘touch with one’s hands’
or ‘see with one’s eyes’ – and yet one cannot touch it with one’s hands
or see it with one’s eyes.… Simply speaking: in order to be able to anal-
yse these concrete capitalist societies (England, France, Russia, etc.), it is
essential to know that they are dominated by that terribly concrete real-
ity, the capitalist mode of production, which is ‘invisible’ (to the naked
eye). ‘Invisible’, i.e. abstract.44

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