Real and Abstract: The Metaphysics of Capital from Sohn-Rethel to iek

Alberto Toscano

The aftermath of the 2007-8 crisis stands as a massive process of disillusionment 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 'capitalist
realism' been reimposed with haste and brutality, through concerted elite action (contrary to any
cybernetic fantasy of a self-regulating system), but even 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
terminal, 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 questionings of the viability of capitalism, we can discern that
attachments to capital relations go much deeper than we'd 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 iek 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 hauteur du capital (to borrow a formulation from Alain
Badiou) has shadowed 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

1 See Frdric Lordon, Capitalisme, dsir et servitude. Marx et Spinoza (Paris: La Fabrique, 2010).
2 See Theodor W. Adorno, Against Epistemology: A Metacritique, trans. W. Domingo (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), p.
10.
incarnation, from the very first pages of The Sublime Object of Ideology iek 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 iek's writings, teasing out some of the tensions in his attempts to
articulate Kantian, Hegelian, Marxian and Lacanian conceptions of the operations of abstraction,
and reflecting on his contribution to the urgent if interminable task of thinking 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 reality, an objective spirit, and that
the psychic life and power of capital cannot be cured away, is a conviction that, as I already
mentioned, we can already find at work in The Sublime Object of Ideology. It also determines,
crucially, iek's critique 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 iek'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 iek underestimates the brilliance of the Althusserian turn nor that
we ourselves should.3 Notwithstanding his later Leninist rectifications, much of Althussers work
can be regarded as one of the boldest attempts, starting from a Marxian framework, to produce a
materialist theory of thought. In Althussers 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 Marxs theoretical revolution in the
study of abstraction?
Revisiting a crucial text on real abstraction, Alfred Sohn-Rethels Intellectual and Manual
Labour,5 iek 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
3 For a reflection on the thematisation of real abstraction in Althussers writing of the 1970s, see my 'The Detour of
Abstraction', Diacritics 43.2 (2016).
4 Louis Althusser, For Marx (London: Verso, 1996), pp. 244-5.
5 Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology (London: Macmillan, 1978).
the real from any empiricist deviation, Althusser, iek contends, cannot truly grasp the uniqueness
of Marxs 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.
iek will argue that Sohn-Rethel's interpretation of Marx allows us to capture the form of
the thought previous and external to the thought.6 What might this mean within the context of
Sohn-Rethels own account of real abstraction? Sohn-Rethel sets off from a bold wager: to repeat,
without succumbing to analogy or resemblance, Marxs 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 edition of Intellectual and Manual Labour: to wit, that there obtains an identity between the
formal elements of the social synthesis and the formal components 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 intellectual labor as well as the commoditys 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 ideological habits of empiricism and to
consider the social and material reality of cognition, 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 ieks 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 serve as a kind of 'primal scene' for iek's
metaphysical conception of capitalism, we need to take a detour through his work, to then return to
how iek 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
6 Slavoj iek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 2008 [1989]), p. 14.
7 Intellectual and Manual Labour, p. 14.
8 Intellectual and Manual Labour, p. 33.
9 The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 10.
quantity).10 The same underlying schema accounts for the productive heuristic 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 interrelationship 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 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 thinking and efforts of men are absorbed by their acts of
exchange.14 Unlike binding 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 standard of commensuration or mediums of
intercourse.

10 Intellectual and Manual Labour, p. 53.

11 Intellectual and Manual Labour, p. 25.
12 Intellectual and Manual Labour, pp. 445.
13 Intellectual and Manual Labour, p. 96.
14 Intellectual and Manual Labour, p. 65.
15 Intellectual and Manual Labour, p. 67.
 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 individual. 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 singularity, or the appearance of uniqueness 18), but also that of a
practical arrest of time and evacuation of space, which customary tools of psychology, or indeed of
philosophy itself, are ill-prepared to analyse. This monetised abstraction 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 understands 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 strangers 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
havent 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-Rethels derivation does not move from the density of
16 Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin, 1973), pp. 2256.
17 For an influential exploration of this notion from Kants Critique of Judgment, see Jean-Franois Lyotard, Sensus
Communis, in Judging Lyotard, ed. Andrew Benjamin (London: Routledge, 1992).
18 Horkheimer and Adorno encapsulated this feature of capitalist society in their analysis of the pseudo-individuality of
the culture industry: The defiant reserve or elegant appearance of the individual on show is mass-produced like Yale-
locks, whose only difference can be measured in fractions of milimeters. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno,
Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso, 1997), p. 154.
19 Intellectual and Manual Labour, p. 45.
empirically observable and palpably material social relations, to the supposedly distorting and
transcendent illusions of philosophy; it takes its cue from Marxs 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 recognisable 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 Marxs notorious
statement on Hegel; to show how the synthetic powers of the transcendental 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 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
primarily by custom, reciprocity, or tradition though these remain the material 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
iek 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 is the unveiling of the concrete, bodily,
hidden abode of production which demystifies capital's hold over our minds and sentiments, iek
takes up Sohn-Rethel's nexus of capital, abstraction and form to recognise Marx's discovery as that
of a transcendental and pathological formal phenomenon, 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, iek 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 fascination 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

