THE CAPITAL IS THE ENEMY ALIVE CAPITAL

1.
A book like What is philosophy? being read by a yuppie in the Paris
subway. Such is the -irnica image, preparing the attack, who knows his
visually impact Zizek begins his article. But it is also an enactment requires
a procedure that key to our present becomes, in its repetition and
acceleration: that by which questions, released as complex questions, as
signs of opening, are metabolized and converted into "demands "satisfy, in
slogans of those who can guess simplification in already-coded formulas.
Such tactics applied to the question of what is the philosophy (which
responds imagining iek be the yuppie) is replicated in the argumentative
logic of the author, as a way of trivializing questions call radical new policy.
If the yuppie playing Deleuze as a postmodern manual helps manages to
capture a "low" reply-in a precise sense: banal, estetizante-, which is
canceled is able to require, before each question, a conceptual dramatization
at the height problematization of which he is capable.
In a text of 2001, Zizek gives us clues proceed paradoxically we would like
to also follow us. Aware of the sterilizing methods (via trivialization) of the
philosophies of emancipation-so common in the financial-elites, the author
proposes to rescue the active nuclei of the philosophy of Marx, repeating (in
a sense of reactualizacin) figures convicted who knew how to liven
revolution. That same rescue the living core of the new political radicalism
is what we wanted "repeat" for the current Latin American scene [2].

2.
When Deleuze and iek posits ideologist of late capitalism (2007: 209),
the problem that arises is that of the current isomorphism between
capitalism and resistance. iek's strategy does not aim to rethink this
apparent convergence, but to lay bare the ingenuity of the resistance,
victims of a confusion in terms. The discovery of isomorphism achieves
two simultaneous objectives: the unveiling of the appointed ingenuity and
successively, the questioning of all constructs tested on these premises.
Thus, these resistors would be doomed from the start to be absorbed not
only by capital, able to metamorphose all, but to replicate their slogans,
their behavior and assumptions. There is no other policy but the same logic.
What finally encourages iek's argument is a dream of identity,
equivalence, analogy, symmetry and adequacy. A dream that, paraphrasing
Irigaray, is required by all ontologies that use the a priori of the same. As a
way of rejecting the radical difference and replicate it as false difference.
The argument of the Slovenian strategy is to ignore the Deleuze author of a
logic of sense pointing precisely to exalt the difference without concept as a
critical substrate of successive isomorphisms proposed by the capital. As
explained by Peter Pl Pelbart (2009), the "difference" that offers capital is
a pseudo-difference or difference controlled, while the ontological
difference is pure movement.
3.

To argue such a thing, iek bears the burden of proof: it must, above all,
des-ontologize all political affectivity understood as acting materiality. This
should not be thought, according to iek, "as libidinal support of
revolutionary activity" (2007: 211). Thus the transcendental iekian
scheme to deny a particular part of the sensible - "erratic excess" (2007:
210) - which is disowned by their empirical naivete be first. So it argues
that "relational field previously existing affections" is not "pirated" nor
hindered by the capitalist logic, but promoted by it. It is the concrete against
the abstract, he warns, but what is already intimately mediated by the
"concrete universal" become capital. In short: no sensible first ontology
leave. But logic ontology of capital reality:
"(...) And, to the extent that alternative social formations unfold the same
ontological attitude, this is nothing more than a mere confirmation that are
mediated, in its innermost core by the Capital as its concrete universality,
such as training particular colors every sphere of its alternatives, ie, which
functions as the all-embracing totality which mediates all other particular
formations "(2007: 212)
That capitalism and the creation dynamics are presented and assumed as it
involves erasing any asymmetry, declare that no longer exists. However, in
this assimilation, which is synthesized with a provocative flattening: the
reality of capital is deleuziana-, which is ontologized as "omniabarcativa
all", is the capital itself. So within the pendular dialectical style, which
makes iek is nothing more than an inclination of the balance: the
ontologization of alternative forms, which says combat and distrust, is

