Žižek writes of “the infinite adaptability of capitalism which, in the case of an acute ecological catastrophe or crisis can easily turn ecology into a new field of capitalist investment and competition”—but such glib if backhanded praise of the market only works to obscure the fact that the efficient functioning of the market system is the ecological catastrophe already in process.
… The so-called “infinite adaptability” of the market … should be understood to necessarily require environmental destruction of some form or another for its own creative functioning—and therefore the destruction is not some potential or theoretically correctable side effect of the market’s functioning but its very engine. Contra Žižek, the supposed newfound power of individual actors to affect History by degrading the biosphere only masks the extent to which capitalism has always demanded widespread and irreversible environmental degradation in order to function in the first place.
… When nature is capital and capital is nature, then, there would at last be nothing outside capitalism at all. We can trust the market even less than Žižek thinks: it is, in fact, completely incapable of even ascertaining the actual gravity of the environmental crisis, much less of recognizing its causes or beginning to offer some solution. There will never and could never be a “market solution” to a crisis caused by the market itself.
[Still from Robert Bresson's Le Diable, Probablement, 1977.]