Ekstasis

On the Nature of Capitalism

tragos:

“Did Madoff not know that, in the long term, his scheme was bound to collapse? What force denied him this obvious insight? Not Madoff’s own personal vice or irrationality, but rather a pressure, an inner drive to go on, to expand the sphere of circulation in order to keep the machinery running, inscribed into the very system of capitalist relations. In other words, the temptation to ‘morph’ legitimate business into a pyramid scheme is part of the very nature of the capitalist circulation process. There is no exact point at which the Rubicon was crossed and the legitimate business morphed into an illegal scheme; the very dynamic of capitalism blurs the frontier between ‘legitimate’ investment and ‘wild’ speculation, because capitalist investment is, at its very core, a risky wager that a scheme will turn out to be profitable, an act of borrowing from the future.”

— Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (via langer)

To quote Captain Renault: “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!”

Every year that passes, Zizek becomes less of a crazy Lacanian (the “monstrous” theorist he describes himself as) and more of a serious commentator. It’s a pleasant shift.