ABSTRACT
The subject of economics enjoys a crucial, if ambiguous, place in Zizek's oeuvre. On the one hand, Zizek insists on the contemporary relevance of Marx's "critique of political economy", positing the capitalist mode of production as the transcendental determining force of any social totality. Yet, on the other hand, Zizek's focus on economics has been singularly defined by its thorough engagement with and critical revision of the theoretical problems endemic to essentialist models of economic determinism that problematically characterized a large strand of Marxist philosophy throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. According to Laclau, Zizek's economism results as "a fundamental level on which capitalism proceeds according to its own logic, undisturbed by external influences". Because he understands Zizek's model of capitalism as a self-generated economic process that simply unfolds the logical consequences deriving from an "elementary conceptual matrix", Laclau argues that the Zizekian theory of economics ineluctably "returns to the nineteenth-century myth of an enclosed economic space".
