The relationship between the cause and the law--the law of causality, of symbolic determination--is therefore an antagonistic one: 'Cause is to be distinguished from that which is determinate in a chain, in other words the law ... there is cause only in something that doesn't work.' The cause qua the Real intervenes where symbolic determination stumbles, misfires--that is, where a signifier falls out. For that reason, the Cause qua the Real can never effectuate its causal power in a direct way, as such, but must operate intermediately, under the guise of disturbances within the symbolic order. Suffice it to recall slips of the tongue when the automaton of the signifying chain is, for a brief moment, disrupted by the intervention of some traumatic memory. However, the fact that the Real operates and is accessible only through the Symbolic does not authorize us to conceive of it as a factor immanent to the Symbolic: the Real is precisely that which resists and eludes the grasp of the Symbolic and, consequently, that which is detectable within the Symbolic only under the guise of its disturbances.
Friday, May 29, 2009
Determinism and the Cause
From Žižek's The Metastases of Enjoyment: On Women and Causality (London: Verso, p. 30):
The relationship between the cause and the law--the law of causality, of symbolic determination--is therefore an antagonistic one: 'Cause is to be distinguished from that which is determinate in a chain, in other words the law ... there is cause only in something that doesn't work.' The cause qua the Real intervenes where symbolic determination stumbles, misfires--that is, where a signifier falls out. For that reason, the Cause qua the Real can never effectuate its causal power in a direct way, as such, but must operate intermediately, under the guise of disturbances within the symbolic order. Suffice it to recall slips of the tongue when the automaton of the signifying chain is, for a brief moment, disrupted by the intervention of some traumatic memory. However, the fact that the Real operates and is accessible only through the Symbolic does not authorize us to conceive of it as a factor immanent to the Symbolic: the Real is precisely that which resists and eludes the grasp of the Symbolic and, consequently, that which is detectable within the Symbolic only under the guise of its disturbances.
The relationship between the cause and the law--the law of causality, of symbolic determination--is therefore an antagonistic one: 'Cause is to be distinguished from that which is determinate in a chain, in other words the law ... there is cause only in something that doesn't work.' The cause qua the Real intervenes where symbolic determination stumbles, misfires--that is, where a signifier falls out. For that reason, the Cause qua the Real can never effectuate its causal power in a direct way, as such, but must operate intermediately, under the guise of disturbances within the symbolic order. Suffice it to recall slips of the tongue when the automaton of the signifying chain is, for a brief moment, disrupted by the intervention of some traumatic memory. However, the fact that the Real operates and is accessible only through the Symbolic does not authorize us to conceive of it as a factor immanent to the Symbolic: the Real is precisely that which resists and eludes the grasp of the Symbolic and, consequently, that which is detectable within the Symbolic only under the guise of its disturbances.
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