emptied but not taken to its radical criticism, but hardly changed sign:
ontology is now the capital.
It is, strictly speaking, a "bad solution" to the problem posed by the latest
Foucault around biopolitics and dynamics of social management. When
asked about how to get out of neoliberal governmentality, Zizek seems to
respond with a "going backwards": return to the socialist paradigm of the
single party and the political centrality of the state apparatus, both decisive
core of libertarian real socialism criticism. Thus, iek overlooked or
rather, politically dismisses the relationship between resistance and singling
out of the crisis, particularly evident in South America "neoliberal model".
it's the economy.
Four.
iek criticizes the use of multiplicity-a bastion of policies combatbecause, he says, is the disavowal of antagonism. However, its inverted
dialectic (that which ontologizes reality-total capital) is another way of
disavowal of antagonism. Only a language that evokes (phantasmatically)
all the time: the defeat.
Taking up the thesis of the philosopher Santiago Lpez Petit in his apolitical
politicizations text (2007), we understand that the position-iek must be
read in the specific context of what he describes as "global age", "our time

is postpolitical because the sphere the economy has fully naturalized

"(2007: 21).
This reality is what allows a harmless proliferation of insubstantial
difference (minority), leaving aside the only truly relevant to Zizek: the repoliticization of the economy, authentic meaning of his slogan "repeat
Lenin". Such statement repositions politics in the classic position of the left:
that is, as the postulation of an instance (state power) able to restrict the
power of capital. This position, says Lpez Petit, underestimates the overall
condition, and shows absolutely unable to answer the key question: "Why
the return policy has no effect politicized socially?". If iek thinks he
rebutted "pure politics" [3] from a rediscovery of the economy as the
determinant instance of the social, Lpez Petit challenges this position still
insist on the "error" to "see the post-political condition as a condition of the
policy itself, rather than understood as a condition of reality itself and our
involvement in it, "characterized by" being poor "(a new type of"
vulnerability "resulting from the" global mobility " that internalizes fear,
weakens and generalizes a sense of abandonment), the emergence of a
"therapeutic power" (to treat "diseases vacuum" and neutralize the
"discomfort" that arise in attempts to adapt to the new conditions of
exploitation , mistaking "life therapy"), a "global capitalism" (which
operates according to the formula of "enclosing the outside"), and
"multirrealidad" ( "openness without outside" depoliticizing).
5.

Following iek's argument along many of their interventions are a

repeated

sequence:

the

denunciation

of

anachronism

critical

of

contemporary changes of power in late capitalism. When capitalism has

become, as we have seen, a concrete universality over-determines all the
particulars, is anachronistic and harmless continue pointing against
totalitarian centralization of the system without perceiving how much the
ideology of criticism coincides with and reinforces itself capitalist discourse
that has opened, adopting a flexible and permissive ideology "is not the
latest trend of management own corporate 'diversify, devolve power, try to
mobilize

local

creativity

and

self-organization'

?,

is

not

the

anticentralizacin the issue of new capitalism digitized "(2007: 211)?.

This reasoning suggests that late capitalism has withdrawn from the
discussion the hard core -economa- to slide, instead, a series of secondary
issues around identities and lifestyles of minorities, and what we generically
call "culture", on which he heatedly discussed under the form of a pseudopolitics.
Indeed, criticism of Zizek is based on an ironic attack on behalf of a
"Lacanian politics" to the call Postmodernism and centers unthinking
diffusion (particularly American universities) who theorize an order in
which there is no visible political enemy, no real confrontations, but a kind
of dissolution of reality [4]. So the final question, against a capitalism
whose guiding principle is the production of differences, a view of the
philosopher, are presented as harmless, it is how to revolutionize an order
whose principle is "self-revving permanent".