20 Intellectual and Manual Labour, p. 130.

21 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), p. 10. The key
document for the Adorno/Sohn-Rethel relationship is their correspondence, currently being translated into English:
Theodor W. Adorno and Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Briefwechsel 1936-1969, ed. C Gdde (Munich: text + kritik, 1991).
22 Intellectual and Manual Labour, p. 45.
 the commodity the determination of its value by the quantity of the work consumed in its production
but to explain why work assumed the form the value of the 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 (emancipatory) desublimation of philosophy (and the
philosophical subject's) supposed sovereignty. If the abstract categories of thought first obtain as
practical unconscious acts structuring commodity exchange, then, iek continues:

the transcendental subject, the support of the net of a priori categories, is confronted with the disquieting
fact that it depends, in its very formal 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 iek's work, that capital's real abstraction as revealed in Sohn-
Rethel's heretical elucidation of Marx, and by homology with Freud is 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' (universality) and worldly 'content'
(matter, praxis) as the unconscious. Indeed, in a productive dtournement of Sohn-Rethel, iek
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, iek will write:

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

23 The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 3.

24 The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 11.
25 The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 13.
26 The Sublime Object of Ideology, pp. 13-14 (my emphasis).
Freudian (but not Freudo-Marxist!) discovery of the secret of form will continue to shape iek's
thought. But not without significant variations. As I hope to show, the shifting concerns of iek's
thought introduce other elements 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 iek's periodic consideration of capital'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 evacuation 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 iek's writings on nationalism and identity in general.
In Looking Awry, for instance, reversing the view of capital's universality underlying our
particularisms, iek 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 leveling 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 passionate 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, iek calls on Marx:

At a certain level, this was already known to Marx (which is why, according 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 imbalance 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 the very form of the equivalent exchange between capital
and the labor force.27

iek turns to capitalism's abstractive-evacuative side in his (at the time of writing) most
recent work of philosophy, Absolute Recoil. Arguably, the dialectic of universality and pathology is
27 Slavoj iek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1991), pp. 166-7.
formulated with less nuance or at least with a blunter take on its political repercussions. iek
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, iek suggests
that this 'emptying of life forms should be given all the weight of the Christian kenosis as a step
towards redemption, as its necessary precondition, which is why one should absolutely avoid an
anti-capitalism based on the defence of particular life forms'. 28 Now, though iek insightfully
proposes, right after this statement, that true universality is not to be attained by rising towards a
pure height cleansed of particularity, 'but downwards, from the totality of a particular life form to
the elements which signal its instability and inconsistency', in a universalism of interstices and
interruptions, one could argue that retaining 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 iek's muddled and misconceived arguments about the virtues of
Western or European values,29 it can be a hostage to liberal narratives of the emancipatory features
of modernization, with their insistent neo-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. iek's Looking Awry, with its far more
dialectical 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 capital's real
abstraction, what of that other figure of capital in iek's work, that of capital as Real? This latter
formulation can have significant virtues of philosophical 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 iek's formulation: 'reality' is the social reality of the
actual people involved in interaction and in the productive processes, 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 content, but

28 Slavoj iek, Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2014), p.
260.
29 See his article on the refugee crisis, 'The Non-Existence of Norway', London Review of Books, 9 September 2015.
30 Slavoj iek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 2008 [1999]), p. 331.
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 deliberating 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 iek's precise sense of opening up the
horizon of historicity, and real abstraction, in keeping with the discoveries of both Hegel and Freud,
can be understood as '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 capital be understood
as a spectral logic which is certainly resonates 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 Wasn't commodity exchange itself, in The Sublime Object, to be understood as a
symbolic order? And in what precise sense does capital resist 'dialectical mediation'? It seems that at
this point where the impossible-unsymbolisable 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 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 iek,
with the Lacanian conception of sexual difference. More enlightening perhaps is iek'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 can't help but
notice that the fluctuations of capital's homological referents (the symbolic, the real, the Big Other)
are perhaps best taken as testaments to how it not only expatriates philosophy, following Sohn-
Rethel, but how it dislocates the formalising efforts of iek's own Hegelian Lacanianism (or
Lacanised Hegelianism).

