Condition of impossibility and condition of possibility

The Condition of impossibility and condition of possibility describes a dialectical structure in which an obstacle is not merely an external limit on a process: it can also be the condition that generates and sustains the process. Removing the obstacle therefore does not necessarily release an intact potential. The potential may depend on the contradiction that appears to frustrate it. The book develops this reversal across political economy and philosophy, from capitalist productivity and commodity form to the relation between Kant and Hegel.

The dialectical reversal

In the book’s account of capitalism, the contradiction between productive potential and the social form that constrains it is not simply a barrier standing in the way of a more complete productivity. Capital incessantly revolutionizes production, but that self-propelling expansion is also a response to its own internal obstacle. The drive to develop material conditions becomes a flight forward from the debilitating contradiction built into capitalist development. Economic crises repeatedly thwart the productivity that capitalism itself sets in motion.

This analysis reverses the expectation that abolishing the obstacle would leave the underlying potential free to unfold. If the contradiction is the condition under which capitalist productivity takes shape, removing it would not deliver the same productivity without its impediment; the apparent potential would dissipate with the condition that produces it. The obstacle is thus both a condition of impossibility, insofar as it prevents full deployment, and a condition of possibility, insofar as that deployment is generated through the obstacle.

The book presents this reversal as Jacques Lacan’s fundamental reproach to Karl Marx. Marx, it argues, inferred from capitalism’s extraordinary capacity to expand production that a higher social order could preserve and intensify that capacity while overcoming the contradiction responsible for recurrent crises. The criticism is not that capitalism’s productive dynamism is unreal, but that its apparent independence from its obstacle is misleading. The argument’s stakes are sharpened by the ambiguous overlap between surplus-value and surplus-enjoyment: the contradiction cannot simply be removed while leaving the same self-expanding drive untouched.

Value, money, and the commodity form

The same logic informs the book’s account of value. It places three approaches to money in contrast: mercantilism treats money as a special thing with a direct, almost magical value; David Ricardo’s classical political economy rejects that fetishism but locates value as a substantial property grounded in socially useful labor; and neoclassical theory treats price as relational, arising through the interplay of supply and demand. The book argues that Karl Marx’s engagement with Bailey’s relational account of value breaks with the substantialism shared, in different ways, by the first two positions.

On this reading, an object is not money because of an inherent property such as gold’s material character. It functions as money because it occupies the structural place of the general equivalent, the position through which commodities relate to one another. The distinction between an object and the place it occupies is therefore essential: a king is king through the social position accorded to him, just as a commodity is money through its place in a social structure. Value is not simply concealed inside the commodity, waiting to be uncovered as a natural substance.

The wooden table makes the point concrete. As a useful object, it remains an ordinary product of labor; once it enters the commodity relation, it assumes a social form that cannot be explained by its use-value or material composition alone. The book invokes Karl Marx’s image of the commodity standing on its head and producing strange ideas from its wooden brain to mark this change in status. The commodity’s mystery does not originate in the table’s physical usefulness. It arises from the social form in which human labor relates to other labor through commodities.

That is why the book rejects a reading of Karl Marx that moves from the visible surface of exchange to production as the sole hidden truth beneath it. Such a move risks reducing exchange to a mere appearance and form to a dispensable wrapper. The essential question is instead why labor takes the form of value and labor-time appears as the magnitude of that value. The form is not a veil that can be discarded after the underlying content has been found; it is part of the reality that requires explanation.

Parallax and the persistence of the gap

The condition of impossibility and condition of possibility also belongs to the book’s account of parallax: opposed perspectives need not collapse into a single, more complete view. In its discussion of Karl Marx, production and circulation cannot be reduced to one another. Value has to be considered in relation to both, while neither perspective supplies a self-sufficient account that makes the other merely illusory. The post-Marxist elevation of production as the exclusive site of truth loses this parallax structure, just as an exclusive focus on circulation would miss the question of production.

The book relates this approach to the philosophical passage from Kant to Hegel. Kant treats the gap between knowledge and the thing-in-itself as an epistemological limit, while continuing to posit an inaccessible realm beyond that limit. Hegel’s move, as the book interprets it, is not to close the gap by restoring access to a complete reality behind appearances. It is to understand incompleteness as a feature of reality itself: the limit is not merely in the knowing subject but in the thing that cannot coincide fully with itself.

On this account, Hegel does not overcome the Kantian division through a final reconciliation of opposites. The shift is to affirm the distinction as such. The very act of positing the gap, without demanding a further domain that would reconcile it, is already the sought-for reconciliation. What looks like an obstacle to grasping the Absolute becomes a way of recognizing the Absolute as negativity rather than as a complete entity concealed beyond finite experience.

Concrete universality and historical tension

The book connects this logic to concrete universality: the universal is not a neutral container shared by particular instances, nor simply an underlying essence expressed identically in each domain. It persists in the irreducible tension and noncoincidence among levels. A particular exception, precisely because it has no established place within the structure, can expose and stand for the universal dimension that the structure cannot otherwise accommodate.

This account also changes how historical development is understood. The same principle may be actualized in different domains without appearing in them at the same historical moment. The relation among Protestantism, the Kantian philosophical revolution, and the French political revolution therefore cannot be reduced to a tidy sequence in which a spiritual reconciliation makes political conflict unnecessary. Their temporal disjunction is part of the historical structure, not a delay that can be erased by discovering a single principle behind them.

Across these examples, the concept warns against treating an obstruction as a merely accidental impediment or a visible form as a superficial disguise. A contradiction may generate the very capacity it limits; a social form may be essential to the content it appears only to express; and a gap may belong to reality rather than to an observer’s failure to know it. The possibility of transformation consequently cannot be inferred from the promise of removing a barrier alone: it requires asking what that barrier has made possible, and whether the apparent potential can survive its removal.