Capitalism as Religion

Boothby's concept of "Capitalism as Religion" designates the structural operation by which the market economy assumes the organizational function that archaic and traditional religions once held: the management of the subject's relation to das Ding, the impossible, pre-symbolic Thing at the center of desire. In capitalist culture, money takes on the character of a phantasmatic incarnation of das Ding — it is both radically absent (like the Thing itself, it can never finally satisfy) and omnipresent as a structuring principle, holding the subject in permanent, anxious orbit around an unattainable object. Capitalism thereby "works" as a religion insofar as it produces and channels the excess anxiety generated by the encounter with the Other's opacity, substituting the market's endless circulation of commodities for the symbolic rituals and gift-exchanges that previously kept subjects entangled with — and regulated in relation to — the Other's desire.

What distinguishes this from mere metaphor is the structural homology Boothby identifies: religion, in its classical form, provides collective rites that hold the terrifying proximity of das Ding at a "right distance," domesticating the Real through symbolic mediation. The "human economy" of gift-exchange sustains subjects in a web of reciprocal obligation that acknowledges and ritualizes the Other's desire. The market economy displaces this function while intensifying its libidinal stakes — money, as fetish par excellence, simultaneously veils and incarnates the Thing, mobilizing jouissance precisely by promising, but perpetually deferring, full satisfaction. Capitalism is thus not merely analogous to religion; it is, in Boothby's formulation, the most extreme religious cult, precisely because it operates without transcendence or symbolic limit — pure drive without the counterweight of symbolic prohibition.

This concept appears in Boothby's contribution to the corpus (slug: diaeresis-richard-boothby-embracing-the-void-rethinking-the-origin-of-the-sacred) and operates at the intersection of several of the corpus's canonical concepts. Most directly, it is an application and extension of das Ding: if das Ding names the impossible, extimate kernel around which all desire circulates without ever reaching it, then capitalism-as-religion names the specific cultural-economic formation that installs money in that structural position. This move is consistent with the Lacanian account of sublimation — "raising an object to the dignity of the Thing" — except that here the object (money, commodities) is not elevated through artistic or symbolic transformation but through the market's impersonal machinery. The concept is equally grounded in the Fetish: money as "fetish par excellence" (a formulation shared with Lacan's Seminar XVI) simultaneously veils and attests to the lack, sustaining desire by promising what it can never deliver.

The concept is further anchored in Extimacy: the market economy occupies the paradoxical locus of das Ding itself — most intimate (the structuring center of everyday life, fantasy, and social relation) yet radically exterior (impersonal, alien, beyond any subject's mastery). The displacement of the "human economy" of gift-exchange by the market economy signals, in Boothby's argument, a transformation in how subjects manage the Anxiety generated by the Other's desire: where ritual and gift-exchange externalized and symbolically regulated that anxiety, capitalism internalizes it as the endless, ungovernable drive to accumulate. The concept thus functions as a critical specification of both Fetish and Anxiety within the domain of political economy, and as a counterpart to Human Economy vs. Market Economy — marking what is lost, structurally and libidinally, when gift-exchange is superseded.

Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the SacredRichard Boothby · 2023 (p.187)

Walter Benjamin did not hesitate to identify a fourth great religion of the West: free market capitalism… Capitalism is a pure religious cult, perhaps the most extreme there ever was.

The phrase "pure religious cult" is theoretically loaded because "pure" strips capitalism of any transcendent referent or symbolic limit — it is a cult without theology, without a beyond, making it more absolute than traditional religion; "the most extreme there ever was" signals that capitalism has not merely replaced religion but radicalized its structure, since the market's promise of satisfaction through the commodity-fetish is infinitely renewable and entirely immanent, foreclosing the very gap (the symbolic distance from das Ding) that traditional religion at least formally maintained.