If this is so, then the evolutionist reading of the formula of capital as its own limit is inadequate: the point is not that, at a certain moment of its development, the frame of the relation of production starts to constrict further development of the productive forces; the point is that it is this very immanent limit, this 'internal contradiction', which drives capitalism into permanent development. The 'normal' state of capitalism is the permanent revolutionizing of its own conditions of existence: from the very beginning capitalism 'putrifies', it is branded by a crippling contradiction, discord, by an immanent want of balance: this is exactly why it changes, develops incessantly - incessant development is the only way for it to resolve again and again, come to terms with, its own fundamental, constitutive imbalance, 'contradiction'. Far from constricting, its limit is thus the very impetus of its development. Herein lies the paradox proper to capitalism, its last resort: capitalism is capable of transforming its limit, its very impotence, in the source of its power - the more it 'putrefies', the more its immanent contradiction is aggravated, the more it must revolutionize itself to survive.

It is this paradox which defines surplus-enjoyment: it is not a surplus which simply attaches itself to some 'normal', fundamental enjoyment, because enjoyment as such emerges only in this surplus, because it is constitutively an 'excess'. If we subtract the surplus we lose enjoyment itself, just as capitalism, which can survive only by incessantly revolutionizing its own material conditions, ceases to exist if it 'stays the same', if it achieves an internal balance. This, then, is the homology between surplus-value - the 'cause' which sets in motion the capitalist process of production - and surplus-enjoyment, the object-cause of desire. Is not the paradoxical topology of the movement of capital, the fundamental blockage which resolves and reproduces itself through frenetic activity, excessive power as the very form of appearance of a fundamental impotence - this immediate passage, this coincidence of limit and excess, of lack and surplus - precisely that of Lacanian objet petit a, of the leftover which embodies the fundamental, constitutive lack?

All this, of course, Marx 'knows very well . . . and yet': and yet, in the crucial formulation in the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy, he proceeds as if he does not know it, by describing the very passage from capitalism to socialism in terms of the above-mentioned vulgar evolutionist dialectics of productive forces and the relation of production: when the forces surpass a certain degree, capitalist relation becomes an obstacle to their further development, this discord brings about the need for socialist revolution, the function of which is to co-ordinate again forces and relation: that is, to establish relations of production rendering possible the intensified development of the productive forces as the end-in-itself of the historical process.

-330-