Changes

"What we need today is not the passage from the 'critique of political economy' to the transcendental-ontological 'critique of instrumental reason', but a return to the 'critique of political economy' that would reveal how the standard Communit project was ''utopian'' precisely in so far as it was not ''radical enough'' - in so far as, in it, the fundamental capitalist thrust of unleashed productivity survived, deprived of its concrete contradictory conditions of existence. The insufficiency of [[Heidegger]], [[Adorno]] and [[Horkheimer]], and so on, lies in thier abandonment of the concrete social analysis of capitalism: in their very critique or overcoming of MArx, they in a way ''repeat'' Marx's mistake - like Marx, they perceive unbridled producitvity as something that is ultimately ''independent'' of he concrete capitalist social formation. Capitalism and Communism are not two different historical realizations, two species, of 'instrumental reason' - instrumental reason ''as such'' is capitalist, grounded in capitalistrelations; and 'actually existing Socialism' failed because it was ultimately a subspecies of capitalism, an ideological attempt to 'have one's cake and eat it', to break out of capitalism while retaining its key ingredient.</blockquote><ref>Žižek, S. (2000) [[The Fragile Absolute]], or Why the Christian Legacy is Worth Fighting For, London and New York: Verso. p. 18</ref> <ref>Žižek, S. (2000) [[The Fragile Absolute]], or Why the Christian Legacy is Worth Fighting For, London and New York: Verso. p. 105</refblockquote>

<blockquote>Back in the 1940s, Theodor Adorno pointed out how, in the [[late capitalism|late capitalist]] '[[administered world]]', the classical [[Freud]]ian notion of the [[ego]] as the mediating agency between the two extremes, the inner [[drive]]s of the [[id]] and the external social constraints of the superego]], is no longer operative: what we encounter in today's so-called [[narcissistic]] [[personality]] is a direct pact between superego and id at the expense of the ego. The basic lesson of the so-called '[[totalitarianism]]s' is that the social powers represented in superego pressure directly manipulate the [[subject]]'s [[obscene]] drives, bypassing the [[autonomous]] rational [[agency]] of the ego.<ref>Žižek, S. (2000) [[The Fragile Absolute]], or Why the Christian Legacy is Worth Fighting For, London and New York: Verso. p. 61-2</ref></blockquote>