Vighi, Fabio. On Žižek’s Dialectics. New York: Continuum, 2010.
… the historical success of capitalism as an economic as well as socially synthetic system ultimately depends on what we might call, resorting again to the fortunate image popularized by Žižek, the parallax between surplus-value and surplus-jouissance: a minimal shift of perspective reveals that
what we perceive as value is actually, in its deepest connotation, the inerasable lack at the heart of being from which the little a emerges, this thing, “in us more than ourselves” that bothers us from the moment we enter the social link to the moment we relinquish our ties with it.
Today’s global incorporation and valorization of this constitutively human surplus coresponds to an unprecedented attempt to construct a social order on an act of recycling, for what we are sold as desirable value is the end product of the invisible conversion of surplus-jouissance into enjoyment (42).
the unpaid labour-power responsible for the creation of surplus-value is ultimately nothing but the constitutive, non-symbolizable libidinal surplus that accompanies any intervention of the signifier, that is to say of any knowledge.
technological innovation allows the capitalist to deskill workers and increase the reserve army of the unemployed. Logically, then, the automatization of production, fuelled by various advances in modern science, caused labourers to completely forsake their original control over production — in Lacanian terms, they had to forsake their knowledge qua surplus-jouissance, knowledge as a “spark” that cannot be taught. (50)