ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a different view of the nature, causes and consequences of the current economic crisis. It lays out what distinguishes the present crisis from its predecessors: the "Long Depression" of the final quarter of the nineteenth century, the "Great Depression" in the 1930s, and the stagflation crisis of the 1970s. The chapter looks at the questions of Lacano-Marxian critique of the value-form as the unconscious matrix of modern society. The concept of self-valorising value brings into focus the generative matrix of modern society constituted by what Marx describes as the system of abstract labour–the systemic "combustion" of direct human energy within the circuit of work, money and consumption–which forms the enigmatic social substance of capital. Jacques Lacan introduced the discourse of the Capitalist which builds on the central narrative of the seminars to denounce modernity's blindness to its own generative matrix, namely the incessant "valorisation of value" promoted by capitalism.