But back to the economy, claiming that he has lost sight of as the real core,
iek justifies the need to repeat Lenin, to use political maneuver to reform
the ways of the economic process. Since the post-politics, any pure political
process has been emptied of constituent aptitude and, therefore, any party
the difference is, according to iek, aided somewhat by the big Other
capital, we understand finally what a Lacanian policy ( a Lacanian)
Leninism. It is to release all bodily development of the power to attribute it
entirely to the master signifier "the Capital".
If Lenin's What to do? He argued that workers could not emancipate
themselves from the chains of capitalist economy because his conscience in
spontaneous struggles remained within the bourgeois horizon (to the extent
they were limited to the union demand) and, therefore, was the party I
should mediate these struggles to gain access to a proper socialist
consciousness, unfolding from outside the class scientific discourse of Marx
with Lacan are the bodies enjoying the subject which will be transformed as
a result of a speech analyst that iek political aims: the Lacan Zizek is the
truth of the repetition of Lenin. So he repeated, Lenin has lost his
Machiavellian side of active reader of the constituent features of the
resistors. Missed admirer of Lenin Soviet commune and, instead, a purely
discursive Lenin appears.
6.

The controversy now points out against a left that, under the name of a
micro, recognizes the libidinal functioning of fascism and opposes another
"political passions" [Bloch, Reich, Deleuze-Guattari]. Hence also known
iek diatribes against the book Empire [5]: "What will happen when if this
is really the desire and the will of these movements-" take power "? How
would the "crowd in power"? "Jokes.
Against sesentayochismo of Deleuze associated with Guattari and the
subsequent alliance with Negri Guattari, iek draws the line trench (from
bad influences) [6]. The enemy is clear: the philosophy of immanence and
producing an image of Spinoza crowd mobilized by a substance-affirmative
desire, capable of producing the criteria (also immanent) to distinguish
between absolute democracy and postmodern fascism. Hence criticism of
the experiences of the new radicality find their counterpoint, in the case of
Latin America, in the figure of Chavez.
The experiences of self-organization inspired by Zapatismo [7] are read
from the perspective iek, in counterpoint with the Chavista leadership
and building a single party. The latter focuses its effectiveness in a control
unit against the spread spirit of autonomous initiatives.
We spit on iek

7.

Let us return to the denial of the first affectivity. But back to think another
edge: the sensitive condition of the feminine and the possibility of founding
another economy. On this point Rosi Braidotti complaint iek acceptance
of the notion of femininity proposed by Hegel and a conservative reading of
Lacan's thought. "In terms of thinking the feminine, the work of iek
represents an anti-feminist regression that reiterates the whole repertoire of
invisibility and symbolic specularity against which feminists have been
arguing since it began to appear the work of Lacan" (2005: 76 ).
But Braidotti also denounced the alleged renewal of a real policy that would
be based on acceptance of the economy as a privileged sphere of
antagonism. Economy of capital that organizes a whole emotional and
conceptual economy: "With the arrogant claim of having unmasked, iek
perpetuates an entire economy, infused by capitalism, the deficit and lack
that invests the Lacanian conceptual machinery and espouses a certain
conception Hegel "(2005: 77).
The economy as a privileged sphere of reality and reconciles the notions of
absence and dialectic, assuming a male subject economy governed by the
lack and negativity. Such an economy becomes ontology. For Braidotti:
"This structuring absence is central to the ontology of Lacan of negativity
and leads to what Derrida describes as the" spectral economy "of the
subject, which is a present, constitutive and unsolvable absence, or absence
structurally necessary, as the only way in which the subject may be present
for himself or herself "(2005: 78). Even if, as the author emphasizes, both

Deleuze (in 1968 with Difference and Repetition) as Irigaray (in 1974
Speculum of the other woman) and marked strong criticism of the theory of
desire as lack. The thought of origin, based from the relationship with the
feminine mother in Irigaray and the material-affective subject roots as
Deleuze, takes away from the fault in both phallogocentric story that denies
the sensible difference as a frame of an embodied materialism.
8.
If we take the terms of the Argentine philosopher Leon Rozitchner, we
could raise it as follows: the opposition is drawn between two types of
proposals subjectivities. On the one hand, one for which no material object
archaic (iek) and for whom everything begins in a structural symbolism,
every body being primarily of words, play of signifiers, pure rational spirit,
the only possible source of meaning. The other, however, is held on a brand
[Freud's primary process], or bodily memory, on the basis of which it can
develop the sense also of language (Rozitchner). Here the language, carrier
sense depends on a material, loving home, which results in a non-linguistic
regularity or common habit that guides language from within. So the
language is not simply the technicalities of the game equivalences and
differences, following the prescriptions of a significant "master".
In this line, the prospect of iek is related (in its common structuralist
root) with the Argentine theorist Ernesto Laclau (2005), whose relative
success in the field of political philosophy to interpret the current regimes
in Latin America as "populist" it draws on a scheme whereby words, as

