ABSTRACT
Eventually, money loses its association with the work of evangelizing the devil and the world and regresses instead, according to some, to its earlier links with something evil to be avoided such as an idol or devil worship. However, the so-called irrationality of money may not be irrational in the ordinary sense and instead may be organized by so-called irrational numbers that form part of number theory as a rational construct.
For Marxist theory, the production of a surplus disturbs the criterion of what is necessary and instead performs a surplus and compulsive unnecessary labor. Other Lacanian readings of capitalism primarily utilize Lacan’s first conception of the Real and jouissance to represent surplus capitalist value as something excessive in the sense of an inconvenient obscene form of jouissance of the Other that may represent suffering more than pleasure.
The conception of the Real in Seminar XXIII is different, since the Real is duplicated, and the new Real features a constructive jouissance that makes accord and ties a new form of the Borromean knot. From the vantage point of this new theory, the jouissance that drives the capitalization and organization of the system can be theorized as constructive rather than simply destructive.
