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The dominant view among critics of today's debt-based and increasingly volatile economy is that, at some point in the seventies or eighties, capitalism took the wrong turn, falling victim to greed and corruption. This view, a familiar narrative in a world that loves to personalise guilt, is flawed. It assumes that our finance-driven system is the fraudulent version of a fundamentally rational mode of production. As I have argued in a recent book, capitalist society is no longer able to reproduce itself through the value extracted from labour (Vighi, 2022). Increasingly and overtly, capitalism is driven by leveraged, speculative returns on financial assets. While it is delusional to believe that value can be produced through securitisation ad infinitum, to imagine that we should look to a putative 'real economy' to ignite a new growth cycle only means we are willing to be fooled twice. The financial demon is nothing but an expression of the inner demons of capitalism as such.

Intro -- Half-Title Page -- Series Page -- Title Page -- Contents -- List of Contributors -- Acknowledgement -- Introduction -- Part 1 Institutions -- 1 On Institutions -- 2 For a Clinical Theory of the Institution -- 3 Instituting Power -- 4 Vox Populi, Vox Dei: On the Vocal Substance of the Present -- Part 2 Ideology -- 5 Neo-plebs and Elites in the Global World -- 6 On the Theatricality and Historicity of the Political -- 7 A Critique of Biopolitics -- 8 Profit, Knowledge and Jouissance: Lacan and the Logic of Action -- Part 3 Capitalism -- 9 Jansenist Morality and the Compulsion of Capitalism -- 10 Capitalism and Law: From Servitude to Freedom -- 11 Matrix Resurrections, or Jouissance as a Political Factor -- 12 The Perfect Crime? Baudrillard, Covid-19 and Capitalist Virulence -- Index -- Copyright.

The following article examines the theoretical foundations and practical consequences of Slavoj Žižek's critique of Foucauldian discourse analysis. It does so by uncovering Žižek's idiosyncratic approach to the question of ideology critique. The aim of our investigation is twofold. First, we attempt to demonstrate the implications of Foucault's failure to theorize the generative principle of sociosymbolic formations; second, we argue that by conceiving the Real of class antagonism as the disavowed core of ideological fantasy, Žižek rectifies Foucault's inconsistency while simultaneously opening up a vital political space for the reconceptualization of the paradigm of ideology critique. Our article does not attempt to bring into dialogue Foucault's theory of discourse with Žižek's theory of ideology; rather, it stages an encounter between the two. The encounter involves a contrastive comparison, the tertium comparationis of which is the problematic of how Foucault's and Žižek's respective frameworks may help us conceptualize political change. Against this background and criterion it is possible to establish where and why their social theories differ, and to assess the extent to which Žižek's theoretical choices are preferable to Foucault's.

This article seeks to unravel the theoretical implications of Slavoj Žižek's plea for a leftist Eurocentrism, focusing specifically on his defence of the 'No' vote in the French and Dutch referenda on the European Constitution (29 May and 1 June 2005, respectively). While most liberal commentators have read these results as a blow to the hopes of a United Europe against the overwhelming geopolitical power of the United States, Žižek argues that the French and Dutch 'No' votes express a deep-seated desire for a radically changed idea of Europe - a desire disclosing the need to move beyond the very notion of liberal democracy in order to 'reinvent that which is to be defended': democracy itself. While exploring the theoretical background to Žižek's argument on Europe through an in-depth analysis of its psychoanalytic foundations (Lacan), the article also contextualizes it within the Marxist tradition, looking particularly at Lenin's 1915 pamphlet, 'On the Slogan for a United States of Europe'.