31 The Ticklish Subject, p. 331.

32 The Ticklish Subject, p. 332.
33 The Ticklish Subject, p. 328.
34 The Ticklish Subject, pp. 326-7.
35 The Ticklish Subject, pp. 330-1.
36 The Ticklish Subject, p. 431.
 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 iek's (and of
Marxism's) parallaxes: Kant and Marx. It is worth noting in this regard that, over against the
tendency to give great prominence to the use of Hegel in Marx's efforts to excavate the metaphysics
of capital, iek 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. iek notes how Karatani's identification of the realisation of value produced 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 temporality into an understanding of Marx, which is deeply attractive to iek,
considering the place of the futur antrieur 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 iek to note how
we can invert the traditional anti-reductivist move of partisans of the autonomy of the political,
against Marxist 'economism', namely by pointing out how 'the field of the economy is in its very
form irreducible to politics'.38
In more recent works, however, iek has explored the place of Hegel in the Marxian (non-
or anti-)philosophy of real abstraction. It is indeed from Hegel that iek 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
philosophy with regard to abstraction? It is to abandon the common-sense empiricist notion of abstraction
as a step away from the wealth of concrete 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, according 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 "abstraction" 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 tensions which makes it move.39

37 Slavoj iek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009 [2006]), p. 55.
38 The Parallax View, p. 56.
39 Slavoj iek, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2012), p. 395.
iek's gambit here is to argue that, contrary to Sohn-Rethel's argument that Marx's real abstraction
dethrones philosophical sovereignty, that the true (dialectical, 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 iek'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 thesis 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 (iek's) Marx, Hegel's dialectic is
not just 'an idealist formulation of capitalist domination'. Rather:

what the Hegelian dialectical process deploys is the (mystified) expression 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 dialectical character of a
Hegelian conception of capitalist abstraction, moving 'from nothing through nothing to nothing'
Marx backslides to a philosophy of content, the content of production, the anthropological
'positivity' represented by the 'productive force of human labour'. Has Marx forgotten that 'form is
essential', or has iek forgotten that Marx never did? More precisely, though it largely exceeds the
limits of this paper, what iek has forgotten is perhaps that Marx asserted the centrality to an
understanding of capital's real abstractions of abstract labour, which is not the concrete,
physiological 'content' of production, but precisely the 'pathological' 'inhuman' form of production
under capital.41
In iek'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 misunderstanding of capital involved his incapacity to see its
properly Hegelian dimensions (something for which one had to wait for Marx, in another futur
antrieur). 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

40 Less Than Nothing, 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 to Marx's theory.
 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 general equivalent but also becomes the active agent of this
mediation, so that the entire movement of the exchange of commodities becomes the 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, monstrously, 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 iek, how the self-engendering
monstrosity of capitalist value is not a merely ideological abstraction (in the 'vulgar' sense of
ideology, iek's own, arguably, being inaugurated under the sign of 'real abstraction').

The problem is that this abstraction is not only in our (financial speculators) 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 Marxs 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 iek detailed in The
Sublime Object, that many of today's struggles against the very concrete effects of the 'purely
virtual' take place. With and against iek, 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 observation by Althusser, not
about capital as subject but about capital as object (another parallax worth developing):

42 Absolute Recoil, pp. 29-30.

43 Absolute Recoil, p. 31.
 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 concrete, 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 analyse these concrete

capitalist societies (England, France, Russia, etc.), it is essential to know that they are dominated by that

terribly concrete reality, the capitalist mode of production, which is 'invisible' (to the naked eye).

'Invisible', i.e. abstract.44

Alberto Toscano is Reader in Critical Theory at the Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London, and
Co-Director of Goldsmiths's Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought. He sits on the editorial board of the journal
Historical Materialism and edits The Italian List for Seagull Books. He is the author of Cartographies of the Absolute
(2015, with Jeff Kinkle), The Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation between Kant and Deleuze (2006),
Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (2010) and is the translator of several books by Alain Badiou, Antonio Negri and
others.

44 Louis Althusser, Preface to Capital Volume One, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, p. 77.