"significant" face, possess the ability to gather and organize in a certain way
the usual representations about the things of the world and eminently
political operation by which certain interpretations of world are imposed on
others in the same level language is called hegemonic. Thus, the main (pre)
occupation of political activity is the determination of "significant" certain
so-called "floating".
9.
A perspective article rozitchneana iek Act or melancholy [8], paid the
direction of our arguments. [9]
Slovenian philosopher's argument is as follows: the "dominant doxa" -that
is, the supposedly transgressive ideology that has not taken note of his
isomorphism with the transformation-rereads in his favor Freudian
opposition between mourning ( "Got acceptance of loss pathological ") and
melancholy" "(" in the subject persists in narcissistic identification with the
lost object ") in favor of the latter statement. There is a "rest that can not be
integrated with the work of mourning," which tends to organize a
fundamental fidelity. Zizek denounces the "objective cynicism" of this
position to a double opportunistic game: enables, for example, "ethnic link
with the lost object", holding a fidelity to the "ancient roots, while fully
participate in the capitalist game global".
This melancholy, accused Zizek, it is the alibi of the "postcolonial studies".
What is the error melancholic ?: "locate this resistance in a positively

existing object but lost" (ethnicity, for example), mistaking "loss and lack".
What is the confusion? "Object-cause lack of desire originally a
constitutively". Positivizes melancholy "empty / missing", through a
deceptive displacement of the lack of loss, deploying a "metaphysical
longing for another absolute reality," "absolute corporeal hybrid and
inconsistent". such an object "can be possessed only insofar as it is lost."
The object of melancholy is subjected to decay: it possesses only
unconditionally loss. Gloomy stratagem to confirm their relationship loss
with a sensitive object is treated as already lost a sensitive object ever
possessed. Thus the melancholy is in the paradoxical position of rejecting
the duel and at the same time, takes an excessive and superfluous mourning
for objects that neither possesses nor are being lost.
To Rozitchner, however, the first object did exist, which explains itself may
have a non-removable rest. It is behind all lost object. What is at stake in
this loss or subsistence of an initial object is the body that holds the body of
signifiers, or the system by which they float on nothingness [preeminence
of the symbolic] are exchanged. It is to defend, then, a type of guy who,
despite everything, refuses to "lose the object" mater-ialismo support.
Melancholy is thus the body that resists castration / aterrotrizante (clotted
mother alive).

10.
It remains to reverse the game. -ingeniosa Work the iek and erudita- cut
the branch on which tries to lie: without identifying the productivity of
resistance in its singularity, we remain in the most extreme of
defencelessness against the forces that mobilize "significant". Where terror
and defeat operate as a brake on the political imagination a completely
insufficient to problematize (either from theory or from the state) realism
arises what social movements put into play during the destituyente phase of
neoliberal legitimacy.
Because, let's be specific: we speak of theories to discuss practices; and in
our case (and also of iek, believe it or not), these -the practices that are
defiant background leading to the most disturbing political issue: the
rejection of obedience and attempt to create new ways of lifetime. Do we
have any chance to reflect on these issues without taking as background the
Caracazo of 1989, the Zapatista rebellion of 1994, the Argentina crisis of
2001 and the Bolivian revolt of 2003 [10]?
We can not but admit that the provocation of iek His relative success
among us - succeeds in defining a certain effect of closing a cycle of
struggles which is also a darkening of the effectiveness of a certain way of
reading situations and texts-, leading to a new period in which the massive
presence in the streets gives way to a moment of institution, complex and
fragile. What is at stake, however, it is not the awakening disappointed

"sesentiochesca illusion", but an urgent and dramatic question for thinking

able to regain that vitality in times of impasse.